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Altered States, Imaginal Realms & Co-Becoming with Dr Maya Ward
664 Plays9 days ago
Today’s subject matter is so slippery and mysterious that even my guest, Dr Maya Ward, finds it hard to describe, though she’s swimming in it. It concerns the aliveness of rivers and the rivers inside us; the nature of reality and realms invisible yet objectively real. It’s about catching the whispers and shouts of the world with pen and paper. It’s shamanic, ecstatic and emphatically esoteric. It’s bloody wild – and I suggest bringing your passport because the places this convo will take you are far out. But also, deep within. If you love all things complex, paradoxical and perspective-shifting, I dedicate this episode to you 🙌
After we recorded, Maya sent this thoughtful epilogue:
We are innately of the world, yet we are also this witness consciousness, experiencing separation. Forgetting, then remembering. “Inside human beings is where God learns”, said Rilke. Does separation itself create the possibility of learning? In my exhibition, on the wall, I have a quote from Robert Bringhurst: “Language is not for talking about the world – that's for dilettantes. Language is for talking with the world.” I wish I'd said that.
***Support Reskillience on Patreon!***
🧵Threads
A new old way to introduce ourselves
Original meanings of yin and yang
The right ratio between humans and more-than-human
The role of the artist and poet
Ecstatic and mystical experiences in nature
Building beauty and vernacular architecture
Where a lack of trust in the system takes you
Initiated vs. uninitiated ways of being
Small, potent work
Third wheeling the love affair between sun and earth
Altered state work
The imaginal realm
Sufi mysticism
The danger of unwitnessed initiation
Automatic/shamanic writing
Reclaiming ‘esoteric’
Acknowledgement of Country spellcasting
🧙♀️LINKY POOS
Maya’s events, workshops & exhibitions
Maya’s book: The Comfort of Water
Nature Based Leadership Training
Henri Corbin
Carl Jung
Rudolf Steiner
Plato
Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff
Gregory Bateson
Book: Songspirals ~ Gay’wu Group of Women
Alfred North Whitehead
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:03
Speaker
Race aliens! Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Reskillience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:18
Speaker
I am gratefully recording in Jara country, central Victoria, where the red volcanic soil is deep and soft and sturdy beneath my feet. That's just my perspective though.
00:00:31
Speaker
The soil would describe me quite differently. Maybe as the ant upstairs, or the faintest of tickles.
Human Interaction with Earth
00:00:39
Speaker
A gnat, perhaps? A tap-turner-on-erer?
00:00:42
Speaker
Or the bringer of seeds and seaweed snacks? What is it like to be soil? I was pondering this while sitting on the couch, distractedly jotting down ideas while jumping up every so often to check on dinner, and I have to wonder what I might have written, what I might have come up with, if I'd instead ventured outside kicked off my shoes, curled my body into the earth and asked her directly, what do you have to say?
00:01:13
Speaker
We so often talk about the Earth, how to save it, how to regenerate it, how to tempt it to take back all that ancient carbon we've gleefully liberated. But how often do we talk with the Earth, with her?
00:01:28
Speaker
It's weird to talk about a person who's sitting right next to you, but we do it all the time to more than humans. How and where would we even begin to converse with rocks, rivers, or the underside of a leaf when our current culture, Western culture, doesn't accommodate their sentience, let alone sentences?
Dr. Maya Ward's Insights on Nature and Creativity
00:01:50
Speaker
As today's guest explains in luminous, shimmering detail, we can talk with nature and the wholeness of life, channel it, for want of a better word, through shamanic writing practices, which, incredibly, have been validated by brain scans, and also the felt sense that what pours out is just bloody well true.
00:02:15
Speaker
If that sounds a little bit crackers, all will be revealed in today's conversation with Dr. Maya Ward. Maya is an artist, designer and researcher with a doctorate in embodiment and meditation practices, as well as Western, Eastern and Indigenous philosophies.
00:02:33
Speaker
She has collaborated with universities to address climate anxiety through nature contemplation and with First Nations women on the cross-cultural experience of speaking with the world and how to respectfully acknowledge and integrate these ancient Australian practices.
00:02:50
Speaker
What more can I say? This is one of those episodes that sings the song at the heart of this podcast and the life that I personally want to lead. If you too find yourself weeping with resonance, please visit the show notes where you'll find a crop of Mayer's workshops, events and exhibitions that can be savoured all throughout autumn.
00:03:12
Speaker
Before we jump in, I want to give a massive shout out to the show's patrons for single-handedly funding this work. I do Raskilliance for the love because these conversations feel joyful and important, and after so many years of having my own podcast-induced epiphanies on road trips, I thought it was high time to give back.
00:03:32
Speaker
As an independent one-person project, Raskilliance is also a space where I can pretty much do what I want, be as idealistic and stubborn as I please, and pursue radical alternatives to the monetisation that is sucking the life out of us and our planet and our creativity.
00:03:49
Speaker
It has always felt natural to me to create freely with wild abandon, without a price tag or paywalls, like an oak tree producing tens of thousands of acorns. And community-supported models like Patreon are making it possible to turn our backs on transactional art and trust in the flow of gifts.
00:04:08
Speaker
Just like a potluck, everyone contributes what they can, when they can, and there's always enough. So if you love this podcast and can spare a few dollars, I would be incredibly grateful for the support.
00:04:21
Speaker
But if you're not in that position, That is absolutely fine. I am simply stoked that you're here. You can support Reskillians at patreon.com forward slash reskillians.
00:04:32
Speaker
And to those legends who've recently contributed, Ashley, Amy, Sian and Jules, I thank you from the bottom of my stomach, which is very deep indeed.
00:04:44
Speaker
I'm really grateful for your goodwill. So I won't keep you in suspense any longer.
Experiencing Dr. Ward's Environment
00:04:49
Speaker
Here is Dr. Maya Ward on altered states, imaginal realms and co-becoming.
00:04:55
Speaker
I hope you love it just as much as I did.
00:05:04
Speaker
What I was really moved to start with, Maya, just off the back of your virtual tour. So you just treated me before we hit record to a little tour of your garden and surrounding land and your shungalow, which is the shed bungalow that you've built, which is absolutely magnificent.
00:05:22
Speaker
So unfortunately, other people are not privy to what I have just laid eyes on. But what struck me was that we never do this. You know, we we never do this before a podcast conversation. Guests don't take the time to kind of orient me to their world. I don't certainly take the time to show people around and for us to have that shared sense of the space that we're in. It just felt really lovely to take a moment to to be with you where you are.
