THE MANDORLA:

A Spiritual Memoir

Diane Cousins

BA (Hons I) University of Newcastle

BA University of Newcastle

Diploma in Teaching University of Newcastle

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements

of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 2014

Faculty of Education and Arts

School of Humanities and Social Science

University of Newcastle

This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other

degree or diploma in any university or tertiary institution and, to the best of my

knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another

person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this

copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for

loan and photocopying subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

....................................................................

I dedicate this thesis to my children

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Acknowledgements

Sincerest thanks go to my supervisors at the University of Newcastle, Dr. Kim Cheng Boey

and Dr. Kathleen McPhillips whose generous support, inspiration and direction were

invaluable. Many thanks also to my fellow postgraduate students for their companionship,

kindness and humour, especially Sally Fitzpatrick who read the creative draft and gave

encouragement and editing advice. Gratitude as well to Helen Moffat at the university who

was always caring and helpful with many practical matters related to this project. I would

also like to acknowledge my appreciation for the APA scholarship without which this

doctoral project may not have possible. Many thanks also to a number of others for their

support and friendship, including Matra Robertson, Daphne Templeton, Geraldine

Searles, Judith Littlewood, Pat Hamilton, Karen Whitelaw and Nancy Evelyn. Finally,

I would like to express gratitude to my dear children for sharing this journey.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents v

Abstract vi

THE MANDORLA: A Spiritual Memoir

East 1. The Scream 1

2. India ’78 12

3. Lost 22

4. Spiritual Journey 37

5. Ashram 55

6. Betrayal 73

West 7. The Heart 82

8. Pilgrimage 101

9. Feminine Faces of the Divine 117

10. Assisi 131

11. Transition 147

12. Dreaming 156

Mandorla

13. The Mandorla 166

JOURNEYS TO SELF: An Exegesis

1. Writing the Self 175

2. The Idea of the Journey in Spiritual Memoir 200

3. Case Studies of Feminine Divine Journeys 214

Glossary of Sanskrit Terms 231

Notes 235

Works Cited 236

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Abstract

The Mandorla: A Spiritual Memoir constructs a life-narrative and is an attempt to articulate

and give structure to an inner world of struggle and conflict that fuels the spiritual journey

of one woman—myself. It is a record of the tribulations, as well as moments of knowledge,

divine insight, transcendence and ineffable bliss. The spiritual memoir is organised around

four journeys, and while the journeys themselves only took around seven months in total,

they map a spiritual odyssey that evolved over four decades from youth through to middle

age. The journeys serve to ground an eclectic range of spiritual themes in places that

provide temporal and spiritual reference points. The first section is centred on two journeys

to the “East,” and is grounded in an Eastern philosophical and spiritual outlook. The initial

expedition explores a youthful quest for truth in India; the second trip tracks a return to

India just before the collapse of my marriage, and follows my life in middle age. The

second section is centred on two journeys in the “West,” one to Central Australia, the other,

a pilgrimage/sabbatical to England and Europe that explores, among other things, the

feminine face of the Divine. “The Mandorla,” the final section, considers complementary

opposites such as male–female, inside–outside, agony–bliss, heaven–earth and how these

irreducible opposites overlap and exist together in a third liminal space, the mandorla, a

place of potential reconciliation and apotheosis for the seeker–traveller.

The accompanying exegesis is divided into three parts and examines a variety of spiritual

autobiographical projects, especially works by female writers. The first chapter explores the

genre of spiritual autobiography, and provides an historical overview exploring key texts, as

well as documenting the process of the writing of the spiritual memoir and the challenges of

working in an autobiographical, self-reflexive style. The second chapter investigates

travel/pilgrimage and eco-spiritual writing, and also considers methodologies for

understanding spiritual journeys. The third chapter of the exegesis reflects on the powerful

autobiographical accounts of the spiritual journeys of two women in modernity—Monica

Baldwin and Karen Armstrong. These memoirs parallel my own spiritual explorations and

journey in The Mandorla and provide a form for reflecting on women’s spiritual experience

in modernity.

THE MANDORLA:

A Spiritual Memoir

EAST

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1. The Scream

“There are vibrations of different universes right here, right now. We’re just not in tune with them. There are probably other parallel universes in our living room — this is modern physics.”

(Dr. Michio Kaku, Physicist, Professor and Bestselling Author)

Late one afternoon I sit down and close my eyes to imagine my story. The force of the

vision that appears surprises me. I see a shadowy hill at dusk, down which a herd of wild

horses are thundering. They seem terrified, almost out of control. But they are not. My eyes

focus on the smooth, sweaty flanks, the glistening wet skin of a dark grey-black horse as he

rounds the corner. At once I am bothered the horse is male. Why is the protagonist of my

story male? Are these words a drone of convention? But there is a feeling of maleness about

this horse, yet also a feeling the horse is me. Then I remember the Jungian inner animus, the

underlying male counterpart of the female psyche. Relieved, I recollect the vision once

more, hear the stampede, ecstatic somehow, a cacophony of hoofs like the pounding of a

thousand disparate temple drums.

I open my eyes. I am sitting alone in the back bedroom of my recently purchased

unit, my boys’ room. The two-bedroom unit in the centre of Newcastle is a significant

downsize, but affordable. I don’t go in there much when the boys are at their dad’s. Of all

the masks, the one of the mother seems impossible to let go of, as if indelibly written into

every strand of DNA. The truth is, six years ago, I was a full-time mother with five children

and a beautiful rustic three-storey house on the water’s edge at Lake Macquarie, enjoying

art, music, learning, a garden and an extended family.

But there are many truths. The truth is I have vivid dreams. Recently, I dreamed I

was back at our family lake-home of twenty-one years. I was there with the youngest two

boys and we were about to walk down the winding bush path at the end of our reserve.

Tristan, then eight years old, would sing as always, and Julian would run to a spreading

rose-gum that he called the twisty tree, to sit on a bough hanging over the lake.

We were about to vanish into the bush when I heard a loud abrupt sound.

“Huhh…!” I turned. Twenty metres away was an ancient group of Aboriginal men standing

in a circle. The one who’d called out was staring intently and stood apart. Without warning

he hurled a boomerang at my throat. “You must speak now! You must speak now!” he said,

his words blurred, guttural. Excruciating pain in my throat, my heart aching, I ran back to

our lake-home. My family was there but no one I could talk to. I was sobbing deeply.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to speak. My story starts with a tiny

antique Indian cupboard in the bedroom of my new unit. The cupboard is filled with

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treasures: little handmade gifts from my children; pinecones from a Himalayan village; an

intricately carved, tiny, brass vase from the ashram throw-out; a miniature foldout shrine to

Mary bought in Rome; a hand-carved incense burner from William, my eldest son; certain

rocks; journals. One of the journals is an old India diary from my youth. Most of it was

destroyed, and the edges of the pages that remain are burnt. I take it out carefully. The paper

is yellowed, watermarked, speckled with brown smudges. The spiral, wire spine is

blackened.

The Fire

“You can still smell the fire,” the woman muses, lifting the remaining pages of her scorched

India journal closer to make sure. “Strange the burnt smell should remain unchanged, even

after twenty-five years.” I see her slantwise, through the half open bedroom door, her lower

legs, the edge of an A-line, black, floral, knee-length skirt. She is sitting on the corner of a

recently purchased low, wooden, double bed in her new unit—a big change from her

“monk’s bed,” as she called it, of the past nine years—a narrow, rock-hard futon.

As she turns the first seared page, a few brown-flaked edges flutter onto the

immaculate wooden floorboards. Did she hear the faintest crackle? She listens into the

silence of that early morning. The surf is some three hundred metres away, across the park

at the bottom of the cliffs. A spiritual master once remarked that the waves roll and crash to

the sound of Aum but she has never been able to hear it.

The old India notebook is still on her knee; she handles it slowly, carefully; the

fragile remains that haven’t been touched in decades. Once again, she lifts it closer,

lingering over it, almost like smelling a rose. And into the silence, her memories rise like a

deluge—the twin tides that have surged and swept through her life, joy and pain, creation

and destruction, all of it inextricably linked. Was it bringing her to some sort of

completion? She thinks back to the fire as if it is another lifetime…

She was thirty years old at the time of the fire in 1987, married with two young

children, William and Anna. Their lakefront house burned to the ground even though they

built it all back up again and more. But at the time it was disorienting, few things were

salvaged: odd pieces of Royal Doulton china that didn’t break in fallen cupboards or with

the heat, baking trays, saucepans that a friend scrubbed up. She still has them, though the

handles remained charred. She lost all her writing—all except those pages from the India

section of one notebook.

3

“I will never forget that scream,” their sixty-eight-year-old widowed neighbour, Ivy,

remarked a few days later. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Ivy said, looking with eyes

softer than Diana had ever seen, gentle blue eyes that momentarily seemed to perceive the

world anew.

The exchange, however, was not indicative of any past or future communications

between them. Conversations had been mostly brief. Sometimes Diana returned home to

“Oh, I’ve pruned your rose bush for you.” Then Diana would look over to the low fence at

the top of the garden to see her favourite deep, red, Papa Meilland rose, once again, stunted

and clipped.

This pruning ritual of the velvety rose was to be Ivy’s consolation for living next

door to Diana’s rambling garden full of spreading trees, fragrant and edible plants and

herbs. Ivy maintained a bare garden: “so that thieves can’t hide there,” she said. Much later,

when Diana left that family home at Marmong Point, she was furious with herself for

allowing that routine to continue for the twenty-one years they lived there. In fact, Diana

was to regret many of the ways she’d given her power away over the years.

On the day of the house fire, however, when she returned home it was not Ivy who

greeted her, but her mother. A beautiful spring day and Diana had been out with three-and-

half-year-old William and two-year-old Anna. The children were excited to see fire engines

and a police car in their quiet street. Diana had to park five houses away and was filled with

curiosity to discover what was happening. Her mother met her at the car. “What are you

doing here?” Diana asked.

Her mother was walking quickly. “Diana,” she called before reaching her. She was

shaking. “There’s …been…. a fire. You’ve… lost everything.”

“What…? Diana fumbled, “You must be joking…?”

“No,” her mother said, gripping Diana’s arm, wrenching it. “I wouldn’t joke about

something like this.” Her mother’s face was white, the lines on her forehead crinkled. “It’s

true,” she reasserted, still shaking Diana’s arm.

Diana thought her mother impatient. She felt hurt. Then she noticed tears in her

mother’s eyes. Only once had she seen her mother cry, when her mother’s father had died.

She braced herself. The evidence was all around: clusters of people on the footpath

outside, the smoky air. A few neighbours spoke out, greeting Diana, but she remembers

none of it. It was as if she was walking in a tunnel. A police car directing traffic was outside

their front gates, also an ambulance. A fire engine was parked in the driveway, and as she

squeezed past it, through the gates at the top, Diana’s feet did not to want to move; her legs

were heavy. She wanted more time but was trapped within the unfolding scene.

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The garage at the top of their long, narrow, sloping, treed block still hid the house at

the lower end of the garden. The house bordered a grassy reserve that led to the lake edge

forty metres from their front steps. Diana was pleased for this reprieve, as she and her

mother walked under the large mulberry tree with its profusion of lush, green leaves, but as

they edged around the corner of the garage, there was no escaping the charred black

framework of the house that peeked into view.

Without stopping, Diana continued down the winding path, her mother beside her.

They didn’t speak. Cupboards, beds, wardrobes, tables, everything fallen in black

indistinguishable heaps, thoroughly sodden also. One possession, alone, was recognisable.

Diana was pleased that the elegant form of her grand piano remained upright, though

completely charred. She could not breathe, but gulped the air a few times. The front of the

house had been obliterated.

Later they were told that the fire had started there at the front. Neighbours had

phoned triple-zero but the 1940s wooden dwelling had gone quickly. The first sparks had

possibly resulted from a pile of old extension cords workmen had thrown into the lounge

that morning without turning the power off at the wall—the workmen were finishing a new

deck at the front. But none had any inclination to lay blame, and this was never proven.

Only a month before, Diana and her husband had the residence completely rewired, having

spoken about the dangers of an event such as this.

Diana and her mother walked down the path until they reached the fig tree twenty

metres from the back door. There, a fireman advised them to stop. Diana remembers the

quiet, a troubled silence and was never sure whether this was because people were

watching, waiting to see how she’d react; or whether shock had blocked all other sounds out

for her. She didn’t know. But it was at that point, she started to scream, a huge, open, full-

throated sound.

Oddly enough, after the first moments, while she was oblivious to everything and

everybody around her, she seemed to be observing the internal workings of this all-

powerful scream. She had accessed a potent, primal centre within. Was it the navel or the

womb? As she was watching the workings of that scream, however, she also knew she

wasn’t sure how to stop. Diana had no knowledge of the fireman who stood with his hand

on her shoulder, nor was she aware of anyone in the vicinity. And it was only when her

mother told her that if she didn’t stop, the ambulance men would have to give her

something, that this scream silenced itself immediately, totally.

And this is where I will once again acknowledge that the woman was me because,

as I faced the flat reality of everything, the devastation of those charred black, smouldering

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remains, I, myself, was also revealed without a mask. I felt overwhelmed, and intimidated

by the extreme attention focused on me. I was required to provide some sort of response

when in fact I felt frozen and exposed, our lake-sanctuary in ruins and out in the open for all

to see, to peruse.

That night it was on the television news and the saga was reported in local

newspapers. Friends, friends of friends and even people we had no connection with, all

helped. It was their generosity that made me reconsider assumptions I’d made about

Australia’s “materialistic, empty culture,” and I remembered what I’d always known as a

child: inherent within the human heart, people everywhere held this potential for great love

and warmth.

The fireman still had their hoses aimed at the house, smoke curled up from the

ashen remains. Peeks and flashes of red glowed out from hot coals quickened in the spring

breeze. The air was still thick with the smell of the fire and floating embers, and it was then

that I noticed my husband walking up from the direction of the lake. A neighbor had called

him at work and he’d apparently arrived on the scene before me.

We walked over with my mother to a patch of open grass next to Ivy’s fence and sat

huddled near an old lemon tree. “At least no one was hurt,” Mum said.

Straightaway, it felt a relief to sit there being thankful and agreeing about that. Then

one of the firemen walked over instructing our neighbour, Ivy, to make tea. “Warm and

very sweet,” he said in his strong, earthy voice, advising her to add some huge number of

spoons of sugar. When Ivy questioned this, the fireman insisted. I cringed, but when the tea

arrived, it tasted good and the warm mug in my hands was comforting.

“Where’s my dump truck?” William asked after a little while. I wondered if

William, who’d been playing absently on the grass and in the mango tree close by, was now

going to get upset. He was standing very still. Anna watched him intently as she sat

snuggled on my knee.

“Umm, it’s gone in the fire,” I replied. “But we can get you another one,” I added,

feeling the hollow echo of these words. I’d been both surprised and thankful the children

seemed unperturbed.

“T’ank you,” William said, after a pause, and then returned to the mango tree’s

spreading branches; but shortly after he came back. “Where’s teddy?” he asked.

“Teddy’s gone, too,” my mother replied this time. “But I’ll buy you another lovely

teddy very soon.”

He hesitated, studying her for some moments, and said “T’ank you” again, smiling,

before returning to the lush mango tree. Now I can see how his chiming clear voice brought

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us all into the present. Over the next few weeks, the children ended up with an extensive

collection of donated toys and clothes. Charities such as the Salvation Army and the Lions

Club offered help immediately; the local shop took up a collection; another friend organised

a drop-off that filled her garage, and others just gave and gave.

The next day, I returned to the house with William to see what could be salvaged.

Three friends helped also. The lake looked hauntingly blue on that clear warm spring day,

its colour an even deeper hue as I viewed it through the exposed framework of the house. I

was pleased for the lake’s unalterable charm as I pushed our wheelbarrow through soggy

heaps of wreckage, brave William next to me, pushing his little red and yellow plastic

wheelbarrow. All the garden tools were in the packed garage at the top of the yard.

Everything there, all my husband’s belongings, was safe.

At first, almost as much as the lost photos, it was the children’s teddies I missed.

They were heirloom pieces and also highly durable; we never did get around to replacing

them. But afterwards, I missed my large collection of books, classical records, tapes, my

grandma’s exquisite embroidered cushions and antique covers, and other irreplaceable

things such as the writings from my youth.

October of 1987 was “black.” As well as the house fire, five days later on the 15th of

that month, the southern coast of England, where I was born and spent the first five years of

life, was lashed by storms; it was reported to be the worst weather to hit England in years.

Then, just two days after, there was the great stock market crash, a day subsequently known

as Black Monday, one of the darkest days in global financial history. It didn’t affect me, but

my parents discovered that they’d lost almost all their savings. This theme of loss was not

new.

Cardiff South, 1963. The year after we arrived in Australia, we lost everything in a flood. I was

six years old. We were living in a tent at the time, washing in an old wrought iron claw-foot

bath in a disused chook shed. My parents had used the money from the sale of our English

home to buy ten acres of land with a two-thousand-chook egg-farm. It was next to Winding

Creek at Cardiff South, an outlying suburb of Newcastle, called the sticks in those days. But

six months after buying it, we were flooded out and lost everything, including the tent (though

the chooks were fine). My father had the Midas touch, however, and after subdividing some of

the land, designing houses and selling them, soon we had a mansion-home that he’d planned

and built. We called it the boomerang house because of its shape.

But five years later my parents sold it, so we could travel back to England and Europe

for a year; we stayed with extended family in Derbyshire and Sheffield, and were treated with

celebrity status; and then toured Europe in an old navy-blue and white, fitted-out kombi.

Afterwards, Mum’s homesickness was cured, and soon after we returned to Australia my

7

parents had another exquisite home. I, on the other hand, at eleven, deplored being back. I

yearned desperately for grandmas, aunts, cousins and the rich familial–cultural life of England

and Europe.

Following the fire of 1987, my life shut down. It took a year for the house insurance

to be settled and a new home to be built. Linden, our third child, was born a week after we

moved in and everyone kept saying, “New home, new baby.” But the fire, and that year of

rebuilding, had unsettled me. And while people’s generosity was unfailing, the experience

of losing everything was like losing my identity, which made me consider how shaky the

spirituality I’d presumed to be practising for the past ten years really was. I kept wondering

if it all would have been easier if we’d had contents insurance. I felt disrobed and trapped

wearing other people’s clothes, and disenfranchised living with my parents once again. Like

old foes, my old fears resurfaced. I was consumed with the same feelings of dislocation and

restlessness that had swamped me after my return from India. Yet I also saw dreams inside

me that were huge and unexpressed.

These were the controversial dreams of my youth, a powerful raw truth; something I

sensed in nature and in the warmth of extended-family gatherings in childhood; a truth I’d

sought at twelve years of age when I became a Christian in a local church youth group; this

was something I did secretly because despite our attending Sunday school as children, my

mother insisted God was irrelevant.

Not long after this “conversion,” as was customary in the Youth Group, I stood on

the stage one night, along with another two new converts. But when my time came to

declare my transformation: “Jesus is in my heart; my life is transformed …” a force rose up

and clamped me shut. I knew it was a lie.

While I’d had fun at the Youth Group, and had pored over the Bible in my

bedroom, finding deep consolation in the words, the truth was I’d felt nothing when I’d sat

in the empty church with a friend and prayed with utter faith for Jesus to come in to my

heart. When I prayed at home, I experienced this same void.

I stood numb on the stage, crying, and was helped down. When I continued to weep

and still couldn’t speak, the priest ushered my friend and me to his house next door, to his

wife. I sat on the floor of their living room, my head resting on their lounge, hidden in my

arms, a stack of tissues beside me. My friend returned to group, but I stayed there, crying,

until it was time to go home. “Maybe God has a special plan for you,” the priest’s wife

consoled, her warm hand on my shoulder.

8

But I felt so empty inside. In my room I cried for much of that night in the dark. My

face was swollen and red at school the next day.

Know Thyself

Who am I? Long before I ended up in India I’d thought about the inner life. As a child I

noticed people shied away from its reality just below the surface. Most adults I knew

couldn’t look you in the eye, not sincerely. But I felt truth in other ways, swimming in our

private creek at Cardiff South, catching tadpoles, the ancient feeling of the bush: I

remember standing in a field of sunlit grass one day, the leaves of the eucalypt trees moving

in a gentle breeze, shimmering in an autumnal light, as if something sparkled in the

landscape and also within me. I dreamed of a noble existence, and although my hopes of

achieving this in suburban Australia were largely diminished by the time I was fifteen, after

I turned sixteen, this changed.

It all began one morning under the wattle trees in late spring. I was in Year 11 and

five of us seniors, having been given a free study period, decided to escape school for an

hour and sit in the sun in front of the old boatshed, two hundred metres away on Lake

Macquarie, the same lake where a decade later we would make our family home. We sat

talking and laughing on the weathered wooden boat-ramp, our feet dangling in the water.

The lake glistened as if sparkling with tens of thousands of jewels.

When it was almost time to return to class, I was talking to affable, artistic Mark

under the wattle trees, when I noticed a female form beckoning, sparkling and dancing on

the watery surface light of his eyes. She kept reaching out to me, rapturous, trying to

communicate something. I was astonished and looked hard to make sure this was not my

own reflection bouncing back. It was not. She was not in school uniform but dressed in

Eastern clothes, ecstatic, divine. I was standing close to Mark, but moved even closer,

speaking gibberish and laughing so as to continue to observe her.

I have no explanation for that experience. I’ve read that it’s possible to look into

another’s eyes and see consciousness dancing, to see a pool of love and in this way

experience divine truth naturally. Also I’ve since wondered whether she was reminiscent of

one of the dakinis; though I’d never heard of those divine, female Tibetan beings then. The

Buddhist tradition claims one may experience little gaps in time where clarity can shine

through, and the more we are open to these gaps, the more the play of the dakini energy can

be experienced.

9

That evening, my bedroom door shut, I stood almost touching the mirror, having

re-plugged and re-angled the desk light so it shone sharply on to the domed surface of my

eyes. I had to find what was inside me, and couldn’t believe I’d never thought of doing this

before. My gaze was fearless. My will was a camera lens zooming-in, unstoppable; my

vision imploded and I plunged inside, free-falling in a measureless void as the fickle

touchstones of my understanding were instantly obliterated. Inside that void, a voice spoke.

Though I don’t recall if actual words were uttered, the meaning was entirely clear: “You

don’t even know yourself!” It thundered, rumbling and reverberating in every cell inside

me.

In Native American lore it is said that looking in a mirror of water can restore a

person to their larger identity and purpose. But what happened to me that night seemed to

achieve just the opposite. My life changed. Having been one of the more outgoing, popular

girls in the year, I became more lost than anyone else I knew, though possibly others didn’t

recognise this. The whole persona I’d assumed seemed a fraud, the shallow details of my

identity, ridiculous. The next morning at breakfast I was unbearably self-conscious and

couldn’t look anyone in the eye. At school it was worse.

“Why are you fluttering your eyelids?” Jim, the chubby class clown, asked as he

caught my arm when we walked from the senior study after the morning break. He stood at

my height and made me watch him flutter his eyelids, a broad grin all over his round red

face. “Don’t do that,” I said alarmed. “I can’t help it.”

“Oh, you’re so funny, Diana,” he said, chuckling as we continued on to class. I

remember the relief I felt when I realised Jim couldn’t see the scale of my internal terror.

For many years I found it difficult to look into anyone’s eyes. How could I when I

didn’t know myself? I was deeply troubled, but could talk to no one about this. On the

surface, my life continued, a succession of normalities. But the real me recoiled, seeking the

solace of the waves, the sun, the moon; the warm reassurance that comes from walking

barefoot on the earth; and the inspiration in literature, music, art, as well as the company of

a few artistic, way-out-there friends.

At nineteen years of age, after completing two years at university, I took a year’s

leave-of-absence to go overseas. Before I left, one of the fellows in our share-terrace house

in Newcastle, a drama student, asked why I didn’t use drugs or alcohol. Just about everyone

used recreational drugs in the 70s. I answered without thinking, “I believe the greatest

experience is waiting to be discovered inside. I think it’s the spiritual equivalent of an

orgasm that will rush through the body and explode out of the top of the head.” When I

began the year-long journey that would take me to India, I had no idea our high school

10

motto, the ancient Greek injunction, “Know Thyself,” Gnothi Seauton, was to be the key to

the rest of my life.

Once more I return to the woman sitting on the bed in her apartment with the singed India

journal on her knee. Three years ago, she turned fifty. Except for her youngest two, Tristan

and Julian, who were in their final years of school, the children had left home. Deep, red

silk saris with shining gold-embroidered borders hang in place of wardrobe doors. A large

wooden desk in the corner is piled high with books. Notice boards above it are jammed with

images, quotes, photos, masks, other things. A narrow bookshelf reaches to the ceiling with

The Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita, Interior Castle, Story of a Soul, St Clare’s letters, books

about St Francis, Dark Night of the Soul, the Bible, Nectar of Chanting, The Spiral

Staircase, Cave in the Snow, other tomes.

But the woman for now remains focused on the old scorched India journal on her

knee. I’m pleased it was the India section that had survived. I gaze down at the heading

INDIA written in large, bold, blue, exotic lettering at the top of the page, though faded and

grubby now. I remember writing it in the dorm room in Varanasi when I’d lain face down

on the bed for hours trying to get the heading to measure up to the unfathomable swirl of

feelings inside me that night in India.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart; try to love the questions

themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue,”

advises Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet. He goes on to say, “Do not seek the

answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the

point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually,

without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

There was much that was unsolved in my heart in those days, including the great

gap between what I felt inside and the reality of my outer life; it was as if I didn’t inhabit

myself or my life fully. My time in India only helped to confirm this incongruity more;

although in India, I sensed there were answers. India was the last stop. I’d intended to go all

the way overland from London back to Australia, but time had run out. I’d been

backpacking for more than a year and when I reached India, I wanted to stay at least another

year there. Yet this would’ve meant losing my place at the University. I went home. But the

“I” that had left never did return.

I’ve spent my life unravelling and reaching for answers; much of what I found

surprised me. The story recounted here is like a vision through a fleeting window, possibly

a quintessential moment, but the account is ephemeral, even to the deepest parts which were

11

written from my bones. Fragments of narrative have been carefully placed, painstakingly

assembled like the colours, patterns, energy in a Tibetan sand mandala that after it is

finished will be thrown to the winds.

12

2. India ‘78

“Know Thyself”

(Written at the entrance to The Temple of the Oracle in Delphi. Also spoken by Socrates)

I left Australia alone in early January, 1977. I was nineteen. My backpack weighed forty

pounds and included a tent, sleeping bag, cooking equipment, maps and a change of

clothes; also I carried a bundle of photocopied words and musical scores for Bob Dylan, Cat

Stevens, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen songs; my guitar was strapped to the back of my

pack. I flew to London first, shared a room with other travellers and busked each day in a

subway until I’d earned enough for a day’s living. Then, after staying with grandmas, aunts,

uncles and cousins in Sheffield and Derbyshire for a month, I travelled to many places in

England and Europe. But this story will begin in Afghanistan in December of that year. For

me, this is where the real story started, where my long relationship with the East began.

I arrived in Afghanistan after having spent five days sick in bed in Istanbul with a

raging fever, bathed in sweat. When I recovered, I felt refreshed and cleansed and travelled

on a dubious assortment of local buses across Turkey and Iran for four days, until I reached

Herat, in Afghanistan. I arrived in Herat two days after Christmas, though there was no

indication of the Festive Season, or indeed anything remotely reminiscent of the West;

except I met a young English couple on the bus from Tehran, Olivia and Luke. We’d

stepped out on to the dusty border of Afghanistan to have our passports stamped; they were

gentle, fair-skinned and ginger-haired and we three waited, along with women in full

Afghan chadri, and Afghan men in turbans, baggy pants and kurtas, who stood next to their

brightly painted patterned trucks.

Olivia, Luke and I shared a room in Herat for ten days. I felt immediately close to

them—we went on to exchange letters for years. Herat was a small, peaceful village at the

heart of the Silk Road, at the crossroads of trade routes leading to India, Central Asia and

the Middle East. Each dawn in Herat, we were woken by the prayers ringing out from

minaret towers, and the sounds of the tinkling bells of horse-drawn wagons and carriages

going past outside on the ancient dirt roads. Close by was the thirteenth-century Great

Friday Mosque, known also as the Blue Mosque because it was covered in minute, blue-tile

mosaic and blue bands of Quranic script. Looming over the village was an old stone citadel

going back to Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. Carpet weavers on the pavement, often

children, nimbly lifted and looped in the coloured weft threads to a chant such as three red,

six green, two blue…. All women wore full Afghan chadri and vibrant arrays of street stalls

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sold traditional clothes, carpets, jewellery, teapots, old coins, as well as other things such as

chai, lamb kebabs, tandoori chicken and naan.

One morning, as I paused on the dusty medieval streets of old Herat, it seemed as I

stood in that most foreign of faraway places, that I also glimpsed some ancient natural

essence inside myself. But at that point I’d not been to India. Being in Afghanistan prepared

me for India; it was where the shackles of my cultural–familial identity finally fell away.

After Herat, I travelled on to Kabul for a few nights, before boarding an old Afghani bus

that wound down through the legendary Khyber Pass to Pakistan, the only road east out of

Kabul. From there, I would travel on to India.

I looked out through the window hoping to catch sight of the colourfully dressed

Pashto-speaking hill tribes. I’d heard and read of them, these intensely independent people

who’d thwarted Alexander the Great and Queen Victoria’s army. But as the bus negotiated

the treacherous shale and limestone cliffs that day, the rocky, arid winter landscape was

bare. I considered how different these fierce, freedom-loving tribal people were to the

women in burqa covered from head to toe, with only a grille-window for the eyes to see

out. Yet, appearances can mislead.

I’d met Anoosh after coming across some children on the vast, barren dirt edges

outside Herat. The children, dressed in an assorted collection of traditional though ragged,

clothes, were playing knuckles with rocks in the dirt, next to a dried up riverbed cluttered

with refuse. I stood watching, wondering if their rules were similar to ours. The children

kept looking at me. I ventured closer to join in, exchanging rules in sign language, and after

this the children jumped up, and wanted me to go after them. I followed over flat stretches

of dirt, even though all the while my mind repeated “No, don’t! You shouldn’t. Don’t.” We

ended up at a narrow opening in one of the three-metre high mud brick walls in a labyrinth

of laneways on the outer reaches of the village.

The children tugged my hand to go inside. But I stood still, feeling it was invasive

to go in. The children ran inside. I waited, not knowing how to enter or how to walk away. I

could hear them calling, talking eagerly. Minutes later, they came out once more, tugging

my hand. I peered tentatively around the corner.

Looking straight at me, I met the shining dark eyes of a woman about my own age.

She had a wide, open smile, and was wearing a red headscarf and colourful skirt, and was

the mother of a few of the children. I’d never expected the shrouded women in the streets of

Herat to look like this. Anoosh’s manner was simple, natural, yet her presence seemed

powerful; I simultaneously realised how hyper self-conscious and analytical we all were in

the West.

14

She beckoned me in to the central courtyard where an old man wearing a white

kurta (a long dress), an old brown overcoat, and a karakul, a type of fez hat, was drawing

water from a well. He looked up with friendly, though cautious, eyes, then continued

winding the rope. After we’d exchanged names, stumbling and smiling over pronunciations,

Anoosh took me to a mud-brick outhouse where another young woman squatted, stirring a

pot over an open fire on the dirt floor. She looked up briefly to smile. The room was bare,

except for a low, wooden storage shelf along one of the walls. The dirt-floor had been

swept.

The children ran around making much noise and when we emerged back into the

courtyard, at least another ten family members had appeared. I wish I could’ve stayed, gone

on nodding and smiling, but I felt flushed; my thoughts were racing; I had an urgent sense

that I had to leave. I said goodbye to Anoosh, to the children, and nodded and smiled to the

others, thanking them, and thanking them again, desperately hoping I’d not offended.

I was thinking of Anoosh and her family as the bus wound down inches away from

the giddy drops of the Khyber Pass that day. My treasured notebook was on my knee, the

page was my sole confidante, but I didn’t write. I was too intent on trying to see some sign

of life in the landscape, but the steep pass was desolate, and though spectacular, I saw no

one.

As I sat there that day, there was no evidence of trouble on the Khyber Pass, even

though locals, including the manager of the Green House where I stayed in Kabul, had

warned of it. I thought they were exaggerating. Three months later, I was shocked when I

heard of the military coup in Afghanistan, and even more surprised the following year,

when the borders of Afghanistan were closed due to the civil war. After the September 11

attacks, this country that had once seemed so remote was to be bombed when President

Bush announced his “War on Terror” in 2001, a year that was to be disastrous in my own

life as well.

But as the old bus descended that day in January, 1978, the future was far away,

unmarked by tragedy. The two-hundred-and-twenty kilometre descent took seven hours on

the pot-holed, dirt road to reach the Pakistani border, which was demarcated with a chicken-

wire fence. The small Afghani bus stopped twenty metres short of it. We passengers, ten of

us, had to climb down the narrow steps off the bus to walk with our luggage through the dirt

so as to cross over the border into Pakistan.

Edgy Pakistani officials awaited us. They wore helmets, carried guns and screened

each of us at a low-roofed mud-brick checkpoint. We ten passengers then boarded a larger

15

Pakistani bus, and were shuttled for an hour across dusty plains to Peshawar, one of the

oldest living cities in Asia.

Close to Peshawar station, I wandered the crowded ancient market place. Being on a

trade route at the crossroads of central and south Asia, it was famous for the variety of

goods: new and old brass and copper pots, plates; ornamental pottery glazed in earth

colours; traditional clothes; tribal and antique jewellery, semi-precious stones such as lapis

lazuli. Many stalls had a makeshift wooden bench, where customers were continually

invited to sit for a clay cup of sweet green tea. But I didn’t stop; with little time between

trains, I bought only nuts, dried figs and dates for the journey, then took an afternoon train

across Pakistan to the eastern-border town of Lahore, a four-hour trip.

In Lahore, passengers had to change to an Indian train to cross the border in to

India. While Indian officials boarded the train to check luggage and passports, their

presence, though official, seemed innocent, and the inverse of tension and strain. I noticed

this same comfortable, relaxed manner in the Indian passengers as well, even though the

train that continued on to New Delhi was overcrowded. I had to sit on my pack on the floor

all night, knees to chest, no room to stretch.

The train arrived in New Delhi at 2.30am with a three-hour wait for a connection to

Agra. I was exhausted. When I discovered a designated ladies’ waiting room on the New

Delhi platform, I laid my old green carry-mat out on one of the slatted bench seats, putting

an unzipped sleeping bag over me. I rested my head on my pack, while gripping the metal

rail at bottom to secure it, and went to sleep.

Hours later, when I half-opened my eyes, I was alarmed to find the waiting room

jammed full. Three Indian women looked down, as if they’d been waiting for me to wake.

The women were trying to tell me something; they were ruffled and gestured to a sign

above the doorway. I’d noticed the sign when I came in. It was written in Hindi as well as

English: “Second Class Ladies Waiting Room.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved, “it’s ok, it’s ok.” But the women looked anxious, twisting

and shaking their heads in that Indian yes-no sort of way. They then pointed to another sign

above a different doorway about ten metres off: “First Class Ladies Waiting Room.”

“Oh no” I said, turning my head, still trying to smile, while also rummaging through

an underarm wallet to find my ticket. “Me, second class ladies waiting room,” I said,

unfolding the crumpled receipt showing the trip from Lahore to Agra via New Delhi. I’m

not sure why I had to speak pidgin English.

To my knowledge, one had to buy a first-class ticket to sit in first class. I would

never have done that. First class not only meant spending a lot more money—at that stage

16

I’d not grasped how inexpensive everything was in India—but also implied superiority.

Nothing could have been more alien to the late-hippie-end ideologies of my youth in the

70s.

But India, I was to learn, was different. In India one had to flow. Like an object

immersed in the inexorable flow of the holy Ganges, one had to plunge into this process

that was India, or feel forever overwhelmed and frustrated.

The women looked relieved when I thanked them and moved into the First Class

Ladies Waiting Room, even though I didn’t have a first-class ticket. The First Class Ladies

Waiting Room was empty, except for two beautifully sari-ed and bejewelled women who

sat talking in one corner. They looked over and smiled, a little conspiratorially I thought.

After putting my things down, I walked outside to stand at the end of the platform.

I breathed in deeply, looking out over that silent, misty, half-lit, morning scene that was

India. Somehow, I felt safe, supremely safe. It seemed a great load had lifted here in India. I

had arrived.

The rhythmic movement of the train on the tracks and the warmer air made me feel

sleepy on the three-hour morning journey from New Delhi to Agra. Despite this, however, I

stayed awake, lolling my head against the window. I was singing inside. Though the

landscape was foreign, I had the feeling of returning home after a long and difficult journey.

I looked out at the many villages, bamboo houses, straw houses, tents; people

everywhere, women in bright orange, red, yellow and other patterned saris, men in baggy,

white pants with loose cotton shirts or bare-chested and wearing a lungi. All looked

extremely poor. Many were walking on the dirt roads, or next to the railway line carrying

loads on their heads; others worked the earth using hoes, or steered bullocks to plough their

fields.

Agra

When I arrived in Agra, I booked into a cheap hotel not far from the station, and went to

bed early. The next day I did something unusual. Despite there being an endless succession

of tourist buses and numerous visitors, which usually I’d avoid, I spent the entire day at the

Taj Mahal. The gleaming, white, marble mausoleum held me strangely. Built by Shah Jahan

as an emblem of love for his wife after she died, following the birth of their fourteenth

child, it was considered the epitome of high Mughal architecture.

I spent hours gazing at the fine geometric patterns of inlaid marble on the floors,

looking up into the twenty-five-metre high ceilings, studying the exquisite floral patterns of

17

numerous precious-stone inlays. I wandered in a daze. The shrine seemed flawless and

perfect in every way; yet also I sensed something intangible and remote. I’m not sure if this

had something to do with the fact that all designs were devoid of anthropomorphic forms,

prohibited in Islamic religious tradition. All decoration was based on calligraphy, abstract

or plant designs, although I hadn’t discerned this then.

After wandering there for some hours, I bought a mango, guava and chapatti for a

late lunch, and sat dreaming in the adjoining grounds among the dark, green cypresses and a

variety of bright red and yellow fruit trees. I’d meant to catch up on journal writing, but

instead sat in a daze looking out as bright green parrots darted across the gardens,

squawking and shining in the sunlight.

Later that afternoon, I met a traveller in the gardens of the Taj Mahal. Pierre was

sitting on the stone bench next to mine, and we started talking; immediately, he seemed like

an old friend and we chatted all afternoon. Pierre was tall, wore glasses, and had discerning

green eyes, though he was witty and light-hearted as well. I remember his large, expressive,

long-fingered hands. We were both staying at the Mumtaz Mahal Hotel, named after Shah

Jahan’s wife, and at sunset when the gardens closed, walked back there. On the way we

stopped to eat curry at a street stall and agreed to visit the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri

together the next day.

Agra, January, 1978. Pierre—French, a writer, philosopher, aged twenty-six. I knew I liked

him from the start. He stimulated my mind instead of deadening it with itineraries of past

experiences or future plans. Said he believes there’s no such thing as truth and right because

there are so many angles to see the same thing from. He brought that completely open state of

mind back to me, where I realised I really didn’t know what I believed. In one light I could see

it one way, but then there were at least another million angles as well. I considered this as we

talked, as I looked at him, as I observed myself thinking about what he’d said. I realised these

impressions going through my mind were not absolute, but only one of trillions of ways of

understanding who he was, and what he meant. Said he’s looking for “something,” but

eventually hopes to live in the country and write.

Pierre feels we shouldn’t try to change a culture such as India, even though many of the

untouchables, street sweepers, and rickshaw drivers have to live on five rupees a day, feeding

also a large family on this. We talked of karma and destiny, and of how content the Indian

people seem; how they believe the rich have been virtuous in a past life and so merit their good

karma. He mentioned, also, the many other travellers he’d met who seemed in a blinded rut,

travelling only to experience the variety of drugs in each country. I’d noticed this too, like the

French guys at the Green House in Kabul, who sat around and got stoned every day in the

hostel common room.

18

I switched on the dim light that hung on a tattered electrical cord in my room in the

Mumtaz Mahal Hotel. I’d not noticed much about the room when I went to bed the night

before, except at three rupees a night, it was cheap. It was the first time I’d had a room to

myself in months. But as I stood in the dusty doorway on that second night, looking at the

mouldy-smelling room filled with a lumpy, double bed, I sensed something disturbing. But

I was tired, and slept until Pierre tapped on my door early the next morning.

We were ready to leave at 5.30am. Still dark. The morning air was fresh and we

walked briskly in the dawn light. But we couldn’t find the bus station, and had to hail a

bicycle rickshaw. I felt arrogant, lazy, sitting there as I watched the driver, his thin body

straining with each downward push. But we made the bus and forty minutes later, after a

rickety journey, we neared the walls of the sixteenth-century, deserted royal city of

Fatehpur Sikri, once the capital of the Mughal Empire. It was built by the Mughal Emperor

Akbar from the red sandstone common around here, though the city was abandoned

fourteen years after its completion because of the bad water supply.

Pierre and I headed for the main entrance, but took a sharp turn after noticing a

crowd of tourists there. Skirting around to a side gate, we entered a different part of the city.

Alone, we explored numerous corridors, small rooms and huge steps leading everywhere.

Like eager young children we climbed to the top of buildings, clambering up terraces,

forbidden places, trying to imagine what life was like when the city flourished. We sat high

up on one of the walls on that clear, warm, sunny day, looking down at lush lowlands, and a

small village in the distance. Except for the birds singing, everything was quiet.

When we returned to one of the lower courtyards two Indian men were carving

ornate marble tiles using a makeshift bow of fence wire and wood. They rubbed grit and

water onto the wire to saw the marble. They liked us watching. We were the only travellers,

but then realised we wanted to return to the main part of that great city to visit a sacred

tomb that some travellers had told us about the night before.

Along a dirt sidetrack we walked to reach the main gate, Buland Darwaza, meaning

Gate of Victory; its huge red and buff sandstone entrance was decorated with inlaid black

and white marble, and the entrance arch read: “Life is a bridge crossing, build no house

upon it, but spend it in devotion.” As we walked through, however, we were greeted with

instant havoc. “Ehh, ‘cuse me mista’, you wanna buy my postcards, you wanna buy this,

you wanna buy that; baksheesh, mista’, baksheesh. Come and have a look in my shop.”

Crowds of tourists moved around taking photos in the dust and heat.

We wanted to run, but knew that first we had to see the tomb of Sufi saint, Sheikh

Salim Chishti. We joined the long queue winding out of his marble mausoleum and, forty

19

minutes later, stood at the carved entrance door. I looked in to the softly lit room, at the

white marble floor inlaid with multi-coloured stones, at the wall panels marked with

Quranic inscriptions. And the slow line moved until we stood pausing before the tomb. I

gazed at its wooden canopy, inlaid with thousands of mosaic patterns in mother-of-pearl.

The unearthly, solemn stillness in there filled me; I was mesmerised. And too soon,

attendants motioned for the line to move on.

When we emerged outside, Pierre and I half-ran through the crowds, and back along

the dirt road to the bus station. We were the only westerners there, and after a hasty chai,

caught the 11.30am bus to Bharatpur. Pierre had read about a bird sanctuary there. The old

bus was half full of local villagers who, for the duration of the rattling forty-five-minute

ride, all turned to stare at us. If we smiled, they smiled back; but otherwise they just looked

intently, expressionless—a tourist experience in reverse. Although I never thought of

myself as a “tourist.” No authentic wanderer on the “hippie trail” ever would, even if I’d

never heard the term “hippie trail” then. We were “travellers,” unintrusive wanderers, an

existentially orientated tribe of people who belonged to the earth.

The bird sanctuary was a three-kilometre walk from Bharatpur. On the way, we

stopped to look at the street stalls. But each time, a crowd gathered and as we walked on, at

least twenty locals followed behind, some walking, some on bicycle rickshaws, others on

bikes. When Pierre and I noticed a large group of villagers standing in a circle watching a

man doing tricks with a snake in a basket, we went to take a closer look. But soon everyone

was ignoring the man with the snakes, and had turned to watch us. We weren’t sure what to

do. Each time Pierre and I looked at each other and laughed, they all laughed, whole-

heartedly, along with us.

At another street stall selling nut toffee, again a crowd gathered. Though flies

crawled all over the sweets, we had to buy some; the shining, golden, nut toffee looked

delicious. The crowd watched in silence as the old Indian vendor weighed our purchase,

measuring it exactly to the last nut. Everyone approved. It was a relief.

We walked more quickly as we neared the edge of the village and the crowd

dissolved; all the while we munched on the delicious nut candy. Five hundred metres on,

about ten women were beating clothes against the large washing stones all around a small

lake. They stopped as we passed, turning to look up and smile, before returning to their

work. In that flash exchange, I saw something fierce and strong that shone out like the

burning sun from within them.

At last we reached the twenty-nine-square-kilometre bird sanctuary; the entry was

filled with tinkling wind-chimes, and just beyond the gates was a lush grassy area with

20

tables, umbrellas, chairs and a chai stall. There, we met Geoff, a stocky Canadian on a

pushbike, who was studying to be an ornithologist; at first I thought we’d been lucky to

have this opportunity to learn about some of the four hundred species of birds in the

sanctuary: only that morning Geoff had happened to see the migratory world-renowned

Siberian crane. But after five minutes, I’d switched off. Another part of me couldn’t stop

listening to the thrilled-chiming and ringing of thousands of echoing birdcalls in sunshine.

Pierre and I ambled on the meandering paths around the wetlands, after taking our

leave of Geoff. The water looked like glass, reflecting the tall trees. I looked up at their bare

outlines against the sky and watched the silhouettes of hundreds and thousands of birds

chattering, singing and squawking. We talked philosophy and other things—Pierre could

bring a story to any situation and was witty, warm, sincere. But mostly we were quiet. At

sunset, we sat on an old wooden bench seat next to one of the lakes and watched the fiery,

orange sun descend over mountains immersed in mauve.

It was dark by the time we reached the road and hailed a bus in the direction of

Bharatpur. The driver kept turning to look at us, missing cars, people and bikes by inches.

Pierre and I were terrified and said “ooh” and “woo,” but this encouraged him in speeding

on. Later, the driver invited us for a drink at his friend’s chai stall, asking our names,

country, town, profession, father’s name, father’s profession etc. etc.

Once more, as was typical in those days when foreigners were a rare sight, a crowd

gathered. The driver invited us to stay at his house, but things were happening too quickly

and we both excused ourselves. It was about seven kilometres to the Agra bus, so the driver

offered us a lift. We had to push the bus so he could clutch-start it, then everything rattled

so much it seemed the empty bus was about to fall apart; the din was so great that Pierre

and I took to shouting to hear each other.

In the dark, on the hour-long bus journey back to Agra, Pierre said he had the

feeling of when he was a young child, when on a Sunday, after a fun family outing, he’d

have that perfect sense of sleepy contentment on the long drive home. Then he said, “You

have to be very strong not to believe in God….” We were silent on the journey home after

that.

The rickshaw ride from Agra bus station back to the Mumtaz Mahal Hotel was

filled with changing plans. Finally, however, I decided to continue with my original idea

and take the overnight train to Varanasi that night. Pierre looked confused, asked if I’d

reconsider, but he wasn’t the type to push; besides, we promised to meet in Varanasi late

the next afternoon.

21

I ran up the two flights of old wooden stairs to my room in the Mumtaz Mahal Hotel

to collect my pack. But when I turned the light on, I started because my pack was on the

bed; I’d left it on the floor. A quick check revealed the flick knife in the top pocket was

gone. I’d never felt good about carrying the knife that Etzard, one of the German medical

students I’d stayed with in Heidelberg, had insisted on giving me. I wasn’t sorry it was

gone. Nevertheless, the room felt creepy and I was pleased to leave.

Pierre went with me to the station. He’d written the name and address of a great

hostel near the river where he’d stayed before. “We must go to the ghats and watch the sun

rise over the Ganges,” Pierre said, handing me the piece of notepaper with the address just

before the train left. His gaze was intense. I was expecting he’d say more, but he didn’t. I

folded the paper and put it into an outside top pocket of my pack, where the flick-knife had

been. It felt good to be having this reprieve before seeing Pierre again.

I didn’t ponder what had compelled me to leave Pierre after what was, I later

realised, one of the best days of my life. It was as though I’d been building a jigsaw, all

through that day, systematically, one that I knew well and had done many times before. As

we sat on the bus back to Agra, all these perfect new puzzle pieces were in place, and a

beautiful, though unsurprising, picture fitted together flawlessly.

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3. Lost

How long is the road to the weary; how long is the wandering of lives

ending in death for the fool who cannot find the path!

(The Dhammapada - 3rd Century BC)

Varanasi, India’s holiest city, is where people go to die, to be cremated and to have their

ashes placed in the Ganges so as to be released from the cycle of birth and death. It was in

Varanasi that I too was to plunge into unfathomable depths, not of the Ganges but of India,

but of myself. It all started when I arrived and discovered the piece of paper Pierre had

given me had disappeared. Though I turned everything out of my pack, I couldn’t find it.

I headed in the direction of the Ganges feeling sure I’d find the backpacker quarter,

usually there was one. But the jumbled streets were packed with cars, trucks, motorbikes,

rickshaws, bicycles, crowds, cows, and elephants with bell-anklets and bright sequined

covers on their backs. The endless, intricate, twisting mazes of Varanasi defied logic and I

was utterly lost for hours. I didn’t see a single Westerner, nor did I meet with any who

could speak English. At one point I sat down and cried, but when I noticed people staring at

me, soon got up again, collected myself and continued.

After three hours of being lost in Varanasi, I finally found a local who spoke

English and followed his directions, until I arrived at a small, white, low-roofed building.

The manager of the hostel came out to meet me. “Indeed, indeed,” he said beaming, all the

while shaking his head in that Indian yes-no way. “You have a lucky forehead, very lucky

forehead.” I thought he was patronising me, but then noticed he wasn’t looking at me at all,

and was still staring at my forehead, as if reading something there.

This hostel didn’t seem like it was in the travellers’ hub, but I felt sure I’d see Pierre

again. The next morning I went to the banks of the Ganges, wondering if I might see Pierre.

It was before dawn. I sat on a wide stone step of one of the ghats, watching the soundless

silhouetted shapes of hundreds who immersed themselves, bending and scooping the holy

water, praying, silently reciting mantras, prayers.

Later, three bright, orange-red ribbons of colour stretched just above the far bank, as

if reflecting the three gunas on a yogi’s head. Then, as the sky drained of colour, the huge,

orange ball of the Indian sun rose, and the great, grey ancient landscape of India

transformed.

Close by were lots of street stalls and after sunrise I wandered up there to get

breakfast. At one corner stall a cluster of exultant Indian men were making fresh chapattis. I

23

could smell the warmth of the wholesome dough and stood in the dirt, viewing the seamless

working of their assembly line—first the kneading, the rolling and then the cooking of the

fresh chapattis on a hot plate.

I ordered two. The man cooking them kept looking up, beaming, his wide white

teeth appearing even whiter in his shining dark face. Next, I bought a couple of bananas

from a fruit stall close by. It was packed high with fruit, pineapples, pomegranates,

mangoes. They also made lassi, an Indian fruit smoothie made with yoghurt. After

wrapping each banana in a hot chapatti, I ate them as I ambled around the jumbled networks

of narrow streets and alleys close by the river.

I kept expecting to see Pierre, believing providence surely meant for us to meet. But

I never did see him again. In Varanasi, I felt infinitesimally small, almost entirely

swallowed up. In Varanasi, I felt I might never be found again. Yet I was not sorry.

Perplexed, mystified, but not sorry.

I did meet another traveller in the street that morning. I’d not noticed him, but this

tanned traveller with dreadlocks and red-and-orange-striped trousers pushed through the

crowd. He said he needed to speak with me, that he was staying at the same guest-house,

though I’d not seen him. He was from England and had been in India for years, staying in

the ashrams, walking the Himalayas, living on houseboats in Kashmir. And as he went on

talking, an ardent yearning to remain in India arose in me. But I had to return home in a

month.

