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You are the flower,
       I am the bee;
Many flowers I have seen
        on my journey.
At some I have stayed,
        gathering the dust of experience.
Your's was a subtle fragrance;
        intoxicated by your beauty,
I drank deep of your nectar.
        The river of your love
has washed away the dust
        which clung to my limbs
and impedes my journey.
        With the nectar of your love,
the honey I am able to share
        will be rich and fruitful.

Crystal,
    brilliance emanating, internal fire
    beautiful but fragile.
        So is it with Silence,
      Crystal is shattered with pitch;
        So it is with Silence.
Within Silence there is Solitude;
      Within Solitude there is Freedom;
Within Freedom there is Peace;
      Within Peace there is Beauty;
Within Beauty there is Love,
      brilliance emanating, internal fire
            like crystal.

I am you,
         you are me,
we are two;
    yet we are one together.

In a spiral we ascend,
entwined.
mirror to mirror,
    soul to soul.

Together
         as a bird from a flame,
consumed yet
released to be free.

The links become
         the strings;
and we play each other;
together and alone.

The melody we create
         is our love.

The arrows of light and love
fly to dissolve the sword
and shield
with which I have long
protected myself.

My heart is open
and I have no fear
for they are not sharp
and cutting,
but warming and soothing
to my being.

No longer will I struggle
and fight anxiously,
but open my heart
to the world.

The gentle falling golden shower of autumn leaves under blue southern skies heralds the coming winter shows when love must sleep its seed resting below the surface of perception.

The seed glows with the promise of hidden potential that speaks of new birth with the coming spring.

My dearest friend, the wind, Daughter of the Sky
Caresser and shaper of the Earth,
Your independent spirit carries you across the land an the seas,
communing between earth and Sky, belong to none but yourself.

I see you in the gentle caressing breeze that plays amid reeds and willows on the riverbank or turning a grassy hillside into a waving sea of green and gold.
But I also see you in the rampant fury of the hurricane.
I love you even then for within the heart of the storm is the Peace and quietude of Love.

Prayer of Love
Whispering on the breeze
I love thee still

Where are you now, o dark brothers and sisters of the earth?
We seek to find you, but see only the riddles and the abyss.
All that remains are the trees and the mountains,
as silent reminders of what might have been
and o so many questions.
Will you come again, gentle mother and father,
and awaken a new people to your ways?

May we learn once more upon your knee
how we may live in the sacred way,
performing the act of worship of the mother
in our everyday life.

The spirit of wisdom which is embedded in the rocks
and the trees of the forest, as a result of its being
the resting place of the ancestors, comes to us on
the breeze and in the babbling brook.

Who is giving and who is receiving
is not of importance.
The fruits of our love are
the truth of our sharing.

Prem Prarthanna,
Prayer of love,.
I love you.

Standing strong and tall like a mountain,
or eternally ebbing and flowing like the sea,
your grace is my joy.

My love for you is a cup overflowing
where it falls
spring flowers
and gentle ferns
to remind me
of your grace and inner beauty.

The trees and rocks perform their gentle dance,
draped in beautiful gowns of vines and ferns.
The music is their voice carried on the wind,
their step is to the heartbeat of their mother-
She who nurtures them gently on her breast.

How is it, gentle brothers and sisters, that any who walk in your midst
not stand in reverend awe at your beauty and power?

Are they blind and deaf,
these men who bring the discordant sounds of machines
destroying the peace of the land
and bringing death to the trees?

Encased in the Earth Mother's
gentle hand
the seed grows in the
new sunrise
Rooted in the dark depths
of past traditions
but eagerly reaching
toward the dawn.

The sacred mountain
calls to us, its children,
to come to be its mouth and arms that it might cry out in its anguish at the slaughter of our brothers and sisters, the trees.

Would that you could gentle sleeping giant rise up and shake off
this evil which comes upon you.
Let us all join as one voice that cries out in the wilderness.
The mountain is the temple of the people
and we will not have our temple desecrated.

