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| Brad Pitt's Trojan Horse Canakkale, Turkey |
"Wishing is the beginning of imagination. Children practice wishing when they are young things, and then--when they have grown--they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm--greed, that kind of thing--but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better." ~ Gregory Maguire
In the nineteenth century menstruation was viewed by physicians as one more sign of the inferiority and weakness of the female. However, there is usually at least a glimmer of truth in any ideology, and the physicians of the Victorian era were not completely wrong when they emphasized the importance of menstruation in women’s overall health; of the relationship between the womb and the psyche; of the wisdom of rest during the period. We have tended to reject all of this because it reminds us of the time when the lives of women were more controlled by men, and because it smacks of old arguments that kept women tied to the home and powerless in the outside world. We have also, quite rightly, rejected the idea that the natural processes of being female are a sickness. But to say that something is not a sickness, and to ignore it altogether–these are not necessarily one and the same thing. By ignoring menstruation, in reaction to the ideas of the Victorian era, perhaps we have lost touch entirely with a lingering thread of awareness of its value in women’s lives.
In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a concept of the female life cycle called the Four Gateways. The first gateway occurs at menarche (the onset of menstruation); the second, at marriage (which to the Chinese really meant the onset of an active sex life); the third, in pregnancy; and the fourth, at menopause. During any of these gateway phases, a woman’s health is both more vulnerable and also more accessible to positive change. Her health can alter for good or ill at these times, depending on how well she cares for herself and on the quality of any medical care she receives.
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| Le violon rouge |
No longer in emotional flux caused by cyclical hormones, after menopause you may well find yourself to be someone you like better, someone who is more stable emotionally, more understanding, more patient, and more kind. The biological and psychological freedom found post-menopause can also unleash creativity and allow for fuller self-actualization. Old fears and issues drop away and a sense of adventure about life can surge to the fore of your psyche. It can be a very good time to be a woman.
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| Al Meister ?? - 2006 |
I had been interested in the menstrual cycle since my early 20′s when I had begun to chart my cycle and use natural contraception. A decade of study and practice of Chinese medicine had opened me up to different cultural viewpoints, and I had specialised in the treatment of women in my work. Since learning how Native American women traditionally behaved during menses I had been taking time out when I had my period, and had been exploring what actually happened if, like them, I slowed down and became still while I was bleeding. But this was my private reality–I had never considered writing about it.
Those four pages were the seed for Her Blood Is Gold. I began to expand on my notes and fill out the bare bones from that initial burst of clarity. The inspiration was so strong that it propelled me through months, and then years, of research and writing. Progress was rather slow: it was my first book and it took me a while to figure out how to go about it. But I persisted and just kept writing: nothing knocked me off track, despite my uncertainty and ignorance about all aspects of the process of both creating and publishing a book. Sometimes it felt like many more women than just me were writing the book, and that the spirits that surrounded me at the lake were having their say.
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| Souer Emmanuelle 1908-2008 |
Never shying from controversy, Sister Emmanuelle's writings--just like her spoken words--pushed the envelope of social acceptability. In her memoirs, she wrote of the insatiable urges and sexual appetite. She wrote frankly of her lifelong feelings of lust, of masturbating as a girl, of falling in love and having to renounce physical love for the love of God. In a very unusually honest account for a nun, she writes: “when desire assaulted me, only some outside presence had the power to stop me; otherwise I was powerless against the avidity of pleasure. A penchant for voluptuousness and an obsession for sensuality developed in my flesh, the intensity of which is difficult to describe. The fact that the needle has not left my old woman’s body is a source of constant surprise and humiliation. I thought that, with the years, its tip of fire would completely disappear. Not at all.”
She also discussed how she grappled with and overcame her early fear of Jews. Since her grandmother was Jewish, she eventually reconciled that with her religious order which promoted the conversion of Jews to Christianity. She elaborates that “little by little,” she wrote, “I went from rejection of, to pride in, my origins.”