I was starting to feel uncomfortable, something in me wanted to run, and I was

about to leave when the fellow asked if I’d wait a moment. I watched him saunter down the

road, and disappear through the sloping doorway of a small shop. Then he came back and

said, “You must read this,” handing me a paperback book. I was still protesting, but he’d

already said goodbye and vanished. I never saw him again, though I looked; I wanted to tell

him how grateful I was for the gift.

Many bodies on bamboo stretchers were being carried to the river as I strolled

through the crowded streets back to the ghats. The air was thick, pungent with smoke, and

many people crowded on the tiered steps of the ghats: astrologers and sages sitting under

palm leaf parasols; half-naked, ash-coated yogis; hawkers with offerings for rituals, silk

apparels, brassware and so many others things.

Each of the eighty-four ghats in Varanasi holds some significance; one is the

leaning temple Ghat, another, the Tulsi-Ghat, where the poet-saint Tulsidas was said to

have written the Ramcharitmanas. All were bathing ghats except for the two designated for

cremation. I sat on a ghat across from the Manikarnika Cremation Ghat, where it was

24

claimed funeral pyres had been lit without a break for thousands of years. I watched the

boats, people washing, the cremation remains with flowers being thrown into the Ganges,

the flames licking the bodies, smoke clouding and curling up. The covered corpses were

piled high awaiting their turn. From one fire a leg stuck out, from another, a foot.

Many temples crowded near the river edge and the air was steeped in an infinite

profusion of aromas; not only the smoke and the smell of burning flesh, which was barely

discernible, but curries, arrays of spices piled high on street stalls, the acrid aroma of red

betel nut that people everywhere chewed and spat out; scents of flowers and incense. A rich

texture of sounds drifted around me also: couch shells, drumming, tinkling hand-cymbals,

horns—all wound together along with Sanskrit mantras, as thousands immersed themselves

in the river, and in devotion to their Gods.

After gazing out for some time, I turned to take a look at the paperback the traveller

had given me in the street that morning: The Dhammapada. I opened it not expecting much,

but was soon poring over it, drinking the words in, thinking: “Why has it taken so long to

come across a book such as this?” One verse in particular held me. I read it over and over,

memorising it. The verse has remained with me ever since: “How long is the road to the

weary; how long is the wandering of lives ending in death for the fool who cannot find the

path!”

On the page, one may explore fears, philosophies, frustrations, observations,

quotations, but as I mused over the tide that swirled within me in Varanasi that night, I had

no words. I spent the entire evening in the dorm-room lying face down on the bed, trying to

write the heading—INDIA—going over and over those letters trying to get that heading to

measure up. There was something huge, something looming at the edges, something that

had the potential to wipe out everything I’d previously known.

Connections

When I left Varanasi, I slept on the floor all night with rubbish all around me on the fifteen-

hour train journey to Calcutta. Close by were Daniel and Dida, French actors, travelling

with guitars, one tall and one short. At first I wondered if by chance they might know

Pierre. Coincidences like that happened all the time while travelling. But they didn’t. Dida,

the tall one, was also travelling with seven mouth organs and a flute, and treated everything

as if it were theatre. Later, after I’d booked into a hostel in Sudder St, I discovered Daniel

and Dida were staying in the same place, at seven rupees a night.

25

Calcutta had the largest urban population in India, and although built for eighty

thousand, the centre held five million, with another fourteen million people in the outer

suburbs. It was full of people on the poverty line—people living in the streets, in slums,

millions of them half-starving. Calcutta was dirty; the air was hot, humid, polluted with

thick fumes from the traffic. Horns seemed to go all day.

The next morning, on the way to get breakfast, I walked through sprawls of people

sleeping in makeshift shelters on the street, washing on the path, spitting betel nut,

defecating in gutters that were littered with garbage. I spoke with two local Indians. They

said they slept there because there was nowhere else to go. They weren’t begging and

seemed educated and aware. Others, who lived next to them, had physical disorders; some

had cut off a limb in order to beg.

Daniel, Dida and I went for curry in a Sikh restaurant not far from Sudder St that

afternoon. We walked past stalls selling meat from the raw carcasses that hung from hooks

out the front in the street, flies crawling all over the meat; past shoeshiners, rickshaw

drivers, taxis, beggars everywhere; constantly, we were hassled for money.

The restaurant was crowded, and we were about to start eating when a beggar

arrived, moaning on his knees at the door. His head was down, his arms up, outstretched,

when a fat Sikh man booted him away. The beggar scrambled back to kiss his feet, but the

Sikh turned, scowled and walked away. My emotions were screaming, part of me wanted to

run over and give the beggar my meal, but I didn’t. We talked about it, a conversation I’d

had in India many times already, where it seemed best for travellers not to interfere with

India’s caste system and cultural ways of dealing with things.

There was another side to Calcutta. I found it the next day when I walked to the

Victoria Memorial and discovered, among the hubbub, at least four spacious, quiet

restaurants and hotels on the way. I lingered inside a couple of them, a breather to escape

the relentless hassling on the streets. When I reached the Memorial, I looked inside at the

gold-framed paintings from the 1800s showing military parades, and the grandeur of

English kings and queens. But I had to get out of that leftover pocket of colonial India. I left

feeling stifled and started thinking about my deep aversion to going home.

To clear my mind I thought to walk to the Great Banyan tree in the Botanical

Gardens. After crossing the Hooghly River, I walked past sprawling masses of rough

improvised shelters, disused rail yards, thousands living in slums, until two hours later, I

arrived, and stood under what I believed was a miniature forest of banyan trees. Later,

however, I discovered this was one tree with multiple trunks—the largest banyan tree in

26

India. I tried to imagine the Buddha sitting under it, but felt only emptiness and desolation

in that place.

The next day, I was feverish, sweating; I could hardly see; every muscle in my body

was aching. That night I couldn’t sleep, semi-conscious, shaky identity, extreme paranoia

running through my veins. Each time I closed my eyes, my fears amplified. I was terrified

of going home, going back to conservative neighbours, imprisoning institutions, soulless

values. Over and over I repeated the only words I could think of, words that seemed to

prevent that flood of terror overtaking me: “Fear is only lack of understanding. Fear is only

lack of understanding,” until I fell asleep. When I woke the next morning, I felt refreshed

and had the feeling everything was okay.

The next day I escaped Calcutta and travelled to Bhakkhali, one of the many islands

spread across the Bay of Bengal. The journey took most of the day, a five-hour train ride to

Namkhana, then a short distance over a river in a wooden boat, after which I caught a bus to

Bhakkhali from where I had to wait for a local to pole six of us across to the island. I looked

out at the Bay of Bengal, wondering if the water was grey because it was near the mouth of

the Ganges.

James, a schoolteacher from England with fair skin and fair hair stood near the

entrance to the sole guest house in Bhakkhali; he was the only other Westerner there. He

wore faded khaki shorts with multiple pockets, and had a most concentrated way of looking

at one with his blue eyes and John Lennon glasses. James and I went for walks, past women

grinding flour, ducks paddling in muddy pools, cocks crowing in the distance. We strolled

on the grey-white sands past fishing nets spread everywhere, and hundreds of scuttling red

crabs that vanished into their holes when we got close. We ate fresh seafood curry each day,

cooked over an open fire in the dirt, and ate with our fingers off banana leaves.

One afternoon, two young Indian bankers who were visiting Bhakkhali told us of a

three-night performance of the Ramayana in a neighbouring village. James and I went and

appeared to be the only westerners there. A huge canvas high-top tent was set up with

numerous candlelit stalls surrounding it; the stalls created a radial web of dirt paths and they

sold all manner of foods and goods.

Inside, the tent was overflowing; James and I were packed in with the many others

who stood at the back. But soon, despite our protests, we were ushered to chairs near the

front. There, in the dark all night we sat, taking in the colourful costumes, extravagant

masks, and ever-changing cast: the God, Rama; his consort, Sita; Hanuman, the monkey-

man; Garudu, eagle king; and among others, the ten-headed demon King of Lanka, Ravana.

The spectacle included also music—a tabla, flute, veena, sitar, and other instruments

27

together with mournful singing at scene changes. James stayed awake for most of the night,

but I felt strangely drugged and covered myself with a shawl, drifting in and out of sleep all

night, waking to the odd haunting sounds of that music and the play.

After five days, I left Bhakkhali. James said he was coming to Australia soon and

we exchanged addresses, before hugging goodbye. But with only two weeks remaining, I

knew I had to escape—one last foray into the wilderness. What was it about travelling? I

should have been excited about seeing family again, doing something with my life, not just

glossing over the surface of everything; but the idea of going home felt disturbing.

Travelling, nobody expected anything of me.

After looking through my tatty Lonely Planet India, complete with hand-drawn

maps, I decided to retreat to Darjeeling, in the far northeastern corner of India. There, I’d

venture in to the Himalayas, summon all my strength before returning home. In those pre-

computer days of the 1970s, one could feel utterly lost in another culture on the other side

of the world. But little did I know just how lost I was in fact going to be.

Himalaya

I secured one of the three-tiered, wooden bunk sleepers that lined all carriages on the

twelve-hour overnight train from Calcutta to Siliguri, at the base of the Himalayas. The

bunks unhinged back into bench seats during the day. I could sleep anywhere in those days

and arrived refreshed at 7.30 am the next day. In Siliguri, I transferred to a tiny, two-

carriage, bright-blue and black steam train to travel the fifty-kilometre steep track up to

Darjeeling. It looked like a miniature, model toy train.

I spent the misty, seven-hour journey alternating between wonder and alarm. The

lush, forested mountains were breathtaking, but the yawning drops to deep ravines and

gorges were frighteningly precipitous. At several points, to ease the gradient, the train had

to stop, and reverse up onto a sideline, so as to continue looping on up the mountain. The

track, only two feet wide between the rails, followed the Old Cart Road and at times ran on

the street through small mountain villages, sounding its loud horn. Village vendors boarded

the train to sell chai, and if I’d wanted, I could’ve reached down from the window to pick a

papaya, guava or jackfruit from a street stall.

The train arrived late in the afternoon. Darjeeling was freezing and enveloped in

swirling cloud. I followed the mud map in Lonely Planet India up the wet streets to the

empty twenty-three-bed youth hostel. The warden, Hans, a friendly German, had been

28

living there for some time, and when he heard my hiking plans, offered maps and advice for

walks.

Hans was welcoming, but I was disappointed with the hostel. Though basic, it felt

like a leftover from colonial times when Darjeeling was a hill station for the British to

escape the heat of the plains. I’d wanted to be somewhere that felt more Tibetan, more

remote.

Hans showed me to a three-bed dorm where I met Emma, an earthy Swiss girl. She

was wearing a large, thick, hand-knitted jumper identical to the one I had on—though hers

was brown, not grey like mine. Emma was standing in front of a small heater attached to the

wall. Another girl, Noreen, who’d just left Ireland, stood leaning over her bed, where

everything from her pack was laid out. She said she was leaving the next day for Srinagar to

live on a houseboat for a month, and after that would explore Kashmir for five months.

That night, Emma, Noreen and I sat around the fire in the common room. Emma,

twenty-six, had been travelling for the past four years, returning home intermittently. She’d

arrived in Darjeeling two days before me, having spent the past seven months trekking in

Nepal. We decided at once to hike to Sandakphu together.

We’d been talking for some time when Emma said, “You’re different, you know.”

She’d said it so unexpectedly that it jolted me, and I wondered what was coming next.

“Most Australians,” she said went on, “they’re not fine people; they have not the fine things

of the past to know and chew on,” which was an odd way to put it I thought, “just beer

drinking,” she added.

“Have you known many Australians?” I asked.

“Oh yes, lots,” she said.

“Really?”

“Well… I haven’t exactly known all of them, but I saw lots of Australians in

Europe. Drinking beer,” she said. “Obesity is so sickening. Better to be small and well-built

with a little spare fat for emergencies.”

This new turn of the conversation was making me feel uncomfortable. This was the

1970s. I’d not thought of Australians as being obese in those days. I knew they were solidly

built, from sport, the outdoor lifestyle, from eating steak on the barbeque. I’d already

noticed that in England, Australians were often taller, certainly more muscular. “Don’t you

like tall guys?” I asked.

“No… not so much,” Emma confirmed. “There’s no sense in being big when you’re

human, no need for it, just a waste of food, space, all that. It’s just vanity to want to be tall.”

29

I didn’t know what to say. Her words, though probably true, struck me as a little

harsh. But then, I couldn’t help noticing how free, open and un-self-important Emma

seemed as she sat there in a faded, tan-brown, patterned Victorian lounge chair in the empty

common room, and gazed into the crackling flames.

The following day Emma and I organised maps, and bought supplies in Gundree

Bazaar. The cloud was thick in the valley and on the mountains, drifting in patches as we

walked down the hill to the steps and landings of the steep Himalayan market place. One

could purchase rice, fresh butter, spices, gundruk (dried vegetable leaves), niguru (an edible

local fern), Darjeeling teas, cloths, umbrellas, traditional clothes and other things. Produce

was sold out of bags, sacks, cane baskets, or spread out on a piece of material; other goods

were arrayed under makeshift bamboo shelters.

We each bought a bag of tsampa, roasted barley flour, from an old Tibetan woman

sitting hunched over on one of the steps; she scooped the tsampa out of a large hessian sack

and put it into paper bags for us. Her earthy, nut-brown face crinkled into a smile as she

bowed Namaste. We bowed back, and then left to wander around. I noticed how the

Tibetans carried loads using a headband, taking the weight through their neck. Some loads

such as firewood must have been extremely heavy, yet their necks seemed not much thicker

than ours.

On the third day in Darjeeling, Emma and I left early, having packed sleeping bags,

food, cooking equipment and a change of clothes. The 6.30am bus climbed slowly up the

precipitous road to Maneybhanjang on India’s border with Nepal, where a drain marked the

boundary. We filled water bottles at a stream, and set off through the small Buddhist Sherpa

village, buying sweet churpis on the way. “Namaste,” greeted the stall owner, bowing low

with folded hands.

“Namaste,” Emma and I said, before purchasing the yak milk candy. Each person

we passed greeted us in this same way, and each time we returned the gesture: “I bow to the

God in you.” It was like being blessed over and over. I thought how noble this tradition

was, yet how out of place it would seem in the west.

Light rain was falling as we left the village and we stopped to put on full wet

weather gear. The gradient of the track was easy at first, passing through peaceful pine,

birch and bamboo glades. We got into a rhythm, continuing in this way through the rain for

hours before a steep climb to the Buddhist settlement of Chitre. We walked through the

rhododendron and giant magnolia forests. Hans had mentioned we might see any one of the

six hundred varieties of orchid in spring, but in winter there wasn’t a single flower.

30

We continued on through deep forest green, walking with heads down to avoid the

full slap of the rain, which had greatly increased. My pack felt too heavy; already my

shoulders were sore. Snow was piled high on the sides of the narrow track; we walked in

the middle in slush; it was slippery and the going was slow. My ankle-high leather boots

helped a lot, the only shoes I’d worn for the past year. They were waterproof and still full of

tread.

It took seven hours to reach the trekkers’ hut at Tonglu, built snug on the mountain

at 3,020 metres. We put our packs inside the door of the shadowy refuge, next to an open

fireplace, and I looked over to two sets of rough wooden bunks without mattresses on the

far wall. I wondered what else might be living in there. Despite wild winds, we went back

outside, hoping to get a glimpse of the mountains in the Sikkim Himalayan range. It felt

liberating to walk without a pack and the rain had stopped. But cloud was heavy; the wind

lashed and stung our faces and there wasn’t even a snatch of the view.

Night fell quickly. It was dark when we went back to the hut. After lighting two

candles, we cooked rice and lentils for dinner on my Esbit burner, a pocket camp stove. We

ate at the rough wooden table with bench seats on either side. Emma and I hardly spoke. It

was freezing. No wood for the fire. The winds continued to rage around us and we went to

bed early.

At first light I woke and noticed how quiet it was, realising that despite my fears,

the night had passed without incident. I slipped on a scarf and jacket and stepped outside.

Everything was covered in mist and cloud. I walked in the swirling white vapours and felt

immaculately clean.

For breakfast we heated up a little tsampa mixed with water; it was a long walk

ahead up to Sandakphu, and we worked quickly. It looked as if the weather was closing in.

Already we were questioning the wisdom of trekking at this time of year, at this altitude.

But neither of us considered going back. Straight after eating, we followed the path that

snaked around and down into the forest, before going up through a few hamlets high into

the snow-covered mountains.

“Look,” Emma whispered, pointing, “look, there’s a red panda!” My heart started

racing. I didn’t want to look, expecting something huge. But then I saw what she was

pointing to. Curled up in the snow was a creature that looked like a raccoon. Its red and

white-striped fur blended with the red mosses and white lichens on the snow-covered trees.

It looked snug in the snow, its long, bushy tail wrapped around itself.

As we pushed on further, snow fell more heavily. It was calf-deep. Then, as we

walked on to join the ridge trail towards Kalpokhari, it became knee-deep on the narrow

31

track. We had seen no one, but all of a sudden, a group of Sherpas with heavy loads was

right behind us. We squeezed to the side of the track as they brushed past in single file. I

stared in disbelief noticing they walked barefoot. The Sherpas weren’t tall, but their feet

were huge with the thickest skin on their soles.

Winding up onto the Singalila Ridge was a difficult climb. We felt lightheaded and

it was dark by the time we reached Sandakphu, the highest point in West Bengal at 3,780

metres. Winds howled and cried through the mountains, everything closed in by cloud and

snow. We had much difficulty pinpointing the house on the ridge track where a Tibetan

woman rented rooms to trekkers.

“Namaste,” she said, bowing low after letting us in. The woman was short, strong,

her face tanned, deeply lined. She showed us to a lounge area where we nodded and smiled,

greeting the family gathered there. The woman moved in small shuffling, quick steps inside

the dark, freezing house. After showing us the guest room, she lit a fire. When we returned

to the lounge room, the family moved away from the fire, insisting Emma and I stand next

to it. But there were only snatches of warmth, and we felt bad keeping the family from it.

After a small bowl of thukpa, a type of broth, we went to bed thinking to get warm there.

Emma and I climbed into our sleeping bags under the quilt of the old double bed

and huddled together. But all night icy winds crept under doorways, penetrated thin walls

and entered through countless cracks between boards. We were half-awake all night,

freezing, listening to the gale.

Early the next morning, it was still sub-zero, but the winds had eased and the sky

cleared. The mountains were so high that they made me tingle, and the light was brilliant as

dazzling rays reflected off the pure white ice and snow. We tried to identify which peak was

Everest but couldn’t be sure, and struggled with Hans’ map as it rattled in the wind. Then

we spotted it, there in the distance set magnificently amongst the others. My journey, too,

had reached its zenith. In a single sweep on the horizon, we beheld four of the five highest

mountains in the world, including Makalu, part of the Nepalese Himalayas, along with

Lhotse and others from the Sikkim Himalayas, and bordering both countries, the immense

peak of Kanchenjanga Massif.

From Sandakphu, we’d originally planned to forge on northward to Phalat and then

travel east, but the northbound track was closed due to deep snow. Our options were to

complete a smaller loop and head east along a mid-ridge trail to Rimbick, or to return to the

refuge hut and go back the way we’d come. We agreed on the mid-ridge track, but our

troubles started when we missed it. We’d walked an hour down the slippery trail from

Sandakphu before realising the mid-ridge track was near the top.

32

Neither of us wanted to walk back up the mountain through deep snow. But we

didn’t want to take the same route back to Tonglu either. The mist was down, the wind

blew, but when cloud cleared, and we looked up, we noticed the ridge in front of us was

parallel to the mid-ridge track to Rimbick, except lower, and it looked like there was a trail.

I was all for going back up, but Emma said we could easily see that this ridge pointed in the

same direction, even though the track in front of us was not on the map.

We trudged through knee-high snow for the first kilometre, the trail narrowing all

the time, until finally, the path disappeared. I wanted to turn back, but Emma was sure we

should press on. But from that point on, the bamboo forest became thicker and our packs

kept getting tangled. Almost every step the bamboo lashed, stinging our faces, hands. We

walked in this way for two hours before deciding to climb to the top of the ridge, feeling

sure there would be a trail up there. But when we reached the top, harsh winds howled and

there was no sign of a path. We could see the other ridge, however, it was miles away with

the wildest rocky valley in between. But now, we’d come too far to turn back.

Up and down we climbed through dense forest, jumping gorges, climbing steep

hillsides, clambering along narrow ledges. We hardly spoke. I think we were conserving

energy. At one stage, Emma and I had to jump six feet across a deep river to land on

slippery rocks on the other side; we both ended up in the icy water and laughed. It felt like a

miracle neither of us had a broken leg. I kept praying it wouldn’t snow and that the mist

wouldn’t come down as it had the day before.

It started getting dark around 6pm and we found a small space of level ground

against a tree. It was dark by the time we’d finished cutting bamboo with pocket knives to

lay on soaked ground. We slept packed into one sleeping bag with the other tucked like a

quilt on top.

We were blessed with the night—no wind, rain or snow; we even transferred back

to separate sleeping bags. I woke on and off all night, but in the middle of that dark night, as

I lay there, I had the feeling of the deepest and most extraordinary peace I’d ever known.

Death felt close but there was no fear. I knew that my mother would be upset, that I’d have

liked to have a baby, and experience true love; but I wasn’t frightened of death. I had never

felt so at peace.

Emma and I were up at first light and stood agape as we discovered that we were on

the edge of a sheer and fatal drop; one slip and we both could have gone tumbling down the

mountainside. Once again, we considered our luck before setting out. We decided to follow

the river, but after five hours of climbing and clambering over similar terrain to the day

before, and not seeing any sign of a trail, we agreed to head back up to the ridge. We hiked

33

up the steep incline, the dense bamboo stinging our faces, getting tangled in our packs. The

branches seemed thicker than ever and it took three hours to reach the top.

On the highest point of the ridge, the winds were wild, though nothing like the day

before. Emma and I searched for the best tree to climb and found one with numerous,

rough-horizontal branches, and deeply-grooved bark. And it was from there, near the top of

that snow-covered silver fir, that we spotted a snippet of a trail. I wanted to cry, but held

back the tears.

We climbed down and sat in the snow, saying things like “I can’t believe it;” and

“Wow, what a journey….” It was the first time it had been safe to rest since starting out

from Sandakphu the day before. Emma started mixing her tsampa with snow. I was about to

do this also, but sprang to my feet, scampering and half-running around to set foot on the

trail and glimpse signs of human habitation.

Emma said she was surprised I’d not freaked out. I smiled, unable to say I’d known

her uniqueness from the start. I’d never met a girl like Emma before. Sitting there together

high on the mountain ridge, eating tsampa mixed with bright crisp snow, we both glowed

all over.

It was a steep climb down the ridge. We came upon two mud-brick and stone

houses and a patch of cultivated land. From there, a mountain track led on all the way to

Rimbick with magnificent alpine views. We stopped in a tiny village on the way for chai.

An old Tibetan woman stirred a pot over a fire near the front of their one-roomed wooden

shack. We sat on a wooden plank and savoured the warm beverage. Chai had never tasted

so good. The old woman refused payment.

When we arrived in the river village of Lodoma it was dark; pigs and hens on the

main street, no roads for cars, only walking tracks. Here, we stayed with a Tibetan family

who gave us a bed, meal and chai for 5.50 rupees. Their house had only two rooms, a

family room and a guest room. Our beds were high and narrow without mattresses and

looked like table tops. The children fetched water and wood while their mother cooked over

an open fire. The front door was made of wooden slats, removed in sections, and replaced

plank by plank again each night.

From Lodoma, we walked out the next day on a trail leading down to Bijanbari,

leaving the exhilaration of the higher altitude behind. The narrow, twisting twenty-seven

kilometre bus ride back to Darjeeling took two and half hours. Emma and I, the last to

board, had to sit on the engine at the front where a small Tibetan girl clung to my legs to

keep her balance the whole way. She kept looking up. I wanted to hug her, but didn’t.

34

Back at the hostel in Darjeeling, we showered and went to bed early. The following

morning, we told Hans of our adventure, and later, met two tall, brawny American travellers

in the common room. They were students and I could see that Larry liked Emma and she

seemed happy talking to him. Larry arranged to come with us to the Darjeeling View

Restaurant the next day.

I went to the restaurant early, wanting to catch up on journal writing, but instead sat

daydreaming, looking out at the deep-green, steep-sided valleys and mountains. Three

rickshaws were lined up outside, and the drivers, cross-legged, were lounging back in their

seats, chatting, as they waited for the next one-rupee ride to come along. With their ragged

clothes and clean, combed hair, they looked content.

My attention then became riveted on the boy who hand-mopped the floor in the

restaurant, his thin pencil legs doubled back on themselves as he squatted. I wanted to smile

at him, but he was immersed in his scrubbing. As I was contemplating this, the manager

started shouting at the boy.

Immediately, I felt responsible. Did the manager suspect the boy, this untouchable,

had roused my attention? The boy looked frightened, quickened to his manager’s gall, as if

attempting to wring out even more meekness. I shrank back in to my book. I feared for the

boy, his losing his job because of my indulgence, and sensed the dangerous clashing of

cultures.

Emma and Larry arrived shortly after and we exchanged travel stories while sharing

momos and achar for lunch—delicious steamed dumplings with meat and vegetables inside,

served with a clear soup. Afterwards we drank chai, and then headed north out of

Darjeeling to join up with the Hill Cart Road that led to the Mountaineering Institute, an

hour’s walk away.

The Institute was established the year after Norgay and Hillary’s first ascent of

Everest in 1953, and included a museum, as well as providing training for mountaineers.

We were the only ones there, and as we wandered, looking at the equipment and old

photographs of famous mountaineers, and reading about the many attempts to climb

Everest, which began in 1852, we started talking about death. We decided that death-

defying sports like mountaineering allowed one to experience the essence of life.

A few minutes’ walk further up the road was the zoo, established to protect

Himalayan flora and fauna, but we left straight away after seeing a magnificent tiger pacing

in a dark, small concrete cage, and five monkeys in a pen with nothing to climb, except bare

walls.

35

The following morning I left Darjeeling after saying goodbye to the Americans and

thanking Hans. Emma walked with me to the edge of Darjeeling where we joined up with

the Hill Cart Road. When Emma and I embraced and said goodbye, before I set off to walk

down the mountain to Siliguri, it didn’t feel like we were parting forever; it was as though

we’d meet again very soon.

The mountain air was exhilarating as I strode down the Old Cart Road, but my pack

was heavy and I kept stopping to rest. In one village, an old Tibetan woman offered me

chai; once again I wasn’t allowed to pay and when she bowed, Namaste, I knew I’d never

been looked at like that before. She held my eye with an ancient look that sank and shone

into the depths of me, a look of complete ease, respect, nobility and love.

I bowed deeply back, before walking to the edge of that village, where I paused to

watch a group of barefooted Indian men in lungi and turbans chanting as they hauled an

enormous log onto a railway wagon using ropes. One fellow stood at the top of the wagon

calling the chant, while the men at the bottom chorused in response and pulled.

From Siliguri I took the overnight train to Calcutta, from where I would depart for

Bangkok the next day. At Calcutta airport, I couldn’t shake myself into the reality that I was

going home, that my travels were over. Having learned so much from people telling me

about their lives, I wondered if, now, I too would be required to tell my story. But as it

turned out, after the first few days of being back home, no one asked about my journeys.

On the flight to Bangkok, I felt trapped—the shades closed, and the passengers in

front speaking loudly. Already India felt like a distant memory. But this made me remember

what James from Bhakkhali had said. Neither of us liked taking photos. I felt photography

was invasive, not only for the locals but also for me, as it interrupted the flow of things. I’d

only taken a dozen photos the entire journey. James didn’t carry a camera at all. He said, “If

you don’t remember something it’s because you haven’t looked hard enough.”

The Qantas flight back home was full of Australians. It felt odd to be among them

again, yet inside I was rejoicing, and a Bee Gees song I’d heard as a girl kept going around

and around in my head as memories from that past year filled me: “You taught me how to

live; you set me free, you set me free.” I sang the words silently over and over inside.

Back then, at nineteen, when I’d left on that journey that would take me to India, I was full

of creativity, health and a burning enthusiasm for life. I played the piano, the guitar, loved

nature and surfed when girls didn’t do those things; I hated institutionalism, deceit and

greed, and danced wildly, made my own clothes, sometimes dressed exotically. When I

went to India, I thought that anything was possible—I believed one could achieve anything,

36

unequivocally anything at all. One of the many images that inspired me at that time was

Leonardo Da Vinci’s red chalk sketch—Rearing Horse. I’d had the print framed and it hung

in the kitchen for decades. The huge, wild, rearing horse, its front legs powerfully raised,

suggested the furthest possible reaches of motion: its back widespread haunches, head

pointing up, neck arched, contorted back, eyes almost closed. So often I glanced up at it

contemplating the extreme nobility and determination of the horse; there was something

magnificent about its aversion to being tamed.

37

4. Spiritual Journey

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

(Krishnamurti)

As I looked out of the plane window, I wondered why it had taken so long for me to return

to India. Once again, I was arriving in India alone, after having travelled to England and

Europe first. But this time, I’d been in England and Europe with my husband and four of

our five children. It had been twenty-six years since I was last in India. I sat in an empty

row with my books, shawl and things spread out. I opened my blind, and looked at the full

moon as the plane drifted through the clear night sky. I was on my way to an ashram in the

north of India for a month, and was filled with spiritual fire, longing and devotion; I also

had a comfortable warm feeling as if returning home.

I didn’t think of Pierre or our perfect time in Agra: it was only years later that I

remembered him again, when I re-read my burnt India journal, and it was then that I paused

to reflect that he was perhaps one of the most significant others I’d ever met. Neither did I

reminisce about Emma, James, Olivia or Luke, nor how my life might have been if I stayed

in India longer in ‘78, instead of returning home. The reality is that as I was returning to

India that night after two decades of immersion in family life and a strong spiritual practice

in Australia, my thoughts were fully engaged with these things. Besides, the truth is, I never

did leave India: Eastern thought had completely reshaped my identity over those past

twenty-six years. I had absolutely no idea this would happen.

When I first returned to Australia, I hated it. I remember how lost and imprisoned I felt in

this place that was supposed to be home. While I loved my parents, and my two brothers,

existence seemed empty in the materialistic, lifeless grey suburbs.

I recall sitting on the edge my too-soft bed, with its tight, white sheets. The bed was

a Queen Anne single, ornate and gold-trimmed; my mother chose it, and I’d never told her

how I loathed it. I recall looking up at the poster of the Desiderata, still tacked onto the wall

from school days; I’d come across it after the words were made into a song, popular in the

early 70s. I knew it by heart. But did I still want to “Go placidly amid the noise and haste

and remember what peace there is in silence?”

My hiking boots were on the floor below the poster and I noticed the clumps of dirt

still lodged in the tread. Memories of my time in the Himalayas filled me. How out of place

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those boots looked in my room at home with its three separate mirrors, and among other

things, a tidy collection of international dolls on mirror-backed display shelves.

I carried the boots outside to oil the leather, trying not to dislodge the dirt. The brick

pillar at the rear of the house under the carport was warm, and I sat leaning against it, my

feet stretched out on the soft grass. My father’s garden at the back was large and lush:

banana trees, macadamias, jacarandas, corals, the subtle soft greens of a glorious English

oak. Adrian peered over the balcony above. “You staying down there?” he called. The

warm Australian drawl still sounded novel. He arrived, smiling, carrying two mango

smoothies, and wearing his Egyptian loincloth—he’d made it himself from a faded red t-

shirt, said it was practical.

My brother Adrian, two years younger than me, was studying art at the university.

Richard, my older brother was mentally disabled, and lived in a group home in

Cooranbong; he returned home every second weekend. Adrian grimaced, observing the

boots, and handed me a smoothie. After finishing his, he stretched out on the grass in full

sun, closing his eyes. His body was deeply tanned from the summer break and lots of

surfing. Noticing my white skin turning pink, I inched further into the shade.

“Well, how was it?” Adrian asked after a while, though he’d hardly moved his lips.

I’d been back for two days, but we’d not much spoken, my having slept a lot. I told him

about the burning ghats, eating off banana leaves with fingers, being lost in the snow in the

Himalayas, and also about how I longed to be back there.

Adrian didn’t say much. He looked perfectly relaxed, stretched out in the full sun,

both hands behind his head. I went on oiling my boots, watching the thirsty leather turn the

deepest, rich red brown. These original leather Blundstones had been my only footwear

over the last fifteen months, bought at a mountaineering shop in London.

“Aren’t you too hot?” I asked, noticing the glistening beads of perspiration that had

settled around the dark, wiry hairs on Adrian’s chest.

“Naarrh,” he said, stirring a little. Then Adrian said, “I don’t want to travel. You

don’t need to travel.” His eyes were still half-closed, but his voice didn’t sound sleepy.

“The truth can be experienced right here…. You don’t need to go anywhere,” he said.

It was not so much the words, but the tone that hurt. I’d always thought of us as

close. He seemed annoyed. My initial instinct was to think that he might be jealous, or

possibly too fearful to travel—he’d always been a recluse, even among the odd and

interesting bunch at art school. But as I looked up into the deep blue sky, and then out

across the dazzling lake that stretched all the way to our horizon, the words “wandering

fool” from the Dharmmapada flashed in my mind.

39

“Yes, I know what you mean…” I said, watching the boats on the lake tracking and

tacking, their colourful sails filled in the breeze. “I agree, the truth can be experienced right

here or… I suppose, anywhere, for that matter.” And in that brief moment, as I felt the

temperate, warm wind bringing me all the untamed love, truth and freedom of Australia, I

wondered if I’d been wrong to travel. But this thought was immediately snuffed out by

another. “Travelling was vital for me,” I said, asserting this for myself, as much as for

Adrian.

Over the following years I wrote long letters to various travelling companions, but

Australia was not a popular destination in the 70s. Only two of those travellers ended up

visiting. James, the English traveller I met in Bhakkhali, was the first. He arrived two

months after my return. He hadn’t been in Newcastle long when he decided it was a

delightful, large, friendly town, because that afternoon I’d stopped the car on the corner of a

main road after noticing an ex-boyfriend riding home on an old pushbike, a surfboard under

his arm; his large fuzzy mop of blonde hair shining in sunlight. James presumed this sort of

friendly thing must happen all the time—that’s how Newcastle seemed.

Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?

That first year home after my travels, I finished my teaching diploma, studied piano, and

also joined the Theosophical Society. I read authors such as Krishnamurti, the boy genius

predicted to be a saint–visionary by Annie Besant, the leader of the Society. Also, among

other spiritual books, I pored over the ideologies of Rajneesh, the orange guru, and was

greatly inspired by Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which included stigmata,

bilocations and numerous miracles. Besides this, I spent hours looking through art books in

the university library, finding in the complex, painful lives of many artists answers to my

own.

Gauguin’s final and most famous painting—Where do I come from? What am I?

Where am I going?—was a work that Gauguin himself considered a masterpiece, never to

be repeated. The painting depicted powerful images of birth, life and death in the sunlight,

colour and freedom of Tahiti: the young Tahitian women, the sleeping baby, a Tahitian

Adam reaching for an apple-like fruit; and other things including an old woman with an

enigmatic white bird. But it wasn’t so much the painting, but the title that drew me—these

were my questions. That Gauguin had almost gone mad painting it affirmed the agony I’d

also experienced in relation to these things.

40

I too wanted to explore these questions at the heart of life, not through painting, but

I knew I would follow something to its source. It didn’t matter what it was, I just had to

choose. I thought first of the piano, but realised long hours of practice would feel

restrictive; then I wondered about a career writing or teaching. In the end, however, the

answer was obvious. It came as a relief. I’d follow the path of marriage and motherhood.

Having experienced displacement when we migrated from England, I’d always longed for a

greater sense of belonging and home. I remember the long letters, numerous photos arriving

from England, family gatherings—grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles. I longed to be there.

I’d always loved my parents, but there was much about their relationship that was

disturbing. When they danced, I thought them the most beautiful couple I’d ever seen. My

father was charismatic, sensual, and would walk around the house in full tenor voice, often

singing in front of the mirror. “Diana, can you see that twinkle in my eye?” he’d say

smiling. I thought him vain, but now I cry when I hear those old tenor songs—“Vienna,

City of My Dreams,” “You Are My Heart’s Delight,” “O Sole Mio,” “Serenade” from the

Student Prince. He’d done well transcending his own poor family roots, and sang in Gilbert

and Sullivan musicals; he’d won the Dunlop Cup for cycling in Southern England, and was

gifted in business and house design.

But I feared my father as a teenager, his tickling hand running up my legs as I

climbed stairs. I’d shout, push him away, made sure never to be home alone with him. I

don’t think we ever had a “real” conversation. His father, a factory worker, had been

petulant, selfish, but his mother was earthy, beautiful and strong.

This may have saved him from being worse, but it didn’t prevent his violence, his

giving my mother black eyes, and once, broken ribs. I loved my mother deeply. She had

beauty, charm, a quick wit, and took meticulous care of us, but her resentment was

treacherous and deep. Of course, she was greatly wronged by my father’s jealous

accusations, but once started her verbal ferocity was extreme. “Please leave it now,” he’d

say over and over, trying to walk away, even though he, Othello-like, had always started it.

I’d tug at her clothes, plead with her to stop. But she couldn’t. She’d follow, whipping him

with her words until he broke.

It was only in my early forties I had further insight into this. I cried for days when

my father, after yet another argument with my mother, revealed her secret. She’d been

sexually abused by her own father for years. She admitted it, as if referring to a mild

disagreement, absolutely refusing to talk more. “It happened decades ago,” she said,

annoyed with me. “I only want to remember good things about my father.” When I pressed

for more details, she was patronising. “Why are you so negative and upset? You need

41

counselling,” she said. “Let us only remember things that make us happy.” When I

reminded her she was constantly negative about Dad, she was furious, and complained to

friends and family, “Diana’s causing trouble again. She’s always been the difficult one.

Adrian was easy.”

But for me, their martyr–monster relationship suddenly made sense. Was Mum’s

virulent rage an unconscious ploy that allowed her to ignore the betrayal she’d felt as a

child? I thought how she’d always scorned emotional displays. “We were never a

demonstrative family,” she’d say. But I realised her father was demonstrative in the most

horrifying way. I remembered how she spoke of sex as something women needed to endure.

Now it all made sense.

As I paused with my father in the sunshine outside the church on the day of my

wedding, I made a silent vow: I will travel to the centre of life, to the depths of love. I will

know God through this path of marriage and motherhood. No matter what, I will endure. It

took decades for me to understand that the endless struggles a fairy-tale protagonist might

undergo to reach the castle of dreams works more as a metaphor for one’s own internal

journey to God.

In that fleeting moment, as I stood there at the bottom of the steps outside the

church making this pledge to Truth, I was surprised by a powerful charge that passed

through me. At that point, the priest called down from the entrance porch of the church

above. Our eyes met. I was flushed. He hesitated, looked surprised, and he flushed also—as

if the same electrical charge had run through him. Then he smiled and turned and left the

porch to position himself in readiness for my father and me to enter the church, and walk to

the altar, in front of which my future husband was waiting (seemingly, as my mother and

others said, waiting as if for a funeral). The priest, I was told later, had whispered to my

future husband before I came in: “She’s glowing!” As I entered the church, my future

husband turned to give a slow, uncertain smile.

Marriage

The man I married was the second traveller to visit Australia, a South African. We’d met in

1977 in a London hostel, and travelled together for a few months in the British Isles. We

both enjoyed remote places, each having deserted the world with our separate intentions; we

hiked more than four-hundred kilometres through peat bogs, rain and snow over the

Pennine and Cheviot mountains, from England into Scotland. But when I left him in

London, I made sure to lose his poste restante address. He’d said we should marry. I etched

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dark, inky capitals into my journal: “I’LL NEVER MARRY SOMEONE LIKE THAT AND LET HIM

DRAG ME THROUGH THE MUD,” I wrote, surprising myself at the force of the words. But I

thought no more of it until one day when I was paging through that journal, which

happened to be not long before it was destroyed in our house fire.

I left him in London, travelled quickly through Europe, and ended up on Crete for

three months, learning Greek and picking olives high up in soft green groves. I remember

thinking, “I hope never to meet that South African again.” But he pursued me, carrying a

photo we’d had taken in a booth, describing me to all the travellers he’d meet, until two

months later he found me at the far southeastern end of Crete in the middle of the night. I

was sleeping in a bamboo hut on a beach a kilometre from the nearest village. He woke me,

saying over and over It’s me, It’s me.

I screamed, felt dread, but didn’t know how to tell him “no.” He seemed happy.

Once again we shared a bed and some time on the road. I liked his smooth, tanned body, his

earthy, clean smell, and the way he mended jeans with leather patches. But I hated his

moods, and most of all, I hated his mind. He was unaware of racial prejudice, referring to

native Africans as “kaffir budgies,” meaning flies or irritating insects; kaffir can be

translated as savage. I was outraged. He said it was a harmless expression in South Africa,

but was careful after that. When I departed Crete for India, I was relieved to leave him—

knowing his South African passport meant, this time, he couldn’t follow.

But he wrote long letters, claiming to love me, miss me, even though I replied, “No,

I don’t miss you, and don’t want to be with you.” His long letters went on for more than a

year, until once again, he returned to my life. I was teaching at Shalvey Public School in the

Western Suburbs of Sydney, sharing a rambling rental house in Penrith with a friend,

another first-year-out teacher, Larissa, and her English boyfriend, Matt. Once again, he

arrived unannounced in the middle of the night, this time breaking in through an unlocked

backdoor, stealing into my room, using a lighter to find which one.

I screamed. Again, he said, It’s me, it’s me. He’d brought gifts, and called them

kitsch, knowing I was fond of this word. The first weeks were fun and, once more, Wayne

shared my bed. But then I asked him to leave. We all asked—Larissa and Matt too. But he

refused; he moved into a spare backroom off the rear verandah, said that would suffice. He

stayed all year, as if this was his right. Matt didn’t want to confront Wayne physically. We

thought of calling the police but decided against it.

At the end of that year the household fell apart. Larissa blamed Wayne for her

breakdown and returned to her country home in Mudgee to rest. Matt went back to England.

And even though there were times I might have successfully escaped over the following

43

three years, each time destiny swooped. My early twenties passed in this way as Wayne’s

life seeped more and more into mine.

As I always told him, “You are not the one!” our companionship started to seem

harmless. I thought Fate would eventually throw the man of my dreams onto my path. Our

friendship was like old hiking boots, comfortable, familiar. Weekends we’d walk into the

Blue Mountains, or swim and hike on a deserted beach. He seemed harmless—quiet,

attentive, devoted; and he formed close ties with my brother and my parents. I didn’t see

how his presence was to be a vine that would grow all over every aspect of my life.

Rarely did I meet anyone new. I thought the world crazy, practised classical piano

for hours, and worked during the week. Two years before we married, he lived in Sydney

and I in Newcastle, and we continued our comfortable weekend relationship. At twenty-

five, ostensibly a good marriageable age in the seventies, I made a strategic decision: I’ll

marry this fellow who is dedicated and true, surely qualities needed for a happy, enduring

marriage.

The Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, claims that you marry someone who

replicates the emotional climate of your family, and in this way you can go on working with

familial experiences of formative years. I’d developed the habit of being acutely sensitive to

those around me, not only due to the stormy climate of our household, and my mother’s

pain, but also as a result of looking out for my mentally disabled older brother, Richard.

Caring for those who were marginalised felt natural, joyful and worthwhile. Wayne’s

stories of a domineering father, a major general who apparently put him down, and a

neurotic, absent mother, made me believe he’d been oppressed, and lacked only

encouragement. “I’d never take a girl home to meet my mother,” he told me, describing her

tantrums and erratic temper.

“It drove me mad being home with the two boys as toddlers,” his mother advised,

when I met her—her long, bright red fingernails tapping the table, her heavily made-up face

contorted into an expression of disdain. “I went back to work full-time as a private secretary

when he was three,” she said; and added, “People often said I was like Scarlett O’Hara from

Gone With the Wind.”

“Ohh…” I nodded, trying to imagine. She observed me keenly with her unsteady,

somewhat close-together eyes.

“He’s a closed book,” his mother went on, looking over to Wayne who was half-

listening, picking his fingernails, a lifelong habit; then she fawned: “I shouldn’t say this, but

he was my favourite child—he takes after my side.”

44

I see now I was a perfect asset for his ticket out of South Africa, and he was

fanatical in anticipating my every need. I forgot my aversions, his bullying, his never taking

“no” for an answer. He seemed mild, gentle, totally unlike my father. I persuaded myself

and told everyone that he had a steady, thoughtful personality in life.

He was thirty when we married; his only possession after more than half a decade of

traveling the world was a backpack. I was not unhappy with this, and without considering it

unfair, had already bought our lake home, all household furnishings, furniture, books,

music, piano, and other things, including a car. I encouraged him to get a career. In the early

days, I worked. He studied, going on to become a dental technician; he said I had such

lovely teeth, and that his wish was to make me a false set just like my own one day. I was

horrified, and reminded him this would mean I’d have to lose my teeth, but this didn’t put

him off. After, he went on to study another year and became a dental prosthetist.

I should have left in the first year of the marriage, when he went to a fancy-dress

outfitted as Hitler, demanding I exchange my own “clownish” attire for Hitler’s mistress,

Eva Braun. If he’d done this earlier, I’d have opposed him, but I’d just become pregnant

and this was a party with his study friends. When I objected, he was assertive, something

he’d never done before; he said it was a joke, that his classmates often said he looked like

Hitler.

Over the next twenty-one years I was to give every part of myself to that marriage

and motherhood. After our second child, Anna, the Department of Education advised I was

ineligible for more leave, so I resigned and stayed home. Wayne built up two businesses

and worked twelve-hour days. Needing nothing myself, I supported him, and put him on a

pedestal, praising him to all others. It was easier to give to life when I used my energy in

this socially acceptable way. Also, there was something instinctive about it. But Wayne

absorbed my energy, and other things too, such as when he took my deep, forest-green

address book—a book with gold-edged pages that I’d had since school; when I asked for it

back, he was infuriated, said it wasn’t mine, told me that I was “always being difficult,”

something he always said when I disagreed. I let it go, not wanting a confrontational

relationship like my parents’.

I managed everything at home, serving, shopping, cooking, cleaning, sewing,

washing, child care. But following the house fire of 1987, I felt trapped, and began weekly

meditations with a local group based on Sri Chinmoy’s teachings—the eastern mystic who

conducted meditations at the United Nations. Continually, I made excuses for Wayne,

seeking to discover my own failings, reminding myself that any devil, if you do ever find

him, will be yourself. Following the birth of Linden, our third child, born after the fire,

45

Wayne worked even longer hours, into the early morning, and was moody and silent. If I

protested he’d sneer, “You’re always arguing. No wonder I never want to come home.”

Sometimes he’d say, “I’ll chop your piano up with an axe.”

The children didn’t seem bothered by his absence, but they hated the trouble when I

complained. He made sure everyone understood the distress was my fault. When I tried to

pull away, and suggested leaving him, he’d tell me I was wrong, say I was imagining

things, that he loved me, that our relationship was improving, but I was too negative to see

it.

It was while pregnant with Tristan, our fourth child, that my whole life changed. I

discovered Siddha Yoga. The power of this spiritual path carried me through the darkest

days of that marriage, which reached an extreme low point early one Monday morning. By

now, I was seven months pregnant with Julian, our fifth child, and wanted some response

from Wayne before he left for work. I’d had the children all weekend, alone. When Wayne

continued to ignore me with the radio turned up, and was about to leave, I switched the

music off, screwed his lunch sandwich up, and threw it on the floor.

He was enraged. Wayne slapped me so hard that it broke my eardrum and I fell to

the ground, as he strode out and slammed the door. There were complications with that

pregnancy. Julian was jammed into my pelvis, and was born with torticollis, his head

leaning to one side, with many medical implications for the first five years. I couldn’t get

out of bed for a month before, and two months after the birth.

Spiritual Path

In a dream one night, I looked down on my whole life from high above,

And saw everything was in fact taking place inside a miniature, toy antlike maze.

My feelings of entrapment and pain were inconsequential in this greater scheme of things.

Spirituality was the only thing that stopped me being overwhelmed in the increasingly

crushing circumstances of that marriage. Even though the idea of having a guru didn’t

particularly appeal to me, I became almost at once an ardent devotee of Siddha Yoga after

an extraordinary dream, during Gurumayi Chidvilasananda’s visit to Australia in 1991.

Gurumayi, a highly educated and very beautiful Indian woman, was head of the

Siddha Yoga Lineage, a position handed down to her by her guru, Swami Muktananda

Paramahamsa (Baba) before he died in 1982; just as Baba’s guru, Bhagwan Nityananda,

had conferred the authority of the lineage to Baba in 1966. Gurumayi was claimed to be a

46

shaktipat guru—one who was able to directly transmit divine energy to others. She ignited

the hearts of tens of thousands of devotees around the world in the eighties and nineties. I

rediscovered and rewrote myself through the path of Siddha Yoga.

In my dream, I was sleeping with my husband in a large bare room with grey

concrete walls, and woke to find Gurumayi standing next to the double bed.

Moonlight filtered through a high barred window, stripes of pale light on the

floor. Gurumayi was looking at me, and I half-sat up, immediately transported by

her profound, yet gentle eyes. She held her hand out for me to follow, and I rose

without question, stepping from the bed, gliding from the room as we twisted and

turned along endless mazes of winding corridors. Eventually, we stopped in an

open cloud sort-of space, her light-filled face directly in front of mine; straight

away, I plummeted into this reality, free-falling, immersed in an intense sense of

ecstatic, peaceful joy; simultaneously, I remembered the dreams of my youth and

saw my present contracted state. When I woke, I was sobbing deeply, and felt my

own boundless, ungovernable longing for the truth surging inside me.

I joined a Siddha Yoga Meditation group in Newcastle and on the first night,

couldn’t stop looking at a large photo of Gurumayi on the puja at the front. Those wisdom-

filled, compassionate eyes understood everything, all my longing, and pain. After that first

night at meditation, I woke to find I was joyfully singing in Sanskrit, that I knew all the

ancient Indian words and verses well. Over the next ten years, I attended weekly

meditations, and daily read a Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course based on the teachings

of Kashmir Shaivism and Vedanta.

It is said the guru is the perfect disciple, that the guru embodies the grace-bestowing

power of God. It is said that the only goal of the guru is to free others into the spiritual path.

It is said that the guru is not the person, but rather the divine animating force in the one who

is playing the role of the guru. The guru principle can also be awakened within each one of

us.

Following Gurumayi’s next visit to Australia six years later, in 1997, the intensity

and frequency of my spiritual experiences increased. Our family stayed in Sydney the

weekend of her introductory talks and the swami workshops at Darling Harbour.

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After listening to Gurumayi’s introductory talk, I woke the first night, the eve of

Palm Sunday, also the eve of my fortieth birthday, to the experience of light-

energy surging through my body. The noise and vibration accompanying this were

like a jumbo jet taking off. I yearned for this energy to explode through me, to

bring me to completion. But the vibration remained humming inside, filling me

with the spectacular feeling of its potential.

After Gurumayi’s second visit, many characters and mythical beings came into my

life. They spoke in dreams and meditations, using signs, metaphors and symbols. I met with

the lion. It was during the night of a twenty-four-hour chant at the Sydney Ashram. I’d

longed to go, but couldn’t because two of the children were unwell. When the children were

asleep, my longing to be at the ashram was intense and I stayed up to meditate, thinking I’d

try to bilocate there. But instead, I curled up on the floor with my head on my puja feeling

exhausted, and rather than going to bed, remained there until late. Afterwards, I thought this

was silly because Julian, then two years old, woke a few times that night. But it was that

night I had the dream:

I was walking past some gardens set in extensive, landscaped grounds, and kept

stopping to admire exquisite flowers, trees, bushes. But out of nowhere, a large

Great-Dane-Rottweiler appeared. The dog was bounding down a long, sweeping

driveway straight towards me, and my usual terror arose. I’d been attacked by a

dog as a teenager. But as this familiar fear ascended through me, the dog directly

transformed into a huge male lion that roared straight into my face. when the lion

did this, however, I experienced, not fear, but my own inner courage rising,

indomitable, wise. As long as I maintained this courage, which was a steady

humming vibration inside me, I knew the lion could not devour me. As I stared into

the lion’s majestic face, it was as if I had tumbled into eternity. When I woke, I

was crying deeply. Afterwards, I felt illuminated for days: mundane life events, I

saw through an entirely different lens.