00:05:49
Speaker
And I wanted to start there. it It spoke really strongly to me of your practice as a whole and this this acknowledgement of place and of the country that you're living on and how we can start to insert that subtly into our everyday experiences with people.
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, thank you. And yeah, I ah love that because it is actually something that I start my courses with. I often get people to introduce themselves, but they don't start with themselves. they I ask them to ah introduce themselves by inspired in part by my um my Maori ex-partners, um sort of the tradition within that culture of Situating yourself.
00:06:33
Speaker
So I always get people to introduce themselves by introducing their river and't there mountain and their ancestral lines and their mother and then their father and then maybe some children and then themselves.
00:06:53
Speaker
And that the way people do that in the meandering course and the emotions that are brought up and the sharing that already happens through that way of finally going down a meandering path to arrive at their name, it's powerful for the whole room and it sets it sets a context.
00:07:13
Speaker
And so... in my little tour for you because the trees have grown up it's not so easy for me to show you now the mountains so to the south we have kurangana the name which when i first came here i only knew it as mount tugwell and mount mount bride and groom but um more recently the old name has come to light and so we are in our community using that now and it means gum sap.
00:07:42
Speaker
And we have to the to the north, Donabuang, the body of the mountain. She's our great mother mountain here and I face the the yin slope, the sweet, soft rainforest side of the mountain.
00:08:01
Speaker
I don't know if you know, but the words yin and yang originally came came from the Chinese. meaning the shadow side and the sun side of the mountains.
Cultural and Philosophical Reflections
00:08:10
Speaker
Did you know that? I did not know that.
00:08:12
Speaker
And everything flows from there. So what's the yin side the inside a mountain is, you know, it's dark and moist and fecund. That's very much the case with Donna Buang as presents to me when I go walking up.
00:08:27
Speaker
up, up into the mountain. But then on the other side where Kurangana is and Little Joe, which is this very, very special little mountain which I like to call Our charismatic mega form, this beautiful little cone of a mountain, sometimes called Warburton's Protector because it seems to gather the fire energy and race it up his flank.
00:08:53
Speaker
And so that slope has been burnt over and over and over and that's very... a sort of a brittle dry grassy sparse landscape covered covered covered with wildflowers because i think partly because it's so um dry it doesn't have the same problem with weeds that you get in the sort of the moisture more fecund areas so that's just this haven for orchards and wildflowers and yeah every week you can go out there and
00:09:27
Speaker
find new beings to meet. It's very, very, very special. And then between them, of course, is Birrarung. The reason I think I came to live in Warburton is that many years ago now I walked the length of the Yarra River, Birrarung, from the sea to the source, and Warburton was the most enchanting place.
00:09:47
Speaker
And so ended up coming and living here right on the river, and that happened right the end of the seven-year process of writing the book, about the journey and it felt like such a such a gift such a gift and ongoingly these are the the beings that i feel orientated to the practice of walking the mountains is so important to me because once you're up there you can look down and see this tiny little village surrounded by forest
00:10:21
Speaker
And that's the reason i came here because it felt like the way things are meant to be, the the proper balance between humans and the more than human, this tiny little settlement surrounded by the wild, by the forest, by the mountains.
00:10:38
Speaker
That feels right and nothing else but that would feel right. And there's something about being able to see it, Do you know what I mean? Like on a plane, you might not get that sense of things, but there's something about that the theatrical nature that is the amphitheatre of a valley, able to have that vista and just this little cluster of houses and then the green.
00:11:07
Speaker
Oh, such a rich evocation of your environment. Thank you so much. And I'm reminded as you speak about the balance between humans and the more than human and how we can maybe, you know, get used to nestling and smalling ourselves within that that splendor.
00:11:26
Speaker
I'm thinking of when I first experienced that, you in person and your teachings with Claire's Nature-Based Leadership Training course, of which I was a part and of which I can't imagine my life without at this point. And I so distinctly remember, Maya, you telling us a story. We're all sitting in circle at Ceres, under the trees.
00:11:47
Speaker
And you were sharing ah story and it was quite a blustery day, if I remember correctly, and the wind was whipping through the trees at one point and the rustling of the leaves was overriding your speech. And instead of raising your voice, as I know we would be inclined and entrained to do let's let's speak over these interruptions you just paused and we all paused and you looked up and around with such a rapturous kind of attention given to that that song or that that conversation that was happening above our heads and that taught me so much in that instant of your pausing
00:12:26
Speaker
and making space for, leaving space for, stepping aside in your storytelling. I wanted to bring that in as ah very odd kind of behaviour in our Western culture and maybe something that you might like to riff off and speak to, like why, why do that? Why pause? Why listen?
00:12:46
Speaker
What it makes me think of is, you know, it's a very, it's such a privilege to be given a platform, you know, and to be able to teach i group like yourselves, fascinating group, wonderful and sincere humans, was a chance for me to sincerely bring my world, myself, and that is something I am always doing. a voice I've always been incredibly attuned to the natural world and being woken by it and being a sense of voices coming at me.
Modern Discomfort and Beauty
00:13:24
Speaker
And so been Yeah, it was just doing what was coming natural to me. But because I had that platform, I had that permission to be in the role of teacher. I went, well, well this is who I am.
00:13:38
Speaker
and I am here in this role because of what I've been directed to attend to, if you like. You know, i feel like I've had very little choice in that.
00:13:53
Speaker
It's felt very directive and very strong and often very uncomfortable because I haven't known what it is. But it's been very, very clear that I have to follow something in culture, something in the world that is not much in culture.
00:14:11
Speaker
It's been useful to see myself, I suppose, as an artist, as someone who's struggled a lot in her life. It's been very, very useful to have the framing of the artist is they're forced to bring something into the world that they didn't receive.
00:14:28
Speaker
If you're like me, you i i needed beauty. I needed the beauty of the natural world. passionately but I was brought up in the inner city in a rough and ugly school as a hypersensitive person I've learned that that's a thing ah highly sensitive brain or sort of makeup i I was just so uncomfortable in the world so I think a lot of what I've done is to make the world not so difficult to be in, closer to what my soul desperately needs.
00:15:07
Speaker
Always feeling, I suppose, that it's not just me who would need these things and that's clearly, clearly the case. Can you say more about those things you're drawn to bring into culture that aren't much in culture? What are some examples?
00:15:22
Speaker
Probably as a young teenager, I started having very dramatic, really, um mystical experiences in nature. A sense of transports, transports of joy. And I use that phrase deliberately because I think it was Wordsworth.