Stop the logging of the forest Stop the raping of the land
let us all just live together
in the Mother's gentle loving hands

Land rights for the trees that they might grow free.

Land rights for the rivers that they might flow free.

Land rights for the people
that through growth and flowing, they might live free.

Live no more in the shadows,
It's time to make a stand
The earth cries out for freedom
Let's take each other's hands
Untie the chains that bind your heart, start growing, keep flowing, then you'll be free

Within you, without you, how do I love thee, let me count the ways. In the forest, damp with eternity, I love you in so many ways.
From the tallest peaks to the sands of blue green seas,
I feel your love around me.
Like a dolphin, I dance with joy within the sea of your love.
The waves of thine ecstasy wash over my body the warming sunshine.
Like the tall rocks, you may be silent and strong full of mystery.
Like the tiny mountain streams joyous in flowing,
you sing and chatter merrily of thy journey through earth and forest dark.
Like the sea, eternal and soothing, you are my healing, my friend, my lover, my sister, to thee I am joined, in spirit and soul

The golden light of the sun reflected off the burnished sheen of his wing tips. He was lord of his domain. He wheeled and dived into the updraught rising from the vast plain below. He was Eagle, lord of the lofty heights, seer of distant visions. All came to him to seek of his clarity of vision, but he mostly preferred to drift alone in the upper reaches of the sky above the sacred mountains. He revelled in the detached serenity of these heights, perceiving with clarity all that lay below him. A vast sea of grass lapping the feet of the towering mountain peaks, teeming with its myriad life forms caught in the struggle of life and death. Eagle felt the pangs of hunger with their cries for relief.

"I must return to the plain to receive sustenance," he thought to himself. "I must seek for an easy meal that I may return quickly to my vision." As he cast his sharp eyes about he perceived a buffalo which lay dead in a circle of rocks on the edge of the plains. In the darkness it had fallen and broken its body on the rocks below. Like a streaming arrow Eagle plummeted toward the pit and gorged himself on the putrefying flesh of the buffalo. Having sated his need Eagle turned from the carcass and prepared for the thrill of upward flight. To his great despair he found he could not rise. He ran towards the wall of the pit flapping his giant wings. He began to lift but he was too close to the wall. Battered by the force with which he hit he fell to the ground exhausted. Laughter sounded behind him and a voice growled, "How so, brother, to find you fallen into folly." Eagle looked towards the sound. Standing on the edge of the cliff staring down with steel cold eyes, was a great timber wolf. "Long have I envied your ability to fly beyond the confines of the earth. I, although I can range at will the sacred mountain, am trapped in my earthy existence bounded to the bare rocks of the upper heights by my lack of wings. If I were to launch myself from the rocks my body would be smashed on the plain below. My envy has grown to hatred but you were so far beyond me that all I could do was howl my contempt for you."

As he spoke he slowly circled Eagle's prison. His eyes pierced eagle with the intensity of his contempt and hated. The realisation of Eagles vulnerability created great fear within him. He tried to run, but his great wings, which in the upper air, gave him such grace, now made him look like a fool. Still the wolf taunted. "It would have been better, brother, had you maintained your normal diet upon the open plains. In your folly you chose an easy meal and did not consider the dangers involved. Now you have lost your clarity for your prison restricts your vision and now you are within my grasp. I can take my time before I descend to rend your body in an ecstasy of pleasure." The wolf gloated to himself over the torment he created within Eagle's mind.

Suddenly Eagle heard a small sound, "Brother, come this way. I know a way of escape." Eagle saw before him the mouth of a small cave. In the mouth of the cave stood a small mouse.

"Why would you, little brother, who in different circumstances would be my meal, be willing to help one such as I?" spoke the bewildered Eagle.

"It is my destiny that I may provide the nourishment that sustained your flight." replied the mouse. "It is a great sin that one such as you should fall into such folly.

There are many who have need of your ability to show us that which we cannot perceive. Your young who dwell on the highest peaks of the sacred mountains have need of your nourishment and your protection. Without your instruction those who have yet to test their wings may try to fly too soon and fail."