I had quite a few lion dreams that spring, and wondered if some sort of

synchronicity was at work. The Siddha Yoga New Year’s message that year was “Wake up

to your Inner Courage and Become Steeped in Divine Contentment.” But I realised also that

this mythical lion was reminiscent of Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the

Wardrobe. Afterwards, I discovered that C.S. Lewis also dreamed of a mythical lion,

48

especially while writing that book. Do such fairy-tale creatures exist in subtle spheres that

we access through internal doorways of consciousness?

In another lion dream that year, I walked next to the lion down the hallway of our

house. I felt particularly happy he’d decided to visit again. But then the lion

started to scratch me—not wounding, more like a kitten playfully pawing a ball of

wool. I noticed he did this whenever my mind touched on frustrations in my life.

Each time he pawed me, I cringed, internally adjusting my mental focus. This

process allowed me to accurately gauge every subtle nuance of my inner state.

Eventually, I felt completely alert and attuned. It was then I felt it, felt the

immense, steady, humming sensation of the great lion’s body. During those

moments, the lion’s body and mine were one. Once again for days I was

transformed, subtly energised in everyday life, and felt supremely content.

Many miraculous things happened through the path of Siddha Yoga. Sometimes the

wind would speak. Once it moved through the shimmering wattle, laughing, telling me

where to find eighteen-month-old Julian, who’d escaped our lake home. I’d been running

everywhere, worried he’d wandered down to the water’s edge. Other times pictures on the

wall might come alive and I’d receive important messages. Sometimes, I’d hear divine

sounds, nada, such as being woken at dawn by tinkling bells. Then there were other

moments when I’d experience strange attunements; one sensory pathway would lead

directly to a spontaneous experience of something else. For example, after long hours

chanting or meditating, the sound of the train on the tracks might turn into a divine chorus

of chanting, or cigar smoke would transform into the aroma of the most heavenly incense.

One of the most remarkable of these transformations happened late one afternoon

when the unrelenting sound of a chainsaw next door filled the air. I felt upset, not only

because of the noise, but also because the large lilly pilly tree outside the kitchen window

was being cut down. But then I felt annoyed with myself for being annoyed.

This caused me to remember one of the teachings. If something disturbs your

meditation, do not fight the intrusion, use it to somehow travel further inside. So, instead of

opposing the aggressive din of the chainsaw, I imagined that it was cutting away all my

samskaras.

49

A dreamlike vibrational pathway opened with imperceptible speed. To my

disbelief, I moved into profound stillness, a limitless space, suspended, swelling

harmonies, and I could hear a divine symphony playing inside. All the instruments

of the orchestra, and a rapturous choir singing too: the sound was immense. Was

this music of the divine spheres?

There were so many wonderful experiences, spiritual and secular, in that family

home next to the lakefront. I’d always think of our home as the far northern wing of the

Sydney Ashram. My mothering work was my dharma, chopping vegetables, cleaning,

taking care of the children, organising feasts. The world of newspapers, politics and

professional careers seemed insignificant, mere shadows. In this life of motherhood,

together with the ancient teachings of my spiritual path, I stood at the royal gateway of life

and, at times, felt powerfully in touch with a divine source.

Over the distant hills the sun and moon rose, shining across the shimmering expanse

of water into the house. The children had a rowboat, caught little fish, put them in a bucket

and then let them go; they made toy boats, sometimes out of nasturtium leaves, or sticks and

bits of washed up foam. We fed the pelicans, had a faithful border collie, kept chooks,

guinea pigs, rabbits, a duck, and had a resident blue tongue in the sandpit; there were frogs

and tadpoles in the pond, and up above sea eagles soared, while the nesting kites in tall gum

trees across the road, trilled.

“Look Mummy, look at this,” four-year-old Tristan squealed one morning, jumping

up and down on our rickety, old, double bed. “Look Mummy,” he called, as he stared out

over the sunlit water. “The lake is full of diamonds, or are they crystals, or lots of twinkling

stars?”

When Julian, our youngest, started school, I travelled once a fortnight to the ashram

in Sydney to arrange the flowers for the pujas. The two-storey ashram in Garnett St,

Dulwich Hill, once a girls’ orphanage, had gardens front and back. On the ground floor was

a huge meditation hall, meditation cave, a large kitchen, dining hall, various devotional

rooms and offices; on the first floor were dorm rooms where devotees could stay. Arranging

the flowers was my seva, selfless service, a spiritual practice said to hold much merit. Each

week, roses, lilies, tulips, other flowers, greenery, were brought to the ashram by a devotee

who was a flower wholesaler. When I let my hands position the flowers with devotion, not

only the displays and garlands came together easily, sometimes, superbly, but also every

aspect of my life. The devotional path, the bhakti-feeling-path was said to be the fastest and

easiest track to God.

50

Finale

I’d been a mother of five children for almost twenty-one years when Wayne and I and four

of our five children went overseas for two months during the summer holidays of 2003–

2004. William, strong-willed, steady, nineteen, was the oldest and about to begin his second

year of industrial design at university; Anna, creative, outgoing, seventeen, was to start

Year 12, her final year of senior school. Linden, thoughtful, musical, fifteen, was to begin

Year 10. Tristan, extroverted and flamboyant, though also sensitive, was on the verge of

adolescence; while noble Julian, nine, was athletic and had a heart-warming smile.

I see now that two-month overseas trip was to be the final chapter of our family

being together, even though this finale could easily have come fifteen months earlier when

I’d left Wayne to live in rental accommodation with the five children. I’d left after

discovering Wayne’s addiction to pornography, prostitutes and other fetishes; he’d had a

secret nightlife in Sydney and Newcastle for the last ten years. When I challenged him, he

said, “It’s you who has all the problems. You’ve had these problems since you were a child

because of your father.” But Wayne’s moods, absences, his late hours, now it all made

sense.

Our family was always in crisis during those months before I first left Wayne. One

night, William and his father were fighting and, oblivious to my screams for them to stop,

had overturned furniture as their locked-in battle moved until it was up against the sliding

glass doors in the dining room. I dared wait no longer, and they stopped when I called 000,

and three policemen arrived. It had started because Wayne and I had been arguing, and

William, who was studying for his HSC, had come out of his room where he was studying

and civilly asked us to be quiet. While I apologised profusely and agreed, Wayne shouted at

William, demanding he go back to his room and not interfere. After taking notes, the

policemen advised that assault was against the law, and asked if I wanted to take out an

Apprehended Violence Order, but I didn’t want to pursue this course.

“Look at all this,” one of the policemen said as they were leaving, hesitating to take

in the piano, violins, viola and music-stands. “This incident is probably just a one off,” he

said.

A few days later, William squared me, butted up right close like a bull locked down

in an arena. “What are you going to do about this?” he bellowed. The dense fuzz of his

words reminded me of two pictures of bullfights in my father’s study, not only because

William was Taurean, but also because I’ll never forget the smouldering resentment, and

powerlessness in his face.

51

School days, 1972. I didn’t go in to my father’s study much, had never liked the room or those

pictures. One was of a youthful matador in ornate brocaded clothes, the thick sweep of his dark

hair, twist of his taut body. There was certainty in that three-quarter view of him as he held a

swirl of red cape out. The bull, head down, was charging.

The second picture showed the aftermath, a close up of the bull, a hulk of thing after

being speared. Its staunch body had lurched, contorting at right angles, front legs folded,

immobilised. Lances stuck out at odd angles, dangling precariously; from each, thin flourishes

of blood streamed down.

I felt myself being utterly stripped of ego during those final months before I left

Wayne. I saw how the marriage was teaching the children deceit, to live a double life. I had

to bear blame, not defend myself. I had to go beyond praise and blame and in this way learn

to go beyond ego. I had many dreams at that time.

In one dream I was meditating, but was not in a good state. Someone opposite me

was meditating really well. I felt the depth of the space they were in, and couldn’t

understand why I felt so distracted until I looked down. Numerous tiny wriggling

leech-like-things had entered through the pores of my skin: fine grey-white

parasites; the more I looked, the more I found. They were in fact all over me. I

tried to pull them off but it was impossible. It reminded me of an aboriginal

healing process I had read about where a person with depression or anxiety might

be cured by the extraction of such worms.

In another, I dreamed of Gurumayi. She looked at me, peering for a while, then

said, “You’re most unusual; you have hardly any past impressions. You live

almost entirely for the future. You communicate and people never understand

you—you are working with the future.” I was feeling utterly depleted and she

showered me with light, and then poured cold water over my head. My first

impulse was to recoil. But when I reminded myself that whatever the guru does is

great, immediately, I experienced this as exhilarating light gushing down onto me.

It was hard finding a place to rent. I had numerous knockbacks. No one wanted to

rent to a single “unemployed” mum with five kids. But after obtaining character references

from two professional friends, who also called in to recommend me to the agent, I did

secure one—the best I’d seen. I signed a year’s lease on an old, rendered-brick, three-

52

bedroom house, three blocks from Merewether Beach. We had to leave secretly, and shifted

everything in a day. Wayne would have made it impossible for us to go.

We moved in after William’s trial exams, and that meant he had time to settle

before the Higher School Certificate. I was surprised at how focused he was. It was perhaps

his way of dealing with the crisis. William and Anna each had a room of their own; the

three younger boys shared a front double room, while I slept on my futon in the lounge.

Life felt simple again. I liked being alone, as if I were picking up where I’d left off in India.

But seven months later, Wayne came back and we put the family home up for sale. I

wanted the marriage to work, but boundaries had to be established. When Wayne moved in,

William moved to student share-rental accommodation near the university, refusing to see

his father. Three months later, when we booked the overseas trip, William still refused to

see Wayne and so declined to go overseas, even though the other children and I begged.

“Do whatever you must to save the marriage,” Wayne’s terminally-ill father had

urged, when Wayne made an emergency flight to South Africa to visit him two months

before our departure date. Wayne’s father was fond of the children, and had paid for the

open-world ticket for all of us to visit that December. We took the children out of school

early and went to South Africa first, but Wayne’s father passed away only ten days before

we arrived.

I never understood why they didn’t wait until we got there to have the funeral. We

stayed with Wayne’s family in Pretoria, then toured through the bushveld in the Limpopo

Game Reserve near the Zimbabwe border and camped in Kruger National Park, with its

amazing wildlife; I especially remember a charging lion pursuing a frightened herd of huge,

graceful, loping giraffes across the veld. After, we returned to Pretoria to spend Christmas

with Wayne’s family, and then flew to England to visit my extended family; we stayed with

a cousin in Hathersage, in the deep green hills of the Derbyshire Peak District; the eight-

hundred-year-old thatched-roofed, stone home was on acres with stables, and the children

rode horses.

New Year we spent in London, and then two nights in Paris before Wayne and I and

the four children retreated to a hostel near Todtnauberg for five nights, an isolated location

in the German Alps, near the borders of the Swiss and French Alps. I’d thought we’d talk,

but Wayne was remote. On our last night, I walked outside alone. The moon was almost

full, shining on the deep white snow; and as I stood in that soundless landscape, feeling the

comforting, yet melancholic presence of the soulful moon, a deep, yearning ache stirred

inside. It reminded me of the longing sadness I’d known in childhood. “Even now, despite a

53

large extended family and the unconditional love I have for my children, something beneath

it all, something essential is still missing,” I thought.

The next morning, the children sleeping, I looked out from our high hostel room

window into the misty, snow-white valleys of the Black Forest. I stared through long icicles

that glimmered on the window, and gazed down at the leap we were about to take.

The children liked breakfasting German style with chocolate, cheeses, assorted

rolls, and cold meats. We boarded a train to the university town of Freiberg, two hours

away. It was close to Frankfurt Airport from where we’d all depart to three different

continents the next day.

After settling in to a six-share hostel room in Freiberg, and rugging up in coats,

scarves and hats, we navigated the cobbled streets in the medieval part of the old town; we

bought souvenirs, including a hand-painted German beer stein and antique edelweiss

cowbell for William. After, we shared a candlelit dinner in a quaint old-style restaurant—

the children tried snails. And though the barrier remained between Wayne and me, there

was no effort required to maintain civility and warmth.

The next day, I was the first to leave on an early flight from Frankfurt to Kuala

Lumpar, from where I’d connect with a flight to Mumbai, and then travel on to the ashram

in India for a month. Anna was returning to Australia to spend the remaining three weeks of

the summer holidays with my mother, while the three younger boys were to go back to

South Africa with Wayne. It was awful leaving the children waving on the platform; I’d

never been apart from them for more than a few days. It felt as if they were being torn from

me.

The journey from Freiberg to Kuala Lumpur Airport took seventeen hours. I was exhausted

when the plane arrived, and the heat felt oppressive after Europe’s winter. At Kuala

Lumpur, I faced a further thirteen-hour wait before the five-hour flight to Mumbai. As I sat

in the transit lounge, negative thoughts and emotions clamoured. I felt suddenly old, felt the

tiresome loathing of the marriage, and believed I’d wasted my life. I prayed ten thousand

times that I’d see clearly at the ashram in India, and would have the courage to face what I

had to do.

I checked my emails in the crowded transit lounge. One from the solicitor said the

sale of our family home was held up. Settlement was supposed to be weeks ago. Contracts

had been exchanged a week before we went overseas, and we’d left the solicitor in charge

with powers of attorney to complete the sale. Now I was full of doubts, half wanting the

sale not to go ahead. Another email contained the much-awaited Siddha Yoga New Year

54

message for 2004: “Experience the power within—Kundalini Shakti.” I felt re-energised

just reading it, and considered how, in less than twelve hours, I’d be in India for a month

where I’d have the luxury of putting spiritual practice first. I thought of my children with

deep gratitude, how much they’d all wanted me to come.

The five-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Mumbai passed quickly and despite my

tiredness I stayed awake, the full moon shining in at the window. As the plane was

preparing to land, I realised I should prepare for the fact that India might have changed. But

as the air-conditioned four-wheel-drive from the ashram glided through the streets of

Mumbai and its extensive outer suburbs, in the middle of the night, it seemed nothing had

changed. My eyes were riveted to the rustic scene that still was India, the endless sprawling

slums, sack shelters, so many people still out walking, that gentle lilt in their gait, little

stalls open, soft lighting everywhere, so much to see.

The full moon stood high overhead when, two hours later, we arrived at Gurudev

Siddha Peeth Ashram. All was completely still and silent in the cool night air. I was

surprised that Justine, a fellow devotee from Newcastle, had stayed up to meet me. We

embraced and walked wordlessly through the moonlit courtyard. At the main temple I

bowed low at the entrance steps, touching my head to the ancient stone. I wanted to feel

devotion, but was depleted and completely drained.

Justine and I walked back out of the ashram grounds, across the dirt road to a high-

walled ashram accommodation area on the other side, where a uniformed Indian guard

stood at the gates. Justine showed me to my twin-share in the condos, a modest room with

two single beds, an ensuite, a tiny balcony, and a rack for drying clothes. There was a

welcome folder on my pillow with a simple hand-painted red flower on the front, also a

Ganesh greeting card with some gifts inside from my roommate. I felt immediately at home,

and climbed into the bed.

55

5. Ashram

“Jagrat svapna sushupta bhede turyabhoga sambhavah”

Turiya exists all the time, even when moving or speaking there is a part which is still.

Only sometimes we recognise it, or have insights, the moment is suspended. (Shiva Sutra 1:7)

The ashram and its grounds in the Tansa Valley were an oasis rising out of the ancient,

dusty landscape in the West Central state of Maharashtra, an area where many of the great

poet–saints of India had once lived. The narrow, potholed road outside the ashram led to the

village of Ganeshpuri, a twenty-minute walk, where clusters of street stalls sold saris,

garlands, puja items, books, chai; there were also tailors working their old treadle sewing

machines almost on the dirt street. Locals walked barefoot or used bicycles or rickshaws,

their existence richly steeped in family tradition, religious ritual, with a notable village icon

being the massive temple drum.

The first day, I’d woken mid-morning, propped myself up in bed, looked around the

room and at my roommate’s neatly made bed, and reached for the welcome folder on my

bedside table, and my roommate’s greeting written on paper gold-stamped with Ganesh;

there were ten thin, metal, disposable bindis with peel-off adhesive backs inside. Original

bindis were made using kumkum power; I’d never wear these but knew the intention was

kind. I looked through the folder containing a map of the ashram grounds, ashram

schedules, ashram dharma, where to draw money, buy basic supplies. But I could hardly

wait to explore the ashram’s seventy-five-acre grounds.

Gurumayi was to arrive in a few days. Brahmin priests and a number of swamis

were also in residence. I’d read their books, seen them on their visits to Australia. I yearned

to be close to the highest spiritual teachers, and considered this one of the best places on

earth for exploring the world within. I was about to dress and step outside when my

roommate returned, peeking her head around the door. “I didn’t wake you this morning, did

I?” She smiled before coming in. “I’m Liz…, your roommate.”

Liz had an open, friendly face, and was about ten years younger than me. I thanked

her for the letter and gifts. She was from New York and travelling for a year, writing about

her journey; had been through a marriage crisis, was divorced and now wanted to

rediscover herself. She’d been to Italy and, after her stay in India, was going to Bali. Many

travellers kept journals and attempted to publish. I was pleased we shared the same

interests. The journal was one’s confidante, one’s internal dialogue laid bare on the page. I

thought Liz charming, and noticed our stories, though different, were also similar.

56

The ashram schedule was strict. My day started between 1.30–4.00am. Often I

would complete five hours of spiritual practice before breakfast at 7am; I recited pre-dawn

mantras for two hours, partaking in abhishek and arati, mostly in the main temple, the

Nityananda Temple. But sometimes I’d walk along a path lined with coconut trees to

partake in pre-dawn practices at the small austere Shiva Temple. Following was one hour of

meditation. You could climb the hill to meditate in the beautiful Brahmin Temple, or

meditate in the Samadhi shrine with its blue pearl above the doors; or among other places,

go to the meditation cave. Mostly, during my week at the ashram, I did my own walking-

meditation on Dakshin Kashi, a twenty-five-acre grass area surrounded by trees, with an old

Ganesh Temple mound at the centre.

Alone there, in early misty morning veils of moonlight, I’d walk clockwise around

the Ganesh mound under the bright orbs of Mars, Venus and the moon, reference points that

reminded me of home. It was a time of honouring my family, praying for guidance, and

invoking that great deity Ganesh, renowned as the remover of obstacles. On each turn

around the old Ganesh Temple mount, I’d bring one my children to the forefront of my

mind. Love and gratitude for my dear family would surge through me. Sometimes I’d walk

slowly, focused. Other times I’d run through the mist, taking my shoes off, skipping and

dancing on the cold grass. I felt as if Ganesh was there next to me; as if I could see him, feel

him, though I was also wary my imagination was going too far. But later I read that

Vashistha, Rama’s guru, had held a great yagna in Ganeshpuri and installed Lord Ganesh in

the temple there.

After meditation I’d go for chai in Annupurna before the ninety-minute “Guru

Gita,” a profound and sacred hymn with one-hundred and eighty-two verses, considered a

supreme study of the Self. It began at 5.30am in Guru Chowk, a large open-air meditation

area adjoining the main courtyard. After this was breakfast at 7am for two hours. Then,

unless involved in a study-retreat, we’d do three hours of morning seva.

My seva was in the kitchen chopping beans, or kneading and rolling dough; we’d be

immersed in the aromas of aromatic spices, and vegetables freshly picked from the ashram

gardens; often we chanted. Lunch was two hours and, after eating, I’d often rest, or study in

the ashram library. Following was two hours of afternoon seva after which, the rest of the

day and evening were our own. I’d go to evening arati, or meditate next to a clump of wad

banyan, or near a cashew or bamboo grove, or write in my journal in my room, or near a

sculpture of Durga, Shiva or Ganesh. After hand-washing my clothes, I was in bed most

nights by 8pm.

57

Tears

On my second day at the ashram, there started a strange chain of events. It began at lunch in

Annapurna Dining Hall. I was sitting alone when three swamis arrived, one after the other

in their long flowing, orange robes. Two of the swamis sat at the opposite end of the eight-

seat table; Swami Vasudevananda, a sharp-faced, stockier, shorter man, about mid-fifties,

sat opposite me. I recognised him from photos, his visits, and link-up programmes at the

Sydney Ashram. He was American and had once been a theatre director, and had also

taught theatre at the New York University School of the Arts, before taking his monastic

vows in 1980. He’d been a Siddha Yoga meditation teacher for twenty-five years.

Swami Vasudevananda wore a vivid orange beanie, and a deep red scarf tied around

his neck. As he was sitting down, a couple swooped in to sit there also, to say goodbye;

they were leaving that afternoon. I listened to their conversation while I ate; they knew each

other well; the swami glanced up a few times and smiled with cheery eyes, but I felt in awe

and couldn’t join in. I went on eating, taking in their simple, honest exchange, and felt a

soft warm, swelling tide within. Love. Relief. Letting go. These feelings rose until they

overflowed and hot tears streamed silently down my face. The others continued talking, but

then the Swami asked, “Are you okay?”

I nodded, tears still flowing. “Where else could you cry and everyone around you

still carry on a normal conversation and not think anything is strange?” The Swami laughed.

The couple looked over. The fellow, a Thai diplomat, introduced himself, saying,

“Usually I cry when coming to the Ashram, but this time I haven’t.” Then almost

immediately, he started to cry. Now we both were crying and laughing. Then his wife

started to cry too. Swami Vasudevananda at this point alerted us to the fact that we, all

three, were crying, and he started to laugh, a bubbling, beautiful sound.

“What should I do when my feelings rise up like this?” I asked the Swami after

lunch as I was leaving. He thought before responding.

“Well, you could focus on the breath. You could say the mantra. Or you could think

of something else. But never,” he said, “never repress your feelings. They will turn toxic

inside you.”

That night in the room, I contemplated the day’s odd events and randomly paged

through Gurumayi’s Inner Stillness; I’d brought it from home. The words seemed to find

me: “There is a centre within the human being that is a reservoir of love. When it

overflows, you cry—that’s just how it is. When the heart is filled with love, there is no

language. No language can communicate love. Tears are the only medium through which

58

we can express our love. Because there is no language and no technique then peacefully we

have to cry.”

I remembered the numerous times crying had connected me to the deep centre

within. In particular, I recalled an overnight meditation intensive programme at the Sydney

Ashram three years ago conducted by Swami Vasudevananda. It had been broadcast by

satellite directly from the Siddha Yoga Ashram in South Fallsburg, New York, and because

of this, only began at 9.30 pm. I remember how in the first session Swami Vasudevananda’s

face had filled the large linkup screen out the front.

Sydney Ashram, May, 2001. I felt drained and wondered how I’d get through the night,

particularly as my back ached and all wall positions in the meditation hall were taken.

“Chanting revitalises every cell in our bodies,” Swami Vasudevananda had said. “Every cell is

nothing but light. Like a flock of birds, or a school of fish all flying or swimming together in

unison, when everything in the body is working well, it works like this. But when sickness

comes, this harmony breaks down.”

After his talk, we chanted, with a full complement of traditional instruments including

the veena, harmonium, tambora, tiny cymbals, drums, as well as violins, flutes, cello, other

instruments. I mentally translated the Sanskrit: “I bow to the holiest one within, the bliss of

liberation.” I repeated this over and over inside, while singing the Sanskrit chant. But as I was

doing this, suddenly the idea of “the bliss of liberation” seemed far away. Rather, the image of

being trapped in a cage like a poor little bird was strong within me, and my mind skipped

around the tortured options in my life:

1. Wayne won’t communicate or talk about things, but refuses to leave.

2. Seems impossible for me to leave with five young children (I’ve tried).

3. Wayne confirmed that if I leave he’ll cause insufferable custody battles.

4. Killing myself is no way out—I’d be burning to reach my children, yet powerless to do so.

Besides, troubles follow into the afterlife without any way of resolving them.

And as my mind circled around these options, I felt frantic, sensing there was no way

out. But at some point, this familiar shell of my existence dissolved, and as happened many

times at the Sydney Ashram over the years, I cried. And the more I cried, the more I felt in a

space of love—liberated, light-filled. After the chant, right on cue, Swami Vasudevananda had

said, “One day you suddenly realise you have become free from old tormenting thoughts, hard

feelings, venomous relationships. All these recurring impulses are no longer relevant. They

have lost their grip. You are lighter.”

59

Two Dreams

That night, after my weeping experience at lunch with Swami Vasudevananda and the Thai

couple, I had two strange and vivid dreams. One was about my roommate, a dream I only

remembered later when I bumped in to her in the ashram grounds. The second was about

Wayne. He’d become huge, made of iron, and had carried me in to the middle of a deep,

dark jungle and dumped me there. I wrote the dream by torchlight so as not to disturb Liz;

then went to meditate in the Brahmin Temple. It was 2.30 am, but I wanted to banish the

dream, thinking it was unhelpful to dwell on fears and negativity. Gurumayi had once said,

“Don’t attempt to banish darkness from a room by removing shadows. Turn on the light.”

I’d dismissed many disturbing dreams about my husband with this philosophy in mind.

Later that day, when I happened to bump into Liz, she seemed particularly anxious

to speak with me: “Do you know what happened this morning?” she asked, flushed. “I was

locked in the room.”

I scrambled for memories of leaving that morning, thinking back to how I’d gone

out early to meditate in the Brahmin Temple. I distinctly recalled closing the door but had

no recollection of locking it, even though right away I realised it was most unlikely to have

been anyone else. I felt bad, and also confused about how it had happened. How could I

have been so absent? But then I remembered the dream:

I had a dream about you last night. I woke all at once with the greatest alarm.

Your bed was on fire! I jumped up to wake you, to save you, but when I looked, in

horror, I saw you were not there. All that remained on the white sheet of your bed

was a small pile of white-grey ash.

Back in the room that night, I apologised to Liz again, though I still had no

recollection of locking the door. She said she’d been frantic to get out of the room to go to

the Guru Gita that morning, a chant she loathed and usually avoided. But she’d wanted to

get there after speaking with Swami Vasudevananda about her difficulties with the chant.

He’d said the one-hundred-and-eighty-two Sanskrit verses of the Guru Gita were so sacred

and purifying that chanting this hymn, one could be turned into pure ash!

Some years later I discovered a double-page spread about my roommate, Liz, in the

Newcastle Herald. We hadn’t stayed in touch, and I was astonished to see she’d published a

book about her year-long journey that had become a best-seller: Eat, Pray, Love. I read it

that day, and recoiled in horror to read the “door-locking incident” recounted in print. But I

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had to smile at this play of the Shakti—that I who loved to hermetically hide should be

exposed in this blundering way.

Coincidences

Strange things started to happen at the ashram in India right after my crying experience with

Swami Vasudevananda. Each time I walked into the Annapurna Dining Hall, I seemed to

stroll in with him. On my fourth day at the ashram, it was unnerving. We walked in together

and just as I was about to sit in the large silent area, he happened to park himself in the very

seat I had picked. I moved to another table out of sight. But then, as I rose to leave, I saw he

was getting up at exactly the same time. We walked out to wash our trays in unison. Then I

found him on the path to the condos. He stopped to let me pass. I hoped he didn’t think I

was tracking him. I didn’t dare look back.

Again, the next day, I arrived at breakfast with him and again we sat down at the

same time. As I ate, I tried not to think about these coincidences. I was annoyed with myself

for being preoccupied with them. But when I was about to leave, I couldn’t help noticing

Swami Vasudevananda was about to get up. This time he noticed, and waited. I felt

relieved, and went to wash my dishes, hoping he’d not wash his at the same time.

I was feeling exasperated with myself for wasting time in maya and went to the

bathroom before collecting my bag. But when I returned to the bag area, I saw Swami

Vasudevananda approaching. I stood back, waiting for him to get his bag. But to my

disbelief, he picked up mine instead, which happened to be next to his and almost identical,

an orange-brown homespun shoulder bag. This time we laughed.

It happened again the next day. We walked into breakfast almost side by side. But at

this point, I had an insight. In the ashram, this powerhouse of the Shakti, everything was

magnified. Because I longed to be at the feet of a spiritual master, and because I was

acutely curious about the Swami’s “state,” this kept drawing us together. The teachings say,

whatever you give energy to, that becomes your experience. I realised it was vital to define

what one really wanted—one’s sankalpa.

When I walked into Annupurna Hall for lunch later that day, Swami

Vasudevananda was sitting in the silent area. I thought: “I want to know the Self, I want to

know God; I want to know the Guru within.” I repeated it like a mantra. After collecting a

delicious array of Indian food from the smorgasbord we’d prepared in seva that morning, I

proceeded to the silent eating area. On the way, I paused in front of a photo of Gurumayi

framed on the wall.

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As I looked at that larger-than-life image of Gurumayi standing in a sunlit field of

long grass, the mudra of her thumb and forefinger connected, every detail came

into sharp focus. She was looking straight into the lens. In fact, what I saw, as

clearly and precisely as I have seen anything was that suddenly Gurumayi was

alive and she was looking straight into me. I felt her profound presence, saw her

shining dark hair, long orange sunlit robes that moved in the breeze. In an instant

I was transformed, attuned to a completely different frequency. “All it takes is a

flash of insight and suddenly we get it,” Gurumayi had once said. “Suddenly we

understand something we were totally unaware of a moment before.”

I looked around greatly relieved that no-one had seemed to notice my

transcendental moment; everyone was still busy collecting food, talking, or immersed in

contemplation in the silent area. Except Swami Vasudevananda—he was observing me.

Though we were some distance apart, the communication was palpable. His eyes were

smiling. After this, the coincidences stopped.

As I ate lunch that day, I mulled over every mouthful. “Ah, to know how to want to

the right things,” I mused. After lunch I almost glided through the ashram grounds as I

walked towards the phone booths to call Anna.

In the hot sun outside the ashram’s reception area I queued, waiting for a spare booth; I’d

attempted to phone Anna many times, but had never been able to get a line through. The

simple wooden ashram reception building fronted the dirt road outside, and had a book and

gift shop attached. Three phone booths lined one of its outside walls. When it was my turn,

I thought that today I’d get through to Anna, and I did.

Anna spoke of our family lake home, how she’d been there that morning with her

boyfriend, Jack. She sounded strong and happy and said how radiant the house looked, how

lush and green the gardens were after rain. I told Anna about how the solicitor had advised

the sale of our lake-home was on hold. Neither of us minded if the sale fell through. She’d

picked mulberries, mangoes and figs, and then she and Jack had walked to Green Patch for

lunch, a secluded clearing in the bush next to the lake, ten minutes’ walk from our home.

“Jack couldn’t believe how amazing the whole place was!” she said.

After the phone call, I walked back to my room, wondering if we were doing the

right thing selling our family’s place of twenty-one years, our sanctuary. I wondered if we

should take it off the market. Rethink things. I felt exhausted and rested on the bed.

Powerful feelings began to surge through me: the strange coincidences with the Swami, the

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living-picture of Gurumayi on the wall; the great beauty of our home. I’d not been resting

long when a spontaneous rhythmic breathing began. Energy moved through me, slowly at

first, from deep in my belly, up my spine as far as my throat.

“Are you okay?” Liz asked.

“Ah…, I don’t know,” I moaned; the rhythmic breathing continued. My spine

became tingling and very hot. Then the energy started moving through me in shuddering

pulses, burning up and down my spine.

Liz sat on the bed, rubbing my back as the waves of energy intensified and subsided

like birth contractions. As the experience increased, Marie from an adjoining room also

helped. Their presence was comforting, but as the waves of energy amplified, rolling

through me, nothing helped and I gave in to it. I cried and moaned, my body tensing,

distorting, spontaneously arching until eventually, my spine and neck completely contorted

back. I cried out, something like a giving-birth scream, then fell back on the bed, exhausted.

“Do you think you’ll be okay to stay here yourself?” Liz and Marie asked half-hour

later when it was time to return to afternoon seva.

“Mm…, I’m okay now; I might wander up to seva later. Thanks… for helping.”

I tried to relax but felt restless and disorientated, and decided to walk up to the

afternoon kitchen seva. On the way, I passed Justine on her scheduled day off. “Don’t you

feel well?” she asked as I approached, her eyes suddenly full of concern. I couldn’t speak

and shook my head as soft waves of emotion again welled. “Would you like to talk about

it?” she asked. “We can walk to Dakshin Kashi?” I nodded, still trying to contain the tide of

emotion inside me.

We walked in silence along the tree-lined ashram paths, ambling past the

Annupurna Hall, and the Muktabodha Institute that Gurumayi had established for

preserving Indian scriptures and Vedic traditions; the institute was also compiling a history

of Siddha Yoga. We strolled over to a shady wooden bench, and sat looking out over the

soft, welcoming green of Dakshin Kashi, with its two-kilometre expanse. It was deserted,

except for us, and the tentative storks. We smiled watching their peculiar antics: their

single-leg standing poses looked almost meditational; and their stilted steps, and sudden

back-and-forth Egyptian-like head gestures were comical as they foraged for food in the

spongy grass in a dip, only metres away.

I felt embarrassed and frightened by my experience, but when I told Justine about it,

she didn’t seem surprised; she told funny stories of her own involving unpredictable

movements of the shakti. After this, however, all at once I felt exhausted and knew I needed

to rest. My spine was still raging hot and tingling. I thanked Justine and began walking back

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to the condos, but on the way instinctively turned into the Ashram’s stonewalled gardens. I

sat there on a rock amidst the fresh vegetables, flowers and herbs, gazing out, stunned.

Luckily, the next day was my scheduled day off from seva. Doubt and fear raced

through every corner of my mind and body. I rested and read in the morning, and after

lunch walked and meditated in the grounds. Late afternoon, I sat in front of the huge statue

of Durga, Mother of the Universe, gracefully side-saddled on her tiger, and clothed in a

deep-red, silk sari with gold edges. But as I looked at her, uncertainties about everything

raged through my mind: doubts about the Ashram, about the sale of our family home, and

about my marriage.

“Durga, that I could be like you. The afternoon sun is radiant behind your helmeted

head and there is softness in your eyes, the gentle impression of a smile on your lips. Yet

you are fierce and strong.”

Durga had ten arms, said to protect devotees from all directions. She held weapons:

a spinning discus of fire, meaning the world was subservient to her will; a conch shell

symbolic of Aum—God in the form of sound; and a partially open lotus flower denoting the

certainty of her success.

“Yes, you hold a flower,” I mused. “Durga, you are the warrior aspect of the Divine

Mother, yet you are also infinitely compassionate and kind. Please, help me understand

what happened yesterday,” I silently implored, closing my eyes. Almost at once my fevered

mind emptied and I heard: Beloved, you cannot go forward until you feel and release your

pain.

Pain

Three days later and still I was burning; fears I’d thought long forgotten had resurfaced. I

was even questioning my being at the Ashram—the chanting, long hours of meditation, the

statues, the ashram routine. Where was my spiritual longing? I decided to speak with

Swami Kripananda about it, an American in her sixties, who’d formerly been a professor of

Spanish literature and languages. She’d taken the vows of sannyasa in 1978, and had

written a number of spiritual books. She was considered an absolute master of the kundalini

shakti.

We arranged to meet outside the Annupurna Hall after lunch. I walked over to

where she stood talking with another swami near a low stone wall, next to clusters of

outdoor tables and chairs. She was tall, willowy, with soft, shoulder-length-white hair that

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shone like silver in the sunlight, and contrasted with the deep, dark maroon red of her robes.

She looked up and smiled as I approached, and suggested we sit down.

“I think I’m finding the shakti too strong,” I said.

“Oh…?” Swami Kripananda looked at me kindly with her gentle, blue, sparkling

eyes. “Tell me a little more,” she said. I described the strange kundalini experience in the

bedroom, and the subsequent onslaught of fear. “Ah…,” she said, nodding with the ease of

a long-standing friend. “But you can take the energy strong. Just make sure you ground

yourself. Eat three meals a day, including plenty of protein and some carbohydrate. Drink

three to four litres of water a day—the practices are very heating.”

“But I’m worried. I seem to be exploding with fears. I’ve had to stop sitting in the

silent area of Annupurna just to escape the tyranny of my mind,” I said, hoping she’d

understand the severity of this situation.

“Lots of walks, walking barefoot is very grounding,” she said, like a mother

consoling a hurt child.

I noticed her eyes were red and wondered if she was tired. Later, at dinner that

night, Heidi, another Australian devotee, a psychotherapist from Sydney, told me she’d

been up late with Swami Kripananda writing down the swamis lectures in short-hand for the

upcoming “Shiva Sutras Silent Retreat.”

“You should have been there,” Heidi said. “My third eye was going crazy while I

was short-handing the talks—the energy in that place….” She paused at that point,

recollecting it, looking at Justine and me with huge, steady, imploding eyes.

The next day, following afternoon seva, I strolled along the dry, dusty, winding

bank of the Tansa River to visit an ancient Devi Temple in the village of Vajreshwari, about

an hour’s walk. Half-naked, barefooted children played on the riverbank, sporadically

dotted with thatched houses; they called out, their white teeth glistening in open, glowing

smiles.

When I reached Vajreshwari, I walked up the old stone steps into the strange,

austere Devi Temple, with its three different statues of the Devi. A temple assistant handed

me a coconut at the door, and I bowed low. But in that place, as I pranammed before one of

the ancient, sacred, stone Devis that stood in a darkened candle-lit corner, my anxieties

were screaming inside me, and I departed almost at once.

After climbing the narrow path up to the top of the hill behind the temple, I sat on a

rock feeling relief, and looked out at the bare Maharashtran Hills, the village of Vajreshwari

below. The sun was low in the afternoon sky, and I noted the numerous lingams silhouetted;

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one well-known Shiva Lingam, larger than the others, stood out. I felt some strength

returning as I sat there.

It was almost dark when I walked down the hill and hailed a rickshaw to take me

back four kilometres along the winding dirt road to the Ashram. The new moon hung low in

the west, a silver bow, Venus close by.

Shiva Sutras Silent Retreat

During my final two weeks at the Ashram I attended the seven-day “Shiva Sutras Silent

Retreat.” People had flown from twenty-six countries to be at the retreat, and to be with

Gurumayi, who was scheduled to be in residence at the Ashram. I’d felt lucky to be

accepted. Gurumayi had a huge global following and the screening process was rigorous.

Just after I arrived, however, it was announced Gurumayi’s trip had been cancelled. I tried

not to be disappointed. One had to remember the guru principle was all-pervasive.

Theoretically, one was able to experience the guru anywhere, anytime, because the guru

was, ultimately, one’s own innermost Self.

Around a hundred and twenty of us sat in the large, half-dark retreat room with its

amphitheatre of tiered seating. “We’re here to study the Shiva Sutras and contemplate the

experiences of the retreat,” Swami Kripananda said in her Boston accent, wearing robes of

that same deep-maroon red, as when I’d spoken with her a few days before. “The Shiva

Sutras were revealed to the sage Vasugupta when a huge boulder spontaneously overturned

in a riverbed near Mahadev Mountain, a thousand years ago, close to Srinagar.” She spoke

slowly, surveying the group, stopping to sip on a glass of water at the lectern, before going

on to tell us in a simple, friendly way, about a trip to that place with Baba and a small group

of devotees in the early 80s.

Each day, the whole retreat room listened spellbound to Swami Kripananda’s

morning lectures, before going on to do other practices such as chanting, meditating,

studying the sutras, as well as mantra-japa, contemplation and yoga. I mostly sat in a back

top row of the tiered seating where I felt comfortable to disappear into the depths of myself

without being disturbed.

“Silence is the highest religion…. We’re here to totally imbibe silence. Silence

means stilling the thought waves in the mind. Why complete our journey to the Self, to the

turiya state? The same as the sages—it is our duty to study our own divinity,” Swami

Kripananda advised, scanning the darkened room, as if her eyes took in each one of us.

“Yogic texts call the turiya state, Samadhi—the sense of “I am” is constant,” she said. At

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that point, she spontaneously held her right hand up, her index finger bent, touching the first

joint of her thumb, as she went on speaking. “We have taken birth to learn how to be

established in turiya,” she said. “The turiya state, perfect I-consciousness, holds all the

other states together—waking, dreaming and deep sleep.”

Not only the words have remained with me ever since, but also the image of the

swami; months later when I happened to be reading about the mudras, I discovered her hand

gesture was a dynamic form of the guyan mudra, the mudra of imparting active knowledge.

Some of my meditations were deeply introverted; I’d be immobilised, and could

neither move nor write. At other times, I’d experience a deep, longing sadness, then I’d sink

into an unfathomable pool, the deepest well inside. Sometimes there’d be kriyas,

spontaneous movements of the kundalini shakti, passing through samskaras (blockages),

causing body movements.

In one meditation, a powerful force pushed my head back and my throat became an

open band of light; my head turned up to a spiritual sun. At the end of that meditation, as I

coaxed my head back down, spontaneous shudders moved through my body. My spine and

the back of my neck remained hot, even in the evening.

“Enlightenment is already yours. We study and undergo the practice in order to let

go of all that obscures our remembrance of this,” Swami Kripananda instructed, explaining

the thirty-six tattvas, or sheaths that obscure the turiya state. In another lecture she

expounded on the benefits of meditating at sunset for an hour each day:

Shiva Sutras Silent Retreat, India: January, 2004. The transitional time of twilight is a key time

for turiya because the life force, the kundalini shakti, easily enters the central column (the

sushumna nadi), at this time. When you meditate at this time the prana is already shifting out

of pingala nadi (the right side related to the sun, heating, and the day), and into the ida nadi

(the left side connected with the moon, cooling and the night). Because the energy is shifting,

this is a good time for the kundalini to easily slip into the sushumna. If you meditate on a

single, powerful, pure thought at this time, it’s a way of entering the still point of the turning

world, and the mind easily slips into the thought-free state,” she said, afterwards also using a

simple anecdote, full of humility, from her own experiences with this practice on recent retreat

in Hawaii with Gurumayi.

“When we do not experience turiya, our life is motivated by desires,” Swami

Kripananda warned, asking us to contemplate how desire had manifested in our life. At

first I couldn’t think of anything, but then an overwhelming longing to be with

Gurumayi flooded over me. I desire above all things to be at the feet of a true spiritual

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master, I thought, the Eastern practice of Guru Bhava full in my mind. Guru Bhava

involved being in the presence of an enlightened master—concentrating, aligning and

resonating with their state, so as to spontaneously and easily access that same

heightened awareness within oneself; like the highly developed art of imitatio, this was

not copying outer appearances, but absorbing an essence and making it one’s own.

“Yes, that’s what I desire,” I thought, my breath all at once moving strongly,

rhythmically. “I desire to be at the feet of a true spiritual master, to be at the feet of

Gurumayi.” It had been seven years since I’d last seen Gurumayi—her last two visits to

Australia were cancelled. Now that it had happened again in India seemed, suddenly,

unbearable. Hot tears flooded, feelings surged. Others were also having strong

experiences; I could feel the whole room was heaving when Swami Kripananda said,

“God is with you; you are with God.” And with that, the emphasis of that immense

desire energy inside me shifted; I felt the whole room shift and saw clearly, the true

reality of that desire was my own longing to be with God.

I’d had numerous experiences of this longing. St Thérèse of Lisieux says, “One can

wrest the grace of mystical union with the divine from God with the intensity of one’s

desire.” Yet Eastern teachings also advise that if not sufficiently advanced, one will rush

away in terror. Ninety percent of one’s spiritual work is preparing the body to withstand

the impact of enlightenment. The one hundred and eight beads on a japa mala, prayer

beads, are representative of the one hundred and eight gateways one must pass through

to enlightenment.

Mystics of many traditions have written of the experience of entering pure light,

or of going into the void. Yet those who have entered the light while still in the body

warn of the dangers: the body can hardly stand the vibrations. Gopi Krishna gives an

account of unconsciously awakening the kundalini power and almost going insane,

feeling his body was about to be destroyed. Teresa of Avila also warned of this danger

in the fifth mansion in Interior Castle. Unless the body has become a pure vessel, and

the energy centres are all open and balanced, the physical body collapses.

I’d experienced something of this. Once, I’d collapsed in the meditation hall at

the Sydney Ashram in Dulwich Hill. It was in the summer holidays of the year I left

Wayne to live in the Merewether rental house, and while the children were staying with

him, I attended a five-day New Year Retreat, “Faith and Doubt at the Gates of Divine

Love:”

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Sydney, New Year Retreat, 2002. After chanting, studying and meditating for three days,

during the morning break of the fourth day, instead of going to Amrit, I remained in the

meditation hall of the Sydney Ashram to ask the Swami a question. Swami Umeshananda was

a popular teaching Swami—a lean, enigmatic American with a background in psychology. I

stood to one side while he spoke with another retreat participant: “The guru does everything: I

just let it happen,” the Swami was saying...

As I stood there, witnessing the subtle purity and fire of the Swami’s longing,

my own yearning for spiritual truth exploded through me. Its growth was

exponential, like an atom bomb, and an intense cloud began to mushroom in the

room. Walls disappeared. I could see the blue dome of the sky. I can’t imagine

what would have happened if I’d been able to stay with it, breathe through it. But

my legs crumpled and I collapsed, gasping, semi-conscious, to the floor.

I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, nor could I see anything as I observed myself lying

there in the foetal position on the floor. Three others in the room rushed over. Swami

Umeshananda’s voice was distant; he instructed them to help me to the hall’s side door where

there was an adjoining verandah. They hauled me, one or two on either side; my feet were

lifeless, and dragged, trailing the floor.

Though my body was numb, my awareness remained and they put me on a chair;

there, slumped, I stayed as soft rain started to fall. Then the Swami asked three long-time

devotees who sat with me, to walk me up and down the verandah, “to try to bring her back into

her body,” he said. But I remained lifeless. Sometime after the Swami prescribed a banana, but

when the banana arrived, I couldn’t hold it, nor could I find my mouth.

I didn’t recover on the verandah that morning and was taken to a private ground-floor

room with a single bed (Gurumayi’s room when she stayed at the Dulwich Hill Ashram). I

rested and by mid-afternoon had recovered enough to walk slowly outside. I held the arm of

another devotee as we walked towards the Cook River, three hundred metres away, but I

remember viewing everything as if from some distance; we didn’t reach the river; I felt

fatigued and we turned back. The next day, the last day of that retreat, I’d felt ecstatic inside,

though Swami Umeshananda had turned the intensity down; never again did he reveal his own

longing spiritual fire. When I arrived home, I randomly opened the Bible at a verse that

described God arriving in the form of a cloud—possibly it was Exodus 33:9, about “the cloudy

pillar” descending, but I can’t be sure.

Marmong Point: June, 1994. There’d been another time in Australia when I’d experienced this

extreme longing and that time it had seemed I was going to spontaneously combust:

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I’d been meditating one night when the children were asleep, and my husband was

still not home. Fragrance of incense drifted through the house, soft chanting music

played. I was meditating with a hunger that burned for God when, all at once, I’d

smelt smouldering inside me. It seemed I was going to spontaneously combust,

literally.

I was terrified and went at once out on to the verandah, gulping in breaths

of icy, winter, night air; looking up to the cold stars, praying for help; after that, I

gave up spiritual practice for a month.

But it was that night, in the earliest hours of the next morning, my husband

asleep next to me, that I was awoken to the experience of dazzling white light

gushing, waterfall-like into my womb. My husband and I had intercourse earlier

and I knew, even though it was the wrong time of the month, that this was the

divine fountaining life force of another child. Nine months later, my fifth child,

Julian was born.

On the afternoon of the fourth day of the “Shiva Sutras Silent Retreat” in India, I was in for

a further turn in my spiritual experiences. First, an exquisite black and white bird with a

long graceful tail was flying around in the domed ceiling, high above the Brahmin fire-pit

of the Mandap; this large, open-air, covered space was where many important ashramic

rituals had taken place, and I’d felt privileged that we silent retreat participants were

immersed in afternoon yoga, there. The swami taking the class interrupted our practice to

alert us to the bird, saying it was “sacred and rarely appeared, only at auspicious times.”

Just after, a twirling downy white feather from the bird dropped at my feet. Then a butterfly

wing landed there.

The following day, my wedding anniversary, I wanted to renew my vows; not to the

secular marriage, but to divine marriage—my undying commitment to God. I wanted to do

this before the retreat began and rose at 1.40am to walk over to the Nityananda Temple in

the dark, wrapped in my old woollen shawl. I was bleeding. My period was in full flood. I

felt open. And after completing two-and-half hours of morning practice in the temple,

including abhishek, arati and chanting, I felt immaculately clean.

Straight after, when I sat for meditation, in the Samadhi Shrine, a frog jumped out

of my meditation cushion, after which I fell quickly in to a deeply quiet space and found

myself back in a dream I’d had in London three weeks before: I was in deep meditation

inside the still, white luminous part of a flame, in the oval-shaped centre where the flame is

hottest. Yet this did not burn; I was immersed in an immense unearthly peace. In her lecture

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that morning, Swami Kripananda said, among other numerous things, “When you see

someone established in turiya it is as if the brilliant moon is walking in.”

That night, I was up with wrenching nausea and diarrhoea. The next morning I felt

exhausted and missed the morning practice and breakfast. But at 9am when Swami

Kripananda’s morning lecture began, I had to go. I could barely walk; my head was

spinning, my limp body burning. When I arrived, though I sat in a daze through the lecture,

afterwards, I was on the point of collapse and had to be taken to the Ashram clinic. A doctor

prescribed five different medicines, capsules, and also assigned a nurse, who helped me

back to my bed.

All day, I was unconscious as the fever raged. I felt as if consumed in an inferno,

and I could hear the steady roar of the flames inside. Yet in a manner more like the burning

bush which is not consumed, this was not terrifying. I remember feeling an unearthly,

infinite peace. God felt near. The next morning the fever had subsided, and the nurse helped

me sip rice-water and curd.

“I’m so disappointed to be missing the last day of the retreat,” I said.

“But maybe you’ve received everything you need. Maybe you received so much

that you needed time to process it,” she said as she sat on the end of my bed, one hand on

my shin. “This sickness you’ve had is very cleansing. Besides, you’ll probably be well

enough to go to the retreat reflection day tomorrow,” she added, smiling.

Though frail, I did go to the retreat reflection day. But that night I was awake in a

dream–visionary state for hours. Thousands of tiny balls of white light were flying and

whizzing about the room, and as the night went on they became more intense. I held my

hands to my heart as hurtling vortices of zizzing white light repeatedly pounded and

exploded into the centre of my chest.

In the morning I told Liz about it, hoping I’d not disturbed her. She said it reminded

her of Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpture of St Teresa of Avila that she’d recently seen

in Rome: “St Teresa felt as if she were being continually shot through the heart with arrows

of light—there are streaks of light coming from the sculpture,” Liz said. I’d read St Teresa

of Avila’s autobiography and Interior Castle years ago, but hadn’t remembered this.

I didn’t enjoy coming out of silence, returning to what I now perceived was the

remorselessly mundane activity of my mind. I longed for the vast, silent spaces of the

retreat and felt suddenly shattered, as if I may need to get sick for months.

That afternoon, my second last at the ashram, I walked up the hill to the meditating

Shiva near the Brahmin temple, at the border of the Ashram grounds. I sat there alone in

front of that blue form of Shiva with snakes, the beautiful Ganeshpuri Mountain rising up

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behind. I was contemplating turiya teeta, the highest state, achieved when one maintains

turiya while living in the world. Like Shiva, I too wanted to cultivate a gaze that looked out,

but also had an indelible focus within. Shiva’s palm was raised in a sign of blessing, an

Aum symbol inscribed on the palm. How I longed to carry such a symbol hidden on my

palm.

I was up at 1.30am on my last day and walked in the dark to the small austere Shiva

Temple. It housed an original lingam from an older Shiva temple on that site. Two Brahmin

priests chanted endless monotone Sanskrit prayers, pouring water, and then sweet coconut

milk over the smooth stone lingam, symbol of Shiva’s divine energy. They also offered rose

petals, flowers and fruit. Then we were invited to make offerings. I placed a pomegranate

and five, white, jasmine flowers near the centre of the lingam, one for each of my five

children. Afterwards, we ate sweet besan as prasad, made with ground chickpeas and

spices.