00:15:39
Speaker
Because I thought I was going crazy. And it wasn't until, and I distinctly remember, and I've told this story ah number of times, of coming in um to the front room of my house where I lived with my mother and my sister and Kenneth Clark's Civilization was on the television and He was reading aloud um a Wordsworth poem over a scene of clouds and I just was struck dumb because it was like hey news is he thing, he knows this thing I've experienced.
00:16:14
Speaker
And that was the first time I a had a sense that it existed beyond just my own world or my own experience. um And so that was life-changing and led me to sort of the study of literature and and the love of books and books Yeah, the discovery of other mystical thinkers and feelers.
00:16:38
Speaker
That was also paired with my love of beauty. Very early on, apparently I was around seven years old when I decided I wanted to become an architect. I wanted to build beautiful buildings.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, I was obsessed with with the beauty of of buildings and particularly vernacular architecture, so indigenous architectures of Europe or Africa or Europe.
00:17:02
Speaker
Anywhere except the modern world, really. i I wanted to bring those into the world, that into my world. And yet I also had this very deep inner feeling.
00:17:13
Speaker
But I felt that they were really linked. And I felt that because I would have these kind of mystical experiences in architecture, in beautiful buildings.
00:17:25
Speaker
And I went, these buildings are creating this experience for me. What is it about this built form that is doing this? It's not just nature. It is also built form but it is only ever very beautiful beautiful places not so much for show but for how they held and supported and mirrored and reflected and fed my body and soul.
00:17:49
Speaker
There's a sense within a lot of us, I don't know the percentage, maybe it is all of us deep down somewhere, that we aren't nourished by the structures of our modern world, whether that's the literal buildings that we inhabit or the the systems and the rules and the workplaces and all of that brouhaha.
00:18:10
Speaker
this sense of being kind of alienated at once from from other people but also maybe our true nature. But it's really hard to put words around that. And I know that you've said, I've just been steeping myself in your back catalogue and there's this beautiful video that you've made with Kat McKay.
Reconnecting with Nature
00:18:28
Speaker
You talk about your opening to nature and feeling nature open to you and that was the point where alienation dissolves and you feel that reconnection or connection or the kindling of of that that relationship once again. And so I'm curious, Maya, about your work in helping people also open that door and really understand what they're yearning for there.
00:18:50
Speaker
I don't naturally come to that that way of thinking around it because I'm not necessarily to know what they're yearning for, if that makes sense. Yeah. yeah I trust very, very, very deeply what I've experienced and I want to present that, you know, and if it works for other people, that's great, if that makes sense.
00:19:13
Speaker
Because I ah came out of decades of activism of sort of trying to change big picture, you know, based on my ideas or something.
00:19:25
Speaker
and I'm just so tired of being like that. You know, I can't i can't do that. but i But I know what I trust and and I trust my own experience and I trust my body's response.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so I bring that forward. And if people resonate with that, then then that's wonderful. And I absolutely have found my tribe, you know. Like when i was 18 and I went to architecture school,
00:19:55
Speaker
you know, following my dream to become an architect. There were very few people there who had the same kind of vision that I had, which was too to create a kind of environmental, earth-loving culture based on that that deep feeling and that deep feeling triggered through a very beautiful architecture.
00:20:14
Speaker
You know, but my activism and architecture were always linked. You know, we can change people through beautiful environments and there actually is enormous amount of research on on that.
00:20:26
Speaker
and Just to sort of cycle back to what you were saying, i mean, I'm trying to do it in my own small way now because trying to be You know, when I was 20 years old and was working for the urban design unit in the state government, looking at radical redesign of Australian cities to cope with climate change. This was in around 1991, when we could have done something.
00:20:49
Speaker
Amazing work in the early 90s was completely scuttled by Howard coming in and Jeff Kennett coming in in Victoria and and the movement was set back a generation or more.
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, i can't work on that level anymore, that big level, because I don't trust the system. Mm-hmm. because the system's so easily hijacked by psychopathy, by the uninitiated way of being.
00:21:19
Speaker
And that sounds, oh when I say that, that sounds really a bit arrogant, but i what I mean is, you know, an initiated way of being is a way of being humbled, being humbled by the more than human world.
00:21:33
Speaker
And so therefore able to work softly, work slowly, work carefully. and to do that culturally. We've done that for most of human history.
00:21:49
Speaker
We've been humbled. We've come in under the law of the land as ta yeah I'd love to just pause on that point, Maya, around your conscious choosing to de-escalate your work, your offerings, and really come from your own heart.
00:22:07
Speaker
Because I'm fascinated by this idea and I absolutely love propagating the notion that maybe we don't have to reach and aspire and meddle in the ways that we think we do to really make effective change.
00:22:19
Speaker
So, yeah is it because you really understand this kind of network nodal effect of how things shift and change, is it a kind of admitting defeat and surrender because we are going over the cliff whether we like it or not? Is it one of those things or is it both of those things?
00:22:37
Speaker
It is both of those things at and at different times. But I do feel like I'm doing my most effective work now and most potent work, even though my platform is...
00:22:48
Speaker
you know potentially smaller than being on a team designing cities, you know, that when i what I was doing when I was 20. Now I work with some small small groups intimately, deeply rearranging the relationship between self and and the animal animate forces that we are.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah, i I believe in, I really believe in what what I'm doing now. In different modes and in different parts of my brain I i have different explanations or understandings.
00:23:22
Speaker
When I am ah stressed and in my um left brain I can tend to think it's all hell in a hand basket kind of stuff, we're all going down. But at other times ah When I'm doing this work, I understand how tiny i I am and what an incredible, vast, intelligent, wise, wild, exquisite thing that I'm part of and it's trustworthy.
00:23:55
Speaker
It's absolutely trustworthy. It's got this. Actually, it's got this. And i don't there's nothing to worry about. Now, when I was younger and I'd hear that kind of thing from a sort of, you know, the new age spiritual perspective, that used to make me ropeable, you know. It was like how dare they.
00:24:13
Speaker
They've just simply no idea. That was because I didn't understand because that how vast this thing called life is, how tiny I am and how little I, as a as a separate individual human person,
00:24:34
Speaker
knows i know so little but i'm part of something wildly intelligent and creative and brilliant and to adaptive and loving and flowing and ecstatic at its at its presentation and it's it's life so ecstatic with itself I know that's a big shift of tone, but it is. There's this huge thing that we're involved in, but the left brain, in me anyway, knows nothing of that. And I have to completely shift my physiology in order to be able to access that knowledge. Yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
And we're in at a really exciting time when when there's so much interesting work happening in sort of neuroscience and physiology to understand sort of the somatic basis of mind and the hemispherical basis of mind. and Yeah, we're at a very, very interesting juncture.