"It seems that I have taken you too much for granted, little one," spoke the Eagle, his head hung in shame, "Too long have I looked down upon you, but now I see that your wisdom is greater than mine. I will follow you."

The mouse led Eagle from the confines of his prison. As he entered the plain he heard the howl of the wolf who had his joy taken away.

"I have learnt much from you little brother. Now do I see the natural harmony that exists upon the earth. One cannot forsake one part in order that he can experience the totality of joy of the other. One must have balance in order to see clearly. A veil has been removed from my eyes and my clarity now shows one truth."

Flapping his wings he launched himself from the prairie. Up and up he rose, the fear shedding away from him as does the gentle rain. As he flew he perceived his mass changing. He grew smaller and his feathers turned to white. He had become the Dove. And the dove, like the mouse, is food for eagles . . . . . . .

Separated this energy is directed towards conflict and personal combat; the eagle endeavouring to rend desire while the serpent desires to crush clarity in its enwrapping coils.

XX YY

Always there is the mother
                           the lover
                           the sister
                           the daughter
                           the woman

if you are a man
you will not forget who
stands before you

if you are a woman
remember you are
all this and more !!!

We start as woman (a medical fact), and then something strange suddenly happens, and change occurs. Somewhere along the line the script got changed but no one read the rewrite until it was too late. The female was sometimes replaced by an XY and this slowly became the par for the course. The drive of every man stems from this fact.
What is a Y, but an X with one leg knocked off, and only one to maintain balance and needs the XX for support.
Think about it.

Once there was a matriarchy. Men felt insignificant within it because they had no power. As a result, the male was overwhelmed with the feminine spirit of the earth and endeavoured as much as possible to take power from the mother, the sister, the woman.
Thus the patriarchal reality became the norm in the world. When the male gods reigned supreme over the Triple Goddess they went out of their way to denigrate the feminine spirit (even though without the mother they wouldn't exist and without the sister and lover they wouldn't survive). Women have assisted this process by giving way to male dominance (mothers seek to foist power in their sons and to take it away from there daughters - in a way to save them the pain of banging there heads against a brick wall).
When patriarchy dominated the fraternal existence before it, men's power went to their heads. Feeling full of their male spirit, which was manifested in the denial of the feminine spirit both within and without. This continual denial of the softer more sensitive side in men has led to a crippling and blinding of the inner female (anima). When men reached outside for feminine companionship they continued to treat the outer woman with the same distain as they treated their inner woman. Any time the woman tried to stand up to the man, allowing her inner man (animus) to strive to protect her from the male onslaught, she was and is beaten down figuratively or physically/emotionally to the point of overwhelming and destroying her existence - unless she chooses to back down and beg continued companionship, regardless of what has gone down before.

Sinead O'conner once recorded that "the opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity". Germaine Greer said it first but it's easier to take from Sinead.
If we can learn to walk together as equals rather than seeing it all as a battle of wills to see who is the strongest (women can handle more pain than any man and they live longer) then we may begin to truly understand what we are doing here on this planet, rather that scoring points on side issues.
The planet and everything in it suffers as a result of the battle between the self-ordained guardians and the gardeners who fight over who should go and the way it should grow.
In the bee and the ant communities everyone starts as a female and only a few are changed to males to service the queen. The problem in the human community is that the males somehow have taken power, and maintain their power by convincing all the females they could be queens and thus creating dissention in the whole hive/colony, with every female battling with every other so that they can't see that the male is controlling the whole situation. The workers, the warriors and the nursery sitters forget the task before them and begin to compete with each other as queens. Why they allowed so many drones to be created in the first place is a true mystery.

Because we have changed the parameters we used to work with, we must learn the new parameters sooner rather than later. We need to ask why we are what we are becoming, otherwise we continue to work within the old way- even though we know this doesn't work anymore. Just because the situation feels familiar in one way or the other, it doesn't mean we can't approach the whole situation in a new way - one that may seem contrary to what we want.