Before departing for the airport, there was just enough time to go to afternoon arati

in the main temple. My bag was packed, including many gifts to take home—gemstone

bracelets, saris, Indian tops, silk scarves, incense, hand-carved wooden elephants, books.

The temple was full.

Heidi caught my arm, pointing to one of the young Brahmin drummers, and said,

“His drumming is said to take you directly to God. Gurumayi says his timing is perfect,”

she whispered. “The rhythm repeats to: My mind is Shiva; I am Shiva. My mind is Shiva, I

am Shiva.” I repeated this over and over as the drumming pounded through me, tearing me

apart. My heart was aching, my body was limp with love, devotion and gratitude.

Outside the temple, I spoke with Radha, an earthy sixty-five-year-old Indian woman

with whom I’d often shared kitchen seva. She and her husband were each on their own

spiritual journeys, now that their children were grownup. ”You’re lucky to be staying

another six months,” I said. “I can’t wait to see my children, but I don’t want to leave India;

you can’t immerse in the practice like this back home.”

“But the shakti is everywhere,” Radha said, hugging me, laughing. “You can feel

shakti in Australia? The play of shakti is everywhere.”

“Yes,” I agreed. In principle, of course, this was absolutely right.

The Ashram taxi pulled away and I waved to friends assembled on the dirt road

outside. Justine and Heidi were going home in two weeks; we arranged to meet at the

Sydney Ashram. They smiled, waving, mouthing “Bye.” Radha held a hand to her heart.

The moon was rising over the hills—huge, glowing, yellow, as we drove along the

bumpy dirt road leading out of Ganeshpuri. It was full, just as it had been a month ago when

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I arrived. It felt like a gift. This same moon will shimmer and rise in Australia, I thought, all

at once filled with hope. Yet I couldn’t help thinking how much more luminous, large and

close both the moon, and the sun, had seemed here in India.

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6. Betrayal

“I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings,

but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

I slept almost solidly for ten days when I returned, dreaming I was back in the temples in

India, immersed in the deep-humming silence of meditation, or in the chanting, drumming,

or in the flames of that inferno, roaring inside. Being back in Australia was like trying to

rouse from the deepest sleep. But slowly, as I settled in, I knew what had to be done. I

recognised the terrifying dream about my husband that I’d had in the Ashram; the one I’d

recorded by torchlight upon waking. These nightmarish dreams about my husband had been

warning me for years.

In the dream in the Ashram in India that night, I stood up to my calves in muddy

slime in a swamp, in the middle of a dark jungle. My husband had carried me

there. He was huge, invincible, made of iron. Though I’d pounded, struggled,

wrenched, I couldn’t get away. He dumped me in the depths of that tangled jungle.

Laughed. Vanished.

I looked out, the deep, dark greys, the oily greens of the water’s mottled

surface. Not even a trace of sunlight though it was still early afternoon. Tangles of

fallen branches, upturned trees, piles of leaves, filthy clumps of old cobwebs,

everything rotting.

As I stood looking out over the swamp, I saw there were snakes everywhere.

Some small like vipers, their heads hardly discernible, others colossal, rising like

king cobras out of a basket. At least six large, black snakes moved towards me at

great speed. One struck almost immediately. Puncture marks on my leg. I had no

idea how I would find my way out.

We were divorced three months after I’d returned from India. Things settled

quickly. We halved everything ourselves, and signed legal papers; though later I realised

Wayne had duped me for tens of thousands on his businesses and other things. The sale of

our family lake home went through while we were overseas. In fact, years afterwards I was

to notice that the actual date of settlement had been the day of that Ashram phone call to

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Anna, the day I’d had the peculiar death–birth experience, but as there’d been no internet

access at the Ashram, I’d never noticed the synchronicity of the dates.

Over the next seven years my life crumbled. Everything I’d worked hard for, just

about everybody I’d believed in was eventually revealed to be a fraud. My life turned in on

me, and against me. Only one thing remained—my faith was unshakeable. Also, I

continued to trust in nature, particular books, the ancient teachings, as well as certain sage

advice. In particular, Swami Umeshananda’s deceptively simple guidance helped.

Justine and I had been debating about divorce at the Sydney Ashram after we’d

returned from India. I said, “It didn’t matter how bad things were, it was against dharma to

break the covenant of marriage.” She disagreed. We decided to ask Swami Umeshananda

about it, who was visiting Australia at the time. But unfortunately, the Swami was hemmed-

in by devotees all night.

Just as he was about to leave the dining hall, Justine prompted me. But I edged

back, the timing seemed wrong. It was late, after 9 pm. Yet this was our last chance. We

were returning to Newcastle that night, and he to New York the next morning. Justine

pushed forward. She was as curious to hear the Swami’s response as me. She’d been

divorced for two years herself.

The lithe, small-framed man walked over smiling. “Keeping a swami from his bed,

ahh!” he said, the soft glowing red in his cheeks highlighted by his bright red scarf, and red,

hand-knitted, cabled vest over his orange robes. I smiled back thinly, half-wondering if he’d

remembered me from the New Year Retreat, two years ago, when I’d collapsed on the floor.

I related the essentials and he responded without hesitating: “I’ve worked with

many couples in bad relationships. Spiritual counselling was my seva at the ashram in

South Fallsburg for years. Also, I’ve had a number of opportunities of getting direct

guidance from Gurumayi on this subject.” I felt lucky, an answer from source. “It’s quite

simple,” he went on. “If you’re not working together, you shouldn’t be together.”

My mind stopped. This was not what I expected. What was he suggesting? “But,

I’m pledged to this man. We have five children together. Besides, in one of Baba’s books I

remember reading something like: there are not many reasons to condone a husband and

wife ever splitting up.”

Swami Umeshananda looked at me. He appeared tired. Again, I felt bad keeping

him up, but now I really had to know. “Nowhere in any of the teachings,” he affirmed,

“Nowhere, is there anything to suggest a husband and wife should stay together if they’re

not working together.”

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But this still didn’t seem right. I couldn’t accept it. I pushed on. I needed his

deepest, and possibly his most difficult answer. “I am pledged and vowed before God to

endure,” I pleaded. “How can I break this covenant? If only I could’ve been more open to

Grace, then, could we have gone on? Tell me….,” I went on painfully. “What would be the

most holy thing to do? What about if one were, for instance… say, not a secular but,

umm… a saint?”

Swami Umeshananda hesitated, studying me. Then it seemed he measured and

volleyed each word. “If you keep getting burnt,” he went on slowly, deliberately, “it is not

Grace that you are able to stay in that situation. It’s Grace when you are finally able to get

out.”

My mind went white. I’d have walked through the fires of hell if the dharma

required it. I yearned for spiritual heights, not mundane secular possibilities. Apart from my

mothering instincts, I had no worldly aspirations.

Even though I hated what my husband had done, and could have said “I hate you”

ten thousand times and more, the truth was I found it impossible to let go. The vow I’d

made was a holy covenant installed in the deepest part of me. Like a mantra over the next

seven years, continually I reminded myself of the Swami’s words: “If you’re not working

together, you shouldn’t be together. If you’re not working together, you shouldn’t be

together.”

Deception

Not only was I to find my marriage filled with dishonesty and fraud, but the guru tradition

also. I didn’t mind that Baba (Gurumayi’s guru) may not have been celibate, but what

concerned me was that he’d covered it up. I’d chanced on a book years before written by

one of Baba’s ex-swamis, Master Charles, that spoke-out about Baba’s sexual exploits, but

as no one at the ashram ever mentioned it, and my spiritual experiences were immense, it

didn’t seem real. After the divorce, however, I discovered numerous reports of Baba’s

secret-sexual interactions with ashram girls, usually thirteen to nineteen years of age,

though, apparently, he never ejaculated. I wondered if Gurumayi had also been subject to

these intimacies. One academic paper exploring the subject suggested that Baba was

attempting to practise tantric yoga, and was operating under the rationale that when one had

reached the highest levels of enlightenment and holiness, any behaviour was considered

permissible. For me, this was double talk and betrayal woven in to our existence at the

highest levels, and the potential for power abuse was huge.

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The authenticity of my spiritual experiences in Siddha Yoga was undeniable. Also,

the remarkable teachings of the ancient Shiva Sutras, The Upanishads and others Eastern

religious philosophical texts have stayed with me ever since. But after the betrayal of the

divorce and the ashram deceit, I started to look further. “Can I still practice Siddha Yoga if

I’ve committed to another path?” someone asked Swami Umeshananda during the visit

when Justine and I had asked him about divorce. As always, he gave an incisive answer.

“Take your time. Ask God for guidance. Never listen to anyone who says, ‘This is

the only way,’” he said. Then he used the analogy of a rocket firing into space, describing

the support network under it. “This massive complex structure is essential; it is what

enables the rocket to finally launch into space,” the Swami said. “Even though, in the final

stage the rocket leaves almost all of it behind.”

I thought of my own support structures, the ninety-minute hatha yoga classes that

I’d been attending for years in Hamilton, an inner suburb of Newcastle. The class was

taught by a teacher from “Yoga in Daily Life.” Each Thursday night, we participants would

leave our shoes at the door and walk up the polished wooden stairs to the spacious first-

floor yoga studio, always fragrant with incense and spotlessly clean. Pinned on the wall,

among colourful posters of India and yoga postures, was a picture of Swami

Maheshwarananda, known as Swamiji, the India guru of “Yoga in Daily Life.”

When Matthew, the yoga instructor, announced that Swamiji was leading a

weekend yoga retreat in Dungog, one hour north from where I lived, I knew I had to go. It

was over Easter during the year I’d moved to the Merewether-rental house with the five

children. Even though, at the time, I was an ardent devotee of Siddha Yoga, the fact that an

enlightened master was speaking within an hour of my neighbourhood had seemed too

providential to miss. I’d not been in the presence of a living spiritual master for six years,

which was when Gurumayi had last visited. Anna and I went to the yoga retreat together,

while the boys spent the weekend with Wayne.

But I was disappointed. While the yoga was enlivening, the food, healthy, I’d had

no apparent “spiritual” experiences, and had been unable to sense any divine energy of the

shakti in Swamiji. Three days after that retreat, however, I had a remarkable dream:

In the dream, Gurumayi was speaking. I loved her words, but after she’d left the

room, I was disappointed to be quickly back in mundane consciousness. But then,

an Indian man came to the door. “Anyone who wants to have darshan with

Gurumayi, follow me,” he said. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, especially as I

was the only one to get up. I trailed after the man through long complicated

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corridors until we reached a curtained room where a small bespectacled Indian

man sat behind a huge elevated reception desk. The bespectacled man looked

down to his piles of papers, and then announced something like, “You’re going to

meet Yogeshwar Sri Devpuriji, guru of Bhagwan Sri Deep Narayan

Mahaprabhuji, guru of… etc.” I concentrated, and miraculously the Sanskrit

names remained intact.

But as the great deity appeared and I tried to utter this greeting, the

words became scrabbled letters, blurred and far flung. The Indian face held me in

the most profound silence. He had a turban and intense piercing blue eyes. As I

looked at him, it was as if the shell of me exploded.

I started to laugh and laugh at the bizarre impression of the mixed-up

letters, and also the utter absurdity of attempting to maintain solemnity in light of

the face that was before me. My laughter fragmented into thousands of pieces, and

I exploded, hurtling through limitless space, far beyond earth. When I woke, I was

soaring with exhilaration and also sobbing deeply; I was transformed for days.

I had no idea who the turbaned man was, but felt sure I was about to find out, and I

did. Through an odd mix-up, and getting lost on familiar Sydney roads, I found myself at

the Yoga in Daily Life Ashram in Sydney the next Sunday night, even though I had no idea

where it was and had never been there before. When I went inside, I discovered a picture of

the man from my dream, in a book. His name was Sri Devpuriji, a guru from the Yoga in

Daily Life lineage, a teacher who’d lived in a remote region of the Himalayas and had long

been dead. None of this fazed me, but something else did. The man in my dream had

piecing blue eyes. Devpuriji’s eyes in all the pictures I could find were brown.

I gained further clarity about this when, a year after my dream of Devpuriji, the year

of my divorce, I attended another Yoga In Daily Life weekend retreat at the same property

in Dungog, which was part of the world-heritage-listed Barrington Tops Mountain ranges.

The blue-green eucalypt-covered Dungog Hills all around were spectacular, and the ancient

Williams River snaked its way through the valleys and deep green pastures below.

I hadn’t been there long, pitching my tent in the fresh autumn air, when I noticed

Eva. Her bright red hair stood out. She was also a long-time devotee of Siddha Yoga. I

walked over to where she was setting up camp on the grassy ridge not far from mine. Eva

looked up and smiled as I came near. She’d been a yogi for decades, was in her sixties, and

besides numerous seva commitments in ashrams, was also still teaching art at a university

in Sydney.

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After we’d been chatting for a while, I told her about my dream, and about how

confused I was because all the pictures of Sri Devpuriji showed he had brown eyes. “Yes,”

she said in her bright Scottish accent, her own blue eyes sparking in sunlight, “But what you

saw was the blue of consciousness—this is something really special.”

The next day, Swamiji was elaborating on the twelfth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita,

in which Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna. As he spoke, the words struck me inside

like lashes of lightning, cracks of thunder, and I experienced wave upon wave of

consciousness entering me, an extreme nobility bursting through. Tears once again issued

forth; truth filled me like a jumbo jet taking off, the powerful throttle of its engines.

Afterwards, I was still trying to ground myself, when I noticed Eva. Most others had

left, or were in the process of leaving, but Eva was sitting close by on the grass under the

large marquee. She was leaning over towards me, urgently trying to tell me something. I

propped back on one elbow towards her. “Have you asked Swamiji?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I can’t because when I asked one of Swamiji’s Swamis about my

dream, he said I had to choose between paths. I could never leave Siddha Yoga.”

“No, of course you can’t,” she said. “But don’t take it from him, he’s not

enlightened—go and ask Swamiji yourself, then you’ll know. Otherwise you’ll have to wait

another year.”

“No,” I fumbled, “I’d feel too rude when one of the Swamis has already given an

answer. I’m too scared …”

“I’ll come with you,” Eva said, refusing to let the matter go. “Swamiji,” she called

as we neared the fierce-looking guru, just as he was turning to leave. Eva held one arm

stretched towards me. This is my friend, Diana. She wants to ask you something.”

Eva left, and Swamiji walked over to stand directly in front of me. He was smiling.

I felt comfortable.

“Yairss…?” Swamiji said all at once, with that edge of a lightening-crack to his

voice. Suddenly I was holding my heart. It seemed there was something huge to

communicate, something so complex and multi-layered that I couldn’t speak. I lowered my

eyes. My questions dissolved in the immense swirling waters that filled me.

We stood for some moments, then Swamiji reached out, put his arms around me. At

first, this jolted me due to the most human feel of his body, his firm stomach bulging

through the coarse material of his bright orange robes. But then he stood back, placed his

hand on top of my head, as if silently saying a mantra or prayer. “Why can’t I feel light

explode out of my head if he’s a true guru?” The thought flashed through my mind. His

eyes were closed. I closed mine also. After this, Swamiji left.

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Almost everyone had walked three-hundred metres up the hill to where a delicious

vegetarian lunch was being served in the only building on the property, a single-roomed,

old, wooden hut. Eva remained standing under the large marquee, waiting, talking to two

other women. I walked over feeling greatly fatigued. “Is everything ok?” she asked, turning

to me, frowning. “What happened? It was a good experience, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. It was…” I said, putting my head on her shoulder, knowing that,

whatever, it was a positive experience.

“Oh,” she said, putting her arm around me. “He looked at you with such

compassion. Did you get your answer?”

“No,” I said, pausing. “I couldn’t ask.”

Eva didn’t say anything at first, and I was still feeling too much to speak. “Well,

let’s get something to eat now,” she said, gathering her things. “Lunchtime is almost over.”

“No, you go, I’ll walk up soon,” I said.

“I can get you something and bring it down?”

“No, it’s fine. I’m not hungry,” I said. “I’ll rest here before we pack our tents after

lunch. I need to be alone.”

“Well I’m going to ask them to put something aside for you,” Eva said, and walked

off. I strolled over to sit on the edge of the grassy slope in front of the marquee, looking out

across the deep, clear valley and the blue haze of distant hills.

After twenty-five years of practising Eastern spirituality in my marriage and motherhood,

I’d emerged close to the edge, but was still bound and unable to leap. I realised that, despite

my titanic efforts, the very thing I’d set out to avoid—the wandering life of the fool—was

what had manifested in my life. And as the post-divorce years went on, I wandered even

more. I felt like the person who spent years digging wells, but had never had gone deep

enough to reach the water.

While I always knew the realism of my spiritual experiences was irrefutable,

increasingly I was to discover ever more ashramic paths littered with reports of

manipulation, and sexual abuse. “What will you give me? Will you give me everything?” a

guru might ask, ensnaring young female devotees into their bedroom. I was to find that

Swamiji, like Baba, was cited in numerous cases of carnal abuse of young girls; the reports

involving Swamiji were more manipulative and seemed worse. Likewise, the world-

renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, author of the highly acclaimed

Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was also the subject of numerous reports of seducing

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young girls. “You should ask him directly about it,” was the Dalai’s Lama response in one

internet report.

Over the years, while I continued to listen to visiting Eastern spiritual teachers, I

also found myself returning to a more mystical form of Christianity. There’d been

premonitions of this shift years before at the Sydney Ashram, but because Christianity

didn’t fit my Eastern approach, I’d always glossed over it. There had been once, at a

meditation retreat, that I’d asked with great longing for my true teacher to be revealed, and

couldn’t have been more surprised:

I found myself sitting in a column of blue light that reached beyond the

roof of the sky. I knew my spiritual teacher was at the end, and strained

to see, but it was impossible to glimpse anything beyond the immense

cloud-like feet. I recognised them immediately: they were the feet of

Christ. I moved my hands up towards them and a subtle snowflake-like

cloud streamed down, softly filling me. “I can’t take any more,” I

pleaded. My fingers were tingling and had started to buzz. But the

raining cloud could not be stopped. Then I understood—one was meant

to return this subtle energy to others and to life.

A glorious double rainbow arched right across the sky late one afternoon during that

first year after the divorce. I was walking along the shoreline at Merewether Beach and I

stopped and stood in the centre of it, as wild, slanting sheets of rain filled the air. It had

been a difficult day of casual teaching; Anna was tense with the upcoming HSC; and I was

stressed, not only from teaching, mothering, and being there for Anna, as well as coping

with the divorce, but I was also completing an Honours Thesis in scraps of time in between.

The fury of the ocean was ringing in my ears, and playful dollops of foam flew far-

reaching, bouncing through the air. Waves continually consumed the tideline and then

retreated again. I was the only one on the beach, my hair wet, stinging as it blew all over my

face. Somehow there, I could forget, and I remembered Rumi’s ecstatic lines: “It doesn’t

matter how many times you have fallen… pick yourself up… ours is a caravan of

rejoicing.”

WEST

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7. The Heart

May you hold on to what is good, even if only a handful of earth;

May you hold on to what you believe in, even if it is a tree growing alone;

May you hold on to what you must do, even if it is a long way from here;

May you hold on to life, even when it is easier letting go; hold on to my hand,

Even when I have gone away from you. (An American Indian Blessing)

It was four and half years after the divorce that I’d settled on that two-bedroom, cliff-top

unit in the centre of Newcastle. The unit was one of four in a heritage building overlooking

windswept King Edward Park with its tall pine trees, the ocean beyond. Although the

apartment was cramped with a 60s interior, I bought it on impulse after going out on to the

verandah. Standing there drenched in sunlight, I felt a path light up across the park between

my heart and the horizon. I just knew this was the place.

The unit needed lots of work, and the boys would have to share a room, but its east-

facing location was spectacular, and I could afford it without a loan. It felt as if years of

difficulty were about to end. I started restorations immediately. But when the old kitchen

was taken away, the builder found damp, crumbling walls. When bathroom tiles were

removed, those walls were also wet. Then, when the flooring contractor came to quote on

sanding and polishing the floor, my having removed layers of carpet and lino, he advised

moisture levels in the floorboards were off the scale. It was fifteen months before we could

relocate there, a disastrous time in numerous ways. When we did eventually move in, and I

began this memoir, I’d already been divorced for six years.

Over that past six years since the divorce it had seemed I travelled from one disaster to

another as I endlessly sought to relocate myself in this new world. My mother, brother and

ex-husband had long associated me with some sense of foreboding and alarm. It made no

difference that I’d assumed a submissive, female role for decades since my early twenties,

and had been a mostly well balanced child; they never let me or anyone else in the family

forget, including the children, that I’d been rebellious and strong willed in youth. One day

at a family picnic, when Adrian and I were in our thirties, he pointed out, “You used to be

the leader when we were young, but now I’m more spiritually advanced and have entirely

surpassed you in this role.”

“Yes…” I said, surprised, not reminding him that unless he was the family guru,

organising where we went, pronouncing judgements, and other things, we’d never have

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seen him and his family; my mother fully supported Adrian in this role, and I never

disputed it. Adrian made fun, fair and caring choices, and the joy of those two decades of

extended family living was immeasurable. Numerous gatherings and feasts with my

parents, and my family with five children, my brother’s six children, friends too at our

family lake home, as well as visiting relatives from overseas.

Following the divorce, however, my excommunication was made clear. Adrian

refused to meet with a sister who had no husband, said he was only interested in his own

family. My mother was abrupt, and reaffirmed what she’d always known—that I was

selfish and that my actions had caused a lot of trouble. Wayne maligned me outright,

ensuring all my family felt sorry for him; he lied to my mother, then in her mid-seventies:

“Diana’s been having an affair,” he said. “I’m heartbroken.”

It was only eighteen months later that my mother confronted me. I’d just purchased

the Merewether rental house and we were having a celebratory dinner when all at once she

blurted out that I’d been very selfish to have an affair. When I told her this certainly was not

so, she was unconvinced.

I spent five months renovating that Merewether house, in between casual teaching

and looking after the two younger boys. Stripping the lead paint off the Australian cedar

skirting boards and architraves and taking away the old carpet was worth it, even though

Tristan, Julian and I had to live in a tent in the backyard next to the frog pond for much of

the time because the house was uninhabitable. It was the year following Anna’s HSC;

William was still in student share accommodation, Anna was on a gap-year and had moved

out, while Linden was living with Wayne, and the youngest two remained in fifty-fifty

share care. But we were only to stay there for another two years.

On weekends or after work, when the boys were at their dad’s, I meditated, read

esoteric books, completed yoga teaching training, practised energetic healing. I yearned to

see life clearly, truly, and never wanted to be betrayed again. Sometimes I attended Siddha

Yoga events, even though Gurumayi had mainly withdrawn, saying she had given devotees

everything. I also went to other ashrams and temples, and continued to listen to visiting

swamis and gurus. I visited Amma when she was in Australia, a very dark-skinned Indian

guru from Kerala with a generous smile, often referred to as the hugging saint; she had

hugged millions around the world. Also, I read books about Mother Meera, an Indian

teacher of profound silence who had an ashram in Germany. Besides this, I spent time with

the Balinese guru, Sri Jaya Nara and his student, Ketut, when they visited Australia.

Sri Jaya Nara was a short, smooth-skinned, solid, though shining, guru with an

ashram in the Balinese Hills. He spoke to a group of us at a devotee’s home in Sydney

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during that second year of the divorce; in question time afterwards, I asked with a deep

longing sadness: “Will my husband and I be together again?”

Sri Jaya Nara looked up and closed his eyes, as if looking in to the inner, third

eye—his face was translucent. His long white cotton garments seemed iridescent in the

darkened room. When he opened his eyes, he turned to me. “Yes,” he said softly, “you will

be together again. But…” he added, his voice amplifying, “First, you must reach Shiva

within.”

“Mmm…?” Wayne said with a grimace, raising his eyebrows, when we met at a

Newcastle café in Darby Street two nights later. After sharing supper at the café, we held

hands and walked along the empty pavements to Newcastle Harbour, a Monday night.

Wayne listed the women he’d been with—a few short relationships, but lots of women

eighteen to twenty-five years of age in brothels and massage palours. Side by side, we

strode back from the harbour on the silent, grey streets, though we never did get into

rhythm.

“I can forgive everything, if you want us to work together again,” I said, as we lay

on the lounge back at my half-renovated Merewether house. But after we’d had sex, I cried.

An apparition of passing women, one after the other, appeared. In particular, one young

woman, remained sitting with us; she was naked, hugging her knees, about nineteen-years

old; her eyes were dark and soft, her head to one side as if a little shy, slightly olive skinned

with mid-brown hair halfway down her back….

“Yes,” Wayne interrupted, as I went on describing the vision: “That’s her. She was

special,” he said, becoming thoughtful and remote. My body heaved, deeper than crying,

and I went to sit on my mediation cushion, holding my heart. Wayne stole out around 3am.

“I would still like us to work on things,” I messaged the next morning.

“Your forgiveness is amazing,” he texted back. But when we talked on the phone

later that afternoon, he laughed sheepishly, somewhat wolfishly. “I suppose I have been a

bit wayward,” he said, refusing to talk more.

I walked in endless weeping circles around the house that night, hunched over, a

gaping hole in my heart. Anna called in around at 9pm. When I told her I was upset because

of the broken marriage, she was indignant: “Why don’t you just move on?”

The next afternoon when I drove past Wayne’s house, he was walking on the

pavement, laughing with Anna. They were dressed up and drove away in his car. Two

nights later, I sent a text. Quite simply it said, “Wayne…” He didn’t message back until the

next morning, when it had been planned we’d all breakfast at Wayne’s house for Anna’s

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twentieth birthday. He texted, “If you’re coming to my place this morning so you can get

me to have sex with you again, I’ll tell you now, I’ve no intention of sleeping with you.”

We didn’t have breakfast together on Anna’s birthday. When I arrived, Wayne was

despising and aloof. There was no option but for me to leave, and I cried out in a chilling

scream—this existence was a nightmare, and what was more terrifying was that no-one

cared.

I don’t think Anna ever forgave me; and I never saw Wayne on a personal level

after that, although we had counselling and mediation sessions, as well as legal proceedings.

Wayne took all the children snowboarding at Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains a few days

after Anna’s birthday (except for William who still refused to see him). I remained in the

tent next to the frog pond, unwell. There were lead-paint peelings everywhere from the

skirting boards, picture rails and architraves that I’d stripped.

When they returned from the snow, I arranged counselling but we had only one

session. “What…? You sent a single word,” the counsellor said. “You simply texted his

name, and expected him to understand what you wanted?” She looked at me as if I was

nuts. “Did you know what she meant by that?” the counsellor asked, turning to Wayne.

“Well, yes…” Wayne said, seeming to feel pleased with himself, speaking the only

sympathetic words I remember after the divorce. “Yes, Diana was feeling vulnerable,

lonely, unwell, upset…” he said as the counsellor’s eyes widened. “She was letting me

know she’d like me there, but she didn’t want to insist. It was a call for help…”

“Well…” the counsellor said, sitting back for a moment in her chair. But after that,

the whole mediation session changed.

“Diana’s unstable; she’s abusive to me and the children. She can’t be bothered

working though she’s got two degrees; she’s a leech and…and….”

“Please stop it,” the counsellor said. “Can’t you see she’s already too upset?” Then

the counsellor said, “I very rarely recommend this, but I believe it would be most dangerous

for either of you to ever consider being together again.”

Flight

Two-months later, it was Christmas Eve and I left speeding away in my car that second year

after the divorce; the children had gone to spend three weeks of the summer-break with

Wayne, and I wasn’t going to remain in the house grieving; I decided to spend forty days

and forty nights in the desert (i.e. three weeks), hoping to hear the voice of God, or at least

gain some clarity. I felt tragic leaving the playful waves and my beloved dreams of family

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behind. But as I passed between the gateways of the hills beyond Maitland, I saw a doorway

into a landscape dwarfed beneath an expanse of sky.

Winding westward I went past the weeping peppercorns, their waterfall branches

trailing ribbons of shimmering green; and between the rows of roadside fennel bowing and

bending in the westerly winds I drove. I didn’t stop and travelled on towards sunset: driving

through and beyond the grey-green, pillowed hills of Merriwa that rose out of brown grass

plains.

The last time I’d been away from home at Christmas was in Istanbul in ’77 when

I’d been alone, and desperately ill, near unconscious for three days, my temperature

soaring. Now, almost thirty years later, it seemed I was dying again. Not just the loss of my

children, and four-and-half decades of family Christmas Eves, but I was bleeding. My

period was a raging flood, and an agitation of eczema bled behind my right ear. I scratched

and felt cool, wet blood on my fingers. My life had devoured me. No, not my life, my

thinking had destroyed me.

I rummaged for a pen. The only one I could find was red. “I’m flooding back along

the arterial roads to the centre, to the womb of this land,” I wrote on a crumpled piece of

paper. On that trip and in the years that were to follow, I often dreamed of a frail babe in my

care, and would be suddenly surprised to see it there, desperate, knowing I’d forgotten it.

Sometimes the scrawny babe would be lost on the floor in a crowd, or half-starved in my

arms.

It was more than forty degrees outside as I looked from the air-conditioned car at

the fingers of light fanning from the bare plains of Dunedoo. As I drove on, tens of

thousands of diagonal spears of golden grass sprang out of the red earth waving and

cheering like a joyous crowd in the ceaseless westerly winds. In the distance, billowing

clouds of heat were a mirage of stampeding emus.

No decoration to announce Christmas. No merry face on the side of the road; I did

not see even one child during those six hours of journeying before dark. Throughout that

passage to Nyngan and further west towards the sunset, I passed only tinted-orange grass

plains, and weeping, white barked gums, interspersed with lavender-like gorse.

Apart from a constant airstream whirring through the roof racks, everything was

quiet, except for the occasional flurry of thoughts in my mind. “Oh yes, yes,” I would

respond to the phantom voices of my brother, my mother and Wayne: “Yes, you the rulers,

who consult your encyclopedias and pronounce unchangeable verdicts. Yes, I know you

won’t let me explain. I see you cautioning. You are nodding. Diana’s dark emotion, you all

confirm.”

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Thoughts swirled like little willy-willies. Not one of them had contacted me for

Christmas. Yet just before sunset there was a text from Wayne. “Ho, Ho, Ho, its Santa,” the

text said. “Don’t you think you should be here with family?” I imagined him sitting there in

his lounge chair sniggering, all the children around. He’d feel like a “Big Man” with his

hoards of money and stories of my great inferiority to tell my mother.

The setting sun commanded the sky, a benevolent eye with a single arched brow of

feather-flecked clouds above it. I pulled over before it disappeared, before that firmament

became a luminous sea of grey-white rippled cloud foam. After sunset, the car glided,

almost dream-like; I travelled on past aged, rough-barked trees that stood like ancient

wizards, witnessing. All through that evening I drove, through the night, and still further

into and beyond the first rays of the sun heralding Christmas morning. I stopped only to

refuel.

I felt at peace in the vast empty spaces and went still further until at last I did pull

over, after seeing a sign pointing to an old red gum tree near the South Australian border. I

detoured and stopped. There alone I stood, holding the red gum’s huge girth, my face

leaning against it. And in that place of endless dry grass fields, for the first time since

leaving home, I cried. And the tree returned some sort of strength to me, as I rested on it. In

its shade I sat, and ate muesli mixed with water and fruit for lunch.

After, I drove through the bare South Australian hills to Port Augusta and beyond,

until the endless ribbon of tarmac road headed north. I reached almost the Northern

Territory border before pulling over at a servo that Christmas night. The owner was sitting

in the café with his family, eating and chatting around a large table, candles and soft lights.

I felt intrusive, couldn’t wait to vanish. I slept in the car under one of the outback servo’s

corrugated-iron-shelter sheds, then set off again and didn’t rest until I arrived at Uluru on

Boxing Day morning. Two thousand, eight hundred and forty-three kilometers I’d travelled

in one and a half days.

The Centre

I’d imagined wandering the desert sands alone, but was to discover that Uluru and Kata

Tjuta were inside a National Park that was locked at night. I pitched my tent in the only

campground at Yulara, Uluru’s adjoining settlement where dingoes roamed on the dirt

beyond the barbed wire fence. The gates to the National Park opened at 5am and each day I

drove to Uluru at that time, to walk barefoot around the base of that great, red monolith. I

wore a wide straw hat, long sleeves, and long cotton pants. The mid-summer heat was

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unbearable, but my senses were keenly alive, feeling the earthy red dust, breathing the pure

air, listening to the winds, the birds, the trees. Sometimes, I sensed Gurumayi, Babaji, Bade

Baba, or Sri Devpuriji walking with me; also, at a similar spot each day, I encountered an

apparition of a tall, Aboriginal woman with a willow-like stance and shoulder-length, white

hair. The loss of my children, my family, was intense. I longed to grieve wholly, loudly,

wailing, as I’d heard the Aboriginal people do, and I yearned to hold Julian, my ten-year-

old.

At dawn on the fourth day, I travelled to the great domes of Kata Tjuta, an

Aboriginal word meaning “many-headed.” The road was empty on that forty-five-minute

trip except for two camels silhouetted on a dusty rise, though they turned and lumbered

away before I reached them. At the empty Kata Tjuta carpark, I plastered myself with sun

cream, then followed signs to the head of the “Valley of the Winds” track. A barricade,

however, announced the walk was closed due to extreme temperatures. I paused,

deliberating, before squeezing around it.

My straw hat was loosely tied, dangling down my back, and I carried a brown

homespun Indian bag filled with water and fruit. I searched for a strong, dead branch, and

when I found one on the trackside, pulled the side-twigs off to make a staff for protection in

case I encountered a snake or dingo. I strode down the red gravelly trail that led to the

valley, tapping the staff firmly on the ground as I went. But soon the landscape, the earth

and flowers seemed to cry out in a soft, pleading voice: “You may take your staff, but

please, not so firmly to beat the ground.” I walked more politely after that but a few minutes

later was concerned again, remembering that this was a sacred Aboriginal men’s area. “I do

hope I not offend,” I repeated like a prayer. And the sense of trespass faded.

An abundance of miniature lilac flowers grew all over the ground and mid-way

down, at a point of steep descent, white stunted daisies set in leaves of deep green grew in

dark crevices, and in the shade of rocky rises. Forty minutes later, I’d almost reached the

base of the valley, where I stopped in the sketchy shade of a native plum to pick and eat the

tiny purple fruits. They were warm and delicious. Two eagles soared above.

From there, it was a short distance to the river at the bottom of the valley; I rock-

hopped over it, and after picking my way around boulders on the flats, ascended towards

the great glowing red domes. There were thirty-six domes in all. Like a gathering of desert

kings they stood.

At a second stream further up, I felt compelled to remove my shoes and kneel next

to the river to dowse my crown: “Sprinkle water on your head while remembering the lotus

feet of the Sri Guru and this is equivalent to bathing in all the holy waters of the world;” I

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sang these verses from the Guru Gita softly inside, then drank three cupped handfuls of the

crystal pure water. It tasted of red rock.

Higher up I went, towards the divine desert domes; near the top there was yet

another stream with a mini waterfall. Once more, I anointed myself and looked out into that

place where the immense feet of the Kata Tjuta Mountains converged.

“What must I do to reach inner truth?” I asked instinctively.

BE STILL I seemed to hear, at the same time being drawn to a sheer conglomerate

red rock wall nearby that was glowing in the sunrise. I walked over, spreading my bare feet

on the warm rocks. There, in that place, I went down on my knees, pranamming—the

crown of my head touching the warm red rock. I felt my grief for the loss of family pass to

an even greater anguish inside me, my thirst for God. With all my longing, and overflowing

with gratitude for my spiritual teachers, I touched the crown of my head into the core of the

ancient landscape, reaching with all my heart and will for the centre of truth in the earth.

It was at that point, however, that something unexpected occurred. All at once, I

realised the crown of my head was touching someone’s feet. I didn’t look, knowing this

would break the vision. Afterwards, I moved as if communing with the landscape in a

measured flowing dance, humming quietly. After, I was filled with a buzzing awareness and

subtle energy that lasted for days.

There was a sudden downpour at Uluru on the morning of New Year’s Eve, and the

dusty heat washed out of the air. I was drenched and ecstatic as I walked on the Kuniya

track to Mutitjulu Waterhole at the base of Uluru. When the rain stopped, the great

monolith was a deep, rusty glowing red; it seemed to be pulsing in the sunlight between

drifting clouds, and patterns of gushing waterfalls flowed all over it with a thrilling sound. I

walked on, massaging my bare feet in the gritty pools of red terracotta earth.

Later that evening, I sat alone outside the Uluru Cultural Centre drinking plunger

coffee on New Year’s Eve. Once more my great loss loomed. “Where is the place in the

world that was meant for me,” I asked.

“Follow your heart,” I heard.

“What lies beyond that?” I asked as an odd dialogue ran on in my mind.

“True fulfilment—contentment, joy.”

“Why am I not with family?”

“You are different; you follow intuition; this makes you feel the lifeblood pumping in

your core; in society, you feel you have to be false; you sought to escape the world through

family.”

“Why?”

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“Much of your childhood was lonely—your mother was fleeing the unreasonable guilt

she felt from years of sexual abuse from her father: thought she’d escape into the sunshine

thousands of miles away.”

‘Why?”

“It was hard. Often you have to journey to many lands, find your courage and also

face fears because all you have become is what prevents you from getting to core reality.”

“Why?”

“Reaching the Self means letting go of everything—that’s why it’s hard!”

An auspicious new moon hung on the western horizon when I drove back to the tent

at 9pm.

As New Year’s Day dawned, I was already on my way to Kings Canyon in Watarrka

National Park, four and a half hours to the north. I booked in to a cheap, single room, but

the old ceiling fan was useless and the room remained overwhelmingly hot. It was

impossible to rest during the day, and sweltering nights meant it was difficult to get to sleep

before midnight. An obsession drove me to constantly check my mobile. There was a

message from Wayne: “Don’t you think you should at least phone to see how the children

are?” I imagined him jubilant, complaining to Mum.

The next morning, Venus and Mars and a few other stars were still in the sky when

I drove the six kilometres to Kings Canyon carpark. I sat for a while before walking across

the grassy flats, and climbing up what locals called, “Heart-Break Hill.” The ascent was

barren and rocky, not long after sunrise, already the sun’s morning rays were piercing my

cotton shirt. Half-way up I stopped at a lone, spreading river red gum that was growing

miraculously out of the canyon’s sheer side; the resolute old tree provided shelter for

spinifex grasses, a turpentine bush with red curling bark, and clumps of witchetty bush. As I

was leaving, a large brown and white spotted goanna moved its head and I realised it too

had been there all along.

Two hours after setting out from the carpark I reached the top of the plateau, where

the ascent trail joined up with the six-kilometre rim track. Alone, I stood there looking

down at the sheer, brilliant red canyon walls in the morning sunlight; Kings Canyon Creek

was below, and the endless desert plains stretched beyond; two wedge-tailed eagles soared

high above. I continued along the U-shaped rim track until I arrived at a place referred to as

“The Lost City,” where I wandered among the unearthly mazes of weathered sandstone

domes. The Aboriginals referred to these as the cat men of the dreaming; they were said to

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be the domes of watchful cats, hundreds of them turned to stone. Afterwards, I completed

the rim track and headed down the other side of the canyon.

“Forty-four degrees in the shade,” a ranger called out from a picnic shelter, when I

arrived back down at the base of the canyon. “So hot you could cook an egg on the road.”

Rivulets of sweat ran down my spine and down the back of my legs. On the way back to the

carpark, I noticed rippled patterns engraved on the canyon walls. These were the marks of

water movement on sand that had formed four hundred and fifty million years ago, a board

nearby informed.

I put the fan on when I returned to the room, but it gave little respite. After eating

some nuts, sultanas and a vegemite sandwich, I decided to cool off with a swim in the small

chlorine resort pool. But when I arrived, I turned back almost straightaway. A man in his

sixties was fumbling and hugging his twenty-something partner.

“It’s wonderful to be old and have wisdom,” I said to my mother, when I was a

teenager.

She’d shaken her head. “There’s nothing good about being old,” she replied.

“I want to grow old gracefully,” I told her. “I’m going to accept the passage of

time.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You wait till you get there…”

Now I knew what she meant.

The next day, again, I left to walk up on to the plateau at 5.30am. This time, half-

way round on the rim trail at the top, I took a detour to a spot named “Garden of Eden,” and

headed down a steep wooden staircase, before wending along a sandstone rock wall. The

Eden waterhole was an outback oasis surrounded by clumps of palm trees, lush ferns, and

ancient cycads with their squat trunks and spirally arranged, palm-like fronds; some were

possibly as old as a thousand years. Kings Canyon was said to have the most diverse flora

and fauna of all of Central Australia; seemingly, there were more than six hundred species

of plants and animals.

I lay on my side, propped up on one elbow on a large slab of warm rock on the

water’s edge, watching a rippled grid of sunbeams send an endless moving river of light

across an adjacent rock wall.

Sometime later, a couple in their late thirties, introducing themselves as David and

Renata, arrived. “Phew” David said, placing his pack close to where I sat. “I really need a

swim after that.” Renata put her things down also and we introduced ourselves. They’d

been travelling in the Centre for two weeks and were returning home to Melbourne in a few

days. David was doing a PhD in Australian literature and Renata was studying

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anthropology. As we spoke, small skink lizards scuttled about, and bright green parrots with

yellow ringed necks and peacock blue faces, squeaked in the grevilleas close by.

“Well, I’m going for a swim,” Renata said.

“I’d just been thinking about going for a swim when you arrived,” I told them. “But

I didn’t bring bathers.”

“We didn’t either. But if you don’t mind, that doesn’t have to stop us,” Renata said,

smiling.

“No, course not.”

“We might even catch some yabbies—the waterhole’s supposed to be full of them,”

David laughed.

We stripped down to our underwear and entered the smooth clear surface of the

water, swimming, splashing, floating and diving off rocks.

Later, dripping, we lay back on the warm slab of sloping rock; mostly we were

silent, but also we talked. Renata told me about Yapalpe, the Glen Helen Gorge, her

favourite place; she’d loved it not only because there’d been no one else around, but also

because there was a special mountain there that she referred to as “the pregnant woman.”

She told me an Aboriginal legend about the mountain, and said it was one of the most

sacred sites in Central Australia. After, among other things, we talked about Robyn

Davidson’s astonishing desert journey in Tracks and of the ancient dreaming paths in Bruce

Chatwin’s The Songlines.

We walked barefoot, back to the plateau on a different route, and on the way

discovered a large native fig tree, loaded with tiny, yellow-red fruits, shimmering in the

sunlight. We stopped to pick some: I must have eaten fifty figs.

David and Renata were leaving for Uluru after lunch and when we reached the

plateau we hugged goodbye. Despite the extreme heat, however, I stayed. I wanted to revisit

the ancient domes of the cat men. It seemed I could feel the looming brooding power of

those weathered domes, waiting. But what they were waiting for—why this latent power

turned to stone?

Afterwards, I walked over towards the edge of the canyon to the shade of a glowing

rose gum; its shining, silver leaves glinted in the sunlight as I approached; a kestrel sat

watching me in one of its boughs. I leaned my face against the tree and was surprised that

the kestrel stayed for some moments; then, after surveying the ravine, the kestrel launched

off, soaring, wide-winged, slicing through the open canyon. Alone, I remained there in a

daze, and it was long after midday before I made my way down.

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Rwetyepme: The Pregnant Woman

Vast empty desert spaces lay to the north, scarred by endless dusty roads. I was playing

Krishna Das as I drove and chanting “Om Bhagavan.” It took me to the most sanctified of

places within. I mentally translated the Sanskrit each time: “Oh God, the Holiest of Holy.”

Once again, I felt my loss, and over and over as I drove, I played the same favourite tracks,

chanting and moaning until I cried out, as if this were the only language to express this

longing for God, together with the inordinate pain of my life.

At “Red Centre Way,” I turned west and followed the West MacDonnell Ranges,

stopping at Angkerle Atwatye (Standley Chasm), a deeply clefted chasm with eighty-metre,

sheer walls on either side. The Arrunga Dreaming, the Kangaroo Dreaming story of this

place, was secret, and as I sat on a rough boulder in the narrow gap, eating apples and rice

cakes for lunch, I wondered if I could attune to the story in the primordial feeling of that

place. When the sun passed over just after midday, I watched as the ancient chasm blazed

incandescent, fiery red.

Further west along Red Centre Way I drove, stopping at the dusty ochre pits,

imagining the Aboriginal ceremonies where they’d use the multi-coloured rock powders for

body painting. After, I travelled on to Yapalpe; and it was here that it seemed I’d arrived.

Five hundred million years ago the gorge was a huge inland sea. Yapalpe was one of only

six permanent waterholes on the one-thousand-kilometre Larapinta River (Finke River), the

oldest river in the world. The river began in the West McDonald Ranges and flowed on

down to Lake Eyre in South Australia, although it was said to only run its full length about

twice in a century.

Larapinta, the river’s Aboriginal name meaning “serpent,” seemed to imbue the

waterway with spiritual power. Kundalini was known also as “serpent power.” I camped in

the dust one hundred metres from the waterhole, under a lone young river red gum that

provided meagre shade. There were ten camp sites yet only one other tent. The old Glen

Helen Homestead two hundred metres away had limited accommodation, a cosy restaurant,

and an old outdoor fridge for campers.

I remembered what Renata had said about Rwetyepme, the mountain she’d referred

to as the “pregnant woman” (Mt Sonder). I took breakfast up to the lookout the next

morning, a five-minute drive from the campsite. I looked out towards Rwetyepme in the

distance and practised yoga, waiting for the sun to rise. Zebra finches filled the stumpy trees

and flittered around the damp edges of the water tank, sipping water and catching insects.

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The tiny grey birds with bright orange beaks and black-and-white-striped tail feathers made

thrilling sounds: endless “beep, beep, beep” noises, mixed with “meep,” “oi,” and “a-ha.”

With the sun’s first rays, I sat on an outdoor wooden table eating my muesli,

pleased for the strong winds which brought release from the sun’s burning heat.

Rwetyepme, illuminated, was engraved against the sky. I’d seen the mountain’s colossal

form more than one hundred kilometres away; but as I looked at Her on the horizon, on Her

back, propped up on Her elbows, it was as if I could feel every cell of Her, full of nurturing

earth: Her breasts, legs, pregnant stomach, Her yearning face turned upward. Something

was calling me.

One legend I’d read suggested the mountain was a pregnant woman who’d done

wrong by the tribe and was forced forever to lie on her back, watching the sun crossing the

sky. I preferred Renata’s version, however. She’d said Arrernte Aboriginal legend claimed

the mountain was a beautiful Creation Dreamtime Being, a pregnant woman who gave birth

to all forms of life. All creatures honoured Her and Rwetyepme rejoiced and sang with

them. Her joy was seen as a splendorous rainbow.

Each mountain has its totemic form. Yours breathes. But your longing for birth

was too large for this land and so you were sunlight baked. Resolute, You, a

universal archetype have remained through raging bushfires and floodwater’s

gushing tears. Your body is a mountain range waiting to come to life. Waiting

until humanity grows big enough to house You in their temples. But You say, the

earth is their temple and their beings reach to the sky.

On the third day, I drove out from the campsite, the last sign of habitation, and

headed west to a carpark, about two kilometres from the base of Rwetyepme. Alone there, I

walked along the crunching angular red stoned path from the carpark to set out across the

red dirt plains. Yet again, at first, I was fearful of snakes, though I’d seen not one—only

playful skinks, wallabies, butterflies, and many species of bird. Wind whistled through the

tall, white, spinifex grasses, and willy wagtails flitted in the mulga bushes that grew out of

the orange soil; when I reached the edge of Red Bank Gorge, the heat was vast and intense.

I hiked down the rough gravelly track into the red-green hues of the ravine and as I

clambered up the other side I gasped, catching the light underside and wing-tipped edges of

hundreds of splendid yellow and green wild budgies in flight, just above the chasm. On the

other side of Red Bank Gorge I walked until I reached the track at the base of Rwetyepme.

There I began the steep climb,

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I carried an open book, my journal, against my breast in one hand, and in the other,

a staff. Temperatures were mid-forty degrees. There were no signs after the first, and I

laboured on the steep, trackless journey feeling wobbly and disorientated in the heat; I was

grateful for my three litres of water, my hat, Indian bag, and white high-collared, long-

sleeved, loose, Indian cotton shirt. When I reached the summit at 1,380 metres, I sat on the

bare scrubby mountainside, completely alone, nothing but vast desert on all sides.

Everything was silent except for the flies. They came in drifts. I hid my hands in the ends of

my long sleeves, monk-like, and closed my eyes.

Burning winds whirred around me in gusts and a powerful unimpeded song of the

earth flowed through me. At the same time, my dreams and my yearning for the children

swirled together with phantom-like images of the failed marriage and my decimated life.

What had we done? Tears sprang; emotion welled; I longed to fly to my children. Over and

over I willed my mind and soul to travel to them, but my children did not come. I remained

on the mountainside utterly alone with the earth.

The way back down was easier because the dome-top termite columns I’d passed on

the way up stood out like miniature lingams on the hillside. The hot winds blew straight

into my face. I screwed my eyes up, but it was not enough; even my eyeballs were

overheating, despite sunglasses. I slipped and slid back down the mountain on the random

piles of splintered rock that were everywhere. The sun was burning my skin, water

drenching out of every pore. I felt weak. Near the base of the mountain, my feet dragged, a

grit-sound on the gravelly earth, accompanied by an ever-present chorus of cicadas and

flies.

The sickly odour of flu emitted from every cell in my body, weakness, feebleness as

I walked back to the shelter of the gorge. Who am I? Ona’s words swirled in my mind. I’d

met Ona, a woman in her sixties, through Siddha Yoga. Her advice had been invaluable

since the divorce. “If you’re only feeling what others need, then where are you? Who are

you? What are you?” she’d asked.

These words echoed in my mind as I headed for the shade of Redbank Gorge, with

its ancient cycads and freezing water. I sat on a protruding root, leaning against the trunk of

an ancient river gum tree. “You’ve not been yourself for a long time,” Ona had said. I

moulded myself to the tree, leaning against it, lolling my head around on the smooth trunk,

my hand resting on one raised knee. There I remained until close to dusk.

That night, I lit a red candle and placed it on a small brass and ivory Indian candle

holder I’d brought from home; the candle was crooked, having melted and twisted in the

heat; I angled it so its lopsided weight was compensated for by the slope of the tent floor. I

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curled up in a foetal position, and tried to find consolation in thinking of the ancient

Larapinta River, imagining it was running through me, even though at present it was only a

pool. My temperature raged; every part of me was leaking, and the sticky moisture all over

my skin brought coolness in the hot breeze that blew through the fly mesh, like an old-

fashioned refrigeration technique. The crooked candle sweated pretty rivulets of wax and

generated a soft light.

The sun was scorching into the tent at 6am. I managed to find shade for a half hour,

but the heat was extreme; though the fever had passed, dehydration was a reality and each

time I started to drift off to sleep, fear and alarm overcame me. I thought, if I let myself go,

I may never wake again.

I decided to find shade in the ancient rough-sided, sandstone gorge, Yapalpe, and

sauntered next to the mulga bushes near the dry riverbed; as I neared the black waterhole, a

flock of galahs flew overhead screaming and squawking, and it made me jump. I stood

ankle-deep in the cold water looking out at the bright green glossy bullrushes and water

reeds fringing the pool and afterwards went to sit in the shifting patches of shade from the

russet-red canyon walls; I felt feeble and rested. A solitary black-footed rock wallaby stood

nearby licking and cleaning her pouch, then sniffed the air, nostrils quivering, her wide eyes

taking me in. That night, I was unwell and felt a scorching burning in one ear; I shifted all

night, sensing something was wrong at home.

When I packed the tent at 5am, the ants were crawling all over me. Not long after,

the flies arrived. I let my long hair dangle over my face to keep them out, but they became

stuck in the corner of my eyes, buzzed into my nostrils, and as my hands were occupied, I

was unable to wave them away. I levered the tent pegs out with a strong stick and rock,

having driven them hard into the red dirt. Just as I was finishing at 6am, the unrelenting sun

appeared, beaming over distant hills. It shone across the red plains straight into my face.