00:25:39
Speaker
Who knows? I mean, it's such an exciting time.
00:25:44
Speaker
This is an exciting time for me because I can see your body moving like underwater scene with weed and coral. It's like really alive in your screen right now in my little window into your life. And I feel like we should go there on your work and and co-becoming and let those things pour out of you because it feels like all of that wants to be said now. And how do you want to talk about your work?
00:26:10
Speaker
Well, I have no idea and I never know. And I don't even know what the work is until I step into the field of it because it's altered state work. so So for a long time, these mystical experiences that started when I was a teenager and I didn't understand, I was, you know, I felt prey to them, you know.
00:26:32
Speaker
So I've spent decades coming to understand them and then I did a PhD studying them and And now I actually understand so much more. I mean, tiny amount, of course.
00:26:45
Speaker
And when I say I don't know how I'm going to talk about it is that to to talk about this work is not to talk about it, is to talk with it. Mm-hmm. with that type of aliveness, as that type of aliveness.
00:27:00
Speaker
It's never been this moment and it's never been the moment of Maya and Katie here. So what is the space between? Because co-becoming is all about the space between.
00:27:12
Speaker
The space between me and the more than human world or another human. It's called the imaginal realm. To describe it, I sort of have to come out of that flow state where I am and it and to talk about it.
00:27:26
Speaker
Does that make any sense at all? It doesn't need to make sense. It does land with me. ah Great. So I've had, it's very interesting to try and talk about the work because it is it is actually wildly elusive. And when you're in there, you're in there.
00:27:45
Speaker
And when you're out, you're out for me. And so my practice over the last little while is is trying to be able to move more fluidly between these ways of being.
00:27:57
Speaker
But to go back, the imaginal realm, I've So that's a term that Henri Corbin, he was an Islamist, a French Islamist scholar who was one of the main influences on Europe. They met at the aon ah Erronus conferences in Switzerland and um had a very, very long, a long creative friendship.
00:28:19
Speaker
So the imaginal realm is a place that he read about in his study of the Sufi mystics. And it's very clearly and deeply described in that tradition and not so well described in the Platonic and the Neoplatonic ah Western history, Western philosophy traditions.
00:28:45
Speaker
I won't go into why it's such a complicated story, but basically the imaginal realm is the co-creative space between. So it's not the imagination as something made up.
00:28:58
Speaker
It is the creative place where you can meet an aspect of world and grow with them. You're with them. You're on the inside of their mode of aliveness.
00:29:15
Speaker
And I've got this wonderful quote by Rudolf Steiner where he talks about it um because its it's it's a state of deep thinking but it's thinking with the heart.
00:29:26
Speaker
And Steiner says, this is not thinking as having thoughts but actual non-dual being beyond subject and object, inside and outside.
00:29:38
Speaker
concept and percept. It is not the conceptual husk by which we habitually know the world, but the living tip or outer fringe of the universal flow itself.
00:29:52
Speaker
To experience this is to experience the impossible, that we are co-creators, resurrectors of the world. this is This is the feeling, this is the felt sense.
00:30:07
Speaker
Now, That might sound a bit abstract, so i'll I'll talk about it when it first really started happening for me very strongly, was when I walked the song line of Biar Arang, from the sea to the source.
00:30:20
Speaker
So that long journey, it was a three-week trance immersion because we were walking, you know, footsteps, eight hours a day or so, in the rhythm.
00:30:36
Speaker
and we were walking an ancient ancient path 40 50 60 000 years old along the river along the river where i'd been born my parents grandparents and great-grandparents but just a tiny little amount of time since invasion and when that ancient path the whole of which is in Wurundjeri country. So all of it was home.
00:31:03
Speaker
Hundreds of kilometres was home for the Wurundjeri. To walk in a sacred manner in that trance state that is walking.
00:31:14
Speaker
and when you And we discovered this. When you walk with, for me, I had a little tribe of my three friends that i was walking with.
Spiritual Experiences and Sharing
00:31:22
Speaker
In order to walk that far every day, you had to walk in time.
00:31:28
Speaker
You had to. We always walked in time. We usually walked holding hands, which really surprised me. but But those two things gave us energy because they take you into a trance.
00:31:43
Speaker
And in that experience of following the flowing, alive river, I started to experience the river differently. I started to experience the river as this alive, alive being.
00:31:56
Speaker
I'd read a bit of philosophy and Plato's forms and I remember one day just looking at Birra, coming to Birra and just got looking and feeling the aliveness and going, oh, you're Plato's river.
00:32:11
Speaker
I saw the river and it was like seeing the river for the first time. There was a quality, that ah a luminescence. um mean so river I The whole thing just landed in me.
00:32:25
Speaker
And i I didn't know what I meant, but I knew i ah knew it was right. And then it took me decades to understand what I meant by that properly. So the river is a pattern.
00:32:39
Speaker
It's billions of years old. And we as ah life process, only um millions of years old, millions though, For millions of years, the primate and the river have been interacting.
00:32:56
Speaker
Over that time, the mind has maid been made by the earth and all beings of the earth, including river.
00:33:08
Speaker
So the thumb monkey that was me millions of years ago came to the river, felt the flow, fell in the river, experienced the flow, drank the river, submerged in the river, floated in the river, floated down the river.
00:33:24
Speaker
Slowly mind was being made by the river. Yeah? Yeah. It's this long, deep, slow evolutionary journey made between the developing mind, developing conscious self-awareness, which we know we are as humans, which emerged as an artifact of the whole world.
00:33:48
Speaker
The whole world has shaped everything, including conscious self-awareness. And the rivers had a huge hand in that. And so there was me, modern human, seeing River and going, we've been together forever.
00:34:07
Speaker
And so much of what I am has been made by you. You made me. You made me. And I could feel it in every cell.
00:34:21
Speaker
and then ah And then, well, what am I? I am every cell water. you know, 70% by weight, but it's more than 99% by molecule.
00:34:32
Speaker
More than 99% by molecule. Every single molecule in my body, 99% of me has been river millions of times. I've been river more than I've been human.
00:34:47
Speaker
But being a human is a lens of conscious self-awareness that has emerged out of the earth, out of river, and can see itself. And suddenly there there I was with my greater self, which is River.
00:35:05
Speaker
And I was with River and I could speak back to River and River could speak as me and I could be River speaking about herself. And I knew that that was amazing.
00:35:19
Speaker
a deeper, more true, more real, more profound story than any separate idea that modernity had brought me up into. And I knew I'd come home.