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| Fagus sylvaticus European Beech |
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| Vintage |
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| Bush Lemons Billinudgel |
There are places that haunt the mind, strange sites of human settlement, sites of dire conjunction. This place where I live, this house of concrete blocks and concrete floor, this house in Alice Springs, in winter; a refrigerator. In summer, the surrounding sand, the yard, the concrete, all bake in obliterating sun. Out the back, across the fence of corrugated metal you could see claypans and resilient trees, Eucalyptus Coolibah Arida, set amid camouflage grey-blue old man saltbush. It’s long been known as a place where visitors meet. Hidden in the saltbush, Aboriginal men camp at nights, or come for a quiet drink in the hot days. Women come. The coolibah trees, in the local cultural story, are said to be people dancing, waving in ceremony, welcoming an incoming group of ancestral Yeperenye caterpillar beings. The area is a sacred site, perhaps a Yeperenye fertility site.
Today, women arrayed in loose black skirts and multicoloured tops, swaying, waving, are calling out to family members; “Jungarai, Jungarai, over here.” Men come to meet them; some shouting hoarsely, some remorseless in their intent, some with beer cans, in party mood, all escaping from the vigilant eyes of police and liquor restrictions. Hidden in the saltbush.
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| Geese under the bush lemon tree Source: witcheskitchen |
In my yard, on this side of the fence, seven citrus trees like seven sisters bearing fruit. One tree, a lemon, suffers from an ailment that has eluded diagnosis and treatment. Between the lemon and the mandarin, a round table; on the table, expecting a guest, I have placed two small coffee cups. I will give the visitor Greek coffee–or Turkish–if this morning, like those who live in disassociated places, he prefers one side over the other. We seem to live, these days, in divided selves. My visitor is one of those who work both sides of divided local ethnic associations. The town of Alice Springs is a “contact zone” where many people, in genetic code or in temperament, occupy a kind of “in-between” position. In this part of Australia the Aboriginal presence is alive and resilient, incorporating and exploiting the resources that come with the white people. The relationship is sometimes symbiotic, interdependent, maybe predatory, and at the same time illuminating, delightful, surprising. There are individuals placed in this region of overlap who can speak the truth of contradictory things; to do so requires a mind capable of holding contradiction. It is the experience of the “in-between” people, the people of the “contact zone”, who I am seeking for this book because I believe it is in difficult places, where racial, cultural groupings grind into each other, that the insidious influence of unconscious pressures felt.
If this were the city, I might seek such impact edges in places frequented by recent immigrants. The restless northern world has poured into Australia countless memories of loss – and countless hopes for a prosperous future. The cities have conquered, and are now developing a mind of their own, but here, in the remote places of indigenous Australia, ambition and a sense of immigrant entitlement continue edging into Aboriginal lands, inducing original peoples to conform to the ambitions of a westernised civilisation – or so it is said. I place my story in the region where the raw edges of Aboriginal mentality and Western mind dominate the scene. If a cultural complex were to surface, it would surface here, in a place of ambivalent contact.
My visitor is part of that hybrid workforce that plays the chess game of white and black interests. I think “chess” because of intricacy, but you could as readily think “poker game” – big money is on the table in government programs, projects, services. All get their cut in this mosaic of Aboriginal territories – in this mosaic of greed.
I am turning your attention to certain people, those whose lives are spent driving thousands of miles (or kilometres, depending upon which measure you prefer) on remote red-sanded roads, passing through the musical landscapes, entering and leaving the business of remote Aboriginal communities. These are the “border linking” people, some indigenous, some not, whose task it is to work between cultures, in schools, clinics, stores, in Aboriginal art centres, police stations, churches, roadhouses. They translate, mediate, and negotiate; they work to support, teach, tend, facilitate; and they handle drunks, suicides and fights. Some play for personal gain, some labour under the discipline of altruism, some are dedicated to preserving cultural integrity. For some few (both black and white) the reciprocal engagement becomes a vocation, an enterprise of illumination and hardening, a tempering pressed always between the heat and cold of paradoxical states. Here in this region of contact there are signs and symptoms of borderline cultural complexities.
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| Girl With the Silver Hands Artist: Claire Partington |