I smiled to see it but not for long. I needed to get out of that heat. The air-

conditioned car gave some respite and I travelled for five hours before pulling over; no car

had passed going the other way all day, although three had overtaken me. I stopped at a

roadside rest area with nothing but red dirt and hundreds of black-burned, rough-barked

casuarinas, their gentle, whispering voices whistling in the desert winds. What was this

pilgrimage in soaring temperatures, riding in an air-conditioned car, crying and longing for

God, longing to understand the catastrophe of my life?

I sat in a fold-out chair listening to the soothing whirr of hot winds through the

casuarinas and was at peace in that sky-domed cathedral: purity, air, space, desert, sun, even

the flies had disappeared. But when my thoughts returned to betrayal, the flies came back.

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I continued driving and some hours later could see Alice Springs from a distance. It

looked like an oasis, but when I arrived it seemed more like a drab host of trappings. I

booked into a hostel and walked to an empty park nearby to phone the children. It was then

that I discovered Linden had split his head while surfing at Point Plomer the day before; the

children were camping with their father at our family’s annual holiday location in a

National Park next to the beach. Linden had eight stitches and was recovering; he laughed

as we spoke, and asked about the many birds he could hear in the background. When I

talked with Tristan, mentioning I’d be home in three days, Tristan warned: “Better be

careful. Dad can be really psycho.”

Afterwards, I walked towards the dry Todd River thinking about Linden and

wondering if Wayne might now realise something of the responsibility of parenting. I

remembered how I’d begged him over and over to help with the discipline and care of the

children, and how he’d always laugh and say: “You love being in charge. I’ve seen you.”

“No I don’t,” I’d reply. “Please, I really want your help. The children need it too.”

I walked along the dry river bank, cluttered with refuse, and recalled our most

recent summer holidays with the children in the second half of the marriage when Wayne

started to take leave. We first went away when Julian was nine months old—unforgettable

journeys to Kangaroo Island, Wilson’s Promontory, Lady Musgrave Island, and across the

Nullarbor to Western Australia. We worked well together camping and travelling, except I

had deal with most of the child management as well as seventy percent of the driving

because Wayne was always falling asleep at the wheel.

But, I thought, despite those holidays and twenty-one years of married life, we were

seldom truly close; he rarely initiated the lovemaking; mostly he went to bed long after me.

“Oh I like it when you do that,” he’d say. But I remember how sometimes after intimacy,

after I’d orgasm, the spasm would continue in an empty wrenching cry, not a physical

yearning—something was entirely missing from that union. Now I see what it was. I had

given everything, all of myself to him, but unrelentingly, he had remained aloof, and had

never given himself to me.

I stayed two nights in that hostel near the dry Todd River in Alice Springs. The

burning air was alive with a host of flying things that also crawled all over the floor; Kristi,

who’d just arrived from England and was sharing the four-bed dorm room, was both

amused and alarmed. Kristi still spoke in a bright, bubbling Oxfordshire accent, and I saw

how the landscape had not moved into her. Later, Kristi and I walked in to the town to buy

supplies and a large green snake hung from a spreading river gum in the main street.

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On my last day in Alice Springs I went to the air-conditioned library to do research.

The library had seemed cool and refreshing at first, but soon felt steamy and claustrophobic.

I hadn’t been there long when I saw Jenny, a New Zealander I’d been chatting with in the

Afghan Trader’s Health Food Shop the day before. Jenny worked in the library and right

away suggested we should go for lunch in her break.

We walked languidly, as just about everyone does in Alice, where of necessity one

gave in, or remained in brittle exile from this ancient place and the omnipotent cradling of

those desert forms. When we crossed over to the Hanuman Café, two Anangu rangers sat at

a window table having lunch, laughing, and I saw how this all seemed a universe away from

our suburban east-coast culture at home. Jenny and I spoke of the dreaming tracks, and

mythical Aboriginal dot paintings, as well as of the Aboriginal elders who were dying; we

lamented that many of the younger ones seemed lost.

“A lot of people say Uluru is the heart of Australia,” Jenny said.

“Well …. it is in the centre and I suppose it is symbolic of the heart in other ways,

too,” I said.

“I think it’s in between the heart and the solar plexus,” Jenny said. “Mutitjulu and

Yulara are very negative but as soon as you get to Uluru it all lifts. That’s how the centre

gets you. And then you can’t keep away.”

“What, have you experienced not being able to keep away?” I asked, knowing

Jenny had only arrived in Alice Springs seven months before.

“Well, I lived and worked at Yulara a few years ago, as well. Then I went back

home. I love New Zealand but I’d see red earth and know I had to come back. It gets into

the blood.” Jenny was silent, looking straight at me for some moments; I shifted my gaze; it

seemed she was thinking it had got into my blood?

“I’ve noticed that going to Uluru brings things up for people. It happens to me,”

Jenny went on. “Things I thought I’d dealt with years ago seem to surface, especially in

Yulara. But as soon as I get to Uluru, it all disappears.”

Mirages on the road shimmered in the distance as I travelled the endless miles back home;

the roads were enduringly straight, a never-ending band of tarmac with deep red desert

scrub plains on either side. When I stopped for petrol and went to pay, I noticed a wide

brown stripe of earth ingrained on my purse; as I was wondering how it got there Jenny’s

words sprang into my mind—“it gets into the blood.” I reflected whether I too would be

compelled to go back. And as I was thinking this, the full moon appeared above a bank of

dark cloud.

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Before sunrise the next morning, the sky was peach-pink and mauve, and

illuminated with golden streaks. I’d driven through the night with only a two-hour sleep.

The land was vast but it could never match the measureless space of that open sky. As I

drove home, the whole landscape seemed to be singing. I’d walked the sacred paths of the

centre and now it seemed the Songlines were singing me home.

Home

I picked the boys up early the next morning to spend the last week of the summer holidays

with me. Linden had to stay out of the water and had a small shaved patch on his head. It

was a relief to be together again. Julian and Tristan went surfing the following morning at

sunrise; I watched from Merewether beach café, Swell. The boys were mostly concealed in

a ribbon of sunlight, and their shining silhouetted bodies kept momentarily emerging in

sparkling flashes, before being lost in that shimmering band of light again. They looked

mystical, dolphin-like as they caught wave after wave. “Mum,” Linden called, arriving

shortly after when I’d moved on to the beach. I turned, smiling to see him, thinking of these

joyful rites of motherhood. Many times, I’d heard children calling “Mum,” and instinctively

turned, feeling sure it was one of my children, only to discover my error.

When I opened my brown Indian shoulder bag at the beach that morning, the first

thing I saw was a tiny terracotta stone. It must have somehow slipped in because I knew

taking stones was considered a bad omen in Aboriginal law. I placed it on my palm and

gasped to see it was the shape of a perfect heart. But this apparent symbol of love wasn’t an

omen of things to come.

“First Diana left me and broke the family up. Now she’s abandoned the children,”

Wayne kept repeating to family, friends and the children’s school. Every step I took,

everything I said seemed to reinforce his story. I didn’t defend myself, knowing his claims

were absurd, believing truth would triumph in the end. But it didn’t. It was if Wayne were

trying to obliterate me. I thought of renting the Merewether house out and taking the boys

with me to teach near Alice Springs. But this idea brought on a new deluge of blame.

Wayne was seething and intensified the issue, presenting me as vain, egotistical and

selfish to my family and the principal of the children’s Steiner School. I cried all night. Hate

was all around, while Wayne appeared to be exalted. I thought how Jungian psychology

claimed that often the shadow self chooses a partner, that we’re irresistibly drawn to those

who carry our disowned selves. I thought of my mother, how she’d spent her whole life

feeling resentment towards Dad. Every time I saw her, she poured out poisoned words

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about him. If I alluded to their failed relationship, she’d be furious; if I praised Dad, she was

annoyed.

The whole foundation of the altruistic life I’d tried to build had crumbled. I was

terrified of passing this paradigm onto my children. I’d given everything of myself to create

an ideal, but this was not enough. In the East, the teachings say that to progress on the

spiritual path, two wings are needed. Self-effort is vital, but for spiritual growth and

transformation one also needs Grace.

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8. Pilgrimage

“Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire”

(Rumi)

The year I turned fifty, two years after returning from Uluru, I went on another journey, a

three-month stint I termed a sabbatical because it was easier to explain that way. This

journey was not to Uluru, but to England and Europe. The idea arose when a friend and I

were crossing the road outside the Queen Victoria building in Sydney. Suddenly in the

midst of the pedestrian crossing, in the midst of our conversation, a message sliced through:

“You’re going to Europe,” a voice said in breathy words into my right ear that sent a shiver

down my right side. At the end of that year, I did go to Europe.

My life had disintegrated further over that past two years, even though some things

had seemed to progress, such as William agreeing to see his father for the first time in four

years on his twenty-second birthday. Great Auntie Helen was visiting from England at the

time and I wondered if it had something to do with her; she was a simple, petite woman,

though magical like a garden sprite with merry, soft blue eyes. When I’d told Auntie Helen

about Wayne and me not being together, every part of her seemed to be listening; her eyes

filled with awareness and compassion and took in my despair.

William continued to see his father after that, but as their relationship developed his

bond with me declined. Other things also went wrong that year after I returned from Uluru

and a lot of time seemed spent at the hospital: I tore my arm on broken glass. Linden had

split his head surfing, and Anna broke her wrist on a skiing holiday with her dad. Wayne

had a hang-gliding accident and broke his elbow. Tristan’s leg had to be operated on to

remove a strange bone growth. And William was hospitalised after his thumb was stuck in a

plastic moulding press at Uni. Later he told me, the trouble between his father and me had

been on his mind.

Anxiety constantly coursed through my body. Casual teaching was stressful. Often,

I had to accept work in the most difficult schools, and still my wages didn’t cover the

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mortgage and the bills. My blood pressure was high. Wayne continued to condemn me,

telling family and friends I refused work and that’s why I struggled with finances; if I

phoned to speak with the younger two boys, I’d have to endure a torrent of abuse from him

first, until sometimes I just had to explode. Later I learned he’d taped these outbursts. “I

have evidence of your instability and violence,” he confirmed.

My mother was abrupt; there were odd misunderstandings with Adrian; and after

William resumed his connection with Wayne, he protested I was too strict with the younger

boys. In addition, Anna complained I’d kicked her out of the house, without recalling that it

was she who’d moved out when I explained I’d have to charge a nominal amount of rent—

she said she wasn’t going to pay off my mortgage. Added to this, Wayne didn’t pay child

support for three years.

Initially, I too had thought child support unfair but, after three years of divorced life,

I realised otherwise and organised for the Child Support Agency to start collecting it.

Wayne was furious, referring to it as the Parasite Support Agency. Already the children had

almost unlimited freedom at his house. Often he wasn’t home. But when the CSA started

collecting child support, Wayne condemned and slandered me even more, and continually

tried to lure the boys to his house during their time with me.

Systematically, he began ensnaring Tristan, then fourteen, and Julian, twelve, so as

to boost his percentage of care as if he wanted to obliterate me, their mother, from the boys’

lives; he’d entice the boys when they were with me saying: “Come to my place this

weekend we’ll buy a dog.” Other times he’d lure them with a new electronic game or a new

phone. Yet other weekends he’d say, “Come and stay this weekend and you can look for a

motor bike on the internet...” and many other inducements.

Julian never swayed, but over the next three years, Tristan was increasingly

charmed: unsupervised gatherings of friends at Wayne’s beach-hangout occurred, two

minutes’ walk from Bar Beach. Later, this developed into drinking, even on weeknights,

and other numerous events while Tristan was still at school. Wayne used the children’s

energy, the strong foundation of their upbringing, and their networks to bolster his life, just

as he’d once used mine.

April 1, Sunday, 2007 (Diary entry)

My Dear Tristan, I will write this on April Fool’s Day,

For indeed I believe I’ve been such a fool.

My heart is breaking and yet I feel powerless to act,

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And know that already you are moving away from me.

Your father grows on you like a vine; he needs

Your structure, your strength, as he needed mine.

A week before it was time to leave on that trip to England and Europe, I sat watching Julian

dive in and out of the surf at Merewether Beach. He kept looking up to see if I was

watching, beaming. I thought owning a house would make life with the children secure. But

while the youngest two boys remained in fifty-fifty shared care, the older ones I hardly saw.

Often the older children were angry and the proportion of time they spent with Wayne

equalled the magnitude of their annoyance with me. If they spent a lot of time there, the

older children would say things like: “You’re stealing Dad’s money;” or “No wonder no

one sees you. You’re an ogre but everyone likes Dad.”

Three nights before it was time to leave on that “sabbatical,” I cried at the hearth, as I

sat in front of the open fireplace in my empty Merewether house. Three and a half years

since the divorce, and yet another home was packed and bare. Our things were stored in the

garage and in a locked bedroom, and the Merewether house, number thirty-one, was rented

for enough to meet the weekly mortgage. I squeezed extra cash by selling the car and

annulling a twenty-thousand-dollar credit card debt by organising a six month 0% balance

transfer. I knew I’d have to sell the house as soon as we returned. I looked down at my

grubby garden hands; the new tenants were moving in the next day.

Everyone kept asking whether I was excited. “Well yes,” I’d say. How could I groan?

But that last week I kept bumping into things—my car boot, people, tables, chairs, doors.

We moved to my mother’s for the last three nights.

“You’ll be joining me in Italy in six weeks when I’ve got things set up,” I explained

yet again to Tristan and Julian. “Anna’s going to drive you to the airport.”

“Six weeks is too long,” Julian said, looking worried.

“Do it all,” Tristan said. “You must be so excited. Do everything you’ve ever

wanted.”

“But my dear children,” I wanted to say. “Don’t you know this is not what I want?

This journey is forced on me against everything I believe. Dear God, you know my heart.”

“Look, I can’t help noticing how the older children treat you,” my mother said not

long after we’d arrived. “I must say, they seem to prefer being with Wayne, and Wayne is

always very good to me.”

“But don’t you see he’s playing you, and that he’s thriving because of the two

businesses? Besides, I don’t think it’s fair you’re seeing him. He was unfaithful to me.”

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“You can’t blame him for wanting another relationship now you’re not together.”

“But Mum, his infidelity was going on for at least ten years before we split. He makes

no effort to resolve things with me, even though he continues to see you. It’s corrupt.”

“Well, I’m not going to cut him off just because you’re divorced. We’ve been his

only family for a long time.”

“But you’re my family. It was his choice to break our bond.”

“Divorces happen all the time,” my mother continued, her voice getting louder, “You

can’t break up a family because of it.” She’d been unbearable of late, criticising me in front

of the children. I’d never known hate, but sometimes during that time, how I’d grit my teeth

and hate.

“Mum,” I said softly the afternoon before I left, “you know I don’t want to go away.

But I have to find something strong in myself again. I can’t be a loser; this isn’t only for

me, it’s for the children too. I have to go and find that joy again that was me. Find…”

“You may never feel like that again,” she interrupted, as if cutting me down before

I’d left. But at that point, a vision of Auntie Helen flashed into my mind. It was as if she

stood before me with her irrepressible spirit, her bright, shining, merry face.

Mystical Landscapes

The coach, direct to Glastonbury, drove out past the brightly lit terminals of Heathrow

Airport, and past a number of reservoirs, before heading west along the motorways. The air-

conditioned bus seemed to glide on that freezing winter’s night as we passed dark fields,

shadowy forests, the clusters of lights in towns and villages as we passed Basingstoke,

Friary Wood and Queens Oak; it was a three-hour trip in all. After exiting the freeway, the

bus twisted and turned on narrower village roads travelling north through Somerset. The

bus filled the width of the road in some villages, brushing under tall oaks, scraping close to

high stone walls. I was heading for the village of Street, a fifteen-minute walk from

Glastonbury. There, I’d camp on Ivy Thorn Hill in the youth hostel grounds, surrounded by

National Trust land.

I knew the journey had to begin in Glastonbury, that place reputed to be the Isle of

Avalon; I’d long been inspired by the nobility of the Arthurian legends and the idea of the

Holy Grail. During this first six weeks, I would not spend time with family in England; I

would see them later, when the boys joined me. This was my spiritual sojourn.

When the bus stopped in Street, in the middle of that freezing, dark night, there was

only another younger woman and me who alighted. I watched as the bus drove away,

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disappearing around the corner; it was only then that I considered how, even on top of the

past forty-eight hours of journeying from Newcastle, I still faced another half-hour walk up

to Ivy Thorn Hill (with my luggage). All at once, as I stood there, alone, in the empty

village, the trip felt meaningless—this most unnatural severing from my children seared

through every part of my mind. As I stood there on the damp cobbled road, I saw a vision of

Linden’s tragic face, and recalled the strange circumstances under which he’d left two years

ago to live with Wayne. I felt the emptiness, and simultaneously saw the hole it had left in

him. He was doing the HSC this year. Why was I here?

My thoughts were interrupted by a young fellow who’d pulled over to pick the

younger woman up; they called out, offering me a lift and dropped me in the hostel carpark.

I stood for some moments in the dirt, looking towards the hostel’s porch light; it was two-

hundred metres away with meadows and woods all around and, as I was navigating through

the field of long grass to the hostel, I tripped and fell in a ditch. Even despite myself, I had

to quietly laugh, wondering what sort of a topsy-turvy beginning this was. It was 2am when

I pitched my tent roughly in the empty grounds thirty metres from the verandah light.

The next morning, I went to see the warden of Street Hostel and booked in for two

nights, surprised to discover myself to be the only one there. Afterwards, I stood next to my

tent on the hill, taking in the marvellous views of Glastonbury Tor. The Tor, a Celtic word

meaning conical hill, could be seen for miles rising out from the reclaimed fenland of the

Summerland Meadows.

After two nights of camping in the midge-ridden, icy, hostel grounds, however, I was

covered in itchy red welts and decided to move. I wheeled my pack down the hill and along

the flats next to the Summerland Meadows, through the medieval village streets of

Glastonbury, until I reached the Crown Hostel; the rambling old backpacker place in the

centre of town adjoined the historic Crown Hotel, which was once a pilgrim lodge and

sixteenth-century coaching inn. I took a lower bunk at the window in a large six-bunk

female dorm room at the front.

Each morning, rugged up, I’d walk up to the top of the Tor in the dark to do yoga at

sunrise. St Michael’s Tower was on the top, which was all that remained from the second St

Michael’s Church to be built on that location. The first had been destroyed in an

earthquake, and the second had lasted until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, at

which time the Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey was hanged, drawn and quartered on the Tor,

together with two of his monks. The Tor was imbued with numerous mythologies, and was

considered one of the possible locations of the Holy Grail.

Not long after I moved in to the dorm room in Glastonbury, I had a dream:

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I was on the lake, poling in the misty marshes, hooded and robed, the water

lapping against the wooden boat. I could hear the quiet slosh of the pole as it

steadily pushed out from the mud. It was a place I knew well; later I realised it

was Avalon. As I was approaching the grassy bank where another waited for me, I

woke. The dream had seemed real, as if I’d entered a past life. On waking, I was

immersed in a deep mystical wisdom, yet also this truth felt earthy and

unpretentious.

“Sounds to me like one of the priestesses from Avalon,” the assistant at Chalice

Well Bookshop said the next day, when I told her the dream. She walked over, rummaging

for a book to show me.

“Really,” I said, still stunned because even though the dream had felt real, more real

than my standing in the bookshop that day, the idea of seeing the images from my dream in

the bookshop felt surreal. I didn’t attempt to rationalise it. Many claimed “the veil” in

Glastonbury was thinner.

Besides practising yoga on the Tor, I looked for “signs.” I followed signs like blinded

Gloucester on the wild heath in King Lear, who says, after having his eyes gouged out by

Regan and her husband, “I see the world feelingly.” I’d followed signs in my upturned

world at home, such as the two storm-havocked mutton birds my friend and I rescued one

afternoon, among the many dead that littered Merewether beach. I saw that I too had been

in a squall and like the mutton birds needed proper nourishment and sanctuary if I was to

survive. There were other signs too, like the toad who sat at my feet for hours one weekend

as I read; and two weeks before I left, at dawn, the three king tiger moths that beat

frantically at my bedroom window where a tiny tiger moth was trapped inside.

As I walked up Well House Lane at the base of The Tor one morning, a sign sliced

through my thoughts as well; a leaf in the shape of cow horns seemed to shine up at me.

This same emblem had lit up on the footpath the day before I left, when a downy-white,

splayed feather, with a disc-like shape in the centre had shone out at me. I picked it up, and

its divided upturned edges had looked like encircling wings. Straight after, the exact shape

was repeated in the sunrise. As the sun blazed out in the dark sky, the feathered clouds

around it had the exact same upturned lines, in a cow horn shape.

I’d thought no more of it until arriving at the airport the next day when, beyond the

line of jumbos, the sky was spanned with brilliant pink-orange feathered clouds. I

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remembered my pavement feather and wondered where it was. At that point, with the heat

of the rising sun through the airport minibus window, I took my jumper off, and there,

fallen into my lap was the feather, pure white, almost luminous. It must have been hidden in

my sleeve all along; I placed the feather into my passport where it has remained ever since.

The cow-horn shape of the splayed feather reminded me of a chalice, or an inverted

triangle, a symbol of the feminine. Feathers were also symbolic of the air, the mind, new

opportunities, but there seemed more to understand. After noticing the same sign again in

Glastonbury that morning, I browsed the new age bookshops, of which there were many in

the main street. The shape was reminiscent also of the headdress of Hathor and Isis: cow

horns with the disc of the sun in between, symbolic of divine nourishment. When I

discovered the hieroglyphic for Hathor was the falcon or hawk, a symbol of divine return in

the sky, I remembered two things that happened just before I left.

A lone kestrel on a cliff edge was attacked by six crows the week before I left; this

was not a dream, but reality, and it took place in King Edward Park (the same

park that my cliff-side unit was to overlook, less than a year later). The kestrel left

the crows and flew across to where I sat on the edge of a grassy, steep bank

overlooking the ocean; it stood two metres away with its head to one side, looking

at me, and then flew on to the roof racks of my car, against which I was leaning. In

Aboriginal Dreaming these birds visit after a massacre or war, and I thought how,

at that time, I was sitting there feeling the utter devastation and grief of my lost

children.

Two nights later, I had a dream though even now I don’t understand it. An old

couple sat on the verandah of an old terrace house. The woman looked ancient

and had a bird on her knee, seemingly older than her. I went to them, up their

rickety, dark, wooden stairs onto the narrow deck, and walked straight over to the

old woman and the bird, a hawk or falcon, sitting quite still, looking at me. I

placed my hands around the bird and it remained motionless, as if allowing me to

attune. The old man and woman exchanged surprised glances, though not to me.

Then, the old woman stood behind me, pushing my head into the ancient hawk-like

bird and it did not move. I felt the strong energy of the old woman’s hand merging

me somehow with the bird.

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In Glastonbury that morning as I ambled through the bookshops gathering

information about the signs, I held the black coal heart that Julian had given me before I

left. I carried it always in my oilskin jacket pocket, holding it, feeling its smooth warmth

connecting with my palm, turning it over. He’d found it on a school excursion. Now it

seemed to be the only thing standing between me and the fact that my life of mothering had

failed. Before all else, I’d wanted to be a good mother, not this guilt-ridden, seemingly

solipsistic, present path. Almost any difficulty might have been easier than this.

“It’s possible to fail in your outer purpose and yet, at the same time, totally succeed in

your inner purpose,” advises Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now, even though, as Tolle

goes on to clarify, to fail in your inner purpose, but succeed in the outer one is more

common. I’d been reading Tolle’s book in La Lune Restaurant in the main street, after

sunrise yoga on the Tor that morning. I often went there to read. It had a well-stocked

bookshelf and a quiet area at the back; I liked sitting there reading and taking notes. My

dream had been to succeed in both my inner and outer purpose, yet my destiny seemed to

have other plans.

At the end of my first week in Glastonbury everything became fractured, especially

after going to the psychic fair in the assembly rooms in the main street. Almost at once, I

developed a headache and soon left, thinking to clear my mind by walking to Wearyall Hill,

where there was a famous thorn tree that was said to have sprouted from the staff of Joseph

of Arimathea.

Hardly had I left the assembly rooms, however, when I almost collided with a fellow

who’d introduced himself a few days before. He’d told me his name was Sada Shiva

Paramashiva together with other Sanskrit titles when I’d met him. But shortly, after a young

woman had approached, smiling, and called out, “Hi Ariel.”

“How are you?” I said, not knowing what else to say, wanting to say something

because I’d seen him around a few times since our brief meeting. He reminded me of a

classic hippie from the hallucinogenic age, long tattered knotted hair, baggy striped pants,

and a sort of jester’s coat.

“Well,” he said, “it depends on whom I’m talking to.”

I thought he seemed offended, though I’d no idea why. “Ah, good to see you… um,

bye then,” I said, before continuing on my way up Wearyall Hill.

I walked to the outskirts of the village and began climbing Wearyall Hill, and on the

way, passed a family singing Happy Birthday to their eleven-year-old son. I remembered

the joy of all the birthdays I’d organised, then realised how endlessly I dredged the past.

There was constant pain in my heart—I longed for my children and wondered if Wayne

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would dog me all over the world, like an interference of background static on my radio.

How could I release him without losing my children? Each step forward was like walking

through a series of one-way doors. As each closed, there was no going back. How did I get

here? Was my mind like a description I’d read in Tolle’s book that morning: “a monstrous

parasite that, unchecked, may well end up killing all life.” But then he went on to say: “We

are breaking mind patterns that have dominated human life for eons.”

That night at the Crown Backpackers, I met Bente from Viborg in Denmark. She

was with a group of eight other women who’d arrayed themselves comfortably in the

common area of the hostel, some sitting on the arms of lounges, others shouldered in

towards each other, odd angles. The women looked strong and happy, chatting, smiling and

laughing; others more seriously engaged. I was taking this in when Bente looked up, and we

went on to exchange stories like old friends. “We travel to sacred sites annually, particularly

sacred feminine sites,” Bente said, beckoning me over to sit on one of the rounded arms of

the old lounge. “We’ve been to Montpelier, Monsegur, and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Last

year,” Bente said, “we went to Assisi in Italy.”

At the mention of Assisi, straightaway, other women stopped their conversations

and joined in. We talked all night. Possibility filled the air as we spoke of miracles and

Madonnas, of pictures and statues weeping tears of blood or fragrant oil. We spoke of

places such as Lourdes, where Bridgette, a poor village girl, had seen apparitions of Mary

eighteen times, and the miraculous healings there. “But we were disappointed with

Lourdes,” Bente said. “It was too crowded.”

The next day after sunrise yoga, as I was coming down off the misty Tor, I had a

vision of the Paramashiva guy, Ariel. I saw him hovering in the air before me, radiant. His

skin was smooth and olive, his eyes, blue and clear. At once, I knew he loved the earth as I

did; his spirit was light and free.

Strangely, as I reached the main street of Glastonbury around 7.30am, Ariel and his

friend were standing opposite Glastonbury’s fifteenth-century Church of St John the

Baptist. The street was empty except for us. Ariel had his pack on a pavement seat and was

making filter coffee into his flask, balancing the conical filter paper over it while pouring

boiling water from a pot he’d just boiled on a portable gas stove. His friend held the flask.

Ariel was looking as withered, worn, and toothless as ever.

“I saw you this morning,” Ariel said, looking up with a broad smile as I approached.

“You helped me,” he went on, his eyes bright. “You gave me a lift and carried some plates

and other supplies to a feast at the White Spring.”

“Oh,” I said laughing, implicitly believing him, though I wasn’t sure how. I told him

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about my vision of him coming down off the Tor. We laughed, then Ariel remarked how the

green of my roll necked woollen jumper perfectly matched my eyes. Indeed, in the fresh

energizing mists of that morning, I felt as if I were a being of the woods myself, my yoga

mat on my back, a deep green velvet Tibetan mandala bag slung crossways.

While we stood laughing there, Ariel remembered his friend and turned to him. His

friend was looking on, blank, as if trying desperately to decode this conversation. “You

don’t get it, do you?” Ariel said, chuckling. His friend was wary, unsure how to respond.

He shook his head a little with an expectant, confused smile. We all laughed.

“Well, see you around,” I said, suddenly feeling I had to get away. “What’s your

reality?” Ariel called after me, still laughing. I didn’t need to answer. “We speak the same

language,” I thought.

The next day, I lost that forest-green, woollen jumper that I’d had for years. I had left

it in a library on the way to Tintagel.

Through the Stone Arch

Standing under the almond-shaped stone arch of the ruined castle in Tintagel on the Cornish

coastline, I didn’t want to move as I looked down at the deep, inky blue and aqua of the sea.

I half-leaned against the cool stone, looking southwards into the distance at the wavering

line of sheer cliffs with frothing whitewash trimming and frilling its edges below, the winds

streaming around me. As I stood under the sacred geometry of that ancient stone arch,

constructed using a Vesica Piscis configuration, I sensed something was also in tune with

my own sacred geometry. I was born near this place on the southern coast of England, in

Bournemouth. Tintagel was where we used to come for summer holidays, and where we

camped for three months after our house in England was sold, while we waited for our ship,

the Oriana, that would bring our family of five to Australia in 1962.

I spent my days there walking along the grassy cliff tops and wandering in the village

of Tintagel. One day, I walked south on the pilgrim’s path from Tintagel’s ruined castle,

said to be the birth place of King Arthur, to the next village. As I walked alone on the wild,

rugged, winter cliff tops, all at once I became aware of three large white pillar candles

burning in my breast. The candles stood on an altar covered with a pure white cloth inside a

small stone shrine; it was alive inside me and I felt a sense of déjà vu, knowing I’d walked

as a pilgrim here before. I kept looking out, feeling sure somewhere close by I might peer

through a window and find that same holy sanctum that I’d seen inside me.

Another day in Tintagel, I followed the Trevillet River through ancient woodland,

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past lush tree ferns and shining quartz stones. While sitting on a smooth rock on the

riverbank under ivy-clad elm trees, under that leafy cathedral arch over the stream, I phoned

Linden, who was preparing for his HSC examinations. This call ended up being one of the

few natural exchanges I had with him and the boys while away. Later I was to notice,

conversations always worked better in nature. Linden told me how he’d been studying hard;

how his schedule was tight and he’d been jogging every day to keep fit and to relax; he was

also trying have fresh juices and to eat well. Two warm-chestnut coloured dippers with

white breasts were perched on the lichen-covered rocks close by; their short tails bobbed

and they made thrilling “zil, zil, zil” sound. Linden was excited to hear the birds as we

spoke.

Afterwards, I climbed up the hill to Saint Nectan’s old hermitage, then walked down

a narrow slippery path over stone slabs and tree roots, through thick greenery to Saint

Nectan’s Glen. I could hear the roar of the twenty-metre waterfall long before I rounded the

corner. I looked up at the waterfall that gushed down to the kieve, before cascading through

a perfectly round l hole in the rock basin to flow on to where I stood in the mossy sanctuary

below. This was known as a sacred feminine site where it was said King Arthur and the

Knights came to be blessed, and where the Knights consulted with Saint Nectan before

setting out on their quest for the Holy Grail.

My last night in Tintagel, I had a dream. I was walking on medieval cobbled streets

wearing a long, peasant dress, and immersed in an unpleasant exchange with two other

women. The conversation was interrupted, however, by my awareness of a baby in my

arms. I was filled with horror and shame seeing its emaciated form, knowing that this little

one, which was in fear of dying, was in fact my baby, and somehow I’d forgotten it.

Certainly, it was in risk of losing the meagre strength it had by my engaging in that silly

interaction. The baby was ancient; its questioning eyes searched my own, piercing into the

depths of me to discover whether I would care for it.

When I returned to Glastonbury for a week, I stayed in Shekinah Ashram and at Chalice

Well before leaving England. Engraved copper, Tibetan prayer wheels lined one outside

wall of Shekinah Ashram and I turned them, before opening the high wooden gate and

walking through the rambling gardens, and booking in. The two-storey rendered brick

building was at the base of the Tor, and dedicated to the Divine Feminine. Most of the first

night, we stayed up chanting the thousand names of the Goddess. Mid-morning the next day

I sat drinking chai and eating raisin toast with Sophie, French, a writer and musician, and

Rebecca, an earthy Druid from Ireland. We three very quickly became friends.

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The next day, we attempted to walk the complex looping labyrinthine path up the Tor.

Some thought the Tor’s regularly terraced slopes and distinctive rutted paths were due to

grazing animals; others thought they were the result of farming, when the monks of

Glastonbury Abbey grew crops there because the plains were often flooded; yet other

theories claimed that the terracing dated back to 3000 to 2000 BCE, and walking the spiral

maze up the Tor was a means of invoking the Goddess.

Sophie had a detailed map of the Tor’s labyrinthine path and we followed it,

completing at least two labyrinthine loops, but eventually we gave up. Bringing the

precision of the map to the complex rutted paths on the Tor seemed impossible, and we

made our own way up the deep, green, grassy slopes, chatting and exchanging stories.

Celtic tales linked the distinctive terracing on the Tor to the fairies’ glass mountain or

spiral castle, the point where earth energies met the powers of death. The Tor’s Celtic name,

Ynys Witrin, meant “Isle of Glass.” Rebecca told us of a large egg-shaped rock that she’d

heard of, “a kind of gateway to the underworld,” she’d said, and we decided to head for it. It

was on the dragon ley line, and alleged to be the entrance to the underground passages that

lead to the Holy Grail, as well the entrance to Annwn, Avalon’s land of the fairies.

When we finally found the large oval rock it was wild and overgrown, certainly not a

tourist destination, though there was no mistaking its distinctive egg-shape. We three

climbed up and sat alone there, atop the huge, smoothly-rounded elliptical boulder, and

though there was not a hint of the Grail or the fairies, we remained for over an hour; just

being there together in winter sunshine was enough.

St Michael’s Guest House in Chalice Well Gardens, on four acres at the base of the

Tor, was where I spent my last three nights in Glastonbury. I’d wanted to stay in that sacred

place since I arrived, but a lot of my time there was spent on unsuccessful phone calls. The

first night, I’d waited up till midnight to phone Linden, but couldn’t get through, not to any

of the children. Then, I rose at dawn the next day to phone him, but my mobile wasn’t

working. So, I bought a phone card, and tramped off to a phone booth, determined to speak

at least with Linden about his exam preparations, but again this failed. I was unable to reach

him until a few nights later, just before leaving England.

The whole upper meditation room of St Michael’s Guest House smelled of roses

and a clean wood fragrance, when I turned on a soft light at the door on my second night

there. Guests at St Michael’s could book the large meditation-study area. I walked over to a

candle-lit cordoned-off area that was permanently set up as the last supper, and knelt before

it and cried. Afterwards, I lit three candles, and leaned down to smell the pink roses in the

vase, surprised to find they had no fragrance. I wondered where the perfume of roses had

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come from. I sat on a cushion and sank quickly and deeply into meditation.

Afterwards, alone, I walked through Chalice Well gardens, and kneeled at the head

of the holy well, shrouded in a sanctuary of trees. In the dark there, I listened to the sounds

of the hallowed red spring as it flowed deep within the earth. The spring water, known for

its purity, high iron content, and distinctive red colour had brought miraculous healings to

many over the centuries. Legend claimed it was the blood of Christ. I pranammed, touching

the crown of my head to the grate of the well. Again I cried. I remained for some time and

wanted to stay longer, but I was tired and freezing, and decided to come back the next night

well-prepared, maybe sleep there.

The flowers were head high on either side as I walked back to my room, and it

seemed a cluster of statice flowers reached over and kissed me, brushing ever so softly

against my face. I stopped, felt suddenly very alone, and began to weep, and once more the

flowers moved, brushing ever so gently over my cheek, as if caressing, loving me.

In the half-light of the dawn I went back as milky white veils of mist floated,

touching everything. I stood dwarfed amidst the flowers and looked at the statice. They

appeared radiant, brighter than the other blossoms, and as I thought this, the statice seemed

to quiver in ascension, though all else in the garden was still. When the dawn darkness

lifted, bright-faced robin red breasts hopped all around the garden.

Equipped with my sleeping bag and yoga mat, I went back to the well-head of the

Chalice Well red spring that night; it had a Vesica Pisces encoded on its lid. Not one star

was out; the clouds were sepia and yellowish grey; no candles lit the garden as they had the

night before; everything was shadowy and damp. I felt restless, but knew this was my last

chance, and was determined to keep my vigil at the well-head.

I knelt, pranamming as I’d done the night before, when my head had been magnetised

towards the unfathomable waters of the deep. But this time, all I could feel was that I’d

eaten too much. I bent my body in prayer, but I was cold and my jacket slid up, exposing

the small of my back. I tried praying in virasana, hero’s position, a kneeling yoga posture

where you sit back on your feet; I tried meditating on my yoga mat, tried wrapping my

sleeping bag around me on the stone seat—nothing worked. In desperation, I lay down,

half-sprawled across the iron grate of the well, hoping to hear the sacred messages of the

water I’d heard the night before.

I asked for protection, summoned all the masters I knew, but felt only a negative dark

pall. What of the sacred healing of the red spring water from this well, said to be the blood

of Christ, the miracle stories? All around was terror, and I returned to my room in St

Michael’s Guest House.

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My heart pounded and I woke a number of times that night, aware of my gritted

clenched teeth. I chanted Hamsa over and over. Hamsa was said to be a universal mantra

because its vibration was already a part of our breath. It was Sanskrit for swan, the vehicle

of Saraswati, Hindi Goddess of knowledge, music and creative arts. But also Hamsa was

Sanskrit for “I am that,” bringing East and West together. God too had declared “I am that, I

am” from the burning bush, when Moses had asked God’s name (Exodus 3:14).

I repeated ham on the in breath, sah on the out, thinking “I am that.” But I was

holding on to something. What didn’t I want to let go of? I breathed deeper so that the

internal sound was audible to my ears, a technique known as ujjayi breath in yoga, Sanskrit

for “victorious breath.” Ujjayi breathing, nose breathing, produced a deep soft sound in the

throat, sometimes described as cobra breathing. I tried to think of nothing else. Only the

breathing remained between me and that flood of fear all around.

The morning star hung full in the sky when I woke the next morning. The dread of the

previous night seemed to have evaporated. I felt refreshed and sat on the swing seat in

Chalice Well gardens. Its pitched wooden roof was covered in soft pink roses, and a fluffy

white flowering climber. I moved the swing gently back and forth, looking up through the

mist to the Tor. I’d always loved the mist, or light rain at home. “Oh, this horrible weather,”

my mother would say. “No, it’s lovely—this is my favourite,” I’d reply.

That last afternoon, I was almost running when I brushed past Ariel, who was talking

with a group of relaxed, colourful-looking friends in a field at the base of the Tor. “I want to

catch the sunset from the top,” I said, trying to rush on past before Ariel had other ideas.

“Look,” Ariel said, smiling, placing his hand in the centre of my chest. “It’s here.”

“Mm, yes,” I half-grinned, before attempting to politely turn once more to go on.

But yet again, Ariel insisted on placing his hand there. “Look, it’s right here,” he

beamed. This time he nodded for me to look in the direction he was pointing and I stopped,

and turned. There it was! Beyond the green tree-lined farmers’ fields and the lush Somerset

Hills, strewn with sheep and black and white cows, there it was—a sky more beautiful than

any I’d ever seen: an iridescent red-orange fire...

But instead of remaining, something in me burned. I pushed on up the path, bull-like,

charging, lathered in sweat, determined to catch the sunset on the top of the Tor. But when I

got there, I’d missed the whole thing. I sat on the damp grass in front of St Michael’s

Tower, catching my breath. The sky was in greys, a few dull traces of colour near the

horizon; but it was a flat reality like when a fireworks display is over.

Around a dozen others strolled in the damp and cold on top of the Tor that Sunday

afternoon. Simone and Marina from Lyon were looking for ley lines, their dowsing rods

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subtly dipping and bending as they walked. I watched. Ley lines were thought to be energy

lines linking the earth’s power spots; being on a ley line, in a place such as this where the

energy was already powerful, was thought to heighten one’s consciousness. When they

reached the spot where I’d done my morning yoga, I had to go over.

“See, it’s right on the Michael line,” Marina said, her dowsing rod moving up and

down. I stayed until dusk and walked down from the Tor with them. They were returning to

France the next day and we decided to have dinner together at the Crown Hotel. It was one

of those easy friendships. We talked of energy spots and sacred sites while I ate my roast

beef, Yorkshire pudding, pumpkin and peas, and Marina and Simone ate their shepherd’s

pie. We discussed our travels and speculated about the wisdom that seemed inherent within

the earth for the rest of the night.

“An analogy might be that vortices like St Michael’s Tower are the acupuncture

points, and the ley lines are the meridians of the Earth,” Simone said.

I mentioned the Dreaming Tracks in Central Australia, and said how it seemed that

in visiting these sacred power spots and travelling along the ley lines, we were able to align,

not only to something sacred inside ourselves, but a more universal purpose as well.

Marina thought that we came close to God in these sacred power spots. She talked

about the places she’d been and mentioned that these links were all over the globe.

Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt are linked,” she said, adding that Glastonbury was

connected along ley lines to Chartres, next on my itinerary.

There was no sunrise on the Tor the next morning because of a cloudbank. I had to

laugh how I’d missed sunset the day before; I thought of the many times I’d barged through

things and missed the joy of the process. It was empty, dull and freezing on top of the Tor. I

came down a back way, along a ridge, climbing over stiles in order to prolong my final

immersion in the English countryside. But when I stopped in the middle of a large empty

field, I felt only like a fool on the edge of a void, the crows cawing in the distance. My feet

were wet and frozen. I was decidedly unenlightened, hungry, and my body was cramped

with cold.

Sophie and Rebecca called in after breakfast that last morning in Glastonbury; and we

three walked the short distance up Well House Lane to the sacred White Spring, said to be

the sweat of Christ; it ran inside caves directly under the Tor, and was not more than fifty

metres from the Red Spring. We explored the mini-maze of caves, where the White Spring

gently surged over rocks and filled underground pools; the cave walls had images of the

black Madonna, a symbol of the universal Feminine Divine.

We were the only ones there, and stood barefoot in a large underground pool of the

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white spring water before leaving, throwing cupped palms of water over our heads; it

twinkled and sparkled like fairy droplets and we flowed, danced, sang and laughed. “I don’t

know what’s happened to me—have I gone loopy?” Sophie said in her charming French

accent.

Back down to the end of Well House Lane we strolled, and hugged to say goodbye.

Words were unnecessary. Rebecca and Sophie had started walking away, when they

stopped, and turned back. We faced each other, hands held up, fingers splayed, palms

facing, and then bowed in Namaste.

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9. Feminine Faces of the Divine

“If there is to be a future, it will wear the crown of feminine design.”

Aurobindo Ghose (1949)

When the young Parisian assistant at Montmartre said that I was booked into a six-share,

mixed room, I was horrified after arriving in the steep village at 10.30pm. I couldn’t change

rooms, even if I was willing to pay for a single—they were booked out. I followed the

young French assistant as he trotted up the stairs, directing me to the last bed in a small

room with three double bunks. At least the lights were on, despite it by now being 11pm.

I nodded hello, but felt like an intruder, travel-worn and old. I put my pack down,

hoisting myself up to the last bed on a top bunk. The mixed group of twenty-to-thirty-year-

olds from Denmark, Sweden and Germany were talking about their day in an international

brand of English. I could almost touch the guy on the top bunk across from me, and the

head of the girl in the other top bunk was close to my toes. Yet, I was surprised how quickly

their mood infused into me. The Danish three were cousins on their first trip to Paris. I

undressed to my modest, dusky-pink, silk slip, and soon after the lights were out, went to

sleep.

The next day, I headed up Montmartre’s old stone stairs to Paris’ highest point at

the top of the hill, at one hundred and thirty metres. Montmartre, meaning “mountain of the

martyr” was so named because St Denis, France’s patron saint was beheaded there in 250

AD. I walked to the Place du Tertre, the village square, in the centre of Montmartre. It was

chilly and the light was almost conspiratorial as it touched the old stone buildings and trees

in various shades of grey; a few stallholders were setting up, but mostly everything was

closed.

I ordered a coffee, and sat under the café’s outdoor awning looking out at that

square, where a century ago impoverished artists such as Degas, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh,

Picasso had lived and painted. Montmartre was Paris’ last village and still very rural, then.

The Sacré-Coeur Basilica was where I’d planned to spend the day, but as I walked

over the wet cobblestones towards it, passing the quaint old stone St Pierre’s, a twelfth

century church, I had to go inside. It had once been Montmartre’s village church, and was

full of antique paintings, religious icons, fresh flowers and a lovely old statue of Mary, with

tall irises in a devotional vase; there seemed a strange glowing violet light around this

effigy of Mary, though there was no electrical device that I could see.

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The gleaming white, Sacré-Coeur Basilica atop Montmartre was celebrating its one-

hundred and twentieth anniversary of St Thérèse of Lisieux’s setting out from there at

sixteen years of age on her pilgrimage to Rome. I’d read The Story of a Soul, her

autobiography, at home, having always loved the stories of the saints, seers, all of them—

East and West. St Thérèse, known as “the little flower,” was the youngest of nine children.

Mary had appeared and smiled at her when she was gravely ill as a child, after which she’d

become immediately well. I remembered being inflamed with longing for God after reading

it.

Near the entrance, just beyond the portico’s huge bronze doors elaborately detailed

with biblical scenes, there was a statue of St Thérèse portraying her in the usual way with a

flourish of roses at her breast. I became lost reading and contemplating the memorabilia of

St Thérèse of Lisieux in the Cathedral. Later, I prayed in the shadowy silences of the stone

crypt with its endless vaulted arches and many statues of saints.

When the bell rang for afternoon Mass, one of the biggest free-swinging bells in the

world, I walked to a pew, sensing something huge was also calling me. After Mass, I stayed

and became lost in the stunning image of Christ in Majesty on the ceiling; the glowing

mosaic, one of the largest mosaics anywhere, seemed alive. It was set high above the choir

stalls, in the apse, and depicted the sacred open heart of Jesus in brilliant gold tiles. Jesus

stood with wide outstretched arms, and a luminous halo, and was being adored by, among

others, the Virgin Mary, Jeanne d’Arc and Archangel Michael.

I stopped for dinner at the Place du Tertre on the way back to the hostel, and sat

huddled next to an outdoor gas heater, cradled in the hum of Parisian talk and French

music; coloured lights were strung between the bare plane trees and everywhere candles

burned. When I arrived back at the dorm room about 8pm, my two new companions were

asleep. That night, I had a lucid dream: A figure I took to be Jesus, though I won’t say it

was, stepped through the night sky towards me; this heavenly figure was made up solely of

humming energy lines of light. He reached out to communicate with me and I felt the

powerful, yet subtle electrical charge of this exchange, and saw that this divine electrical

energy connected everything.

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Chartres Cathedral

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is the experience of receiving and bearing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Even from a distance across the fields and flat countryside, Chartres Cathedral could be

seen rising out of the plains of Beauce. The gothic cathedral stood on a hill that had been

dedicated to the Virgin for centuries, and was a two-hour train journey southwest of Paris.

Chartres Cathedral was built over the site of a Roman temple, which in turn, had been built

over a Druid temple. Previous to this, the site had been a clearing in the sacred oak grove on

the hilltop, where Druids had gathered at an ancient well and worshipped Virgo Partitura, a

virgin who was about to give birth.

I wheeled my backpack up the hill from Chartres Station, and stood in front of the

mammoth stone cathedral, looking up at it. Though it was late afternoon and I still needed

to arrange accommodation, I couldn’t resist a peek inside. The cathedral was shadowy,

candlelit, filled with an imposing quiet. But I didn’t stay, and following my map, I walked

down the ancient stairs on the other side of the hill, my pack bumping and clunking behind

me; after crossing the Eure River, and following the narrow, riverside, cobblestone road, I

hauled my pack up another hill to the hostel, around a forty-minute walk.

It being the end of October and out of season, the hostel was almost empty. I shared

a dorm room with Liz from England; we were the same age, though she looked younger—

her dark hair, smooth, tanned olive skin, and generous smile. She’d spent years travelling

and had worked waitressing, teaching, fruit-picking and writing travel articles; she’d never

had children.

Liz was meeting Christos, a French fellow she’d been friends with for the past two

months on Hydra. He was arriving the next afternoon to lead a four-day sacred tour of

Chartres Cathedral. “He leads tours all over Europe,” Liz told me. “And he speaks of

mystical experiences related to Mary Magdalene, the Black Madonna, the Knights Templar,

the Cathars and Merovingian kings, as well as explaining sacred geometry in the

architecture.”

The cathedral was almost empty when I returned there at first light the next

morning. I walked in prayerful silence, mesmerised by bands of the transitional light, taking

in the great echoing silence of that place into which legacies of wisdom, magic numbers and

sacred geometry had been inscribed into stone. In particular, I was drawn to the Blue Virgin

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Window, known for the “Chartres blue” of the pigment. Some said it was the most beautiful

stained-glass window in existence, it had miraculously survived the fire that damaged most

of the old Romanesque cathedral in 1194.

Alone, I stood there, leaning against a great stone pillar in the south ambulatory,

looking up, dreaming; though even now I couldn’t say what I was dreaming of. The Virgin

was looking out, crowned, enthroned, robed in that exceptional “Chartres blue,” against a

ruby background. The Christ child was on her knee; angels supported her throne and a dove

descended from above, its beak connecting to her halo with three blue rays.

When I returned to the hostel in the afternoon on my third day in Chartres, Liz was

sitting in a lounge chair reading, her pack and things stacked beside her. She hadn’t

returned to the hostel the previous night, and looked up smiling when I entered the common

room. “Oh, so you are going to stay with Christos,” I said walking over; Liz had mentioned

that she hadn’t been sure if they would share a room.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s a gorgeous place, an old stone building right below the

cathedral. Christos has stayed there many times, three meals and only fifty euros a night.”

Then Liz told me about their evening. How lovely Chartres was by night, how beautiful the

angel was lit up atop the Cathedral, and how romantic the candlelit restaurants were that

jutted out into the canals, and lined the Eure River; and finally, how she and Christos had

dinner in a gorgeous one.

I glanced down at her book on the table, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, by Julian

Mantle. “Mm, this looks interesting.”

“Yes, it’s a great book,” Liz said. “About a man who seems to have everything but

he knows his life is empty and so….” I made a mental note to read it, though still I haven’t.

There was so much more we could have talked of, but at that point, Christos arrived.

Christos was tall with shoulder-length, blonde-brown, wavy hair; Liz introduced us

and we spoke for some minutes; there was something alluring in his genial, though slightly

aloof way; I found him impossible to read, and he did seem pressed to leave. I watched

agape as Christos picked up her bags, kissed Liz magnificently on the cheek and she,

looking regal and complete, walked off with him. I never saw them after that.

When I returned to the cathedral the next morning, the chairs had been removed

from over the thirteenth-century labyrinth; I walked the maze, held between the strange

shifting bands of filtered light coming through countless stained glass windows. The

labyrinth filled the width of the nave, and although its diameter was only about thirteen

metres, it took me more than an hour to walk, with its complex network of circular twists

and turns, continually looping back and around on themselves; sometimes the path would

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turn in close to the centre, other times all at once it would lead far away; yet always one

remained within the maze. I moved in deep meditation, aware of the amber glow of

hundreds of devotional candles. It was as if I was looking down from a great height and had

walked through the entire ant-like maze of my life. When I pranammed at the centre, my

entire awareness was flooded with an overwhelming white light, and after, I sat numbed in

the cathedral, compelled by that inner vision and light energy still coursing through me.

The next day, I stayed up till midnight because I wanted to talk with Tristan early

on his birthday morning in Australia; but couldn’t get through.

28/10/07

My Dear Tristan,

HAPPY 15th

BIRTHDAY my Beautiful Boy! I thought of you all day and wanted to talk to

you so much.

I stayed up till midnight last night (your birthday morning), only to find that, after trying to get

through at least 25 times, my mobile was out of credit. So I walked around in the silent empty

night trying to find a phone box, but couldn’t. Then, I went first thing to the village, but all the

public phones required a phone card, and nowhere was open because it was Sunday.

I couldn’t stop thinking of you and sat teary eyed through the Georgian Mass at Chartres

Cathedral. But after, I met a lady who told me about the internet café. That is where I am now,

even though its 2am, your time, on the night of your birthday.