00:35:31
Speaker
I knew I'd come home to the deeper truth of things.
00:35:36
Speaker
And everything changed. And it was it was a huge initiation moment, that sort of truism of initiation. you have to For initiation to be complete, you have to come back and how tell it to your community who will understand and affirm it i didn't have that i didn't have that community to come back and tell it to and affirm it so that was quite painful and also very spiritually inflating which is the danger of this kind of thing if if you know what i mean by that like i thought i was so special knowing this thing and that's a very um
00:36:11
Speaker
painful and difficult state but you know that was sort of worn off me worn out of me by the sheer bloody effort of writing a book you know and i wrote the book and I tried to and hint at these things i the my first book The Comfort of Water tried to hint at these things
00:36:33
Speaker
And I didn't know if I'd succeeded and it was only when a few, you know, elders, really but great writers or great thinkers who came to me and said, I see what you've done. That's all they had to say. And I just dissolved in relief.
00:36:48
Speaker
was like, discharged, I've come home. And then since then, I've just thought, well, this is this is my work is to understand how to bring this more into culture.
00:37:00
Speaker
A long way around to telling what co-becoming is. It's very, very simple thing. process and it's with a very very ancient lineage this was my the substance of my phd research was to explore the lineage of this jung for instance is one of the people who have popularized this thing called automatic writing which is very very simple method of pick up a pen and just write without stopping that's the substance of it um And he got it out of the very ancient oracular tradition of ancient Greece.
00:37:35
Speaker
So the oracles, and I find this very interesting, and if I've got my story correct on this, when we hear the story of the Greek philosophers, it's all men. But at that time, all of those men would all consult the oracles who were women who were trained in this kind of deep trance state of co-becoming, being with, being with River, whatever, and allowing River to speak through, or whatever it is.
00:38:04
Speaker
Allowing the moment to speak through, the time, the zeitgeist, the culture, the the need to speak through. And that can be done wildly easily through picking up a pen and writing.
00:38:20
Speaker
And there's very interesting research to back this up. So it's fascinating. So when you do this kind of automatic writing, and the way I teach it is I take people into, i suppose, a kind of trance through a guided meditation.
00:38:37
Speaker
And I ask people to meet certain aspects of the more than human world. And it can be from very inner to very outer. They can be asked to meet their own heartbeat or their own breath, their own blood flow, their bones or the skin. Or one very interesting thing is the inside of the skin. Meet the inside of your skin.
00:39:00
Speaker
Another very interesting thing is to meet your, should I talk about this? um To meet your own poo.
00:39:07
Speaker
It's a permaculture podcast. This is an alive beings, billions of them, alive, intelligent beings with whom we could not live, who live inside us.
00:39:18
Speaker
They are the earth inside us and they long to go back and join the earth.
00:39:24
Speaker
the earth inside. So to experience the gut as the earth inside with a longing for connection and to feel our feel true deep grounding through the ground that is inside us made from things that were born from the earth, oh, my gosh.
00:39:45
Speaker
It completely changed my somatic sense of my lower half of my torso. Like, it was wild. Anyway, where was I, Katie? Anyway, I ask people to meet various aspects from inside their own body to indeed very large parts of the world.
00:40:05
Speaker
The elements, their mountain or their river, but also Gaia herself. And another co-becoming process that has been extremely moving for a lot of people is to experience Gaia's relationship with the sun, right?
00:40:24
Speaker
Talk about sexy. It's very, very, very wild. Like the the love affair between the sun and the earth. The air, the pool, the way the sun draws life out of the earth and the earth spinning.
00:40:40
Speaker
Oh, it's experience. I asked them to imagine in and then to hand over their pen two the more than human being.
00:40:53
Speaker
and let them write, give them a chance to write and to tell you about what they know. That's all I do.
00:41:05
Speaker
But what happens is crazy. It just works. Then i invite everyone to read aloud what's on the page and to read it with the respect and courtesy that you would give
Exploring Otherworldly Communication
00:41:23
Speaker
other people's, other honoured elders' words and to read read beautifully, absolutely no preambles, absolutely no apologies. If you can't read a word, just skim over it. Read it back, read it beautifully and read it to the group and then it becomes one long praise song.
00:41:43
Speaker
one long lesson, one long download from the more than human, from the animate ones. When they've done scans on, this so this is channeling really.
00:41:54
Speaker
I don't use that word because it sounds so woo-woo new age, but it is, i think. When they wire up the brains of channelers, the part of the brain that normally fires during writing doesn't fire.
00:42:07
Speaker
So the felt somatic sense of I'm not doing this is actually a true thing. Where is it coming from then? So when I'm talking about the animate ones, the way I do actually like to break it down because I'm not.
00:42:23
Speaker
I came from a very sort of scientific reductionist background and I i have very, very high um cynic cynicism, which I've had to watch, but I also appreciate in a time when there is a lot of bullshit, you know.
00:42:36
Speaker
So the thing I like to to say is the river is... animate in separation just like me as a human i am not intelligent or self-aware in separation that that is utterly ridiculous i am only what i am in this networked entangled life So I talk about, you know, accessing the voice or the intelligence of something that you would say, well, it doesn't have a nervous system, doesn't have a brain. How can it be intelligent?
00:43:12
Speaker
We're in a field. Life is a field. I am not separable from my drink or my air from for a moment.
00:43:23
Speaker
So the the intelligence and the awareness is in the field. The brain, conscious self-awareness, is an emergent phenomenon of the whole.
00:43:35
Speaker
It might be housed in this particular monkey's body, but it is of and for the whole. And that's what this work is, which you could call shamanic writing as much as anything else.
00:43:51
Speaker
It is giving back voice to whom conscious self-awareness actually belongs. It's an emergent phenomenon. It belongs to the whole.
00:44:02
Speaker
Does that make sense, Katie? Yes, and it puzzles into one of my first prompts, which is the space that you leave for the trees and it feels so right in that greater story that's that's here in this little episode that we're having together, there is something that I want to ask you and it's about those comments of, oh, that's that's a bit woo-woo, that's a bit esoteric.
00:44:29
Speaker
And I wonder if you'd like to speak to this relationship that you have with the word esoteric. Yeah, look, and I feel very, very grateful for Wouter Hanegraaf, who's this amazing Dutch scholar who I've, you know, emailed with a little bit over the over the time. he He's doing such important work in this reclaiming the word esoteric, so I really want to.
00:44:52
Speaker
hand hand that particular gift over to where it came from for me. You know, the esoteric, it's like, you know, the definition often is likely to be understood by only a small number of people.