As a male who seeks to understand the totality of experience I continue to try to understand why my other would have pain in their lives. Why do women choose to take on pure shit in their lives in order that they may seem to be real? Why can't we dance with each other to each others music, without worrying who is playing the dance we play?
In the end both sides/will play the game of underdog if the game is good enough. The problem is when the game pales! It is not simple convenience and complicity which bring us together. We are here for each other but not purely for the others enjoyment. We come together to understand the totality of self. If we can come to understand each other we will bring peace to this earth because we will not be vying for attention because "we are the truth".

Men have a creative spirit and imagine that they create the world, but women are creative beings, but they have most of the baggage that this creation entails - they cannot just shrug their shoulders and say "well, I did my best", and even if they do say it, they know in their heart that isn't true. If men can understand that life asks of us, that it wishes that we might dance with discretion and grace rather than overpowering our polarity, then they will be able to create a more harmonious environment in which humanity can dance. Women need to accept that men are slow on the uptake. It is all to do with the fact that men are unstable because they have only three legs instead of four.
Aretha Franklin sings "If you want a do-right all right woman, you've got to be a do right-all night man". What most women want is a friend not another master.

Truth,
       Love,
             Understanding.

The three principles which guide life.
All three are needed for the others to exist.
Without love, truth and understanding are shallow and without power.
Without truth, love and understanding are of no constructive use.
Without understanding, truth and love are meaningless concepts.
If we have these three principles within us, we develop trust of ourselves and others, and begin to make creative endeavour in the world.
Fear,
         Hatred,
                      Deceit.
The consequence of failure of trust.
The cause of all this is our belief.
If deceit becomes a way of life to us - because there is no understanding of truth, fear and hatred grow within us because love cannot grow within such an environment.
Because we do not trust, our beliefs become chains of Fear, Hatred and Deceit. When we are babies, before we can talk, we have we have dark blue eyes, but as we learn to talk and walk within the world we forget why we came here in the first pace - our solid dark blue becomes a scurf ring around the outside of our iris, rather than the whole.
Working from this faulty premise we seek to understand the world - an impossibility which we think is reality.
The dark blue of a babies eyes (only in whites probably) (like the animals) is the true understanding of our purpose on the planet - the why we are here principle. Maybe some of the baby's cries of frustration come from the not being able to express this. By the time we learn to talk we already have so much crap filling our mindspace, due to the learning process, that what we knew in the beginning is pushed to the edge and away from our direct consciences. Look in a baby's eyes sometime and then try to tell me you can't see the wisdom within. As we learn more about how others see our place in the world the more we lose perspective of where we stand in the world (and thus lose even more of our original iris colour than before). Look into the eyes of a derelict human being - there's lots around, flotsam and jetsum of life's war with itself.
Like the thymus- an organ of the body, which begins to shrivel as we venture on the sexual highway, we have to learn to relearn that which we knew in the beginning.
Without understanding our purpose on the planet we cannot begin to trust ourselves -so how can we trust anything else. Without trust we can only know fear, hatred and deceit. The reason why the world is in such a bad way is because people don't trust themselves enough, but tend to trust where trust should not be given.
If we live by the beliefs of others, we can never grow into our true selves, and thus we are denying to the existence the truth of our being (so many weeds grow in our garden that we can no longer see our fruits and flowers). We became so entrenched in the idea we must live up to the ideal of others that we can no longer see the beauty of our own garden. To see a human being reach within themselves and draw beauty out of themselves (because they can) makes the world a better place for at least a little while. Humanity seems to need masters so much that they see themselves as ineffective because they're alone. If you are prepared to speak out appropriately at the right time there will always be ears that hear.
Self trust is our immediate task rather than something that we might do one day. Without personal understanding we can never see the truth of our love, and thus we make the whole journey pointless. If we cannot remember the reason why we came here (we knew it before we began the journey - we just lost it because we were negligent and easily duped) we tend to reach outside for understanding - without realizing that we are creators of our world, they are creators of their own; thus when we allow ourselves to be swayed by outside influences, because we are feeling vulnerable, we deny the truth of our own way. It is just as bad if we deny the existence of the outside world, that we might fulfil our destiny - because without the outer world to test our theories, they are useless.