Hope you had a fun, yummy day! I kept trying to imagine what you were doing—surfing, or a

picnic, or…? I could see your face so clearly in my mind’s eye. I will try phoning you again

tomorrow

Many Blessings and Much love

Always Mum xxxooo

I was sorry not to have spoken with Tristan the morning before when I’d sat on the

tree-lined walking path next to the Eure River, chatting casually with Linden, who’d had a

good week studying and had sounded positive about the HSC. He’d sent an English essay

for me to look over and we discussed it as I’d sat watching the ducks, and the mist rising

from the tranquil water. It had been almost three years since Linden left, and though he

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never called in to see me more than a few times a year (and those visits were brief), guilt

swirled inside me, afterwards. I kept trying to rationalise why I was here.

Now, I was even more restless after the numerous attempts of trying to phone

through to Tristan, and felt the alarming distance between us, even despite my having used

one-hundred-and-fifty dollars of phone credit in the last few days. I felt dislocated between

the shifting time zones and dates as I walked to the covered open-air market in the village

square the next day to get supplies.

Local farmers held these colourful markets twice a week, selling green-topped

carrots, pumpkins, parsnips, apples, fresh bread and among other foods, fresh game pies.

All produce was arrayed on wooden trestle-tables. I spent the morning walking around with

my phrase book open.

At an organic stall offering homemade yoghurt and cheeses, there was a long queue;

when it was my turn I was unsuccessful in making myself understood, and as no one

seemed able to help, I thought to ask one smartly-dressed French man further back in the

line: “I wonder… if you might speak English?” I asked. He looked at the others in the

queue and didn’t answer right away.

“Where are you from?” he queried.

“Umm… Australia?” I ventured, hoping that was okay.

“Ohh, Australia, Australia,” he said, laughing, mentioning how he’d seen Steve

Irwin, crocodile hunter on TV, before going on in a quaint, chuckling way in both French

and English; the others in the queue were smiling. “Only because you are Australian will I

speak English,” he said. “Otherwise, not.”

The crypt below Chartres Cathedral was only open for Mass once a day. I went early to

view a relic known as “the veil of the Virgin.” It was near the altar and said to be from the

tunic of Mary when she gave birth. The small piece of yellowed cloth was in a frame, and

had been housed there since 876 AD, which made it easier to believe the cloth was genuine;

yet still this idea seemed, somehow, too fantastical, and I never did decide about it.

The Black Madonna on the altar in the Crypt was a copy of the eleventh-century

original, known as “Our Lady of the Crypt.” Throughout Mass I contemplated this effigy of

the Divine Feminine, carved from dark brown wood, and sensed new possibilities. She

looked straight out, and seemed resolute and wise, yet also remote, the Christ child on her

knee.

After Mass, the Crypt stayed open for half an hour and I went behind the altar to

gaze down into the depths of the ancient well, once the sacred initiation grotto and healing

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well of the Druids; but also monks had been thrown to their deaths down this well. As I

stared down in to it, there seemed to be a cold, swirling, hypnotic energy in the well, and

Simone’s words from Glastonbury echoed in my mind: “These ancient power sites are

founded on underground streams that connect the energies of the earth—dowsing shows

this energy to be some kind of spiraling magnetic force,” she’d said.

Before I left the Crypt that day, I paused to look up at the hand on the ceiling behind

the altar. Christos had told me it was a blessing hand. I stood under it, as if in a hue of violet

light, and was immediately transported into a feeling of deep, unearthly peace.

Chartres Cathedral, heralded as the “Seat of the Virgin Mary on Earth,” was

dedicated to one of the most venerated black Madonnas in Europe—Our Lady of the Pillar.

This black wooden Madonna in the upper cathedral, a copy of a thirteenth-century silver

Madonna that once stood on the main altar, was elevated on a three-metre pillar in the north

ambulatory, and set in a mandorla-shaped cavity.

On my last night, I stayed before “Our Lady of the Pillar” until the cathedral closed;

two nuns sat there also steeped in silence. I prayed, and also contemplated the Maria–

Sophia wisdom of the Black Madonna, next to hundreds of devotional candles that burned

for her. I knew that the unfathomable, dark, feminine depths of divine knowing were the

key to finding my own strength and my going beyond the betrayal.

The Black Madonna had been venerated from pre-Christian times and could be

traced back to Diana, Cybele and Isis. Early Christians took much of Isis’ iconography for

the Virgin Mary such as Isis’ titles: “Star of the Sea” and “Queen of Heaven,” and others.

The Virgin Mary was also often depicted on a crescent moon, or with stars in her hair, or

around her head, just as Isis was. In Chartres Cathedral, “Our Lady of the Pillar” was

surrounded by a hemisphere of stars, and above her was a stained glass window showing a

scene of the worship of Diana. These inclusions of pagan iconography were explained by

Catholic officials as “pre-figurations of the Virgin.”

When the Cathedral closed at 9pm, I walked back along the empty cobbled street

and across the grass at the back of the Cathedral; my fingers holding and turning the black

stone heart in my pocket that Julian had given me, the divine feminine depths of the Black

Madonna full in my mind. As I rounded the top of the ancient stone stairs to descend to the

river, however, I gasped. The full moon was just above the eastern horizon; and in that vast

vault of blue-grey night sky, it was shrouded by a perfect, heart-shape of the softest, grey-

white cloud.

I left early in the morning mist, and stopped to pause on the old wooden footbridge

while crossing the Eure River. Three white swans flew by so close they almost brushed my

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face; I felt the winged movement of the air, and turned to watch them glide effortlessly

down that mystical ribbon of dewy white vapours, with their long graceful necks, and

cherry-red bills.

Swans pulled Apollo’s chariot in one of the stained glass windows in Chartres

Cathedral; through that window on the summer solstice, a beam of sunlight fell upon the

iron tenon on the cathedral floor. I thought of Hamsa, Sanskrit for swan, the thousands of

times I’d silently repeated that natural mantra of the breath. Swans were also known as

feathered serpents and invoked to ensure a safe passage while navigating one’s return to a

state of Grace. But as I dragged my backpack up the long stone stairs of the cathedral hill

that winter’s morning, I felt far from transformation and couldn’t help thinking, I was like

the ugly duckling, an anomaly, lost, not knowing my family or home.

Ashram of Mother Meera

On the train from Gare de Nord to Köln, the carriages were packed. I sat squeezed in on a

bench seat with my pack at my feet. The lady opposite was annoyed, and while other

passengers read or were occupied with something else, she sat staring at me for the whole

journey as if disapproving of my right to breathe. At Köln, I changed to the empty train to

Koblenz. It was a smooth, cocoon-like ride through rain and mist, but I couldn’t relax.

Again I wondered what I was doing here. Late afternoon from Koblenz, I connected with

another train that wound slowly up the Lahn River to Balduinstein, the closest station to the

Ashram of Mother Meera in Schaumburg, where I would stay for two weeks.

Thousands of people from both East and West visited Mother Meera, claiming her

to be a living Incarnation of the Divine Mother. Mother Meera, born on the southeastern

coast of India in 1960 was recognised as exceptional as a child: “going to different lights” at

age three; to samadhi at age six, where it is said she often remained for fourteen hours. At

sixteen years of age, she was said to be fully realised. Mother Meera said, “The Divine is

the sea. All religions are the rivers leading to the sea.”

I had read miraculous things about Mother Meera, yet also I knew stories of betrayal.

Well-known writer, Andrew Harvey, tells of his eventual disappointment with Mother

Meera, and confesses to feeling deeply betrayed by, what Harvey terms, her manipulation

and homophobia when she asks him to sever an intimate relationship with another male.

Despite Harvey’s profound experiences of the Divine Feminine through Mother Meera, he

came to think of these experiences as merely a grounding stage on to develop a more

mature connection to spirituality that was his own.

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I arrived in Balduinstein around 9pm, and had no idea where I would stay. Being

alone at that hour was always a worry, even in a quiet riverside village such as this. Just as I

was thinking, “What the bloody hell am I doing on these endless foreign dusty roads?” I

saw a heart shining up out of the mud next to the platform. I’d seen hearts everywhere. I

saw them at home too: on the ceiling above my bed, on the toilet floor, in leaves, rocks,

other things. Liz, who I’d met in Chartres, said she saw them also.

Signs had been around all day. Once I’d have thought it mere coincidence or

imagination. Now I can’t explain. The number thirty-one had kept shining out at me in

Chartres, the number of my Merewether house at home. As I stepped from the station onto

the wet, village road, I saw it again—a large number “31” in the centre of a wall near the

river. No house, just that white number shining out on a black domed background in a gold

framed plaque. Close by, I found a cheap hotel.

The next day, I ascended the hill to Schaumburg to the ashram of Mother Meera,

hoping for accommodation. Entschuldigung, bitte schön, bitte I chanted, as I climbed next

to the long grass at the edge of a ploughed field. I was puffing and had no idea why I was

saying that silly mantra, the only German words that came to mind. Bitte schön

entschuldigung, I puffed as I climbed to the top. There, the ashram, three hundred metres

away, came into view. I stood there, and sensed someone watching, saying: How much

longer will you tramp in order to receive that which you already have?

I looked up instinctively to the ancient castle of Schaumburg, and then across to the

four-storey ashram. It was an old rendered brick building, sandy-yellow, block-like, maybe

a hotel in its day, surrounded by fields and the Black Forest. A small casement window at

the top of the ashram was slightly ajar. I felt a sudden subtle movement of air, noticed

sunlight twinkle on the damp, long grass, their blades moving ever so softly.

I stood for a few minutes catching my breath, and then pushed on, past old apple

trees, the last of their fruits rotting on the ground. I continued with the silly chant,

Entschuldigung, bitte schön, together with a new background drone: How much longer will

you seek for that which you already have? But everywhere in chorus, the hills, and the soft

pastures were lit in yellows, oranges, reds; and as I walked, something also lit up in me. I

paused a hundred metres from the ashram. The sky was soft blue, two white-tailed eagles

encircled above; their movement seemed charged, ecstatic.

I rang the ashram’s door bell, but heard only a hollow echo as it sounded into a

seemingly, vast empty chamber. Nothing stirred. I sat on the ashram’s cold stone steps,

phoning the ashram’s number at least twenty times. But the line was busy. I prayed for help.

All at once, three birds plummeted with a crashing sound into a dome of brambles in the

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centre of the driveway, directly in front of me. It was as if they had fallen from the roof, or

from that upper casement window, but they’d disappeared. Instinctively, I moved off.

A sudden wave of cold hit me as I walked across the front of the ashram to a path that

led down through the Black Forest, feeling sure it would lead to Balduinstein. Everything

was silent except the crackling, cackling autumn leaves. I moved with a light tread, almost

holding my breath, descending through the womblike silence of the forest, until forty

minutes later I arrived at foot of the mountain on the fringes of Balduinstein. This quiet

riverside village with a population of five hundred was surrounded by fields and the Black

Forest. I looked out at the steep-roofed, half-timbered black and white houses, the church

spire of St Bartholomew’s rising up, and the ruins of a fourteenth century castle perched on

a rock just above the town.

Right away, I found a place to stay. An old German woman, Gerda, lived alone and

rented out rooms in her three-storey five-bedroomed home at the base of the mountain. I

booked a small ground-floor room for two weeks; it looked out onto the garden and had a

writing desk at the window. Gerda offered to organise a bicycle from her friend in the

village, and then she helped me book eight darshans with Mother Meera.

In the room next to mine was Fran, a psychotherapist from Melbourne with a round

happy face and short grey-white hair, though mostly she wore a beanie. Fran had arrived

that afternoon, and had a twenty-year-old son in Australia. We went together for our first

darshan with Mother Meera the next night. Another house-guest offered us a lift, but Fran

and I were keen to walk through the Black Forest. We rugged up; it was freezing; the track

was dark and we had to use torches the whole way, relieved to reach the clearing at the top

where we could see the softly-lit ashram in the distance. We both laughed. Fran teased me

about the faintness of my torch, and I said she looked like a miner with that lamplight on

her head.

There were many devotees outside the ashram; a long, silent line began at the

Ashram’s steps; the area was lit by a single porch lamp. White drifts of vapours moved

around us. Fran and I seemed to be the only ones speaking; we couldn’t help it; both full of

vata somehow, everything seemed funny and exciting. Yet we spoke quietly, respecting the

others’ silence. When it was time to go inside, first-timers were invited to sit in reserved

seating near the front.

We sat two rows from Mother Meera’s chair, which was on a wooden platform at the

front. The hall was full and utterly silent; all darshans were conducted in silence because

Mother Meera explained, “Silence is the language of the Supreme.” Mother Meera’s way

was completely opposite to Amma’s, the “hugging saint,” whose inexhaustible joy often

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rang out in the tingling air around her.

Mother Meera entered through a back hall door and walked down the central aisle to

her chair, her head tilted down, her long dark hair in a loose pony-tail; she wore a

magnificent peacock-blue silk sari with gold edges. I was surprised how small she was, less

than five feet. Gurumayi and Amma were also very short. She sat soundlessly in her chair,

looking down at her hands folded in her lap.

When a hall monitor invited our row to stand in line for darshan I thought: “This time

I’ll take the leap. I don’t have much time, and have done decades of spiritual practice.” I

stood in the silent queue, as one by one people kneeled before Mother Meera. When it was

my turn, I positioned myself as close as I could to her feet, as we were advised to do, and

bowed before her, feeling her finger tips lightly placed on my head. “I want to know the

absolute,” I was thinking. When she took her hands away, I looked up with the deepest

reverence, thinking of my plea.

But as I gazed up, I saw she looked frightened, as if the watery surface of her eyes

had become an agitated sea. I’d not expected this. “What? Is she even enlightened?” The

doubt flashed through my mind. I tried to banish it, but Mother Meera had already cast her

eyes down, signaling my turn was over. I tried to get up, but felt disorientated and was

helped.

When I sat down, I was powerfully pulled into stillness. My eyes were closed and my

breath was coming in deep rhythmic waves. Perfect posture. My eyeballs felt like they’d

been seared. Each breath was like drinking in a world of bliss. Everything was purple and

mauve. Sometime later, when I tried to open my eyes, it was near impossible to draw away

from the magnetic pull of this inner vision, still coursing through me.

Later I learned Mother Meera places her fingers tips on your head for about ten

seconds so as to read how much energy you have: two subtle white lines on one’s back,

start at the toes, rise along each leg, then join at the base of the spine where they become a

single line reaching to the top of the head. When Mother Meera touches your head,

apparently the light moves upward in the white line, and she reads it like reading a meter.

When Mother Meera looks into your eyes, she says she is looking into every corner of your

being, untying knots in the soul body and infusing them with light.

After darshan that night, Fran and I walked to the base of the mountain through the

Black Forest, sharing our experiences on the winding path back down. The next day, I

cycled along the Lahn River, alone. At lunchtime I sat on a remote seat on the far riverbank,

eating a boiled egg and roll left over from breakfast. I thought of my children:

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My Dearest Children,

I saw all five of you standing before me on the banks of the river Lahn, first

William, then Anna—all of you in order—Linden, Tristan, and then Julian, too, as

if you were really there. Your living faces were before me, shining and strong.

I’d started to write this in my journal but had to stop, tears falling on to the page,

wetting it, smudging the ink. As tears flowed more, the moistness stopped my hand sliding

as I tried to write. I’d told the children I’d be in silence for two weeks at the Ashram. I’d

begin letters, often in my mind, but not send them:

My Dear Children,

You are all always with me... We are so close, our absolute nearness at this level,

yet I know you are confused. In my dreams I see the misunderstandings between

us….

Next to the Lahn River that morning as I cried, it seemed I could have gone on

crying, sinking into those emotions forever. But instead, after sitting like that for some time,

I moved on, pushing the bike up a forest path to the slow gentle sound of autumn leaves,

falling and tumbling through the bare branches.

The nights were filled with restless fragments of dreams similar to numerous others

I’d had before. Over the years that were to follow, it was my dreams that helped me to

unravel things and let go. In Germany, dreams revealed the horror and pain of the severing

from my children. In one dream, the children sat with Wayne having dinner. My parents

were there. I was angry with Mum, a little with Dad, but furious with Wayne. I saw his lying

games, his stealing my heritage. I wanted to fly at him, but was not sure I had a case. Other

dreams I’d be with the children, on trains, in strange houses but always we had to part....

Sometimes, I’d do yoga in the Black Forest before Gerda’s generous German

breakfast of eggs, toast, cold meats, cheeses and freshly brewed coffee. I’d cycle next to the

river, either with Fran or alone. I also read a lot, studying Mother Meera’s books. Her words

and spiritual experiences had been written down by her uncle, Mr. Reddy, who was also her

guardian and devotee, as well as an Indian woman in her sixties, Adilakshmi, who was a

companion, secretary and devotee.

Adilakshmi explained that Mother Meera had little formal education and had learnt

from the fiery and immediate awareness of the soul and the supermind. Mother Meera, she

said, worked with “Paramatman’s light,” which was like electricity, and everywhere.

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Paramatman, the Supreme beyond all modifications, had a voice like thunder, and one

otherworldly journey to Paramatman Mother Meera described as, “soaring up as if caught in

a whirlwind.” I thought how Mother Meera would have been working with all this during

that January, 1978, when I was in India.

In one darshan I was fearful, my heart tried to speak, I was crying. Another darshan,

my worst attributes sat within me and wouldn’t leave. The next audience with Mother

Meera, as I kneeled before her and then gazed in to her eyes, I saw myself in the third

person, as if observing the fickle imperfections sitting like imposters inside. But this time, a

beam of golden light shot out from Mother Meera’s eyes and moved straight into me. I

believed I’d never been loved like that before. When I sat down, I felt utterly cleansed, and

I cried.

Sometimes, my fears were a plague of parasites, prickling all over, little itches,

making me restless, small biting things on the surface, and I was continually compelled to

remember the anxieties that had plagued me at home: money, mortgage, marriage,

motherhood, feeling shut-in, feeling shut-out, getting old, deceit, lies. If it weren’t for the

children I’d never return.

Yet also there were times I felt myself again as I walked in the winter landscape, a

soft woollen scarf around my neck, my hair falling more gently, somehow. I felt almost as I

had that first time in India: a tender feeling of freedom, altruism, together with a resolute

solidarity with the earth.

When Fran left, I found myself constructing conversations with her in my head. We’d

shared so much. During my final three days at Gerda’s house, I met Friedrich and Ulla,

long-time devotees of Mother Meera. Conversations with them, like those with Fran, were

easy and sincere. In particular I spoke with Friedrich, a medical doctor in Frankfurt; he was

lean, my height, around sixty years of age, with a finely sculpted face and shining white

tousled hair. I think it was Friedrich’s humility I liked most.

Friedrich told me how he’d written to Mother Meera many times with different

problems; he advised me to do this, and said Mother Meera would respond through

Adilakshmi. Friedrich said he often felt Mother Meera’s presence with him, shining clarity

on to challenging situations in his life, even when he wasn’t at the ashram. He told of

miracle stories, such as his daughter, Erika, who’d been unable to conceive for years; but

after they’d sought Mother Meera’s help, who sent her blessing and advised Erika to pray,

Erika conceived almost at once. There were other stories too, such as devotees who’d been

in near accidents and unbelievably escaped, and said they’d felt Mother Meera’s presence

helping them.

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On the banks of the river Lahn on my last morning, there seemed an ominous

foreboding in the autumn leaves. As if the iridescent oranges, deep luminous reds, and soft

sun-drenched yellows of the forest were a fiery herald signalling not only winter, but also

my own death. While I stood observing this, there was a sudden fierce, piercing blast of icy

winds. I took it in with teary eyes, knowing I too was somehow watching my own demise,

though I knew not how.

That night of my last darshan with Mother Meera, I felt I’d gambled away those

precious exchanges. I disliked myself, yet knew I was capable of nothing else. I sat waiting,

exhausted. When our row was invited to line up for darshan, I felt numb.

I kneeled and bowed my head when it was my turn, and again felt Mother Meera’s

tender fingers; when she removed them, I looked up into her eyes.

“Well, then, hmm, so …?” Mother Meera’s eyes seemed to say. I was drained but not

empty, and at that point, the dregs of my spiritual smugness were laid bare.

“Maybe it was that I was expecting you should at least be a little impressed with my

spiritual prowess;” the thought rushed through my mind, accompanied by the ill-construed

vain idea that despite my self-effacement, Mother Meera had never once acknowledged my

spiritual attainment.

“Hmmm, ohh… so…?” Mother Meera’s eyes seemed to reply in that soundless

exchange of my last darshan.

I remained there mute, transfixed, saw those vain, uninvited thoughts writhing;

ensnared inside the perfect mirror surface of her gaze. Directly, my ego was exposed for the

flattering traitor it truly was. And I was emptied.

But in that instant she didn’t put me down. Mother Meera’s eyes shone through me:

Her Divine nobility, impeccable humility was an ineffable blaze inside me; this was not

only hers; it was also my own.

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10. Assisi

A fertile slope hangs from a lofty hill…

from this slope where it breaketh most steep

a sun was born into the world…(viz. St Francis)

(Divine Comedy Dante, in Paradise XI, 43-45)

Somehow I’d believed Assisi would be the summit of my journey, not only because the

miracles of St Francis of Assisi and St Clare had immortalised that sacred place, which was

a sanctuary of nature as well, but also because it was where I’d planned to stay for two and

a half weeks to consolidate something to give me strength before returning home. Maybe I

was looking for a miracle.

It was said that when Clare took the vows of the Franciscan order, the divine fire

encircling Francis and Clare was a celestial blaze that could be seen for miles. I thought

about such wonders after dropping the children at school, shopping, making dinner.

Researching these things was what I did instead of reading magazines, or newspapers, or

being fashion conscious, or watching TV at night. Something vital seemed missing from the

glib reality of most of western life.

Something important was also missing from this trip. After Mother Meera, I’d gone

to Malta, and begun preparations for the boys to join me. I wanted to spend time in that

place of megalithic goddess temples before meeting the boys in Rome. The goddess temples

there were older than the pyramids, the oldest in the world.

But after arriving in Malta, I walked the dense mazes of streets in Valletta, the capital,

with my mobile burning at my ear. Wayne had told Anna she wasn’t allowed to organise

the boys’ travel. “You work it out with Dad,” she’d said. Repeatedly I called for days, and

listened to Wayne’s abuse, biding my time so we could get to the part where we’d arrange

the boys; but he refused everything.

“I’m not allowing them to go,” he repeatedly said, after I’d listened to his streams of

offensive comments.

“You can’t do this. It’s already organised,” I said. “I support you taking the children

to South Africa. You wouldn’t like it if I said they couldn’t go.”

“That’s different. That’s my family.”

“But this is my family in England.”

“You’re not stable, you’re crazy,” he went on. “That’s why the boys can’t go.”

“Stop it, Dad. Let me speak,” Tristan called out. I heard Wayne, irate, the boys

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pleading with him in the background.

“You must let them come,” I said. “It’s part of their heritage. Besides, it was agreed

before I left.” “Please,” I begged, “will you put the boys on?”

“I don’t want them to speak to you. You’re unbalanced. You’re demented. What do

you want to say? I’ll tell them.”

Finally, Wayne did allow Tristan to speak, although I could hear him muttering at the

side. “It’s okay Mum, I don’t want to come,” Tristan said.

“But… you were excited. You wanted to come before I left. We’ll go to see the

family in England; we’ll go to Florence to see “the David,” and to Rome. Your father

shouldn’t be doing this.”

“My decision has nothing to do with Dad,” Tristan told me. Even after I returned,

Tristan continued to believe this was true.

“I still really want to come…,” twelve-year-old Julian said. “But I only want to come

if Tristan comes too.” I could hear Tristan arguing with his father in the background, who

didn’t want Julian speaking to me. My voice felt infinitesimally tiny. There was no option

but to stand down.

I left Malta in a hurry. Even though I’d spent a day wandering around in the womb-

like temple of Hagar Qim from 5,000 BCE, and travelling to Calypso’s island, it was as if I

was suffocating in Malta. When the plane ascended that afternoon at sunset, it seemed all

the gods and goddesses were there in the clouds in a merry, feathered group, rose and red,

winged. “See what you’re missing?” they seemed to say. The plane circled as wide as the

sky’s dome, smooth, undulating turns. I looked down on the isle of Malta. Unlike England’s

ordered array of checkered fields, this island seemed a fragment of a universe that stretched

to the stars.

The air was dense and freezing outside Santa Maria degli Angeli Station as I stood gazing

up at Assisi. The many-tiered, medieval village was perched halfway up on the southwest

slopes of Mount Subasio; there was snow on the tops. I’d reached the bus stop just in time

to see the old blue-and-white commuter bus for Assisi pulling out. My eyes followed as it

disappeared around the corner. But schedules had lost all meaning, it having been twenty-

four hours since I left my room in Malta. I looked up again at the fortified town of Assisi

and felt a flash of disappointment, thinking it looked more civilised than I’d expected.

The station’s espresso bar was close by; it was small and crowded, but the aroma of

coffee was divine. I looked at the faces of the Italians talking and gesturing, and glanced

down at my Italian phrase book: “Un grande caffè piatto bianco un croissant di cioccolata

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per favore,” I recited the words as I stood at the dark, wooden L-shaped counter, trying to

blend into the Umbrian scene. The wiry, dark-haired waiter leaned forward, showing

slightly stained teeth. “Large coffee, milk, one croissant, chocolate?” He said,

communicating also with dark, expressive eyes. I nodded, noticing a large print of the

Virgin Mary above the cappuccino machine. A young couple who were about to leave lent a

hand steering my luggage around tables and chairs. “Grazie, grazie, molto grazie,” I said as

I sat down at the round wooden table.

“Where are you from? How long are you here?” asked the students from Perugia,

who were visiting Assisi for the day. Their eyes grew bright when I mentioned Australia, as

if they’d just spotted a rare bird. Hints of my own duplicity prickled, remembering the

many times in Australia I’d felt the necessity of qualifying that I was not Australian, but

“born in England.”

I sipped coffee and reached for the Lonely Planet guide. But my mind was swirling

and dreaming in another place. I’d easily defined myself as Australian in the café, and

identified myself as English in Australia, but which one was I? Certainly, I felt decidedly

un-English sitting there. Actually, I’d rather be classified as neither—always hankering

after the fringe, vague edges, not being boxed up. What we know of the self does not define

who we are.

I remembered my rational mother’s view about my unconventional ideologies, and

this made me recall her recent advice about Wayne: “All men are like that,” she’d said, as if

I should’ve known. “Why did you have to tell her?” she went on, speaking to Wayne while

I remained there, as if his infidelity were of no consequence. She seemed to enjoy the

drama, her elevated status with my children, and with Wayne. They became better friends.

He scored an advocate, playing down his unfaithful role, and turned my own mother against

me.

It was hard losing her friendship. She was a Leo and loved the sun. That was partly

how we ended up in Australia. Besides numerous family gatherings, we’d shared laughs,

cups of tea with the children on the verandah, and we’d go on trips to the art gallery. I liked

her enthusiasm, but my mother’s rationalism was hard to accept. I learned early to keep

silent.

I drank a second cup of rich, dark coffee and savoured the soft, warm chocolate

croissant. Immersed in the hum of Italian voices, memories of my dear children rose: I had

to smile remembering three-year-old Tristan, how once, when he’d been lost in the

supermarket back home and I’d asked him afterwards why he didn’t ask for help, he’d said,

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tears streaming down: “I couldn’t ask for help because everyone was speaking Italian.”

Now, here I was, hopelessly lost, and everyone truly was speaking Italian.

Stepping outside onto the street, I felt renewed, and ready to find my way through to Assisi.

It was always a challenge sourcing cheap, clean accommodation, while navigating a new

place as well as lugging baggage. A number of others waited at the bus stop outside the

train station. I looked down at my alarming load. All zips on my pack were straining, the

outer pockets were splayed. As well as a tent, sleeping bag, clothes and food, my pack now

contained at least twenty books. I was worrying about how to get onto the bus, chastising

myself for travelling with a pack that I couldn’t lift.

When the bus arrived, however, I was helped by two well-dressed Italians, who

squeezed my pack through the door, and lifted it up the steep narrow steps without my

asking. The bulging pack filled the aisle next to me, as the small commuter bus zigzagged

along a network of streets, before leaving the little town of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

The passengers who’d helped with my luggage plied me with questions. These were

not the local café dwellers; they were visiting from Milan. It was difficult to understand

them above the noise of the bus and other conversations, and I felt arrogant requiring them

to speak English when I was in Italy. My smile felt brittle. I wanted to disappear. “Yes,” I

re-confirmed. “I’ve been travelling alone for five weeks.” Memories I’d thought long

discarded were dredged up, times when I’d been imprisoned in this same acute self-

consciousness as a late teenager.

As the bus approached the ancient village, I stood with the other passengers ready to

file out. No vehicles were allowed inside Assisi’s walls. The two Italian men who’d helped

waited with their partners outside, expecting to offload my things. But when I heard there

was another bus stop at the top, I’d decided to stay on.

“It’s just a short walk through Porta San Francesco to the Basilica of St Francis,” one

of the well-dressed men who’d lifted my pack called out to me.

“Everyone gets off here,” his partner said, smiling; she was about my age, wearing a

designer coat and finely crafted, high-heeled leather boots. She saw my uneasiness. I

wondered if she felt sorry for me. “This is the best place,” she assured.

The driver was waiting; the engine was running. I’d lost my voice. I knew it would be

easier to wheel my luggage down the hill even if it was a greater distance. I moved to the

window mouthing “Grazie, grazie,” waving, and pointing up the hill. As the bus turned to

ascend to the top of Assisi, I glanced back, saw the others heading towards the

insurmountable stonewalls surrounding the medieval village.

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The bus was almost empty. Upwards it climbed through silvery olive groves devoid

of fruit after the November picking, past terraced vineyards, streams; the valley looked a

patchwork of fields below. Ascending further, twisting and winding, I looked out at the

mountains of the Apennine chain and gazed at snowcapped Mount Subasio where St

Francis had retreated to live in a cave—I thought of his sermon to the birds, a story I’d

heard in childhood, when our literary, theological and mythical realities existed in European

places. It seemed a miracle that I was here.

I placed my hands in prayer, though obscured the gesture from the three others on the

bus by placing them rather to the side of my face, leaning on them lightly against the

window to make it appear I was resting. I looked out at the lush green soft heart of Umbria

and was filled with devotion and thanks.

As the bus spiralled still higher, the landscape seemed enveloped in a thin, misty sort

of veil as if we were travelling up Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory. Dante alludes to St

Francis in Divine Comedy, saying that even the name Assisi, derived from Latin ascendere,

falls short of understanding the great spiritual heights reached by St Francis in this place.

At Piazza Matteotti at the top, I alighted and walked through the old stone arched gate

of Assisi, wanting my pilgrimage to disappear into the peace of this place with its soft,

pink-tinged medieval stone houses arranged in tiers. But inside the city, I cringed, knowing

the familiar knocking, grating noise of my pack on wheels would accompany me all the

way down to the Piazza del Commune, as it trailed behind over the cobblestone streets,

announcing my arrival like a catastrophe in this spiritual oasis.

Assisi’s history dated back to pre-Roman times. The Piazza del Commune was built directly

over a Roman forum, which could be visited underneath. It was lunchtime when I arrived in

the vibrant Piazza; a woman holding a clipboard with papers and a pen walked over. She

began in Italian but I interrupted: “Non parlo Italiano, parlo Inglese?” I asked.

“Ah, sorry… would you like to register for activities today? Crafts, concerts or,”

she said, nodding towards the portico of the Roman Temple: “Visitors are invited to write a

prayer in wax on gold paper. They’ll be thrown into the bonfire tonight in front of La Rocca

Maggiore.” The woman spoke as if to an honoured guest, while I felt bedraggled and

middle-aged. “There’ll be a candlelight procession up to the fort at 6pm if you want to

come,” she added, pointing up to the massive fourteenth-century papal fortress towering

over Assisi. It was at this point I learned it was the “Feast of the Immaculate Conception,”

an Italian public holiday. The timing felt auspicious.

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Thanking her, I left the busy square for the even busier tourist office that fronted the

square, only to discover there were no vacancies in the monasteries of Assisi. The tourist

attendant turned the computer screen so, together, we could go over the lists again. But all

were fully booked. She seemed as disappointed as me and printed off a list of other places. I

decided on a moderately cheap room in the middle of town, two minutes’ from the Basilica

of St Clare’s, thinking I’d move after a couple of nights. But the room was only available if

I took it for a week. Reluctantly, I agreed and the tourist attendant penned a line to it on a

tourist map. Uberto, the owner, would meet me there in an hour.

I stepped outside and looked over to the Roman Temple of Minerva; the medieval

bell-clock tower next to it soared forty-five metres into the air. I walked through the

bustling piazza, passing almost without notice in, and leaned my pack against one of the

elegantly fluted columns at the bottom of the temple steps. There were six columns; they

were huge and supported intricately decorated Corinthian capitals at the top.

Goethe had written that words were not enough to express what a contemplation of

this monument aroused, that its fruits would be eternal. Yet I felt uncomfortable there and

never did go back until my final day, ending the journey where it had begun. The temple

had been built by the Romans in the first century BCE, and while the inner sanctum was

altered in the seventeenth century, the rest was original. It was generally assumed the

temple was dedicated to Minerva, Roman incarnation of the Greek Goddess Athena, virgin

goddess of poetry, wisdom, medicine etc. Afterwards, I couldn’t help wondering about the

temple’s origins. The Etruscans too had dedicated a Temple to Minerva there and before

that, the site was sacred to the Umbri because of a healing spring. But there were other

theories that the temple had been dedicated to Hercules after a votive plaque to him was

discovered.

I never asked for things for myself in prayer. But on the porch of the temple that day,

when I wrote my prayer in wax on gold paper, I did: I pray that I will hear the voice of

God; know the wisdom of God, and live in this Truth as much as gracefully possible. And, if

it is within Divine Will, please let Linden come and live with me for at least some time

before he leaves home.

The sky was a soft diaphanous blue. People moved as if cloaked in the finest mist of

reverence and ease, as if the indelible stamp of St Clare and St Francis was encoded into the

air, the earth, the architecture. I sat on the steps eating an apple, a roll and some nuts.

When it was time to look at the guesthouse, I found it without delay. Uberto was a

stout but gentle man, with slightly stooped shoulders and some grey hair. He’d brought his

brother, Fillipo, who spoke more English. Inside, the rich dark tones of the natural wood,

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and the elegance of an unrestored Italian oak hallstand were highlighted in the soft light of

the entrance hall. The brothers soon established that I was single.

But I replied at once, “I’m on a pilgrimage. I’m going to stay in a monastery after this

week.” Then I added, “I’m a teacher in Australia. I’ve come to Assisi to study and pray.”

The brothers proceeded to open the wooden shutters that covered the windows.

“Please, you choose any one of these,” Fillipo said, moving his arm in a wide arc to indicate

all eight rooms on the ground and first floor. The brothers returned to the entrance hall,

giving me space. I looked in each room and then peered down over the carved wooden

balustrade on the floor above. Fillipo smiled and called up, “The house is empty until

Boxing Day; after … the house fully booked for winter holidays. Why do you want to

move? Please, you take any room … you pay same price.”

When I noticed a large ground-floor double room with an ensuite and a view of the

Basilica of St Clare, I couldn’t resist. “Can I take this one for a week?” I asked. The

brothers seemed pleased I’d chosen it, and agreed straightaway. The room was light, clean

and open, with a desk at the window, bedside tables and a lamp on either side of the bed;

ten metres down the hall was the kitchen with its dark grey, granite benches, large

commercial gas cooker and lots of storage.

After settling in, I went to Uberto’s deli to pay. It was full of the best Italian foods,

cheeses and meats, and a wide range of gourmet items. The fragrance was delicious. I ended

up staying in the guesthouse for two and a half weeks.

That night, I had no inclination to join the candle-lit procession; it was freezing and

particularly dark—a new moon; but I couldn’t resist a glimpse of the lights winding up the

hill. When I went outside, however, I could see no one, and there was not even one candle

light.

In the dusky mauve-blue light of evening, the next day, I half-ran down the hill over the

cobblestones towards the church of San Pietro; I could see it from some distance, the

Romanesque square bell tower and unusual dome, with its Benedictine abbey attached.

Assisi was full of churches and holy sites. San Pietro was set on the southern border of

Assisi and had once stood outside the city’s walls, but was now encompassed within them. I

hurried towards the high stone entrance arch, decorated with beautiful vine-scrolls; and was

surprised to find its great, front wooden doors were locked. I stepped back, looking up at

the austere, though lovely, rectangular façade with three ornamented rose windows high up;

orchestral music and voices rang out.

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I’d been looking forward to the concert since I’d arrived, having singled it out from a

long list. San Pietro was known for its great acoustics and the programme included four of

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, some of Handel’s Carmelite Vespers, as well as a selection

from Hildegard von Bingen’s sacred music by Rome’s Academy of Ancient Music. I

thought to tap lightly on the doors, but had already decided against it, even before I was

momentarily jolted into a type of déjà vu. For a split second, the stone lions on either side of

the steps had seemed real.

It was then that I noticed a small side entrance twenty metres away; it was covered

with a thick red velvet curtain, and I glanced inside before going in; it took a while to adjust

to the soft lighting; the church was packed. I headed towards the back, but an usher moved

forward, steering me to a pew in the middle of the nave. At first, I felt cramped, people on

all sides, but as the harmony of the music resonated inside the stone walls and inside me,

soon I was being buoyed along on a shimmering sea of violins, violas, cellos, flutes,

bassoon, harpsichord, and others.

Everything changed at intermission when the lights came on and family and old

friends all around me greeted one another. I felt displaced, and memories of my own family

rose, but because the Italians on my row had been particularly friendly and welcoming, I

didn’t know how to leave. I struggled to conceal my vulnerability.

Not far from San Pietro’s was the massive Basilica di San Francesco. It dominated

the extreme western corner of Assisi, and the great convent attached to it loomed large on

the northwest side. It was a thirty-minute walk downhill from the guesthouse and, during

the first week, often I went there twice a day; I meditated in the crypt, and wandered

through the upper and lower churches, one on top of the other, connected by an internal

staircase. On the walls of both basilicas were numerous frescoes by some of the best-known

thirteenth-century Italian artists such as Giotto, Cimabue, Martini and Lorenzetti.

Giotto’s twenty-eight frescoes depicting St Francis’ life filled much of the nave of the

upper basilica. I studied the murals as a way of understanding St Francis’ life such as his

receiving the stigmata at Mt La Verna, when a seraph with six fiery wings had hovered in

the air before him; after Francis’ body was impressed with nail holes on his feet and hands,

and an open scar on his right side, which often bled. Another mural showed how farmers

from nearby villages had been terrified that night, seeing Mount La Verna enveloped by fire

for more than hour as bright flames lit the surrounding mountains and valleys.

Eight hundred years ago Francis had said, “So great is the good I expect that all pain

is to me a delight.” Remarkably, Assisi has been a peaceful place of pilgrimage since then;

a venue for international peace conventions; and hundreds of monks and nuns visit

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annually, especially over Christmas. There were Dominicans, Benedictines, Carmelites,

Franciscans and others in their black, grey or brown habits. I loved seeing them at Mass or

walking around, that gentle contemplative air, particularly the Franciscans with their brown

habits and sandalled feet. I spoke with two Franciscan nuns who were visiting from Rome

and they seemed happy and wholesome.

At first I was disappointed that the worldly element of Assisi impinged on this

monastic town: the delicious bakeries, interesting bookshops, galleries, craft shops and

restaurants. But being in Assisi brought a shift in my perception. Here one could be

immersed in deep prayer while also engaged in everyday and ordinary life, like the concept

of sahaja samadhi, or turiya teeta, said to be the highest state. St Francis also lived in this

way; having prepared a dwelling place for God inside, he remained deep within his own

spirit, as he wandered, giving this fullness through miracles and healing to the world.

I’d given William the prayer of St Francis in a small wooden, gold-edged frame for

his birthday when he turned sixteen. I’d expected he’d tuck it away in a cupboard or drawer,

but the prayer remained prominent on his desk. Even when William shared a house with

university friends, the prayer sat atop a chest of drawers. I’d been thinking about William

and that gift when an email arrived from Anna saying that William was about to have his

Final Design Exhibition. I was heart-broken not to be there and wrote at once:

Assisi, Italy: 13\12\07

My Dear William,

I have wanted to write to you so often. Anna tells me your Design Exhibition is opening

tomorrow and also that you did very well in your end of year subjects at Uni. I know you would

have deserved it.

As I think of you now, standing at the end of yet another completion—the potential of

your life, unwritten—I remember the role you took growing up; being the oldest of five was no

easy part and you were always helpful and good at fixing things. Especially I remember you

rescuing the baby guinea pigs trapped under the cage when you were five, when I had no idea

what to do and you ran to fetch the wire-clippers; and then you rescued fifteen-month-old Linden

when he’d climbed to the top of the builders’ ladder while the new verandah was being built after

the fire.

I went to the place where St Francis composed the Canticle to Brother Sun early this

morning; as I stood in winter sunlight, in sparkling grass between the dew soaked olive trees, I

thought of you and of the prayer of St Francis on your desk.

It is so very cold here in Assisi on the mountainside and has rained almost non-stop since

I arrived. I’m renting a room in a stone terrace house in the village; there's no one in the old 4-

storey building but me. Sounds spooky, but it’s not. It’s cosy, a heater, a desk, all my books and

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writing spread out...

If you climb the narrow, marble stairs at the top of the house there’s a small door. If you

bend down, squeeze through, you can go out on to a 3m x 2m platform on the roof with a

washing line and a chair, and spectacular views of the valley and beyond.

I often sit in the tomb of Saint Francis in the ancient Crypt, underground, below the main

church there. Candles always burn, and there is the subtle fragrance of oriental lilies. Extraordinary

things are still said to happen. This is my last letter to you because, as the boys are not joining me,

I shall return to Australia in two weeks. Looking forward to seeing you soon

Many Blessings for a Wonderful Exhibition!

Love Mum xx

Sanctuary

During the second week in Assisi, it started snowing. I’d heard the silence at Eremo delle

Carceri on Mt Subasio was profound and had wanted to visit since I’d arrived. The

hermitage and surrounding woods had been protected by the friars since St. Francis’ times.

When St Francis had first gone there in 1205 to pray and do penance, the only building had

been a small twelfth-century oratory. He’d lived alone in a cave and when other brothers

followed, the tiny oratory became known as Santa Maria delle Carceri because of the small

grottos occupied by friars. “Carceres” was Latin for “isolated places,” as well as “prisons.”

The melted snow mixed with the dirt had turned to slippery brown ice in the freezing

winds as I walked to Assisi’s upper gate, Porta Cappuccini, near Piazza Matteotti at the top.

I thought of the terrors of breaking a limb and measured each footstep up the hill. Outside

the ancient arched gate, the road was even steeper and more slippery. But after taking a fork

in the road, two hundred metres away, the snow was deep, soft and untouched on the

narrow upwardly spiralling road to Mount Subasio.

There were no signs and the landscape was covered in snow and enveloped in surreal,

grey-white vapours. As I ascended, I could see nothing more than twenty thirty metres

ahead; except once, through the swirling bleakness, I caught a snatch of bright orange

beaming out from a snow-covered persimmon tree; another time when the blanketed mist

momentarily parted, I glimpsed a sliver of the valley and a house below. As I walked

further up, I noticed Assisi’s small campground in a basin, set off to the side of the road; it

was deep in snow and deserted.

A few days ago, I’d met an English couple in their late twenties who’d been staying

in the campground. I’d met them on the verandah of a café up one of the side alleys in

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Assisi. It was freezing. We three had been the only ones outside. They were travelling,

living in their Kombi, and the fellow looked so much like Linden, he felt like family. He

also seemed strangely drawn to speak with me. We’d sat looking at the view, rugged up,

eating pizza and drinking coffee. He was a physiotherapist, just what Linden wanted to do,

and I asked him about it. He loved the work and spoke of the many career opportunities,

and I kept making notes in my head of all the things I would tell Linden when I returned.

The couple had told me they were leaving because a weather report had warned the

campground would be snowed in for weeks.

Further up the mountain, three donkeys leaned against an old wooden fence meshed

in with chicken wire. I’d been alone, shrouded in the silent swirling mist for the past hour.

But as I stood looking at the donkeys, wondering how much more of the four-kilometre

journey I still had to trek, I heard the sound of a car in the distance.

“Ciao!” A large fellow in his sixties pulled up; he was leaning out of the window of

his four-wheel drive and asked, “E 'tutto ok?”

“Sì, io … Carceri,” I said, looking up the hill.

“Ahh, English,” he went on, switching languages; he said his house was close to the

Carceri and offered me a lift up the hill. I hesitated, but felt safe. He asked about my

journey, said he and his wife had lived on Mount Subasio for years; and it wasn’t long

before we’d arrived at the end of the road where a sign pointed to the Carceri. I thanked the

fellow and stepped outside.

All zips and snap locks were closed on my hooded jacket, and my deep-maroon

woollen shawl was wrapped around my neck and face so it formed thick insulation; the

shawl was iced up and its frozen edges moved against my lips as I breathed. The Carceri

was still a fifteen-minute walk. My feet crunched through the deep crisp snow in the white

holm-oak woods and my eyes were sore and burnt from the lashing snow particles. The

small white-grey icy balls whirled around, flurrying against my face; my feet were frozen. I

thought of St Francis and St Clare who wore only simple homespun garments, and sandals

or bare feet.

In the open courtyard of the small hermitage of Eremo delle Carceri, I was met by

two Franciscan monks who were out there shifting supplies. They invited me to use the

chapel, to look around and to stay as long as I wanted, and gave me a map; it seemed we

three were the only ones there. I paused, looking in to an ancient well in the courtyard

where St Francis had miraculously caused water to flow from a rock, then went down to

take a look at St Francis’ cell.

The hermitage was built against the steep mountain side out of which many parts of

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its rocky walls were hollowed. I ducked through small medieval doorways and squeezed

down the stone stairs before arriving in the low-ceilinged grotto of St. Francis. But as I

stood stooped next to his bed, carved out of the mountainside, I felt imprisoned and

nauseous in that shadowy space, and left to walk through another stone doorway that led to

a small porch outside. I gazed down at the “Devil’s Hole,” a dark, rough hole in the rock

where St. Francis was said to have thrown a demon. But it was wild out there and I returned

to the courtyard, so as to visit the chapel.

A round door marked Santuario led first to the small stark white stone chapel that St.

Bernardine had built, then to the miniature twelfth-century oratory with an original

altarpiece fresco of the Virgin and Child; but in that subzero, eerie light, the image seemed

remote and I moved on to another door that led in to a newer, light-filled, larger chapel. I

went in. All along one side, large windows looked out onto the densely wooded white

slopes of the gorge, where it seemed all of winter’s wildness had been unleashed.

The altar was a large flat slab of stone, resting on a single block of rock, apparently

the foundation stone. The altar formed yet another tau—the Franciscan T-shaped cross that

was everywhere in Assisi. This newer chapel of thick stone was built into a crevice on the

side of the mountain and its honey-coloured pews seemed welcoming and warm. A deep

royal purple satin cloth with a gold appliqued cross hung from the lectern; on each tip of the

cross was a fleur-de-lis, a religious reference to Mary, and also a symbol of the feminine.

Close by, bright red poinsettia flowers with deep green leaves stood in a vase.

Despite the whishing, whirling, whistling winds outside, inside the stone sanctuary

everything was completely still and I felt the deepest peace. I sat next to the window,

watching branch loads of snow on the high-trunk ilex trees continually bowing, as if

showing constant obeisance before the terrible might of those winds. Alone, I prayed and

contemplated there, and stayed for about two hours. I wondered why I was there, why I had

I needed to walk to the ends of the earth, to the wild depths of that grotto? Would I at last

move into the depths of truth inside myself and formulate a vision to give me strength back

home? As I prayed there, I was searching for You, longing for You, yearning for You, who

was in my own heart...

Afterwards, I walked beyond the hermitage, in to those swirling white winter depths,

hoping to retreat in to St Francis’ cave, and see the famous holm oak tree where he’d given

his legendary “sermon to the birds.” But as I walked calf deep in the trackless snow, I

realised how quickly one might become lost. My shoes were soaked, my feet frozen, and

snow kept slipping down through the top of my shawl. I turned back, thanked the

Franciscan monks, and then half-ran through the squall all the way back down to Assisi,

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thinking “Not this, not this.”

Everyone in Assisi understands the contemplative air: nuns and monks going between

Basilicas, monasteries, their long flowing garments almost prayerful as they walk. I too had

moved around in the graceful folds of prayer, often feeling almost unobserved. I’d been just

about completely alone for two weeks. And it wasn’t until my last days in Assisi that I spent

time in the Basilica of Santa Chiara. I wondered why more prominence wasn’t given to St

Clare’s story and felt I’d betrayed some aspect of my own womanhood by not spending

more time there, especially as it was only a few minutes’ walk from the guesthouse.

The beautiful geometric simplicity of the basilica’s façade dominated the Piazza San

Chiara with its distinctive soft, wide lines of pink limestone quarried from Mount Subasio.

The bands of colour were showing for the first time in centuries, because the Basilica had

been cleaned in 1997 following the earthquake. But still, it was often empty.

I sat in the half-light of the empty Chapel of the Crucifix in the Basilica of Santa

Chiara following afternoon Mass. It was from this crucifix that a voice had spoken to

Francis when he’d famously heard: “Go repair my church, Francis…” as a shaft of light had

beamed through the window. The large cross was suspended over the altar and almost two

metres high. Unlike a traditional crucifix, this twelfth-century icon, possibly painted by one

of the local Syrian monks, expressed the whole paschal mystery—not only Christ’s death,

but his resurrection and ascension into glory.

In the Chapel that afternoon, I looked up at the crucifix as I whispered the words of St

Francis’ prayer: sighing murmurs, yearning words that looped back and amplified inside

me, before spiralling down into the soft red-walled chamber of my heart. I sat completely

silent and still in that ocean of sighing and crashing words, while an epicentre of subtle

tongues and mouths in my chest prayed the “Prayer of St Francis before the Crucifix:”

All highest glorious God,

Cast your light into the darkness

Of my heart

Give me right faith

Firm hope

Perfect charity

And profound humility

With wisdom and perception

O Lord, so that I may do

What is truly your holy will.

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That night I pored over the letters St Clare had written to Agnes of Prague, a woman

of noble birth, who’d established an Order of St Clare in Bohemia. The passion of mystics

and saints was well documented: St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, St Catherine of

Siena and others. And the living mystical passion of St Clare shines through her letters

often inspired by Biblical verses: O heavenly Spouse! Draw me after you, let us run in the

fragrance of your perfumes, I will run and not tire… in the mirror of your perfection…

The present stone crypt, below the Cathedral of San Chiara, was built when St Clare’s

remains were found in a stone sarcophagus under the high altar in 1850. Although the

crypt’s walls were once completely frescoed, these were removed in the seventeenth

century and were now mainly bare. St Clare’s remains were partially restored with wax and

placed inside a crystal casket. Early the next morning I went there.

I felt the stillness there in the crypt as I gazed at the crystal casket of St Clare: her

perfect peace. I stood outside of time, as silence flooded in through my hands, my

feet, the pores in my skin; until I disappeared inside that silence that was also

inside of me…

I may have remained longer except for two children who approached with their

mother, clamouring to stand on the stone pedestal where I stood. I roused, smiled and

moved on, wondering if they too would feel that great pause lingering in the quiet of the

saint’s resting place.

I paused, taking in a mass vestment made by St Clare around 1300, at the other end of

the crypt; there was also the breviary and tunic of St Francis, a shirt embroidered by St

Clare, Clare’s hair, the original Rule of the Franciscans, and other things. Their simple

handmade garments had been patched and mended many times.

Outside, the winter sun was shining but it was still cold. The piazza was almost

empty, except for an old Italian couple who sat on a stone bench feeding the pigeons; and

two children who were running around the fountain in the centre of the piazza, their

mothers strolling with prams, chatting. I stood on the edge of the piazza looking out at the

silver-blue haze in the valley, the vast fertile countryside beyond. Words had lost their

power to convey the intensity of what I felt.