00:45:05
Speaker
Well, yes, when we have a culture that's not initiated, Yes. so that So esoteric often meaning hidden. It's hidden until you learn about it.
00:45:16
Speaker
So, you know, I've read a lot ah about, you know, written by sort of peoples from shamanic cultures talking about initiations. as ah As a young person, you know, we're very self-centered.
00:45:28
Speaker
We're just discovering what it is to be here. And we're we're in ah we're surviving, yeah? But the initiation, which often took you to the edge of your survival, yeah, it really...
00:45:39
Speaker
put you into questioning that was was a process to help you understand how deeply enmeshed you are. And when you do that, this thing that is hidden, ah the the world of co-becoming, where you and it are not separate, not separable, and have been made by and for and with each other over millions of years, that is emergent.
00:46:03
Speaker
I'm a little bit afraid of not doing justice to Hunter Graf's work, but the way I understand it is that through the long traumatic centuries of colonization and plague and war and invasion throughout Europe like Europe's been an absolute bloodbath for a couple of millennia like seriously horrific like the hundred years war and then this and then and then one third of the population killed by the Black Death and then and then the enclosures of the commons and then the city-states and then the armies.
00:46:38
Speaker
Horrific, horrific what um our ancestors went through in Europe and why i think our culture is a highly traumatised one because we carry a lot of mess, I think, from that though that enormous amount of violence and it's why we still are very violent to the earth culture, I think, because we've been violent.
00:47:00
Speaker
and experienced violence for a long time. So this direct knowledge, like the initiatory knowledge, was, I think, shut down, you know, consciously, unconsciously, who knows, but people were not were not considered to have direct access to to God, you know, that that was mediated by the Christian church, and by those in power in the Christian church, and they had to surrender to these people who were the sort of the gatekeepers of direct spiritual experience. And, you know, people who claimed direct spiritual experience were generally tortured to death.
00:47:37
Speaker
I mean, it's not a good legacy of this kind of work. The esoteric was dangerous and hidden because it was the direct path. And it's been a ah very, very difficult journey to reclaim that.
00:47:51
Speaker
higher and highly traumatizing and and look this is something that's very interesting in my own journey towards reclaiming this work it's been it's been very long and very painful to learn this stuff that I just glibly talking about now it hasn't come easily for me at all and I think partly is because our cultural history with this kind of experience, the direct experience of being with the modern human world is so beautiful and so powerful.
00:48:24
Speaker
But it has been for my ancestors, dangerous knowledge. Women who practice this what were called witches and we know what happened to them.
00:48:37
Speaker
The coven was a group of women doing this work together. And that's what I do. The co-becoming work is women doing this work together. And when we do this kind of work together, when we have these experiences of direct experience of the of the world speaking through our pen, and then we speak it aloud, something amazing happens in the field of the group.
00:49:02
Speaker
of almost entirely women, 99% women. I have a few amazing men who I work with too. Reclaiming the word esoteric has not been without a difficulty or painfulness and at times because There's a very, very bloody history.
00:49:20
Speaker
and and And then this played out in colonisation. Primitive peoples who so who experienced God in the world and as all things were considered ah pagans, heathens and were punished and were sought to be brought in under a Christianity where their experience was mediated and the world of alive presences was was killed off, was disenchanted.
00:49:46
Speaker
And that's not a metaphor, disenchanted, because speaking aloud, speaking aloud. So this is what we do in in the work that I facilitate is we speak aloud these voices.
00:49:59
Speaker
We chant. And when you speak this stuff aloud, you fall into a chant. It is a ah process of enchantment. We yeah are enchanted together.
00:50:11
Speaker
Mm-hmm. the cadence and the beauty of the voice and the run of the words and the words and I say you must read this very beautifully and no preamble no postamble read read read and we make a spell again a metaphor it's the role of language language is key here to get out of the way and to be the voice of the river or the mountain or the tree and to feel to actually feel truth of them speaking using your tongue.
00:50:48
Speaker
Now that sounds esoteric, doesn't it? But I was trying to explain it before in this kind of scientific way, the ecological way. I am mostly river anyway.
00:51:01
Speaker
And a bit of mountain. ah grew yeah i grow most of my food here on this soil, on this mountain. I'm a bit of Donabuang Mountain. I'm mostly Birrarung. I drink the water from the upper catchment, this river, from the dam up there.
00:51:18
Speaker
I am mostly this mountain and this river. And when I actually can get out of the way and be what I am, which is this mountain, life i can feel the truth of that and that's absolutely incontrovertible and it's scientifically accurate much more accurate it's a much more accurate perception of what we are so i mean i'm excited to try and get better at explaining this from a kind of scientific point of view to say look this is actually just common sense
00:51:58
Speaker
you know And we've had a history of wonderful scientists, scientists like Gregory Bateson, for instance, who was really good at explaining this kind of thing. John Seed and Joanna Macy, also very, very good at explaining this kind of thing.
00:52:11
Speaker
and Before I'd had these experiences, I would read that and go, oh, that sounds wonderful and rich. But I didn't know it as a truth. I didn't know it to my bones. Now I am the knowing of it. Sorry for these enormous monologues.
00:52:27
Speaker
Oh. Do not apologize. Be off with your apologies.
00:52:34
Speaker
It's so beautiful. I'm um absolutely in gratitude to you for sharing in such a way. I'd love to bring something into this conversation that I would loathe to to miss, to catch in this, which co-becoming a your way of finding or a way of finding culturally respectful practices and and ways that acknowledges all of that horror which has come before and is absolutely steeped
00:53:05
Speaker
in ancient traditions that live in the country here Australia. Thank you. Thank you. That was a path I was going to go on about 40 minutes ago and I somehow got on the way. Let's hold hands and skip down that path for a little while, Mayna, because your Acknowledgement of Country workshop is life-changing and if you could speak to that ritual of acknowledgement, I would be absolutely chuffed to hear from you.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah, um I mean, this, yes, this should have come earlier, but but maybe not. not Maybe there's a reason for it coming now. Let's
Cultural Healing and Workshop Success
00:53:43
Speaker
find out. So I've been completely fascinated by this ritual of acknowledging country because it I didn't grow up with it.
00:53:50
Speaker
It's a relatively new thing, and I sort of remember when it started to emerge, and and I just became more and more fascinated by this thing that was happening.
00:54:01
Speaker
because I believe in the power of words and acknowledging country. I mean, people don't necessarily understand what country means. Country doesn't mean landscape.
00:54:14
Speaker
Country is an Aboriginal English word with a very specific meaning, meaning the full gamut of people and land and the animals and weather and stories and histories.