Christmas 2003

I returned to Tasmania after a six year break, happily it was to say hello again rather than to say goodbye.  The main thing that made me sad, and left me with the understanding that all may be taken from us without our knowing - because we have taken our eyes off it, was the way in which the trees which have cloaked the ridges and valleys of a beautiful state are being systematically sacrificed to the greed of a few, because of the apathy of the many.  You cannot say the plantation products are growing to replace the diversity of forest timbers when you come to do the new extension in your home (if you can still afford to do it).  If Gunns + Co have their way the only forest of consequence, as far as building materials go, will be in National Parks and World Heritage areas.
In Thailand, as the forests disappeared into the maw of multinational effort, everyone blamed everyone else as the reason why it was happening, and while they were arguing the land was stripped of forests. Tasmania is endeavoring to develop tourism, but what will there be left to be touristy?
It is not touristy but terrifying to come around a blind corner on a narrow road to find a log truck barreling along taking up most of the road, or seeing thirty loads of logging trucks in the space of 30k's (and this is happening almost everywhere).  It is not touristy to take a forest drive and see total devastation with a sign saying "Quiet - Forest Growing" or a sign saying "Forest Working" while loggers are actively raping the forest.  Forest "Management" means removing the unruly scrub (otherwise known as biodiversity) and replacing it with a foreign eucalypt species planted in neat rows for ease of future harvest. As well as this most of the wildlife is at threat (if you want to see dead wildlife drive along any road in Tasmania - there's heaps of it) due to intensive treatments of 1080 poison because they threaten the future livelihood of the "Company".  To watch television and see on Southern Cross Television a program dedicated to tourism in Tasmania pushed by Gunns -"building Tasmania's future"  (they can't think there is much future after they have finished) is to wonder if they really imagine that everyone is bought by the sham they produce.  There are so many beautiful places in Tasmania but to see most of it one must go through so much destruction in order to get there.  The reason why they use so many S.A eucalypts in there plantations is because, like the "mallee", they coppice easily, (you cut one stem and three grow in its place) but the problem with them is that they don't let the water back as the Tasmanian species do so you have drought-like conditions over most of the state.  Back in the sixties they planted Australian eucalypts in East Africa - there were places that had no water but had to go up to six days for firewood.  After the trees grew, there was lots of firewood but they had to walk days to find water.
The animals lose their habitat and so they're moving on - hence the overwhelming road kill.
When I was young and growing up in Tasmania, I lived in a mixed farming community in N.E Tasmania.  There were butter factories all over the N.E. but in the 70's they were all bought out by the whole milk industry (Cadburys).  There used to be a rail industry servicing most of the state.  Later it became a log train to Bell Bay or Triabunna.  Now logging trucks have taken over.  There was a vegetable processing factory in my home town (it closed when I was in Town because the American owner decided to consolidate his investment - didn't sell it so a competitor could compete).  So much has changed over the last thirty years that I found it hard to find the special places I loved as a child - they had been erased or changed in such a way that make them so different.
I love the state and it will always be a part of my heart, but I know that if people are going to save it they need to lose their apathy and stand up proudly, no matter what the neighbors think.  Mainland people shouldn't just focus on the Styx Valley but the whole state if they don't want to lose a precious gem.  The price everyone will have to pay for a piece is going up fast as real estate turns it's greedy eyes at what is left - three ferries - no waiting (unless you leave from Sydney - they're booked out for three months)
To have what I might love to happen is as likely as dropping through the Blowhole (only a joke that maybe Tasmanians can understand) and being able to dance back on the surface of solid Tasmanian reality (not everyone can calm the resurge).  Tasmania is waking from a dream but they don't know how it has become a nightmare while they were asleep.
But now is the time to wake up, not tomorrow or "please let me sleep in a little bit more".  Now is the time to stand up for what you believe in because otherwise everyone else will think they stand alone.