Back at the guesthouse, I opened the shutters and sat on the end of the bed, digging

for my journal under a pile of books. The conglomeration of what I’d become seemed clear.

I didn’t write but drew. The strong, deliberate sweep of the pen surprised me—first the head

and shoulders, then a large, round body almost filling the page. It contained a watery-

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wrecked world inside: buildings torn down, hundreds of unplugged wires, spiral springs

hung in various twisted up-and-down positions. The figure had no legs, no arms, no hands,

only feet and ankles. The feet, planted on a miniscule portion of earth, were consumed in

flames, though they did not burn. The caption: My children want this world—I cannot leave

them. The face had no movement. The third eye was the only point fully coloured in. It had

a Franciscan tau over the eyes and nose, like armour, and a gaping hole in the throat. The

caption: I can barely hear you but… the heart knows: it does blaze inside me.

The second picture was similar to the first, except this figure stood up to the armpits

in a murky ocean. The naked, starved body showed no sign to indicate femininity or

masculinity. “My children are here. I cannot find them,” read one caption; another: “A

world I do not understand.” Yet another caption, where a sword was driven into the heart,

dripping both blood and tears: “I have left this world, yet my heart yearns for my children. I

am rent asunder.”

That night I had a vivid dream of Linden, and later discovered that these events

were taking place in his life: at first, you were half pleased, trying not to show it,

telling me you’d done okay in your HSC. You’d projected your UAI (University

Admission Index) from your marks. I hugged you, congratulated you. But later in

that dream when I met with you again, you had retreated; no longer flesh, but a

phantom; your head greatly enlarged, foetal-like, covered in the diaphanous folds

of a thin milky bag; although you could breathe, your mouth had almost

disappeared. Your eyes were slits and seemed closed, as if the skin had grown

over them. You were not flesh. You were so sad, and there was no one to love you,

to bring you out from it. I cried out to you, yearned to be with you, to hold you, to

bring you back, and then I woke up.

I phoned Linden immediately; he picked up, having not long come back from the

letterbox with the letter containing his UAI. He was alone and in shock; at this point, no one

else knew. I strained with my feelings towards him, and spoke from my dream, knowing

how upset he was; though on the phone he played it down. We talked for some time and it

was a good and healing exchange.

When I phoned a few days later to speak with the other children, they had nothing to

say, as if they’d already edited me out of their life. Yet when I spoke with love and longing

about Assisi, I could feel their loss and sadness. I wondered why our lives had turned out

so.

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At Midnight Mass at the Basilica of San Francesco on Christmas Eve, people sat on

the floor, on stairs, stood in aisles. There were robed priests, bishops, a choir and a mini

orchestra. And the slim Gothic columns of the elegant white marble high altar of the lower

basilica were lit by candlelight. Afterwards, as I walked outside past the life-size nativity on

the grass in front of the upper basilica, snow was gently falling. Groups of nuns and monks

in their flowing garments were everywhere; some seemed merry as they walked. I followed,

unable to take my eyes off them. I too sought this utter loyalty to God in every moment, but

I wanted a family, too.

For lunch on Christmas Day, I sat rugged up on a faded green plastic chair on the roof

terrace eating a takeaway meal from the day before. Afterwards, I drank makeshift filter

coffee, made using ground coffee beans bought from the fruit shop, and some old paper

filters from the communal cupboard, with a steel sieve. I’d become used to the nutty full-

flavoured edge.

I’d tried many times to phone the children that day and the night before, but hadn’t

been able to get through. I prayed for guidance and Grace and randomly opened the

guesthouse Bible at Isaiah 8 and 9: “there will be no gloom, for her that was in anguish …

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of

deep darkness on them has light shined….”

The moon was full and high over the Basilica of St Clare that last night in Assisi. The

next morning while half-awake I had a vision:

Bathed in iridescent blue light, a figure whirled and danced; straight after, I saw a

crouching figure resplendent in gold—intense light brimming, shooting into my

heart; also I heard the tolling of inner bells.

In the station café at Santa Degli Angeli that morning, I meet an English woman,

about ten years older than me, a teacher also, though she tutored English from home. She’d

married an Italian, and had also spent Christmas alone in Assisi. She didn’t tell me why.

Her face had looked brooding when I arrived, but afterwards she seemed happy. For me, the

clarity of our exchange was unforgettable. Strange how one can meet briefly with a person

and feel a deep connection.

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11. Transition

“Time is Thy barque and not Thy dwelling place,” Papa often said.

The image of a ship always delights me,

and helps me to bear the exile of this life.

(St Thérèse of Lisieux)

Departure: In less than twenty-four hours, I would be awaiting my departure from Rome’s

Fiumicino International Airport. I wondered how I would live without this art, music and

culture which gave immortal beauty to the themes of life, archetypal myths replaying over

throughout the centuries. I’d had a number of dreams connecting me to home. I knew it

would not be easy. If it wasn’t for the children, I’d never return, even despite Australia’s

pristine air, vast oceans, beautiful beaches, desert heartland and tropical rainforests.

Just outside of Rome, on the train from Assisi, a young gypsy woman with a child

boarded: “If you give me money, it will bring your family and your children luck,” she had

said in Italian. The sonorous beauty and depths of her voice were hypnotic. She wore a

simple Pamela-like dress in natural fabrics, and around her was an unmistakable, yet subtle

aroma of roses; everyone in that packed carriage was listening. I couldn’t decide whether

she’d learned her art well, or whether she was divine, which of course would be rare.

After booking in to a monastery overlooking St Peter’s Basilica, I wandered around

inside the immense opulence of the cathedral feeling both displacement and awe. Standing

before Michelangelo’s Pieta, I cried: the dewy white marble carving of the Virgin Mary

with the dead body of Christ on her knee was one of the most beautiful artworks I’d ever

seen.

Later that afternoon, I strolled down to the Tiber River and looked out from the

ancient stone bridge near the towering cylindrical castle of San Angelo with its magnificent

statue of Archangel Michael on top. What was most uncanny that last afternoon was that in

the sunset clouds, beyond Vatican City and the Tiber River, once more I saw the same sign

I’d seen in the sunrise before leaving Australia: the cow horns with the disk of the sun in

between.

From my third-floor room in the convent that night, I gazed out at the great dome of

St Peters and looked down on to the softly lit St Peter’s Square. I prayed with deep

wrenching devotion. Tears flowed. That last night I had a wakeful dream:

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I perceived a presence kneeling over me, and in my dream I woke, more awake

than day. This figure’s head was surrounded by light and energy lines of the most

peaceful, auspicious resolve. “Who are you?” I whispered. He didn’t answer for a

while, but remained intent on kneeling over me with the most compassionate

solidarity I have ever felt. Then he seemed to answer because I remember hearing

a voice inside me, “one of the four founding fathers,” though I can’t be sure,

because after the dream I felt it was Jesus. I knew he was blessing me. While

kneeling there next to the bed, he was making an unusual hand sign, which I drew

in my journal and later looked up, discovering it was the sign for “Christ the

Pantocrator,” meaning “Almighty Ruler.” I was filled with immense peace when I

woke, and immersed in a profound state of prayer.

Arrival: on arrival at Sydney Airport, four of my five children were there. I couldn’t stop

jumping up and down and hugging them; we were all beaming and the journey back to

Newcastle was full of stories and smiles. Anna drove, and because there’d been a mix-up,

and the tenants hadn’t moved out of my house, we had to go back to my mother’s for two

nights. I was most concerned when my mother greeted me with a grimace, and the limp

formality of a hug.

“We all had Christmas at Adrian’s house with Dad,” Anna announced almost as soon

as we’d all sat down. “It was one of the best Christmases ever,” she added, looking at the

other children, and then at my mother and me.

“That’s good,” I said, in to the silenced room, determined to make this new

beginning a positive start, trying to smile as Anna continued with more details. The next

day we all went for morning tea at a café in Warners Bay near my mother’s house; we sat

outside happily chatting at a table that overlooked Lake Macquarie; directly across the

water, one-kilometre away, was our old family lake home, framed on either side by soft

green plane trees.

On the way back to Mum’s, my sister-in-law phoned, but as I was driving I couldn’t

talk. My mother and the children were annoyed that I’d not returned the four missed calls

from her from the day before. But I’d sensed trouble in that ring. When we walked through

the back door of my mother’s, however, and the phone was ringing, this time there was no

escaping my fate.

“Why are you phoning,” I asked Sandra. “This is the first time you’ve phoned since

the divorce.” My sister-in-law and I had been good friends for more than two decades; we

met regularly when the children were young, and had helped each other after babies and

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other times too. Everyone would have agreed Sandra was the most innocuous woman ever.

In fact, most would have used exactly the same epithets for Wayne.

“I’ve been excited to talk to you, to hear about your trip,” she said.

“You just want to get the gossip then I’ll never hear from you again,” I replied,

unwilling to share the joy of my travels in the face of betrayal.

“Oh… that’s not true,” said Sandra, which was untrue because she hasn’t phoned or

messaged me since.

I told Sandra a few details of the trip, but could tell she had no interest. She’d

condemned the journey as selfish just like my mother and Wayne.

“It was hurtful you all being together at Christmas…” finally, I say.

“Oh…? Oh…? Why’s that…?” Sandra asked, as if she didn’t understand, even

though I see now, this was most likely the reason for her call.

“Well, how would you like your family to continue a close relationship with Adrian if

he was unfaithful? How would you like it if Adrian never discussed things with you, but he

endlessly maligned you to your family?”

“Oh, I don’t know what you mean?” she replied.

“Well… I think it’s immoral,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t want to talk anymore right now.”

“Oh why…?” I heard Sandra starting to ask, as hunched-over and weeping, I began

walking from the room.

My mother took the phone, making sure Sandra didn’t feel snubbed, saying she’d talk

later; then my mother went after me, holding my arm, telling me not to be silly.

“I just need to be alone for a while,” I said trying to get away, sickened that my whole

family refused to acknowledge Wayne’s abuse and infidelity.

“Please leave me,” I said. “You can’t rule my life. I’m fifty.”

“Why are you so upset that we’ve been together,” my mother asked, shaking my

wrists in to sensibleness. “This is what divorced families do. Grow up.”

“Leave me alone. I think it’s corrupt. This is my point of view,” I said. But my

mother stayed, telling me I had to accept this new blend of the family and stop causing

distress.

This time, I held her arms and took her back to her lounge so that I could get away. I

noticed the surprise on her face before, once again, she pursued. A second time, I led her

back to the lounge and, when she continued to thrash me with her opinion, I did something

I’d never done before. I gripped her arms, shouting: “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”

It bruised badly. I was appalled at myself, and the children, who’d been calling for me

to be quiet, were angry and upset. Rightly, my whole family condemned me as brutish and

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out of control.

Departure: all that remained in the exodus following my return was the irrefutable need to

believe in something. Just speaking, or writing or listening to the Sanskrit language was

said to transform one because it was the only language that used both the left and the right

sides of the brain. I needed both to work through the layers and layers of problems that were

to unfold over the coming months.

Chitta sthivat shareera karana baahyeshu

Just as the mind is fixed (in turiya) during introspective meditation, so too during

the ordinary conscious life of the body, senses, and objects, one should remain established in

the inner consciousness, even though the mind is turned outward

(Shiva Sutras: III.39)

When the boys went back to school a few weeks later that January, as planned, I put

the Merewether house on the market. Only weeks later, it sold. I was standing solitary in the

kitchen when I found out; my hands were immersed in warm soapy dishwater around

9.30pm, after yet another day of scattered relief-teaching in schools; I was almost at the end

of daily chores, Tristan and Julian in bed. The wind whirred softly in the night air; its

resonance relaxed my body; I’d grown used to the comfort of such things.

Yet that night was different. I’d kept looking at a cold bright star that was shining in

the kitchen window, as the shadowy leaves of the tuckeroo tree lightly brushed and tapped

the glass. All at once, my body started to tingle. Every cell was alert and I’m not sure to

which part of me a voice spoke, but a message was gifted as swiftly and clearly as if from

winged Mercury: “Your house is sold,” I heard, accompanied by a feeling of bright,

trumpeting angels.

Immediately following, however, I saw a vision of Linden—his face. He looked

tragic just as he had three years ago on the morning he left. It didn’t seem strange that he

was hovering outside the kitchen window, as if beamed up. When he left he’d just turned

sixteen; I couldn’t have stopped him even if I’d tried. An apparition of Linden appeared at

my bedside before dawn on the day he left. This apparition of him told me that he was

leaving, not with words, but volumes can be exchanged in a look. Also, dreams had

prepared me for his departure, and to understand this was his destiny.

But Linden’s leaving had come to stand for so many other losses. I’d held onto that

Merewether house, hands bone white, as if it were the last hope of survival in a stormy sea.

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I’d thought owning it would make life with the children secure, but anxiety constantly

coursed through my body as the demands of the mortgage and constant bills consumed me.

When the phone rang early the next morning and the real estate agent said, “Well,

you’ll never guess what…? Your house is sold.” I wasn’t surprised. It was a relief. “The

buyers seem as keen as mustard,” the agent had added, chuckling.

I felt renewed from the pilgrimage, and my faith remained deep within me, but I

needed to understand my unfathomable life, run to the edges of it, peel back the layers, peer

into the depths. Times before when I’d traveled deeper in to my grief, I saw it was founded

in an even greater anguish inside me, my longing for God. This burned. Stretched across the

canvas of my life, I saw in snatches a whole trailing series of images yearning for God.

“Sharie Samharah Kalanam”

“Therefore in order to put an end to the bondage brought about by Maya” (Shiva Sutras: III.4)

i.e. One should think of one’s body being burnt by kalagni arising from the toe of the right

foot. At last there is the realisation of light, which is sarnta, where there is not the slightest

trace of difference.

(Vijnanabhairava: Verse 52, Shiva Sutras)

Arrival: William began his first job in Sydney as an industrial designer that year, Anna

continued her studies at Sydney University, Linden took a gap year to travel to England and

Europe, while the two younger boys and I moved in to a rental apartment on the next street.

Great Auntie Helen, at eighty-eight years of age, arrived only a few weeks after, and when

we were concerned how she was after a twenty-eight hour flight, she jumped up from her

chair with merry, bright eyes to show us how she could touch her toes; up and down, up and

down she went with her lithe body until we begged her to stop. She’d brought gifts and

stayed for two enchanted weeks.

We’d been renting for three months when I discovered the cliff-top unit in the centre

of Newcastle, across from King Edward Park. Truly, it felt as if years of difficulty were

about to end. But hardly had contracts been exchanged when Mum had a stroke.

My reaction to this news greatly concerned me. I was alone. Heat and prickling anger

coursed through my body as memories of her betrayal rose: her friendliness with Wayne,

believing his lies; the two of them turning my own children against me, and her never

giving up on trying to sway me to her beliefs. The pain stuck like a lump in my throat that

would neither come up, nor go down.

This lump is unexpressed fear and blocked rage that keeps the voice in the throat,

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Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, says. When we do manage to free our own authentic

voices, our whole being resonates with that truth. I remembered my scream after the fire,

my screams during childbirth, how I’d felt connected to a more honest layer of truth within.

When I drove to the hospital, that day, however, I didn’t scream; the lump dissolved in to

the deeper feelings that emerged.

It was a severe stroke; my mother was paralysed on one side and couldn’t walk, speak

or swallow. She was being fed through a tube down her throat, and was wired up. When we

were told the results of numerous tests, doctors advised us she didn’t have much time. I

took leave from the full-time casual teaching work I’d recently begun at the Language

Centre of Newcastle University. All the family sat around Mum’s bedside in the hospital,

chatting and reminiscing; the children brought their art books and drew. My mother’s mind

was undiminished, but she could only rasp out a few blurred words.

When we were alone, I apologised again for the incident in her house and also said:

“Please Mum, I’d really like you to accept that I have a right to live in a way that feels true

for me.” It seemed imperative to broach this issue, for I could clearly see her still trying to

control me with her iron will through the ethers. “Please Mum, I’d like you to respect that

even though it’s not your way, it’s important for me to live my life in my way,” I said.

My mother looked at me as though she were concentrating from a great distance. “It

will be hard…” she said with difficulty, as if each word were scraped out from far away.

“But…I’ll… try.”

We had a month with my mother in the hospital before she died, a time full of love

and Grace. Strangely, since her death, I have felt her support. According to my mother’s

wishes, she was cremated. Adrian insisted on halving the ashes, saying he’d have a private

ceremony with his own family in the bush, and didn’t want me, or my children, or my

father, or Richard there.

I wrote to Sophia, one of my cousins in England, though I didn’t tell her about Adrian

halving the ashes. Sophia’s mother and mine were sisters and had been close all their lives;

Sophia had once described Mum, whom I knew she liked a lot, as “Feisty.”

“Really…?” I’d said, because despite Mum’s iron will, I’d always characterised her

in the bleeding-martyr role. I see now this was due to me being the primary recipient of her

eternal stories of victimhood and exasperation with Dad.

“Oh, yes…” Sophia confirmed, laughing. Anna also straightaway agreed.

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Dear Sophia,

Thank you so much for your kind thoughts and the lovely flowers for Mum—a generous

mixture of bright yellow lilies and red roses. We had a simple memorial service for her in

Christ Church Cathedral in Newcastle in one of the small side-chapels where there was

wheelchair access for Dad. Afterwards, we each lit a candle and then went outside into the

extensive grounds at the back to reminisce under the trees, each sharing something about our

memories with Mum. Although she was never religious, Mum visited this cathedral as it was a

venue for some of the best classical music concerts.

Mum had spoken many times about wanting her ashes to be buried on the point at

One Mile Beach, so after lunch we drove up there and walked out on the headland track, until

we came to a pretty sheltered spot with three casuarina trees, and nearby, a perfect place to sit

on the rocks. Just as we finished burying her ashes, the sun was setting; bright oranges and reds

on the horizon and the skyline detailed with upward sweeps of feathery cloud.

These past weeks have been difficult, especially as Richard has been unsettled all year

following a medication change; he’s moved houses three times. Also, Richard had a cardiac

arrest a week after Mum’s passing. Medical investigations revealed no physiological cause;

doctors suggested it was behavioural. He recovered quickly, but remains troubled and in

transition accommodation.

Besides this, Dad, who is still in Carey Bay Nursing Home, although coping with

mum's passing, is much declined with Parkinson’s and dementia—he’s unable to feed himself,

or use the toilet or walk. Added to this, I’ve just sold my house and bought a unit, which I am

supposed to be renovating.

The boys are on school holidays and we’re off to the beach in the rain… It’s a strange

time as life goes on amidst it all, but in quiet moments you feel pulled back into the depths.

Thank you so much for your kind thoughts.

Love

Diana xx

After mum’s death I wanted to grieve. I felt open and deeply in touch with my

feelings. Despite our recent differences, we’d been close our whole lives. But there was

little space for mourning; the newly purchased unit was a shell. Wayne launched immediate

legal battles, trying to edge-up his percentage care of the boys so as to reduce his child

support payments. My brother Richard needed lots of care—often I dreamed of him: once

he lay in my arms exactly like Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta; in another dream I was the

many-breasted Diana of Ephesus and fed him. I continued to worry until he settled in to a

new share-home a year later.

I took Richard shopping not long after Mum’s death and was surprised how

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protective I was. Richard had large, sparkling blue eyes, and loved rock music and Ford

cars, and never stopped talking. When some people at the shopping centre stopped with

smirking faces to stare at him, which was not surprising because his voice was so loud, I

stared back, warding them off: “You ridiculers, do you mock my brother?” I thought.

Afterwards I remembered how I’d always forced friends to accept Richard when we were

young, though mostly they seemed willing enough. Sometimes Richard’s eyes filled with a

guileless pure expression. It was disarming and many times this protected him amidst

irascibility.

The boys and I went on renting; many of our things remained in boxes. I continued

teaching and organised other things in between. I liked the idea of renovating the new unit

and kept imagining the parallel overhauls I was conducting on myself. But this new start in

the unit was to reveal layers of problems: crumbling damp walls inside the apartment, and

also walls soaked with grief and pain inside me. When the moist floorboards were removed

from the unit, seven truck-loads of building debris were removed from the sub-floor;

similarly, the rubble of deceit and betrayal were piled high in the substratum layers of me.

I’d locked myself inside my own cloistered ideals for decades, and now this cocoon had

become a coffin: I’d think how much I’d run around for everyone, all the family get-

togethers, how much love, time and understanding I’d given all my family and Wayne, how

well off I once was when I was single.

“Why did you waste your life…?” I think

“Jagratsvapnasusuptabhede turyabhogasambhavah”

“Even during the three different states of consciousness in waking, dreaming and

profound sleep, the rapturous experience of

I-consciousness of the fourth state abides.”

(Shiva Sutras: I.7)

Departure: Six months after Mum’s death there was a phone call from the nursing home

saying Dad had taken a turn and to come in at once. While driving there, the nursing home

phoned again, advising me to pull over. Dad had died. I sobbed on the side of the road, and

then drove on through tears to sit next to his lifeless body; shortly after, my children

arrived. Adrian refused to have anything to do with Dad’s death, or his ashes, or the

memorial service, although he did accept his inheritance. It was difficult sorting out my

parent’s house alone.

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One weekend, some months after my father’s death, I sat in my wide, deep blue

Milton armchair, “Dear God,” I prayed. “I long to be with you … but can we remain

established in you when the mind is turned outward? My tears have been held back, even as

my mother and father have passed from me, and still I cannot stop as this future approaches,

where everything recedes. I’m forced to drive forward, managing ever-increasing

problems.... It’s been more than a year since I purchased the unit and renovations are still on

hold…”

I looked over to the frail tea trees and a bright scarlet potted geranium in the small

courtyard of the rental place, a pile of building and engineer reports next to me; the reports

showed moisture readings off the scale in the new unit, yet still two of the four strata

owners refused to accept the problems were real. There’d been many meetings. There were

other documents as well, piles of papers relating to puerile-legal escalations from Wayne.

My heart ached. I held a hand to the centre of my chest, aware of the sound of my

breath, warm, moist, somehow comforting; a deep indigo-blue silk sari hung at random on

the wall, covering brickwork; it was from my Indian travels, and a colour I often saw in

meditation. Ganesh and a meditating Buddha sat on a small devotional table surrounded by

five radiant frangipani flowers I’d picked that morning from a tree on the corner of our

street. I leaned towards them, closed my eyes, breathing in their fragrance, and the perfume

entered, permeating the void.

“Dear God, many traditions claim that you are within, but must we literally lose

everything to go through the eye of your needle? I keep trying to reach you while walking

on a path I believe is the truth. I know that the path of dharma is described as a razor’s

edge, cutting away the non-essential, but hasn’t the cutting gone on for long enough? Yet

also I know that somehow I have co-created this destruction, and am not sure whether I

should pray for it to stop, as I do seek enlightenment…”

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12. Dreaming

Don’t go back to sleep.People are going back and forth across the threshold where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open.Don’t go back to sleep.

Rumi

Fifteen months after purchasing the cliff-top unit in the centre of Newcastle, we moved in.

It seemed perfect for our new beginning: the sun rose in to the lounge/kitchen area each

morning and as I gazed out at the ocean and across the undulating deep greens of the park,

it seemed to me that I would never leave. Some weekends there were two or three weddings

celebrated outdoors at the little fort high on the bluff, about a hundred metres from the

apartment; rose petals would be scattered all over the grass. But the unit stood at the

gateway of birth and of death. There were also a number of suicides. Sometimes an

ambulance arrived. One day, thirty metres from where I sat at my writing desk overlooking

King Edward Park, there was an undertaker’s van. Two policemen held a large blue plastic

sheet up to conceal the body on a stretcher, but somehow they let it slip and I watched as

the dead person was pushed in.

While I continued to love the location, life certainly didn’t get easier. More than

anything, it was my dreams that helped. Often I dreamed of houses. In one, the crown of my

head was simultaneously removed with the roof, and I saw the infinite potential of the mind

in a wide open sky. In another dream, an opening in the kitchen wall of the new unit

connected to a smooth grey rock cave with a portal at the end leading to a pristine seashore.

In yet another dream, I sat alone in a large rambling house, speaking into a telephone as I

unpacked cupboards, which really represented the cleaning and sorting of the many

cupboards of my mind: “Ah, so this is what’s stored in here,” I kept exclaiming, clearing

and sorting through obsolete concepts, mounds of impressions and other information stored

there.

In another dream, Wayne told me he was going to burn his house down and said that I

had to run inside to get his keys; he and the boys would be waiting in his car. I knew that if

I didn’t do this, he couldn’t leave. Wayne lit a match and the fire gained ground instantly. I

called out, warning a fourteen-year-old girl, possibly Anna, who was looking on with

hollowed eyes, then plunged in to the burning house to find his keys; I gave them to Wayne,

and he was gone. Following, I dreamed of his new house with his new partner; I saw he

intended to keep the boys there, and thought of his voyeuristic pleasure watching their

innocence subsumed in drinking, sex and parties at his house, while he, the benevolent

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parent, helped adolescent drunks off his lawn and administered water to vomiting teenagers.

Another night, not in a dream, but in waking reality, Tristan, Julian and I sat in the

lounge room of our new cliff-top unit. Six years since the divorce, and still I was finding it

impossible to move on—the boys in continual transition, two weeks with me, two with their

dad. There’d been a lot of trouble with Wayne making up lies, in relation to an ongoing

court case that he’d launched, involving his non-payment of child support of three years,

and my consequently not repaying him a loan, which was less than what he owed. “None of

you know, or have asked my side of the story,” I said, concerned that Wayne’s continual

indoctrination of the children would cause irreversible harm.

“We want to hear your side of the story,” the boys said, sitting on the white lounge

looking up at me, their honest faces emulating the complete justice of this. But as I tried to

formulate the right words, healing words, nothing came as far as my mouth. The boys sat

looking, waiting. But the words to defend myself would not come. Fragments had

formulated further down beyond my throat, but I did not want these phrases to come out

about child support, school fees, the unfair settlement, their father’s pushing up of

percentage care, or his bullying and lies, because compared to the beauty of the silent truth

between us, it seemed any word would distort. And so the boys sat looking, respectfully

waiting.

St Francis told the story of how when one speaks, one should consider one’s neck

like a long crane with many segments. Before one speaks, he advised, words should move

through the process of these stages. Gurumayi similarly advised, “It takes much

concentration to know what one really thinks, to know what must be said and what must

remain unsaid.” Likewise, the second line of the sixty-first hexagram of the ancient Chinese

I-Ching advises that the vibrational effect of one’s words can be felt more than a thousand

miles away. The Vedas instruct that speech is the connection between heaven and earth.

After yet another day in court with Wayne, towards the end of that first year in our

new unit, I walked alone along Newcastle Beach, my stockinged, sandalled feet sinking into

the wet sand near the shore line. I needed to be outside, to really breathe; or was it rather

that I needed to exhale before settling down for another night? It was almost dark, the wind

was driving hard and it was raining out to sea. I looked up to my apartment perched high

above on the top of Shepherd’s Hill; a mass of troubled clouds was approaching from the

east—lurid frothing shadows, illuminated sulphurous yellow-grey by the last trawling

beams of hackled sunlight. The spiralling path back up to the cliff tops looked just like

Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory.

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The court case with Wayne took more than a year to resolve with three different

magistrates, who all agreed there was a child support debt, as did Wayne; it had seemed a

clear situation in my favour. But because I represented myself, and because the matter was

heard in a Civil Court, not a Family Court, this gave Wayne a loop-hole through which he

managed to evade paying child support for three years. The case settled the night the film of

Eat Pray Love debuted in Newcastle and I’d gone to see it, thinking it might cheer me up.

But I walked out early. The movie didn’t reflect the memories of my time at the ashram in

India, nor did it seem to accurately represent what was written in the book.

Never in my life had I felt as indecisive as that first year in the cliff-top unit. But I

was dealing not only with the death of my parents, Richard’s unsettledness, the relocations,

the endless renovations, and ever more legal proceedings with Wayne, but there was also

menopause.

Every night I’d wake, my heart pumping wildly out of my chest; and I could feel the

blood pumping in the back of my head. Palpitations and a fragile feeling of anxiety were

part of my reality. I questioned if I’d ever feel strong and earthed again. I had to make

changes, cleanse, lose weight, and go back to herbal teas as I once used to drink. I thought

of the pupa of the case moth that had hopped around in its chrysalis at my new unit straight

after we moved in. I’d watched it, thinking the winged creature to emerge might similarly

herald my transformation. But the creature died in its cocoon, never having attached long

enough in any one safe location to transform.

Apocalyptic dreams of my life and my children prevailed, more real than day. One

night in a dream, William’s head was pressing into my solar plexus; the pressure was like a

birthing experience in reverse, his need to travel back to the unconditional love and

foundation of his formative years. I stroked his head. In other dreams, William fought with

his father and tried to keep his father from me. I had many dreams of Linden; often we

communicated through the third eye, and he cried on my shoulder. I dreamed much of

Anna; in one dream she said, “Dad makes it impossible to see both of you at once.” In

another we were on a city footpath next to a multi-lane road, crowds, trams, bicycles,

cars…. Anna was stony. I couldn’t reach her. The next morning, on opening my computer,

a caption flashed: “A mother’s heartbreak.” When the screen loaded, however, the headline

was gone. “If deeply sensitive, feeling children get too hurt, they shut down and become

completely unfeeling themselves,” I had once read. I wondered now if this had happened to

Anna.

Over and over I was faced with an immovable sadness soaked into the depths of me,

as if, inside, there was the eternal moaning of some sort of primordial creature, increasingly

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lifeless, embedded in the mud of its matriarchal psyche. To pretend it was not so would be

to play with my sanity dangerously. It was as if my children had been ripped out from a

deep soft core of being, around the red internal lung area, the place of my breath and heart.

In yet other dreams, the youngest two boys would be trapped in child-versions of

themselves and I’d navigate dark forests and night-time city streetscapes, searching for

them. Always, we were moving and there was great danger. In one, Tristan disappeared into

an inner city ghetto, and at the same point, Julian became trapped between sliding doors. A

week after that dream, Tristan, then in his HSC year, went to live full-time with Wayne.

There was lots of drinking, weeknight parties, hanging out with older boys, until a month

later, Tristan left school before finishing. My dreams guided me to let go and trust; Tristan

now had to find his own way.

I remembered the impressionist exhibition that Tristan, Julian and I had gone to see

at the NSW State Art Gallery some months before. I thought of the incomprehensibility of

the Monet originals close up, especially Monet’s later works where the canvas was awash,

redolent with vibrant daubs and smudges such as his late water-lily series and Rouen

Cathedral; only standing back, did the light-filled images emerge. The paintings were not

sad, but tears ran down my face as I looked at them. Something had yielded, faith was

renewed.

The second year in our new home, not long after Tristan left school, I had an

extraordinary dream. It came just two weeks after the massive earthquake, tsunami and

Fukushima meltdown in Japan; a time when Tristan, precisely at the time the earthquake,

gashed his head in a surfing accident and had to have eleven stitches. The dream was on the

night of April 4th 2011:

At first, I was in the hospital in Lima speaking with a friend’s daughter who had,

in reality, had a serious accident in Lima; but after discovering my friend’s

daughter was okay, the dream switched.

Suddenly, I was standing in front of Machu Picchu. I was actually there, as if

I’d bilocated in to that shadowy, stormy, late afternoon landscape. The mountain

was Mary: she was immense like the primordial mother. Her hooded face, the top

of the peak, was blurred, though full of Grace. The entire mountain was her cloak,

the ridges and rivulets the folds, under which all the troubles and traumas of

humanity were bubbling, rumbling and seething. Through Her intercession, Mary,

Mother of the Word Incarnate, was holding and divinely bearing humanity’s path

of free will. I was in awe, seeing Her infinite compassion and unconditional love.

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Yet also, clearly, I saw that this mountain of human dysfunction and toxicity was

at some sort of saturation point; something huge in relation to humanity’s

relationship with Mary seemed about to change.

When I woke, I was crying deeply and had the sense of the greatest awe, and

also of feeling over-awed. And the dream has stayed with me ever since.

Later, I read that the Incans considered Machu Picchu to be the Divine Mother, and

also that the Great Mother Goddess, once located there, would shift at the end of the Mayan

calendar, which was to herald either catastrophe or a new age.

A soft, luminous pink rosy light poured in through the lounge and kitchen frosted windows

of the unit before sunrise the morning after the winter solstice. I’d planted violas, leeks and

shallots in the footpath garden late the afternoon before when, quite unexpectedly while I

was planting, they were watered with a brief shower of light rain, spiritually a sign of

Grace. Soon after, Tristan and his girlfriend had arrived for dinner. We’d had pumpkin

soup, yoghurt, parsley and hot homemade meat rolls. Five tea-light candles burned for my

five children and I’d lit an extra one for Tristan’s girlfriend; the ancestor candle was

burning too.

“Are you crying?” Tristan had asked when he rose to leave straight after eating.

“No, it was just so good to see you,” I said, because these occasions, once the norm,

nowadays were rare. I wondered if my face had grown into a sorrowful look from the past

seven years of sadness. Growth periods were said to be every seven years in Rudolf Steiner

philosophy, because every seven years not one cell remained in the body that was there

seven years before.

The following year, Julian began his final two years at an inner city Catholic senior

school. When we enrolled, a picture of St Mary MacKillop on the wall had seemed to come

alive and smile at us. Such things seemed normal and greatly reassuring to me, though I

never mentioned these things to anyone. In the face of mounting religious betrayals, both

East and West, I continued my spiritual practices alone. I meditated and prayed in

cathedrals, the Mary MacKillop shrine in North Sydney, Buddhist temples and also at the

beach, the park and other places too. Afternoon walks, often I prayed the Memorare, or The

Lord’s Prayer, or the Psalms. Mostly it brought an immediate connection to the spiritual

depth and stillness. Also central to my spiritual path were dreams. That third year in the

cliff-top unit, I dreamed again of the lion:

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All of a sudden, the lion appeared on the mountainside. He was huge and barred

my way back down. I was pulled into instant meditational focus, a different

frequency band. I’d been walking on the alpine tracks with friends, but the lion

communicated that I had to traverse the remaining part of the journey alone.

My friends were grey, out of focus; they were staring at me, but they couldn’t

see the lion. I tried to tell them I was going on by myself. They looked confused—

seemed unsure of me, and then faded.

I gazed up at the barren track ahead; it was narrow, gravelly and

precipitous—I could see nothing beyond the first treacherous bend.

Legal Battles

In the echoing damp silence at the bottom of Town Hall Station’s subway stairs I stood for

a few moments before ascending to busy George Street above. The leaves on the plane trees

had already turned as I walked to the tribunal hearing in Sydney that day, hopefully the last.

Wayne’s continuing legal escalations had involved interminable trails of paperwork and

documentation; even when his applications were rejected, he pushed on, misleading and

lying in yet more appeals trying to get his own way.

Wayne hadn’t paid his half of almost three years of school fees, and unable to exit our

twenty-two year connection with the children’s private school with a debt to them, I’d taken

out a loan to pay them, having been assured by the Child Support Agency that if I applied

for reimbursement, Wayne would have to pay me back. But once again, Wayne spouted a

mendacious stream of false accusations, and complicated the matter by raising the same old

issues that had already been legally settled in his favour years before; a history of which this

new tribunal were unaware of.

The crisp brown leaves on the pavement made a crunching sound under my feet as I

pushed on against the chill headwind of autumn to the hearing, a hundred metres from the

Queen Victoria Building.

“Would you like to take an oath by stating it, or on the Bible?” the tribunal asked.

“I’ll just state it,” I said.

“Umm, I’d like to take an oath on the Bible,” Wayne said, shuffling with a slow

smile, half-looking down as if he was shy.

“Oh no, here we go again,” I winced, noticing a glow pass through one tribunal

member; something like: “How noble! A true-hearted Christian man…”

“I believe Wayne should pay half of Julian’s school fees, especially as his taxable

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income is more than five times my wage,” I said when asked to summarise the outcome I

sought. But the tribunal interrogated me for almost an hour. Wayne had written pages of

complaint about me and lies: Why hadn’t I worked more? Why was I doing a PhD? Was

this so I could get more child support? The tribunal escalated their questions.

“Why haven’t you earned a full year teaching wage if you’ve been casual since 2002?

When did you last work full-time?” they asked, as if all my years of mothering five children

and creating a home had counted for nothing.

“Umm, 1986 was when I resigned,” I said, sobbing, surprised at the emotional impact

that divulging this information brought. “The Department of Education wouldn’t give me

more leave. I had to resign. Things were different in those days.”

“How is it you could only earn $35,000 for a whole year if you were available for

full-time teaching work?”

“I put my name down at more than thirty schools and though I sometimes taught in

the Grammar School, and also did blocks of work in the most difficult places, the work was

sporadic. At one school, I suffered high blood pressure; at another I daily travelled close to

an hour each way because they’d offered me six-months’ teaching work. It wasn’t until I

started teaching at Newcastle University that I was offered full-time casual teaching work.”

“It’s very hard to believe that you couldn’t have worked more,” they said.

“Every morning I waited for a phone call; I worked at many different schools,” I said,

forgetting to also explain that my low wage meant I had to sell my house and was

constantly in debt, often needing to put things back on supermarket shelves, while Wayne’s

two businesses, built up over twenty years of working twelve-hour days, were flourishing.

Besides this, he also had a huge cash-wage.

“Oh…, come on,” they scoffed. “This is difficult to believe.”

“Give me the Bible,” I said, standing up, my face hot. “I will swear,” I pleaded,

feeling suddenly desperate to be heard.

“No, there’s no need,” the tribunal members muttered, turning away.

When Wayne spoke he lied about everything and included his complaints from the

last ten years: school fees; his assets and wage; his liabilities; his percentage care. Since the

divorce, he had lied and lied and re-lied again until his lies sounded like the truth.

A pod of dolphins were riding the two-metre waves breaking a hundred metres away from

the front of the Merewether Beach café just after sunrise. Justine and I sat there speaking

about Aum, one of the greatest teachings, the primordial sound of the universe. Chanting

Aum one moved through three vibrational layers of syllabic sounds: ‘A’ symbolised

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conscious waking, ‘U’ the dreaming state, and ‘M’ the dreamless sleep state. The crescent

and the dot to the upper right of the Aum symbol represented the fourth state, turiya-

avastha, the state of samadhi, which was the unspeakable world of silence beyond Aum.

“I rarely do the practices formally these days, though I’m always thinking about it,”

I said, laughing. “I tend to silently practice Aum, or the breathing while walking around.”

This sounded like evasion but we both knew it was not. Our conversation was punctuated

by the crashing and breaking surf. We’d both worked intensely on the spiritual path for

more than twenty years, and certain teachings seemed to stand out. We spoke again of

sahaja samadhi, also referred to as turiya teeta: retaining an awakened consciousness of the

Self at all times, whether awake, asleep, or in an intermediate state.

“Ah, but how many more lifetimes…?” I laughed.

“I’ve noticed, as everything keeps falling away, we just have to keep saying, Yes

God,” Justine said, referring to an existing difficult circumstance in her life. “Your

personality often doesn’t want to but the Shakti is directing.”

“Yes, I know what you mean; but even though I know that teaching well, I keep

needing to relearn it.” We laughed.

It seems there have been too many endings, and too much letting-go over these past post-

divorce years, so that my life has felt like a continual backsliding. I kept wondering when it

was all going to stop. While writing these final chapters, I had an odd and exhilarating

dream:

I was supposed to be teaching; the students were sitting at their desks at

the university waiting. I was about to begin when someone entered

carrying you, my baby. I took you in my arms, knowing I had to feed you,

even though I felt bad about leaving the class. But as it happened, just as

I rose to leave, a shadow form drifted in to take my place.

I lay on a church pew at the back of the classroom; way, way

down the back, a hundred metres or more. It was half-dark, silent and

holy. My baby was ravishingly hungry and drank voraciously the milk

that had let down into my breasts. I was oblivious to everything except

you my child: that I had to feed you. My breasts were full. I had to dream

to remember you. And in my dream, I woke and you were not scrawny

and forgotten; you were plump and strong, probably five to six months

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old. I will never forsake you. I had to let go of all of myself to feed you,

though this was easy, instinctive.

The old wooden pew was in an ancient church; and the

classroom remained in the distance at the front, even though I could

neither see nor hear it. I was immersed in the long shadows of dark and

light, shrouded in the peace that passeth understanding, though you, my

baby, drank hungrily.

At first, your thirst seemed unquenchable, but the milk in my

aching breasts was flowing, illimitable. Soon my darling baby was

satiated and had taken only from one side; the other breast remained full

and painful. It did not occur to me that I might be required to walk out

into the common light of day; that I might have to wander like a bovine

animal with these dripping breasts.

I remained there on my side on the bare, elegant, wooden, church

pew. My feelings were simple, wholesome and strong. The air was holy,

charged with the light of birth and new life; there at the centre of things,

this unconquerable stoic resolve of a mother’s will to nurture and

nourish life.

Mandorla

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13. The Mandorla

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light.

(Matthew 6:22)

A skeleton of a bird is in the birdbath one afternoon when Julian arrives home from school:

feathers, blood and guts cover the front porch of our cliff-top unit. I scrub that night with

soap and tea tree for more than an hour, but cannot erase the strange smell, like the odour of

an ancient altar hovering over. Even though I love the location, having lived in the unit for

almost four years, I will sell it soon. There are too many reasons to do so: disturbing

problems with certain neighbours, unending strata disputes and erratic water issues. During

a recent freak storm, water flooded in where flashing hadn’t been replaced above the front

French doors after the subfloor repairs. A friend suggested the place was cursed. Certainly

the universe seems to be edging me out. Besides, the unit was destroyed by fire in a recent

dream; I knew the dream was not a premonition of a literal fire, but probably a metaphorical

one. A week after the sacrificial bird incident, I dream a wild horse is on its knees at my

door.

“Remember how you said you felt out of place after that vision of the horse,” my

friend Bridget says two days later when we walk on Newcastle Beach. She has four children

and we’ve been meeting regularly for walks and swims for the past ten years. “I’ve seen

lately that you feel you don’t belong here,” she says. We speak about the loss of our

children and the deep sadness. “It came through for me just how important it is to breathe,

to breathe in and out with your whole being,” Bridget says.

It is late afternoon and we do this, breathe consciously, as we walk in silence along

the shoreline; aware of the vast ocean, the horizon, the foot massage in cool, wet, fine-

grained white-yellow sand. Except for us, and a dozen surfers catching the waves, there’s

no one on the beach. The tide is out, revealing an ancient rock platform, showing for the

first time in years after the recent storms; it’s covered in luminous lime-green moss. I feel

the quiet despite the crashing surf, the squawking black and white oystercatchers with their

long, orange beaks; and the internal sounds of my own ujjayi breathing. We take a turn at

the remote southern end of the beach and once more resume conversation: “That horse

dream was odd,” I say, going over it once more:

In a predawn misty light, I’m galloping on a huge, grey-black horse in high alpine

meadows, amazed at my horsemanship, exhilarated, realising I’ve forgotten I have

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this skill. I’m completely attuned with the wild horse and the earth, and know how

to guide this powerful, highly sensitive creature with every subtle nuance of

thought, the slightest touch of the reins. This feels natural.

Afterwards, I climb down, pat and lean in to the horse in the tingling air,

then return to my house, two hundred metres away on the mountainside. But when

I look through the window, I’m horrified to see an old school associate climb on to

the horse. I realise he’s been watching, and wants to ride as I have—thinks it’s

easy. When the horse continues to stand there, and doesn’t move, he starts kicking

it, harder and harder. I wince and pine knowing this will break the horse, but

believe I have no right to interfere because this is a wild, free horse.

Deeply saddened, I recoil, and retreat to another part of the house. Later,

when I look through that window again, I see the great, wild horse hobbling down

my path, stumbling a few steps before folding forward on his knees at my door. I

go out to him filled with the deepest regret; put my arms around him, reaching out

with every part of myself, unsure if he will ever recover; though now I can never

leave him, and will try.

Five days after that dream, I sustain a complex elbow fracture and dislocation,

together with a shoulder injury that leaves me housebound with insufferable pain for the

next three months. The injury takes more than a year to heal. The night before the accident,

I have a vision of the break, wake in the middle of the night, sit up and can’t lean on that

arm because it has snapped. Though I think this strange, I roll over and go back to sleep.

In the morning, I am tired and wonder whether to go in to the university late, but the

thought of certain neighbours spurs me out. One turns even “good morning” into ruthless

despise. Other neighbours threaten, and send offensive texts about a few pot plants under a

decades-old grevilleas tree, in my half of a shared private lane. After I move them, they

chop down the tree—no consultation. It wasn’t in the way, nor did it obscure their view;

many birds daily fed there. Further problems were to arise after the elbow–shoulder

accident, bizarre issues with two of the three other strata members that escalate to involve

legal proceedings.

I used to avoid the number thirteen, but now embrace it. Thirteen moons in a year,

including a blue moon; thirteen menstrual cycles; thirteen is a feminine numeral, an

irrational number, representative of the other side of a sane, ordered universe—chaos. 2013,

this year, this story with thirteen chapters will end. It is also the ending of this phase of

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parenting, as Julian, the youngest of my five children finishes school. It is the ending of my

ownership of the unit too, because the strata problems have become unendurable; the unit is

up for sale and once more, I am preparing to move on. There have been so many endings

over the past nine years. But surely I’ve lost enough when the horse is on its knees at my

door.

This story began with galloping horses; Leonardo Da Vinci’s red chalk sketch—

Rearing Horse—inspired me in youth; the crest of Newcastle University, once a mythical

seahorse, is now a bolder, more contemporary, forward-looking horse head, depicting the

waves of the sea as well. Horses were also there in the beginning when Wayne when I met

in a London hostel, at nineteen, and he suggested seeing the play Equus on our first outing.

Equus is about an adolescent boy, Alan, who has an obsessive religious relationship

with horses, especially Equus, who he takes for bareback midnight rides, naked. When the

horses are privy to Alan’s first sexual encounter with a girl in the stables, they become

agitated, make noises, and Alan shouts for the girl to leave, pleading with the deific horses

for absolution. But, seeing his intense, pure connection with them tainted, Alan blinds the

horses with a hoof pick through their eyes. Through these recurring connections to horses of

late, I’ve been contemplating the Katha Upanishad where “the horses are the senses.” The

Katha Upanishad says: “Atman is the Lord of the chariot,” our reason, the charioteer; and

the reins, our mind. This Upanishad says the good charioteer, with well-trained horses,

“reaches the End of the Journey.”

Often I have prayed at the grotto of St Mary’s Star of the Sea, or at Christ Church

Cathedral during the three-month recuperation after my elbow–shoulder accident. Both are

in the centre of Newcastle and only five minutes’ walk from the unit. One day, James, the

Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, is leading a silent retreat morning on “peace.” I go early,

sit next to a huge pillar on the left side in the middle of the nave and meditate, as the winds

whistle and scurry around the hilltop in gusts. There, in the howling, shadowy half-light of

the empty cathedral, all at once, I have a strange sense of déjà vu, remembering how I’d sat

in exactly the same position in another church, aged twelve, when I’d asked Jesus to come

in to my heart. “Still I am trying to integrate that request,” I think.

“God calls us to die, to do that hard work, and if we’re not up for that then we are

probably not a believer,” James advises, speaking at the lectern from where the retreat is

taking place inside the smaller side Chapel of St Michael. James talks about the radical

hospitality of Jesus, and then goes on to quote Matthew 34–39:

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Jesus says, I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance

against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her

mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loves father or

mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loves son or daughter more than me is

not worthy of me. And he that takes not his cross, and follows after me, is not worthy of me.

He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.

The words fill me like a pure illumination of fire, yet I’m horrified as I contemplate,

as James has asked us to do, how this teaching relates to my life. My unrelenting quest for

truth has led only to this destruction, a destruction that the Matthew teaching is advocating.

But this wasteland was not what I was praying for. I think again of the story of Job, a

parable of devastation, patience and faith that has stayed with me all my life.

“But dear God, please, I pray, though I seek You, truly, I am not seeking

nothingness or extinction; surely this apocalyptic lesson of detachment is too extreme. All

my children except for Julian have deserted me and formed a new life with Wayne and his

partner. Is this how one is meant to go through the eye of your needle? Everything I was

trying to avoid ended up manifesting in my life. I fear for my children and I grieve. And I

must ask if, as a mother, I’ve made a mistake in standing back, in being quiet all these

years; trusting that because I’d given everything of myself to my children that they had to

now act from the promptings of their own hearts and minds? And dear God, what about

Julian, am I to let go of him too? He’s always fuming after being with Wayne, as they all

are.”

I remembered how last Sunday when Julian returned from his dad’s, he was angry

and rude and, knowing it wasn’t good for him, I said.

“Be quiet, you’re always annoyed,” he’d shouted, among other things, before

slamming the door. I didn’t say more because I knew words would only confuse things.

“But Dear God, please help me to understand? Did I love my children too much?

Was it just as the anonymous author of the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing advises,

that even “good things,” such as religious oblations and love for one’s children, can cause

hidden pride, attachment and conceit?”

It is winter’s end, and before dawn I light a candle and some incense on top of the tiny

antique Indian cupboard in my room. I sit on the corner of my bed, praying. Today Julian’s

trial exams begin and I am in the same place where, almost four years ago, this story began.

The doors of the little Indian cupboard are wide open. On top sits William’s incense holder,

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heaped with white-grey ash. On the shelves, in the middle of a pile of books and papers, is

the blackened spine of the burnt India journal. A black velvet bag with bright embroidered

flowers, a present from Anna, is almost tumbling out; and a hand-made gift from Linden, a

prayer mala of casuarina beads from our lake-home, strung with finely plaited gold and red

threads, is curled up on a scrap of sari silk. The silk usually holds my Uluru rock, and I

make a mental-note to search for the tiny heart-shaped stone.

After praying, I meditate using ujjayi breath. It reminds me of the sound of an ocean

crashing and sighing on an inner shore. I practice it instead of Hamsa these days. Recently,

I heard Aum in this inner ocean of breath. I also hear it in the waves on the beach, now.

I drop Julian at school for his first trial exam, and he lingers and walks slowly from

the car; after crossing the road, he pauses to turn back, and I smile, mouthing “Good Luck!”

He beams, and we wave.

Afterwards, I drive to the university and free-park outside before walking along a

back entrance to an office where I’m working on my PhD. The path is a little-used,

casuarina-lined trail, and in the freshness of that early winter morning, something compels

me to look up. There it is! Shining in the centre of that vast open winter sky, I see a huge

luminous, softly feathered cloud wing, like the pristine, pure white wing of a soaring

Atlantic albatross. Mesmerised, I remain looking up at it as a light-filled humming energy

courses through me: To fly, the bird needs two wings: you have put in the self-effort but to

fly you also need Grace. You have to let go!

The mandorla, the almond-shaped space created when two circles overlap is about

letting go, travelling to an edge. It is a place where land meets sea, outside meets inside,

timeless meets time, human meets divine. A mandorla forms when one simply speaks a

truth, but ultimately the mandorla is representative of the still point of the turning world, to

use T.S. Eliot’s words. It is the paradoxical space that forms when the shore of one world

meets and intersects with another: when dreaming borders waking, and when self overlaps

with Self. Here, in a third space—a feminine, vulva-shaped, mandorla—a synergy is

created that is symbolic of creation, birth and renewal. The overlay of a mandorla can be

small, middle-sized, or large. But when the edge of one circle touches the centre of the

other, it is also termed a vesica pisces. In sacred geometry this is the womb of the universe;

in religion, the fish symbol of Christ.

As I sit at my desk in the morning, struggling to write the last pages of the memoir,

I muse over this place at which I seem to have arrived. Aged fifty-six, after more than four

decades of seeking God, I live on an edge like an alien, waiting. I exist inside the margins,

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floundering, breathing, praying; and even as a mountain of Faith remains within me, I seem

to have arrived nowhere, and have lost almost everything in the devastation of my life.

Strangely, as I drive home from the university in the afternoon, a piece of music

comes on to the radio that seems to sum up my story. Two completely different musical

scores are running together like the twin symphonies that have sounded and played through

my life. Every part of me is alert. The pianoforte forms a sonorous base arpeggio, repeating

a rhythm that is pulsing over the keys. Yet, equally, over the top, a viola swells and rises:

higher and higher notes that aspire towards irrational rims and edges, and I see my pristine

Atlantic albatross. It soars.