00:54:27
Speaker
So it's acknowledging animate, alive, listening, aware, sensate, sensing earth. So to speak aloud to a world that's listening,
00:54:41
Speaker
and a world that knows the truth of what's happened here on this land. For the earth itself to hear us slowly make stumbling apologies and seek to come in under the law of the land, yeah.
00:54:57
Speaker
Of course it's for people and absolutely it's for Aboriginal people. As all Aboriginal people that I know would say, it's like, well, we are also country. We are utterly inseparable from that.
00:55:11
Speaker
and country itself needs that respect and is hearing us. So to speak aloud, knowing that there's a world that's listening, That changes everything.
00:55:24
Speaker
And all of this work that I'm doing came out of running these Acknowledging Country courses and and understanding something's happening here. Because it was it was about five years ago or so when the Jung Society asked me to if I could run a course in Acknowledging Country. And I said, oh, of course not. I can't possibly do that in any way.
00:55:44
Speaker
They held my hand and i got and we got there because it was like, well, what is the settler response? What is the settler responsibility? And what is the the archetypal and the depth psychological nuances of this ritual? Because a ritual is a big thing to bring into a country and it's happening thousands of times a day throughout this land.
00:56:09
Speaker
Like think about that. That's something profound. Now, yes, of course, many, many times, perhaps most of the time it's done perfunctorily, but still something is happening.
00:56:22
Speaker
And those times when it is not perfunctory and when people are sort of caught by what it is they're saying and and come into the feeling state as they say it, All those things are changing culture. It's bringing up a lot of shadows and a lot of potential.
00:56:38
Speaker
When we speak in Acknowledgement of Country, we are naming our shame. Yeah? And can't just keep naming the same shame because shame is a cultural emotion that is seeking to transform.
00:56:54
Speaker
you If you get stuck in shame, shame is then not doing the work. It's meant to, by processing it, by digesting it, alchemising it, we come into something new.
00:57:09
Speaker
That's what shame is for. Shame is a very important emotion for helping us grow. So if we are to still do the same old acknowledging country over and over and over, then we're at risk of not not getting the lesson.
00:57:25
Speaker
Yeah, not actually learning what it is. I get heartily annoyed with lots of acknowledging countries because especially if they are token, because when they're done rote, you get the sense that the person isn't there.
00:57:40
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? If you're not in it, it's you're denying the spell it's trying to cast on you, you know, ah the magic.
00:57:51
Speaker
A spell is to perform magic. This is a magic spell if we can get in it and say it sincerely. And then ideally every time we do an acknowledgement, we're learning something new.
00:58:06
Speaker
And, you know, spoke a little bit before about how, you know, as Europeans, got millennia of traumatised ancestors. And on some level, they're all still in me.
00:58:21
Speaker
acknowledging country will inevitably start unpacking all of that baggage. And I feel like on some level all sorts of different ghosts can pop up, all sorts of different ancestors.
00:58:33
Speaker
I think it is ah a ritual of coming into terms with like a whole host of ghosts. but but But when you acknowledge the um the imaginal realm, which is the realm of not only the the psychic field of the river, born over millions of years between the primate and the human, but the psychic fields of all things, like all the ancestors, that they're all there in the imaginal.
00:59:05
Speaker
and And so when we speak a spell of acknowledging country, we're opening up a door to that world, the imaginal world, if we're sincere.
00:59:16
Speaker
And so all of those ghosts can potentially come in, all of those animate forces.
00:59:24
Speaker
I hear me talking and I go, I was brought up so rationalist and I hear me talking and I go, If I didn't know what I know, i would think I I'm so anyway, so I just wanted to name I'm having a bit of cognitive dis dissonance. So if other people listen to this and they go, oh my God, what a crock this is.
00:59:47
Speaker
I just want to say i hear you and I know you because I have that person in me. But my experience of sincerely involving myself in something larger is that this is real.
01:00:01
Speaker
So i feel like acknowledging country rituals are, they are seeking forgiveness, they're seeking to to transform change shame, they're seeking to transform this culture now, but they're doing that by changing us and we change ourselves by by acknowledging our ancestors and our lineages and our ghosts and our traumas.
01:00:26
Speaker
And some people, I've had that said of like, well, you know, you can't bring that kind of thing into an acknowledgement of country because Aboriginal people's suffering is greater than your's the suffering of your ancestors. and And that's the most important thing. And it's like,
01:00:44
Speaker
On some level, that is absolutely true because as a white person, I have enormous privilege. That is a real thing. And Aboriginal disadvantage is an absolute true, true thing.
01:00:59
Speaker
And that is very important that that is heard. But if you do that at the expense of looking at your own shadow, you will only make more trouble in the future, I feel.
01:01:14
Speaker
we can't We can't say that our own psyche doesn't matter because our psyche will get angry and will act out in shadow ways.
01:01:26
Speaker
So when I was doing the Acknowledging Country courses, I worked very closely with a book called Song Spirals. And that is actually where I got this term co-becoming from because before i was using the term co-becoming, I was using a whole lot of different terms from different philosophy or different different Western thinkers that I'd heard or Buddhist terms, you know, reciprocal creation or co-arising, interdependent co-arising. But when I read this book and I and i learned, oh umll write I'll read out what how they talk about what what they say is co-becoming.
01:02:03
Speaker
Country, it's describing country. Country has awareness. It is not just backdrop. It knows and is part of us. It is home and land, but it is more than that.
01:02:14
Speaker
Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become. So country is not without humans, yeah? Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become, the way we emerge together and will always emerge together.
01:02:32
Speaker
And in this book, they also write, we bring this book to you we cannot let this knowledge fade away it has been here so long and it is still here that is why this book is so important to pass knowledge down to continue the spirals it needs to happen now and we want you to walk with us on this journey So this incredible book was written by five traditional Aboriginal women and three Western anthropologists or women. So a group of eight women co-wrote this book over a process that goes back over 20
01:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's very slow, very deep. It's in a very, very amazing book. I think everyone should read it And so when I, when we were working with this book, one of my participants in the courses said that co-becoming thing, that sounds just exactly like what we do when we do this writing.
01:03:27
Speaker
And I go, it does, doesn't it? It does sound like that. So I wrote to them and I said, look, this is what I do. i'd like instead of using all these terms from other traditions or something that I've made up, I would like to use this term that I've learned from you. i mean, other people in other traditions have used that term, of course. They don't own it, but I found it there.