Incidents Vietnam 70 - 71

1) Couple of weeks before I arrived - 2 Australian platoons met in the jungle and open fired on each other each thinking the other was the enemy - at the end about 11/12 men were wounded or killed.
2) Christmas Eve about 11.30pm - a soldier decided he wanted to kill his platoon sergeant.  He fired 6 or 7 shots through the frosted louvers of the sergeants' mess (each bullet hitting flesh) and three men lay dead and a fourth was wounded.  The sergeant he was after was at he other end of the building.  The guy was eventually declared insane and held at the "Governors pleasure"
3) Two guys walked into a shipping container which was full of fuel and ammunition/explosives.  It was dark inside so one of them lit a match
4) We were in the Fire Support Base in the north of the province, and after a morning patrol, an engineer bought back an unexploded flare.  He wanted the silk parachute that floated the flare down, so he took his find back to his hooch, which was also the armoury (full of ammunition and explosives) and proceeded to yank out the parachute thus igniting the flare.  Someone called "Fire" and everyone went racing towards the smoke.  Then someone said "It's the armoury" and we all dived for whatever cover they could find.  "Fuck the fire, I'm saving my arse".  The guy was literally left "red-faced" as he suffered severe burns to his hands chest and face.  The parachute burned in the fire.
5) My first dead body - we camped one night right next to (about ¾) an enemy bunker.  The forward platoons ran into it just as we started moving out in the morning.  I spent about 20 mins positioned behind a log praying no one came to the front of me because I feared either the company commander or sergeant-major would put a bullet in the back of my head - to say they disliked me is a bit of an understatement.  When we moved forward to help mop up and destroy the site I saw my enemy for the first time, although he didn't seem real - more like a wax dummy from Madame Taussauds.  At that moment I came to see what life was by seeing what was missing.
6) At a night defense position by the beach and the "mine-wall" - The platoon commander and I were sharing a weapon pit during a "stand-to" watching a scenario below us of a number of VC leaving a village and heading towards the beach (illuminated by artillery-fired flares) when a piece of shrapnel fired into the sandbag on which we were leaning, missing both our heads by a couple of inches.  We both quickly lost interest in what was going on below us as we sought protection from what was above.
7) On day the Army Payments Committee wanted to see us in "mock action" to see whether we were payed enough, too much, or needed a raise in pay.  In the play I was the medic on the ground in the field (actually atop a small hill above the hospital) and a friend was the "dust off" medic.  After we had finished that afternoon we were about to have our weekly BBQ when the dust off got an urgent call-out.  The last thing the medic said to us was "Save some steak for me!"  About 20 minutes later we heard over the radio that the chopper had been shot down by an R.P.G (rocket propelled grenade) and the burning chopper fell on top of him after he jumped out.  All they had for identity was a molten pistol and melted "dog tags"  He was declared missing in action rather than declared dead (rumor has it he was last seen heading into the bush).  I wonder if the Army Pay Committee saw his loss of life well paid for in the scheme of things.
8) On the next operation after I left H.Q Company D + E platoon, 5 or so of my mates were wounded or blown-apart in a contact.  They were riding on top of an APC.  The APC commander had claymore mines strapped around his turret.  An RPG hit one of the claymores and set them all off.  The tank commander was cut in half and my friends were shredded.  They were picking up parts of them for about 2½ days.  If I had stayed with the unit for another op I would have been with them.  
9) I went for a horse-drawn carriage ride with my girlfriend along Pt St Jaques in Vung Tao.  We were admiring the French mansions along the foreshore and heading towards the huge Jesus statue (looks a little like the one in Rio) on the point when 2 or 3 VC (in classic uniform-sandles, black cotton clothes and cone hat) carrying AK-47's, broke out onto the street about 2-300 meters away from us.  There was a rather tense couple of minutes as they looked at us uncertainly and the driver tried frantically to turn + beat the hell out of there, then they turned and went the other way.  

Copyright © Kenn Austin, 2001