01:03:51
Speaker
And I said, I would like to use it with your permission and I would like to, with my courses, raise money. for for your cultural maintenance. So together, the co-becoming community has raised thousands and thousands of dollars for them, which is really exciting.
01:04:07
Speaker
So all the workshops that I do, part of them part of the money goes to them. It just feels really important that when I talk about co-becoming, I have the responsibility too to say that this kind of deep, intimate, co-creative act is something that has been happening on this land for tens of thousands of years.
01:04:32
Speaker
It's in my lineage too. It's in the lineage of all peoples. It is the primary primary shamanic communication. eighty is it It is the the knowing that happens after initiation, in my understanding.
01:04:45
Speaker
So all peoples have done it throughout all time. Western philosophy is slowly trying to reclaim this. There's ah there's a movement called process philosophy. So Alfred North Whitehead is a very prominent philosopher in this tradition, but he's from the tradition of the Neoplatonists.
01:05:02
Speaker
So there's a there's an enormous scholarship that is starting to really take off now in that area, as well as sort of some of this more esoteric philosophy coming forward.
01:05:14
Speaker
So for me, the exciting thing is being able to, you know, talk with these women. So i went up to um Darwin and met with them and talked to people about the work that we do and they're excited about this cultural interchange that we're having but also that it's a cultural interchange without with my ancestral line as well.
01:05:37
Speaker
So bringing this together, not in any kind of perfect way, it's ah it's an emergent, co-creative, messy process, but But it feels exciting. That feels like the perfect segue into your workshops because I know you have quite a few things in the works, Maya, including an exhibition and also your groups and workshops that folks can get amongst if they're in Victoria or are willing to come to Victoria. ah Well, this work actually started on Zoom.
01:06:10
Speaker
Really? In lockdown. And it works extremely well on Zoom. i cannot believe it, but you can create a very sacred container on Zoom. And another thing is because people are in their own homes and they're relaxed.
01:06:25
Speaker
But the screen and also with the screen, you can see everyone's faces all together. So it's like your inner circle. um Yes, I've had lots of co-becoming students in America. I'm teaching it in an American university course, actually, which is exciting.
01:06:44
Speaker
But also students in New Zealand and um England and Italy, but mainly Australia. My preference is to work in groups in my home, which is treat.
01:06:57
Speaker
But... but But there is something rather exciting happening at the moment because every now and then I take some photos and I took these wonderful photos, if I can say that, of my nephew playing with a seal and Melbourne Zoo.
01:07:11
Speaker
This young child seal who didn't have playmates and my nephew, he's a dear little boy who came out of hospital after having to learn to walk again. He got a kind of modern-day polio.
01:07:25
Speaker
Anyway, so i have one-on-one time with him and he would play with his seal for ages behind the glass and they would he would throw a scarf and they would the seal would chase the scarf and try and bring it back but it's on the other side of the glass. And it was beautiful to watch, they this beautiful relationship him.
01:07:43
Speaker
blossoming over course of a year of going to the zoo every week. And um took these beautiful photos and wanted, Elan and I said, be nice for more people to see these.
01:07:53
Speaker
So I applied for an exhibition. I got one and then decided to turn it into a co-becoming exhibition with my um participants from my courses. So about the um the art and poetry of about 20 or 30 of my the participants.
01:08:09
Speaker
But also a series of 49 of my photos that tell a bit of the story of Cobra Cumming. You know, this photo that I have on the front of the brochure, which is this wild thing. It looks like a river looking back at me. It looks like the eyes of the river seeing me.
01:08:26
Speaker
I'm really happy with the exhibition that's on at the moment and and it's up until 27th of April. This beautiful space in Warburton and I've got a whole lot of different events. Dance is probably my favourite thing.
01:08:38
Speaker
so contact improvisation and so running some contact improvisation don't get me started on contacting other podcast um and Tucker Tina with this which is this altered state rhythm training work with this co-becoming writing and I've got the information of those events on my website and if anyone is in the Warburton area or feels like trekking out Along Birrarung towards the headwaters, beautiful part of the world. Yeah. Come and see the show.
01:09:12
Speaker
Yeah. Let me know you're coming and I can meet you in the gallery or something. would be nice to meet some people. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, it's it's a buffet of good things on The Cook there, which I'll link for everyone so they can have a look around at their leisure.
01:09:26
Speaker
And Maya, am just, I'm so grateful for your vivacity, bringing that to this audio space. I feel like we have a deficit or I have that deficit of of mystery chatter, of of conspiring around some of these things which feel totally indefinable, but we're going to try and come upon them and tiptoe up to some kind of shared meaning around them. It's like, what am I filling that deficit with? And maybe this is, yeah, something that underscores a great deal of our behaviours as modern humans.
01:10:03
Speaker
I think we all get that there's so much more to this life and so many more dimensions and a beautiful description of that imaginal realm that I came upon in your work was like pages between the pages of the book of our lives and experience and I just wanted to acknowledge how nourishing it is to be in a space where we can name those things and yearn and yawn towards all that is unsaid I want to know what else is out there and what else is possible and how else I can experience this crazy wonderment of being an animate
01:10:41
Speaker
part of the world um which is also animate so thank you so much all of that is a giant long-winded thank you Well, I mean, I think just to finally finish, I think, the you know, I didn't really say, but, you know, the things that come through the pen, and this is actually possibly the most important thing, the things that come through the pen with co-becoming are beautiful.
01:11:09
Speaker
They're poetry, they're imagery, they're metaphors. their They are saying something in what seems like some other way but is actually not.
01:11:21
Speaker
So the main phrase that I use in this work is isn't it's not a metaphor. It's not a metaphor. I say depth and I mean depth. I go into your gut and then from the gut you can go into the earth, deep.
01:11:34
Speaker
Go into the water. Go deep into the water. none It's not a metaphor. The physical, the somatic experience of being in the world and the things that actually happen This is the most important thing and this is the clue in.
01:11:54
Speaker
It's very hard to talk about this. The exhibition and the poetry in the exhibition says it so beautifully. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to get to the point of publishing this what I know and I've written like ah just this little book about it at the moment that I'm starting to get out. But it's so difficult to understand There's the poetry and then there's the explaining the poetry and not to to try and do justice to this subtle and fragile way of knowing. it's ah Anyway, it's a slow process.
01:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, we won't look at it too hard and scare it away. Thank you. Thank you so much, Maya.
01:12:37
Speaker
That was Ward. And please get amongst the show notes and links to steep yourself in her offerings and perhaps even attend her exhibition or workshops if you're in or around Melbourne.
01:12:50
Speaker
I can't wait to catch you next week. And thank you so much for spending time with Reskillians.