The music is still playing and I am listening as I turn into Maud Street, with a multi-

lane flow of cars; and I slip through a vibrational attunement outside of time where a fire

burns and an aching stream of tears flows. A cacophony of swirling viola strings and the

stampeding pianoforte whirl together as the harmony and discord of my whole life is taking

place within me. Yet all the while, a resolute awareness remains inside me, watching, and

intent on the road. I allow my hair to tumble over the sides of my face to conceal my

expression from the peak-hour traffic.

My yearning for God is as strong as ever, palpable in moans, tears and sighs; and I

long for my children, in the light of that lovely morning when, after my return from Uluru,

we swam with the dolphins in the sea. This terrible knowledge of agony and pain takes me

back to two weeks ago when, at 2am on Tristan’s twenty-first birthday morning, I’d woken

to the experience of light imploding, and pouring into my conscious field; and I’d thought

that if I had been less tired, less consumed with the maya that was occupying me, I might

have been able to travel further into that light. A door was open: possibly it was an internal

threshold with Tristan’s coming of age and Julian finishing school. Later that day, I met

Tristan at the beach; as we approached each other, it seemed as if two waves were coming

together in a clap of joy. We walked and chatted on the sand; I found it uplifting, though

Tristan said he didn’t like the irritable wind blowing in his face.

The flow of music mounts inside me as multiple strings of memory align, together

with the ecstatic yearning of the viola and the structured urgency of the percussion base.

Did my life have to be so complicated? The house in ashes, my burnt journal, journeys

through India, the ashram, familial ties, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and betrayal; then

there were the cathedrals, the sacred sites in England, Europe, together with a multitude of

teachers, books, dreams, visions. Dear God, I have tried so hard. Why is my life in the

world so muddled and filled with loss?

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The fire’s inexorable roar leaps up inside me as the twin musical tides merge and

swirl at this confluence point. My hair is wet from weeping and my head is down as I wait

at the traffic lights at the end of the street. Far away in the northeast are my mother’s ashes

out along those craggy red-brown rocks of her favourite headland. I don’t blame her that

she had too much control of my life, nor for the fact that three decades after carrying my

first child, I’m crucified on a family cross. This is all part of the irrational music as I sit here

waiting, where flames of factory chimneys had leapt, and where the wetland mud flats were

once scattered with skeletons of dead birds. Am I wasting my time, thinking I’ve moved on,

when, in fact, I’m utterly bound to my former life? And yet I can’t complain how my

longing for spiritual truth is being fulfilled.

Besides, I’m here, at the centre where the complementary opposite scores of the

unfinished symphony meet and intersect, where an unspeakable tide of creation and

annihilation rolls through me. But I’m here, in the third space, the mandorla, as one eye

laughs and the other eye weeps. This space is perhaps the eye of the needle through which

we return ultimately, at the end of the cycle of birth and death.

The music stops, but I’m moaning, sighing and crying as the notes echo inside. This

is the place at which my life has arrived. Yet, I have an insight that jolts me, and though I

continue driving, all at once I stop. I hear the silence, feel the peace. To be in this space, one

simply has to pause, listen, feel, breathe—to really breathe in, and breathe out. The Self, the

watcher of this space is within the breath, between the breaths—the unwavering

attentiveness that watches the road while this is taking place, the same mindfulness that

penetrates waking, dreaming and deep sleep. This place of consciousness is the mandorla,

and all those thresholds and doorways of my life have led me to it.

JOURNEYS

TO SELF:

An Exegesis

Journeys to Self: An Exegesis

Table of Contents

1. Writing the Self 175

Definitions of Autobiographical Spiritual Writing 178

Spiritual Autobiographical Writing from the Fourth Century to Modernity 181

Evolution of The Mandorla 192

2. The Idea of the Journey in Spiritual Memoir 200

Spiritual Travel Writing 201

Pilgrimage Writing 206

Methodologies for Understanding the Journey in Spiritual Memoir 210

3. Case Studies of Feminine Divine Journeys 214

A Monastic Vocation 215

Leaving Monastic Life 217

Finding an Authentic Voice 221

Spirals and Metaphors 223

Women’s Contemporary Spiritual Journeys 227

Symbolism, Dreaming and The Mandorla 228

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1. Writing the Self

i found god in myself and i loved her

i loved her fiercely

(Ntozake Shange)

The creative component of my thesis, The Mandorla: A Spiritual Memoir, explores my own

lifelong search for authenticity and spiritual truth, and spans more than three decades of

journeying towards God/Goddess, Self, The Absolute. This doctoral project is what

emerged after the collapse of my life in middle-age. This was a time where, in the absence

of a contingency plan, I was to discover the question “Who am I?” had become increasingly

central to my existence. While answers to this did become clearer, they were filled with

paradox. In the final chapters of The Mandorla, aged fifty-six, I find myself in a place of

desperate nihilism and loss, yet also there is utter clarity and faith. This is an absurd place

where, once again, I’m required to begin anew. Adrienne Rich (1972) claims that in the act

of re-visioning our lives we see with fresh eyes. She writes that because we as women live

in a male-dominated society, this process of re-visioning is essential, “an act of survival.”

She explains, “We enter an old text from a new and critical direction” (18). Once I would

have argued against this notion of being trapped in a masculine-world view. In the end,

however, I came to see how I was so inextricably immersed in this reality that it was

completely hidden from me. The Mandorla is an existential search for spiritual truth and

authenticity. It examines the human potential for metamorphic growth, and is a quest for the

feminine face of the Divine.

Spirituality, mysticism and Self are notions that are central to an understanding of

my thesis, as well as being fundamental to spiritual autobiographical writing. The term

“spirituality” is derived from the Latin, spiritus, and the Greek pneuma, which both refer to

the “breath of life” (Schneiders 167). The adjective “spiritual,” first coined by St. Paul, was

used to denote that which is influenced by the Holy Spirit of God such as “spiritual

persons” [1 Cor. 2:13, 15] or “spiritual blessings” [Eph. 1:3; Rom. 15:27] (Schneiders 166).

Murchu states that like the breath, which rises out of the body, spirituality stems from an

inner quest that reflects a “deep hunger for meaning and connectedness” (192). Atchley

claims spirituality is “an intense aliveness and deep sense of understanding that one

intuitively comprehends as having come from a direct, internal link with that mysterious

principle that connects all aspects of the universe… past, present and future” (158).

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This experience of an “intense aliveness” of the spirit within is the mystic’s

experience. Evelyn Underhill (1920), who states that a mystic is a “doer in the world, not a

dreamer,” describes the direct contact of the soul’s substance with the Absolute as “a vivid

life springing up within” (43). She declares that mysticism is “True union: … individual

will is matched by an Absolute Will” (38). Rudolf Otto, in his classic religious–

philosophical text, The Idea of the Holy (1917), also defines the mystic’s experience as this

synchronising of human and Divine Will (22). Otto defines the mystical experience as “the

most exalted of non-rational, supra-rational elements of religion” (29).

This alignment of individual and Divine Will could also be termed an experience of

God within. St Paul says: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (King James Bible,

Galatians 2:20). Jesus declares, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). The

experience of God/Goddess within is sometimes defined in terms of different forms of

mysticism such as pantheistic mysticism and contemplative mysticism. Nevertheless,

despite these phenomenological and experiential differences, one may argue, in accord with

German philosopher–mystic, Meister Eckhart: “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of

the world speak the same language” (23).

The experience of God within may also be described in terms of an aligning of self

and Self. The term self may denote an outer, personal, egoic ‘self,’ as well as an inner,

universal ‘Self’ that is synonymous with the Absolute, God. Autobiographical writing is,

literally, self-life-writing. The etymology of the word autobiography is the Greek autos,

meaning self, bios denoting life, and graphein, to write.

An Eastern view of Self, based on the ancient Katha Upanishad1 explains:

“Concealed in the heart of all beings is the Atman, the Spirit, the Self; smaller than the

smallest, greater than the vast spaces…” (61). The Self is omnipresent, eternal, pure

Consciousness. It is “the pure awareness of “I am.” (59). According to the Katha

Upanishad, even though this “pure eternal spirit” (63) exists in a woman, a man, the earth,

the waters, and the rocks of the mountains, the Self is none of these things, nor other infinite

notions of subjectivity. “The Self is the perceiver, the witness of the mind,” and also “the

divine consciousness residing in the individual” (66).

Another view of self/Self is presented by Luce Irigaray (2000), which is surprisingly

similar to this Eastern view, though Irigaray’s emphasis is different. Irigaray stresses the

absolute importance of “being two” separate genders, which opens up a way for both men

1 The ancient Upanishads record the foundation of Hindu thought and are found in the final part of the Vedas—the part that is concerned with pure knowledge. The word “Veda” means ‘knowledge’; and the Upanishads are sometimes described as “Vedanta,” meaning the “culmination of knowledge.” All are dialogues between teacher and student. The Katha Upanishad is one of the thirteen principal Upanishads and the teacher is Yama, Death. But there are one hundred and twelve Upanishads in total, which would equal The Bible in volume. For additional details see introduction to The Upanishads (7–45).

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and women “to return to the self” (Democracy 172–173). While Irigaray foregrounds the

notion of an irreducible feminine subjectivity, she also refers to a collective principle of

Self within each of these distinctly gendered selves. “This universal principle cannot be

reached outside the self … it is within you and develops out of you as a flower grows from

the earth” (Democracy 28–29). Hence, Irigaray’s universal principle here could also be

termed Self.

Carl Gustav Jung (1973) also explores the self in some detail. He declares that the self

is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. This idea is revealed to Jung in a

vision–dream and allows him to feel stability, and take an objective view of the many

psychic impressions that fill him. For Jung, the goal of psychic development is this self.

There is no linear evolution, only a circumambulation of the self. This is a process that Jung

refers to as “individuation” (Memories 222–224). For Jung, the self is not only the centre,

but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious

(Memories 398).

The quest to become spiritually aware and awake to Self is central to the mystic’s

experience, central to the spiritual journey and fundamental to spiritual autobiographical

writing. While traditionally a religious vocation was undertaken within a monastic setting,

in modernity, a vocational spiritual quest may often assume diverse, experimental forms,

including an existential appropriation of ancient religious practices and sacred sites, as well

as an exploration of the sacred as part of every day and ordinary life. Ian Reader (1993), a

contemporary academic and researcher of postmodern pilgrimage, says, “Spirituality is

inherent to every day and ordinary life” (14–16). Professor and theologian Peter Gomes

(2005) says, “spirituality is not anti-religion, but more than religion, in some cases beyond

religion: “in the place of doctrines, creeds, and beliefs, in postmodern spirituality, one has

access to an experience of the divine within the realm of the human” (xxii). According to

Lyn Hume and Kathleen McPhillips (2006), many contemporary seekers are looking for

“re-enchantment” (xv).

The first chapter of the exegesis looks at the genre of spiritual autobiography and

contains an historical overview of spiritual autobiographical writing from St Augustine’s

Confessions (397–398) through to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised By Joy (1955). It examines

arguments about how women’s spiritual autobiographical writing differs qualitatively to

men writing in this genre. The final section of this chapter documents the process of the

writing of The Mandorla: A Spiritual Memoir. Among other things, it looks at the

challenges of writing in an autobiographical, self-reflective style, and how kataphatic

language is used to express transcendental experiences in human language. Chapter Two

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explores contemporary travel–pilgrimage and eco-spiritual writing, and spiritual memoir; it

also looks at methodologies for understanding the idea of the journey in spiritual memoir.

Chapter Three considers, in detail, two2 spiritual memoirs from modernity that influenced,

guided and informed my own creative work: Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over The Wall

(1957); and Karen Armstrong’s Through the Narrow Gate (1981), and The Spiral Staircase

(2004). The purpose of examining these spiritual memoirs and methodologies for the

spiritual journey is to appreciate and contextualise, in a reflective framework, the account of

my own life as a spiritual memoir.

Definitions of Autobiographical Spiritual Writing

Critical investigations into the genre of autobiography began around the 1960s with Roy

Pascal’s influential study, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960); perhaps it is the fact

that the study of autobiography is a relatively new field of endeavour that explains the many

gaps in theoretical investigations in this genre. In particular, there appeared to be few

critical texts that defined and explored spiritual autobiographical writing. Pascal’s definition

of autobiography emphasises the author’s intention as being paramount, as other critics

have also done.3 He also emphasises “the quality of the spirit of the writer” (19), something

de Montaigne refers to as “a man’s [sic] master form” (35). In addition, Pascal stresses the

“design,” aspect of this genre: he says, “Truth might partake of design, and design might

embody truth” (27). Pascal’s definition is often quoted:

It [autobiography] involves the reconstruction of the movement of life, or part of a life, in

the actual circumstances in which it was lived. Its centre of interest is the self, not the

outside world, though necessarily the outside must appear so that, in give and take with it,

the personality finds its peculiar shape” (9).

Feminist theorists such as Sidonie Smith (1987), Shari Benstock (1988) and others,

however, argue that Pascal’s definition, requiring “the personality [to find] its peculiar

shape,” is unconvincing because it is based on autobiographical texts by male writers. This

is somewhat in opposition to critics like Pilling (1981), who remark on the diversity of

2 Karen Armstrong’s memoir is in two parts, comprising Through the Narrow Gate (1981) and The Spiral Staircase (2004). 3 Pascal states, “Autobiography depends on the seriousness of the author, the seriousness of his personality and the intention of the writing.” Marcus similarly claims the author’s ‘intention’ is singled out as a primary factor in assessing whether the writing fits an autobiographical style. Anderson clarifies that intention is defined as a particular kind of ‘honest’ intention, which guarantees the truth of the writing.”

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studies in this genre.4

Another widely quoted definition of autobiography is Philippe Lejeune’s (1971):5

An autobiography is a “retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning

his [sic] own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of

his personality” (2).

One of the pitfalls of Lejeune’s definition, however, is that it requires a “real person,”

a requirement that does not address the fissure between the degree to which one’s “self” and

one’s “self-image” might not be in accord. Many critics comment on the impossibility of

accurately representing one’s self. Jerome Buckley (1984) describes autobiography as a

“semi-fictional creation” (vii); Shari Benstock (1986) questions the possibility of ever being

able to depict a “real” person (8); and Mary Evans (1999) similarly comments that self-

writing is a “fiction” (1). In Missing Persons, Mary Evans describes the numerous absences

and evasions in autobiographical accounts of a life, and suggests that fairy tales can also be

thought of as autobiographical (3). Paul Eakin (1999), in discussing Lejeune’s focus on the

“referentiality” of the autobiographical text, explains that autobiography is a genre that

touches the world in the way that causes “reality to be refracted through the eyes of the

narrator in the text” (43). Michael Sprinkler (1980), who also takes this view, underlines the

mutability of self-writing. Sprinkler defines autobiography as an “interpretive” genre that

must perpetually return to the “timeless, elusive centre of selfhood within” (342).

While neither Pascal nor Lejeune’s definition of autobiography makes specific

reference to spirituality, Jerome Buckley’s definition explicitly stresses “growth in the inner

realms.”

The ideal autobiography presents a retrospect of some length on the writer’s life and

character, in which the actual events matter far less than the truth and depth of his

experience. It describes a voyage of self-discovery, a life journey confused by frequent

misdirection and even crises of identity, but reaching at last a sense of perspective and

integration. It traces through an alert awakened memory, continuity from early childhood

to maturity and even to old age. It registers a commitment to the unity and mystery of the

self or soul, both alone and among other human beings. And as a work of literature, it

4 The diversity and proliferation of autobiographical studies that Pilling remarks on mainly relate to studies of texts written by male autobiographers and include: “versions of the self,” “metaphors of self,” “the art of life,” “the voice within,” and “autobiographical acts” (2). NB. This diversity does not include critical studies of women’s spiritual autobiography. 5 According to critic Linda Anderson (2001), Lejeune’s definition is the most widely quoted. She qualifies, however, that Lejeune himself remained dissatisfied with this definition since it did not seem to provide a sufficient boundary between autobiography and adjacent genres of biography and fiction.

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achieves a satisfying wholeness. Yet it is never complete since the writer’s life is

necessarily in process.” (10)

Interestingly, while Buckley argues that the major autobiographies in English are

narratives of conversion, of recovering a lost identity, or discovering a new and meaningful

self (53), I had much trouble in locating critical texts that expressly define and investigate

spiritual autobiographical writing. Only two theorists stood out. American English

Professor, David Leigh6 (1999) looks at modern spiritual autobiography. He defines it thus:

Spiritual autobiography (referred to also as philosophical or religious autobiography), is a

story where a character is developed and contextualised by the protagonist’s lifelong

search for an ultimate reality. When this is a central theme and gives meaning in the face

of evil, suffering and death, the writer has created a spiritual autobiography (xi).

Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best American Spiritual Writing series, who has conducted

wide-ranging investigations into the field of spiritual writing, claims:

Spiritual writing is poetry or prose that deals with the bedrock of human existence—why

we are here, where we are going and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the

way (2005 xiii).

James Dillon (2011) writes that one of the principle things we learn from reading spiritual

autobiographies is that “the quest for meaning, purpose, and coherence in life is an

immensely powerful drive” (150). Yet despite this apparent import of the inner quest, most

critical discussions of autobiography focus primarily on the more personal, subjective, time-

bound accounts of self that followed on from the 1800s. English Professor Paul Jay (1984)

writes that after Augustine’s Confessions, autobiography remained a relatively alien genre

until the great autobiographies of the English 19th century (9). English Professor Jerome

Buckley’s major autobiographical study, excluding Augustine, focuses on the 1800s

onwards. Novelist Professor E.M. Forster’s classic, Aspects of the Novel (1927) also focuses

on subjective explorations of self. He looks at how nineteenth-century protagonists evolved

from an allegorical one-idea of character to something more intimate and psychologically

challenging (63–64). Eminent Turkish novelist and academic, Orhan Pamuk (2010),

6Leigh’s study of spiritual autobiography (1999) investigates ten twentieth-century spiritual autobiographies (all male but two) including Gandhi’s An Autobiography (1927); C.S Lewis’ Surprised By Joy (1955); Black Elk’s visions in Black Elk Speaks (1932); Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952); Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (1948); Malcolm X’ The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965); Paul Cowan’s An Orphan in History (1982); Rigoberta Menchu’s I, Rigoberta Menchu (1982); Dan Wakefield’s Returning (1988); and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1990).

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describes the “splendid array” of nineteenth-century “unforgettable heroes” such as Tom

Jones, Anna Karenina and Oliver Twist, and considers how novelists had begun “to

investigate the secret souls of modern individuals” (71).

Except for Augustine’s Confessions, which is typically mentioned in most critical

discussions of autobiography, one may discern that a number of significant spiritual

autobiographical works, many by women, are not included. One may argue, however, that

these works should at least be mentioned. Spiritual autobiographical writing, Self-writing,

such as found in the flourishing spirituality and direct experience of God of the medieval

visionaries and mystics, perhaps represents a field of autobiographical writing in its purest

form.

Spiritual Autobiographical Writing from the Fourth Century to Modernity

St Augustine’s Confessions (397–398) is generally hailed as the archetypal spiritual

autobiography. Augustine uses a second-person narration throughout to address God with

an extensive and detailed account of his shortcomings. This is, Augustine says, so that he,

and “whoever else reads them may realise from what great depths we must cry unto you”

(22). The “depths” Augustine refers to relate to an epic internal battle between his body and

spirit, and between the idea of holding on to a personal agenda and letting go, so as to align

with God’s Will. Leigh delineates these themes of spirit and flesh and holding on and

letting go as being central to spiritual autobiography, along with three other themes,

authenticity and inauthenticity, home and alienation, and light and darkness (144).

For St Augustine, as for all mystics, the inner universe of Self is vast. This inner

world of Self, Augustine terms “memory,” which is an “immense majestic place inside his

mind,” its “wide plains” and “innumerable caverns and hollows” are “full beyond compute”

(23). Augustine “never finds an end to it” (30). God, too, dwells here but Augustine is not

sure where because “God is everywhere within” (32). Yet despite this, and Augustine’s

lengthy second-person narrations to God/Self, his God remains, largely, a Divine Otherness:

“How hidden you are,” Augustine says, “you who dwell on high in silence.” And Augustine

wails: “I beseech You, God, to show my full self to myself,” and says, “Even those who are

most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you” (23).

The intangibility of Augustine’s God/Self contrasts distinctly to the revealed,

authoritive first-person voice of the God/Self that speaks in the writing of many female

medieval mystics. Even though one might assume that the dialogue of God/Goddess is third

person, one can equally reason that these visions and revelations are autobiographical, first-

person dialogues of Self. Here, self and Self are in dialogue and this conversation represents

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the multi-layered reality of our individuality; or in other words represents the two ends of

the spectrum of our human-divine actuality of self and Self.

Some examples of this type of spiritual autobiographical writing, just to name a few

from the medieval period, include: twelfth-century St Hildegard’s Scivias or “Know the

Ways,” encompassing three sections of six, seven and thirteen visions respectively; the

Revelations of fourteenth-century St Birgitta of Sweden, which comprises eight books of

visions, mysteries and discourses with The Virgin, the Saints and others; fourteenth-century

St. Catherine of Siena’s The Dialogue of Divine Providence, which is an extended, intimate

interchange between her soul and God/Goddess/Self dictated while in a state of ecstasy (this

along with her three hundred and eighty-two letters are considered an important part of

early Tuscan literature); and the anchoress, Dame Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine

Love which are also from the same century and contain “Sixteen Shewings” (Revelations

xix) or visions, as well as insights and further explanations of these “shewings” or visions.

One may discern that these works represent important autobiographical explorations

of Self, where the first-person use of the verb ‘to be,’ which takes the nominative case, links

the dual aspects of self and Self: not I am her, but I am She. The I and the She are the same,

just as the I and the He are the same: “I am He.” These revelations are examples of “God

within.” Abbott (1999) argues another reason for works such as these being considered

autobiographical. Although Abbott is referring to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, his

argument for an inherent subjectivity in Julian’s text may be equally applied to the other

visionary works from this period. He says, whatever register Julian’s text is written at “any

given point—anecdotal, didactic, descriptive, theological, analytical, advisory—[it] is

rooted in the vulnerable soil of the author’s contingent personal experience” (180).

Another important example of fourteenth-century spiritual autobiographical writing

is Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe. While once, stories circulated

suggesting that this eager pilgrim, who is also the mother of fourteen children, was a

“madwoman,” the discovery in 1934 of her dictated memoirs suggest otherwise, and

Margery Kempe’s memoir is now heralded as the first autobiography in English. Sarah Law

(2012) describes Margery as a “largely uncategorisable visionary and pilgrim” (4).

Jennifer Lash dedicates her spiritual memoir, On Pilgrimage (1998) to Margery

Kempe, and writes that above all, it is Margery’s struggle for complete honesty that is so

endearing (xii). While I too observed Margery’s honesty, I was unable to find any evidence

of Margery’s autobiography being “a vivid and lively account of life on the road” (Lash

xiv). Except for the final section, the reader hardly hears of the journeys from her home in

Norfolk to religious sites in England, Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela,

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travelling at a time when women were not allowed to travel on their own. Margery seems

intent only on one thing—scrupulously detailing her numerous and various spiritual

encounters and proving her ardent spiritual resolve.

One of the things for which Margery is notorious is her copious tears. In spiritual

autobiographical writing, tears often function as an important bridge between self and Self,

and are a recurrent motif in this genre. The mystics document many different nuances of

tears. Tears may represent a turning point for the spiritual memoirist such as Augustine’s

classic flood of tears in Confessions in his epiphany in the garden in Book Eight. During

deep reflection, Augustine’s “misery [is] dredged from the secret recesses of [his] soul,”

and “heaped up in full view of his heart” (177); with this, a “mighty storm” arises and

Augustine flings himself down, giving “free rein” to his tears, after which he is converted to

the “Will of God and Providence” (178). In St Hildegard’s Scivias, tears are also apparent.

God says: “when she feels Me … her eyes let fall tears of sweetness … nourishing” (192);

God says tears such as these are “issued from the fountain of the heart” (328); in another

vision God says, you can “…speak to Me with a flood of inner tears” (477). Possibly these

are the tears to which St. Jerome refers when he says, “Tears torment the devil more than do

the pains of hell” (Kempe 78).

But there are also other tears. In Interior Castle, St Teresa warns of bitter tears that

“spring from the passions and bring turbulence” (69); and she cautions to beware of

sentimental tears (140). Teresa also remarks on how a flow of tears may act as a purifying

stream, so that one feels refreshed and renewed (141), and how yet other tears result from

the soul being plagued by yearning—these are tears and moanings that rise from deep wells

of love (143). St Teresa also writes of the tears that spring when she is pierced by flaming

arrows that inflict a subtle penetrating wound in the depths of the soul (166–167).

Margery Kempe’s plenteous tears are something that she is frequently admonished

for, but Julian of Norwich advises her that because her tears and visions led to charity they

were of the Holy Spirit (Kempe 78). The priest who writes down Margery’s dictation is also

dubious about her tears, but is convinced of Margery’s genuineness after reading about the

beguine, St Mary of Oignies, and of the “uncontrollable tears” that she wept (Kempe 18).

The Franciscan, St Elizabeth of Hungary, “cried with a loud voice” as well (Kempe 193).

In her spiritual autobiography Story of a Soul, nineteenth-century St Thérèse of

Lisieux also mentions tears: the tears of joy that are “too deep for words” when “all the joy

of heaven” comes down and “cannot be contained without tears” (38), and Thérèse cannot

speak. The nineteenth-century, anonymous pilgrim in the Russian spiritual classic, The Way

of The Pilgrim, also refers to these tears of joy, and extreme gladness (23, 60), as well as to

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tears of rapture, that express thanks and gratitude to God (19, 35, 39). The pilgrim prays

earnestly with tears (90, 151), falls down senseless with tears of grief (67), as well trying to

hide the tears that spring from the “quickening flame of prayer” (73).

While clairvoyance and omniscience are fruits of the nineteenth-century, anonymous

pilgrim’s spiritual efforts, and he helps a number of people along the way, the pilgrim

refuses to be distracted by these gifts. He believes mystical union, where “two—heart and

mind—become one” (9), requires constant inner prayer. This “unlettered” pilgrim’s journey

is different to the highbrow mysticism of St. Augustine. And his ascetic journey also

contrasts with the flourishing aesthetic mysticism of many female medieval mystics.

This is something that Jungian analyst Robert Johnson (1991) explains as being due

to important new dimensions of understanding self/Self that emerged during the medieval

period that propose the possibility of “touching the high voltage of God in a personal way”

(67). Johnson attributes this to “two great myths that surfaced at this time:” the Grail myth,

which “speaks about the relationship of individuality and the spiritual quest,” and the myth

of Tristan and Iseult, which “introduces the power of romantic love” (66). Certainly, the

writing of the medieval mystics would attest to Johnson’s view. This open-line

communication with God, the Divine, the Self continues into the sixteenth century with St.

John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul (1578), a masterpiece of Spanish poetry

recounting the soul’s long and difficult spiritual journey to God, as well as Saint Teresa of

Avila’s Interior Castle (1675) and her autobiography, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by

Herself. Although in St Teresa’s autobiography she writes that divine experience cannot be

“clearly described because what … takes place is so obscure” (125), this is not always so in

her writing. After divinisation she comments, in an almost patronising tone, that she rarely

goes into rapture these days. From this perspective, St Teresa, once known for these

raptures, emphasises the inherent flow of charity and service that arises and streams

naturally when one enters fully into divine marriage and reaches final apotheosis.

This journey of apotheosis to ultimate union with God, St Teresa describes in

Interior Castle, one of the most prominent books of mystical theology. Like the internal

world of Augustine, this inner dimension of self is vast. She pictures the soul as “a castle

made of a single diamond or very clear crystal in which there are many rooms” (28); one

enters this castle through “prayer” (31). While guards occupy the outer courtyard (32), a

place that is “full of wild beasts and animals” (33) that are sometimes “allowed to bite, so

that we may learn better” (51), in the fifth mansion, “where many are called but few are

chosen” (96), we are “betrothed to God” (106). Yet still, “the trials continue,” particularly

the “excessive interior trials at the centre” (110). One progresses “by practising the virtues”

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(114), until finally arriving at the seventh mansion at the centre, where the soul, a butterfly,

“dies full of joy” because having been transformed into spirit, “within lives Christ” (215).7

Grace Jantzen argues that women have a different, more homely and fruitful,

experience of the divine which does not exclude or claim elitism. An example of this is

demonstrated in St Catherine, who is without formal spiritual direction. Central to her

spirituality is the crucifixion image, together with a vision she has at age twenty-one of her

mystical marriage to Jesus. For Catherine, “the way to God… begins in the cell of self-

knowledge” (The Dialogue 280). Jantzen refers to the “natality and flourishing” of

medieval mystics, a concept that is dissimilar to what she describes as the dominant

necrophilic, rigid imagery mostly prevalent in Christianity (Becoming Divine 157).

In Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Jantzen explores various social

constructions of mysticism and questions the view that the Divine is veiled in mystery and

unknowing. She explains that the patriarchal view of the Divine, inscribed into the Christian

religious hierarchy for centuries, supports power structures that sanction the elite in order to

keep most others, particularly women, in inferior positions. She claims that women were

forced into this lesser role because of a lack of formal education and because authority was

seen largely as a male preserve (168-169). She explains that gender stereotypes identifying

women with food,8 the flesh, and suffering service ensured “a symbolism which placed

women to men in the role of the suffering servant” (223). Other critics also remark on this.

Webb notes that while the task of interpreting the Bible was restricted to men in the Middle

Ages, specifically ordained priests, interpreting God through the senses and the body

became the domain of women mystics (76).

These bodily expressions of the spiritual include numerous cases of tears and

weeping, Saint Teresa of Avila’s physical pain, sicknesses, levitating, and being bodily

struck by arrows of light, and many other examples. The fact that the site of the encounter

with the Divine Other, with the Self, is not in the head, nor is it an out-of-body experience,

but an experience of the whole body and the heart is something that Wyschogrod explains

in terms of the entire saintly body functioning as a sensorium. Wyschogrod cites Saint

Catherine who does not merely see the passion, but “enters into the passion with her whole

being” (17). Similarly, the German beguine, Hadewijch, as Jantzen suggests, pours herself

7 Many traditions depict the internal mystical world in a similar way, such as The Upanishads. The Chandogya Upanishad states: “the little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe” (120). Of interest, also, are resemblances in The Upanishads to St Teresa’s writing, such as the metamorphic process of the butterfly being likened to the soul’s journey to God in the Svetasvatara Upanishad (95). Also, the image of an interior castle is employed in the Katha Upanishad: “the pure eternal Spirit, Self, dwells in the castle of eleven gates of the body” (63). In the Chandogya Upanishad, “the interior world is the castle of Brahmin” (121). Similarly, in the Svetasvatara Upanishad, “the soul dwells within the castle of nine gates of the body” (90). 8In Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Jantzen points out that because women usually didn’t have wealth or power, which is what male religious typically renounced, they were much more likely to renounce food in their spirituality (208).

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out in compassion and care for the ignorant and the oppressed in the same way that Christ

had done (Becoming Divine 141).

This approach contrasts to the disgust of the body and preoccupation with sexuality

described by a number of male religious such as St Augustine and St Francis, who describes

his body as “brother ass.” For medieval women, the struggle between body and spirit was

often enacted in relation to food, and anorexia is a prominent issue. St. Catherine and other

female medieval mystics suffered from this.9

Jantzen comments that Julian of Norwich develops a powerful imaginary of the

divine where the body, the physical, the sensual and material are emphasised in a way that

is not true for male mystical writers (Power, Gender 147). She says that this positive

valuation of the physical means the body is cherished, rather than being left behind or

mortified (Power, Gender 151). In Julian’s well-known vision of the hazelnut in

Revelations of Divine Love, God is the substance and essence of all life:

…he shewed [me] a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut, in the palm of my hand…. I looked

thereupon … and thought: “What may this be?” And it was generally answered thus: “It is all

that is made.” …methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was

answered in my understanding: “It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it.” And so

all thing hath the Being by the love of God (Revelations 9).

This lack of obscurity of God, the Self, is also evidenced in St Hildegard’s

spirituality, who “receives her visions, not in a state of ecstasy, but in full consciousness

with eyes wide open” (Clendenen 51). The direct language of the Absolute invested these

women religious with a commanding, yet subtle, authority that allowed them to bypass the

religious hierarchies in which they operated. St Teresa of Avila is urged and endorsed by

Divine decree to open monasteries, go on pilgrimages, meet with certain people and give

particular replies, or conversely avoid others. St. Hildegard, St Birgitta, St Catherine, Julian

of Norwich, and St Thérèse of Lisieux are similarly empowered.

Yet this language of the Supreme also seems to have different registers according to

one’s theological, cultural or social context: Margery Kempe, who is variously given

precise instructions, advised and consoled by God, the clergy and her husband, relates how

9 Woodman explains how food “symbolizes the life force, the Great Mother, with which the wisdom of the body is desperately attempting to connect” (The Pregnant 103). She suggests that the inherent rhythms and tides within a female body unconsciously bind a woman to nature’s cycles, and an underlying rhythmic current of life because a woman is bound by her physical body to bleed in moonly cycles, and instinctively feed her baby. In the contemporary spiritual memoir, Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong becomes anorexic after leaving the convent, as does her convent friend, Rebecca; Armstrong says that both were doing their best to make their bodies disappear (249).

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our Lord says, “‘the more homely that you allow me to be in your soul on earth, it is …

right that I be the more homely with your soul in heaven (259). Margery explains how when

at various times she was very ill, she was consoled sometimes by our Lady, sometimes St.

Peter, or St Paul, or St Mary Magdalene … “or whichever saint in heaven that she could

think of, through the will and sufferance of God” (256). Her visions and innumerable

Divine dialogues provide her with the spiritual authority to successfully challenge family,

priests and a number of highly respected ecclesiastics. This contrasts with many in the

secular world, who remain unconvinced, which is a recurrent source of difficulty for

Margery. Margery’s life is much influenced by the stories of earlier mystics such as St

Birgitta of Sweden and St Catherine of Siena, whom she quotes.

Of note however, are the indisputable deific signs that female saints such as

Hildegard, Birgitta and Catherine required in order to have the confidence to speak out. St

Hildegard had to become seriously ill before knowing that she must write and proclaim this

vast interior world, which also includes rebuking her male counterparts for being

“lukewarm and dull to preserving the justice of God” (Scivias 7). Julian of Norwich also

had to become seriously ill before having the self-assurance to speak of her visions and

revelations, which includes speaking out against her male counterparts and revealing the

corruption in the church. St Catherine of Siena does this as well. Through miracles, visions

and direct dialogues from the Divine realm, Catherine has crucial political and religious

sway in the Italy of her day. She guides and directs politicians and the Pope, whom she

counsels to reform his clergy.

Feminist philosopher, Grace Jantzen, laments the fact that, despite Julian’s success in

confronting the clergy, she remains in strict subservience to male-defined ecclesiastical

boundaries (Power, Gender 183). Jantzen states that women were oppressed by the many

male religious who were corrupted by their earthly power. She says women were also

oppressed by the lack of access to formal education, as well as the strict requirement for

physical enclosure for many female religious, such as thirteenth-century St Clare of Assisi

and her sisters10 (Power, Gender 184-202).

Yet, as Jantzen observes, it was the women that had more visionary experiences than

men (Power, Gender 168). Thousands of extraordinary visions and intense experiences of

the Divine are recounted. St Hildegard’s prolific gifts as a musician, artist, poet, naturalist,

healer, theologian, she attributes to her visions, and direct inner guidance. The nature of this

may be understood through Hildegard’s theology of viriditas, the ‘verdant green’ of the soul

10For more detail see Chapter 6: “The visions of Virgins: Spiritual and Sexual Control” in Grace Jantzen’s Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism 193-242.

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within.11 This ability to access the direct dialogue of God/Self is correspondingly true for St

Birgitta, St Catherine and Julian of Norwich. For instance, Hildegard says:

... when I was forty-two years and seven months old, a burning light coming from heaven

poured into my mind. Like a flame which does not burn but rather enkindles, it inflamed

my heart and my breast, just as the sun warms something with its rays. And I was able to

understand books suddenly, the psaltery clearly, the evangelists and the volumes of the Old

and New Testament… (Scivias 2).

This is also demonstrated in Hildegard’s vision of “Synagogue,” a very tall woman,

the “Mother of the Incarnation,” whose role is to prepare humanity for Christ. Synagogue’s

head is illuminated by a shining, bright band of light, “white as snow and transparent as

crystal,” symbolising the Virgin Mary12 (Scivias 103); Synagogue has various coloured

bands of illumination on her body.

Of note, however, are the differences between male and female representations of

the God. While Augustine emphasises “the sins of men” (27), and believes “to love the

world is to break troth” with God (34), female medieval mystics accentuate the

compassionate, nurturing and accepting qualities of the Divine Absolute. This is evident in

Hildegard’s reshaping of the narrative of Eve, where she highlights Eve’s vulnerability

rather than her sin in being tempted by the serpent. Similarly, Catherine, while aware of the

idea of “sin,” prefers to put emphasis on “the soul’s radical likeness to the Creator, whose

image it bears” (30). Likewise, Julian’s theology of God as both father and mother

highlights these nurturing qualities. Julian believes the bond between mother and child is

the only one that comes close to the relationship one can have with Jesus, and writes that

suffering and difficulty are not signs of God’s wrath and are not a “matter for moaning.”

There is “matter for mirth” because these things lead to self-knowledge, growth and

understanding (Revelations 145-147).

A prominent theme in the writing of mystics from many traditions is the importance

of the virtues, particularly humility and charity or service. These qualities are repeatedly

noted as being paramount to the spiritual path. St Birgitta emphasises this and, like many

mystics, portrays charity as the highest virtue of all. Birgitta is “on careful and diligent

watch not to let anyone climb over the top of the fence [of charity]” and prays that if this

“divine charity” is challenged: “My lord … immediately send your guardian reason out to

meet it with the commandments of God” (212).

11 Clendenen points out that Hildegard had “a connection to the sacred in all things, especially Nature” (51). 12 See Scivias pp103-125 for more detail.

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St Catherine also stresses charity. During her short life, Catherine is prompted to

serve Christ in her neighbour in indefatigable ways, such as her service to the leper

community and other works. God says: “…look at those who are clothed in the wedding

garment of charity…. They are united with me through love” (The Dialogue 26); “…it is

charity that binds you to true humility (The Dialogue 63); and the saints are “set ablaze

[with bodily purity and spiritual sincerity] … in charity’s furnace” (The Dialogue 223). The

virtue of charity is also the zenith of spiritual expression for St. Teresa of Avila; and while

Teresa maintains, “Unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never

grow bigger than dwarfs” (Interior 229), after apotheosis she places charity at the very

centre of the interior castle, seeking “to serve God and all” (Interior 229).

Following on from the time of these profound dialogues of Self/God, significant changes in

self/Self writing occurred. Although the primary orientation of ‘self’ had typically been

one’s relationship to Self/God, as well as an understanding of self in terms of ancient

concepts of anthropology,13 in the 1600s this changed. Bush (1962) remarks, “in 1600 the

educated Englishman’s mind and world were more than half medieval; but by 1660 they

were more than half modern” (1). According to Bell and others, it is John Bunyan’s

placement in history in the seventeenth century that signals this point of change.14

Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) is

typical of the conversion narratives produced en masse around this time.15 It is excessive in

its recording of detail, and there are not the visions of the medieval mystics, nor the fervent

ardour of Augustine.

With the great political, philosophical and social upheavals of the eighteenth century,

the focus of autobiographical writing went on to explore more personal, subjective, secular,

time-bound accounts of self, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782).

Rousseau opens by celebrating his new-found subjectivity: “I have studied mankind; I am

not made like any one I have been acquainted with” he says (17).

Spiritual autobiographical writing in the nineteenth century, such as Cardinal

Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) meaning, “the defense of one’s life” (3) is often

13 Ward (1990) states, “Man [sic] was the microcosm of the universe, and both were made up of the elements of earth, air, fire and water” (172). 14 Bell here is referring to writers such as Franklin and Rousseau (109). Bell also notes that in the 1720s Defoe capitalised on the popularity and authenticity of the seventeenth-century conversion narratives to produce Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (120). He says there is a new assumption behind the fictional and actual autobiographical narratives of the eighteenth century where the emphasis is on individual experience. This is unlike the Augustinian model with the uniformity of personal experience, and the dichotomy between the fallen and reborn selves (121). 15 There was even a recipe for spiritual autobiography, and a defence of the genre published in 1656 by John Beadle, entitled The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian. Puritan doctrine fixed the structure and content of all such accounts which were ultimately modelled upon the great patterns of Christian sainthood, Christ and Paul. John Beadle’s guide to the conversion narrative, the Puritan substitute for the confessional, recommends to begin with the everyday life of self and go to Self (Bell 108).

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compared to Augustine’s Confessions, but Newman’s heroic, confessional style, typical of

males writing in this genre, has a self-justifying tone and lacks the authoritive power of this

earlier work. Dissimilar to Newman’s writing, however, are two other nineteenth-century

spiritual autobiographical works. The Russian spiritual classic, The Way of The Pilgrim

(1884) traces the journey of the anonymous author of the “humblest origins” (3) who is

inspired by Paul’s words in the Bible—“to pray without ceasing” [Thessalonians 5:17]. The

“unlearned peasant” (3) journeys, visiting churches and monasteries, until he finally meets a

spiritual father who teaches him the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have

mercy on me, the sinner” (48).

The hauntingly simple, yet poignantly mystical tone of The Way of The Pilgrim is

similar also to nineteenth-century St Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of Soul (1898). Yet the

scope and influence of St Thérèse’s life is vastly different. She begins her spiritual journey

as a child, and joins a Carmelite order at sixteen. Despite her short life of only twenty-four

years, her spiritual achievements are immense and she is recognised as a saint and doctor of

the church.

Her remarkable spiritual journey takes place within a Divine mystical reality that is

both within and beyond the religious setting in which she operates, and is also far removed

from the fractured, intellectual–psychological–social space that came to characterise the

modern secular world.16 Thérèse says:

Time is thy barque and not thy dwelling place…

The image of a ship always delights me

and helps me to bear the exile of this life (Story 42).

After her confirmation, on “that luminous night,” when she hears Jesus say, “I thirst,”

and is “ignited” by “an unknown very living fire” (99), Jesus changes “the night of [her]

soul into rays of light” (97). Thérèse says, “Charity enters into [her] soul” (99), and shortly

before her death writes, “The soul who plunges into the shoreless ocean of Your Love

draws with her all the treasures she possesses” (254).

In the shifting grounds of modernity from the early to the mid-twentieth century,

spiritual autobiographical writing includes the idea of social and political change. Leigh

comments on the autonomy of spiritual seekers during this time and the lack of a stable

16 Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers were influenced by Sigmund Freud and later Carl Jung and often worked with psychological realism, which emphasised the interior characterisation and complex emotions of characters such as found in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927); modernist autobiographical writers also explored imaginative, mutable dimensions of selfhood such as in James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist (1916). In the 1960s, with Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell’s troubled autobiographical confessional poetry, notions of ‘self’ became more fractured.

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sense of self, which resulted in the trying on of various masks (xii–xiv). Pioneering,

pacifist, spiritual activist, Mohandas Gandhi’s An Autobiography (1927), subtitled The

Story of My Experiments with Truth uses his spirituality, grounded in ahimsa (non-

violence), to bring about great public and political change. Paramahamsa Yogananda’s

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) is another influential spiritual autobiographical work from

this period and was a remarkable read for me in youth—full of miracles, paranormal

experiences, bilocations, the stigmata, weeping statues etc. Simone Weil explores the idea

of mystical union in Waiting For God (1951), where Weil wants to conform to God’s Will

completely through a religious philosophy of universalism. C.S Lewis explores mystical

union through an understanding of “joy.” In Surprised By Joy (1955), an autobiographical

account of his conversion, Lewis claims that ‘joy’ may arise from a moment of poetry, but

this joy creates a feeling of desire that can be “almost sickening in its intensity”—an

unsatisfied desire that is more desirable than any satisfaction (15–16). This feeling plunges

the author “a few fathoms deeper into delight.” But it must have “the stab, the pang, the

inconsolable longing,” as distinct from pleasure (68–72).

In the experimental turn of spiritual autobiographical writing from the mid-twentieth

century to contemporary times, creative nonfiction genres are often employed. The term

creative nonfiction includes memoir, spiritual memoir, the lyric and personal essay, literary

journalism, plotted narrative, biography, meditation and nature writing, eco-spiritual writing

and other hybridised forms. Lee Gutkind (1973)17 explains that creative nonfiction involves

“writing nonfiction using literary techniques such as scene, dialogue, description allowing

the personal point of view and voice, rather than maintaining the strain of objectivity” (3).

There are, however, widely varying theoretical views relating to contemporary,

spiritual autobiographical writing. While Buckley pauses to observe that few women

autobiographers have devoted themselves to writing about their inner lives (ix), other critics

such as Linda Anderson (2001) explain that this is because women’s writing has been

viewed as transgressive in relation to a form which assumes a masculine subject. Other

views also claim that women’s true autobiography has yet to be written because women in

the past either adopted a model of male selfhood or adapted themselves to a model of the

male-approved “ideal woman” (Smith 18). Laura Marcus (1994) similarly protests that the

17 Lee Gutkind was one of the first people to teach creative nonfiction at a university level. The phrase creative nonfiction is now widely accepted, even though at first, the term was much criticised in major newspapers/magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The New Yorker where phrases such as narrative fiction, literary journalism, expository writing, among others were preferred (4).

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history of autobiography achieves coherence as a history through its exclusions.18 Yet this

pattern is changing and Judy Davis and Juanita Weaver (1982) also note that feminine

spirituality is only now being explored after several thousand years during which Western

history was defined basically by men in the Jewish and Christian traditions (368). Charlene

Spretnak (1982) declares that, though unfamiliar, women’s spirituality is newly reclaimed

(396).

Zaleski (1999) laments the “Wild West atmosphere” of present-day spiritual

writing, while at the same time praising the “vast metaphorical and philosophical lexicon”

that was “developed to describe the indescribable, with the soaring language of the King

James Bible and the via negativa of medieval scholastics.” He claims that nowadays, all but

the best spiritual writers ignore these riches” (York Times 2). Lyn Hume and Kathleen

McPhillips (2006), however, who research and investigate new experimental approaches to

spirituality including pagan groups, goddess groups and others, explain that these groups

are a result of the fact that contemporary seekers are looking for “re-enchantment” (Popular

Spiritualities xv).

While the idea of re-enchantment as well as the notions of God and Self might seem

representative of a remote Divine Other, critics such as Erin Johnston (2013) argue that

Self/God is already integral to oneself. Erin Johnston, who uses the term “awakening

narrative” (19), argues that religiosity is “innate or natural” (559) and it involves not

conversion, but the “(re)-discovering of an underlying, true self” (560–563). Renee

Lockwood (2012) likewise describes transformation in this language of self-continuity. For

Lockwood, one reaches mystical union and the higher Self by locating “layers of stories” or

“in-authenticities” (108–111).

Evolution of The Mandorla

Locating layers of in-authenticities, mystical union and a higher Self are notions that are

central to The Mandorla. The creative component of this thesis is mainly written in the

genre of spiritual memoir,19 even though it also employs other hybridised forms such as

18 Feminist theorists note the great diversity in women’s autobiographical accounts. Linda Anderson argues that for feminist historians, women's autobiographies provide not just source material about lives, which have traditionally been overlooked, but these accounts play an important part in feminist recognitions of the heterogeneity of women’s lives. These stories highlight the differences among women, and provide a more complex view of Woman than simply the “Other” of man (34). Shari Benstock (1991), also looks at the multivalent voices of women, and explores the complex ways different forms of autobiographical writing resist old definitions (5–7). Similarly, Laura Marcus comments on the diversity in a collection of women’s stories, including oral histories, feminist confessional narratives, and contemporary writing by women of colour, and others. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck also explore these widely varying cultural contexts and historical eras of women’s stories (15). 19 Memoir, sometimes considered a subgenre of autobiography or creative nonfiction, is also a genre in its own right. According to Hampl, sincerity of tone is mandatory in memoir and the voice of memoir is confidential and close-up. “Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to tell a story. They want to want to tell it all … of consciousness itself … tell their mind, not their story,” Hampl writes (1999, 13).

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travel writing, poetry and a personal essayistic style, as narrative vignettes are sliced and

intertwined. But this late-modernity, spiritual autobiographical project had been through a

number of permutations before this. My original idea had been to organise the creative

work as a prose poem—I’d mainly written poetry in the past. But the subject matter became

too detailed and unwieldy to be contained within this form. I then tried to organise the

numerous episodes of writing as a “literary mandala.” In Sanskrit, mandala means holy

circle or the land of our soul. I liked the religious overtones as well as the idea of order, and

divided the writing into four thematic quadrants: north, south, east and west, each with an

element attached. “North” explored themes of idealism, spirituality, new ideas, the future

and symbolism from the element, air. But as I progressed with this undertaking, it became

pedantic. When one of my supervisors suggested organising the project as a collection of

personal essays, I liked this idea. I had read Kim Cheng Boey’s Between Stations,

recounting his own life journey in a collection of essays. The essays included travel stories,

philosophy, spiritual insights, poetry, poignant moments, as well as an exploration of his

complex feelings about family and belonging. This was similar to the content of my own

work, and I straightaway saw how easily my writing could sit within this form. According

to Lopate, an essay is “the voice of middle-age” and closer in kind to poetry than any other

form (Essay xxxvi). I formulated essay headings, and went on writing, but as I continued,

the project shaped itself naturally into a spiritual memoir.

Central to the memoir is the opening symbol of fire, a potent signifier of the recurrent

themes of loss as well as spirituality. These themes are intertwined and threaded through the

entire piece. Fire is not only emblematic of devastation but also a potent signifier of the

spiritual, including the notions of catharsis, rebirth and renewal. Episodes of loss are

unfailingly followed by purgative vignettes, leading to emotional and spiritual growth, the

pushing of boundaries, metamorphosis, rebirth and renewal.

The centrality of these spiritual themes together with themes of annihilation and loss

mirrors the internal processes of kenosis and apotheosis. In kenosis, Christ gives up certain

divine attributes in order to become human, conversely, this project explores a giving up or

restraining of certain human qualities in order to make a space for the divine. This process

need not be perceived as austere or harsh, but a natural evolution of one’s inner

metamorphic journey to an understanding of self and Self.

Many theorists note the indescribable nature of the infinite, and the problem of

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finding language to express the holy, such as Leigh20 who notes the difficulty of “naming

the whirlwind” (9), and a well-known Sanskrit phrase from Hindu Vedanta describes

Brahmin in apophatic terms as neti, neti, meaning “not this, not this.” While

acknowledging that ineffable spiritual experience can be obscure and impossible to relay in

human language, nevertheless, numerous depictions of the Divine in this thesis are

expressed in straightforward kataphatic language such as the fragrance, the subtle garments,

the unspoken, silent language of the divine. These encounters with Self occur not only when

messages pierce, or collide, or drop through in meditations, visions, dreams and moments of

illumination, but also in everyday and ordinary life through experiences of nature, joy and

of silence when one pauses to breathe, and to feel.

Nature is a dominant presence throughout the thesis and grounds the spiritual. The

world of Nature creates a bridge between mystical experience and the physical world.

Throughout there is an awakened sensitivity towards the world of nature reminiscent of the

pantheistic approach of Wordsworth, and sensitivity of Hopkins and Blake. Yet my

approach is also similar to present-day eco-spiritual and travel writing, examined in Chapter

Two. Nature also magnifies meanings in the text, as the landscape either looms or

conversely gives light. For example, the mythical encounters with the landscape of central

Australia act as a perfect counter balance to the subtle hell of my exile, loneliness and

isolation, in Chapter Seven of The Mandorla.

Constant re-visioning of the project provided me with opportunities to probe deep,

and find layers of symbolism, dissonance and resolve. I wanted to include recurrent signs

and symbols to strengthen the structural integrity of the project, such as the recurring

symbols of hearts, crosses, Madonnas. Archetypal images and recurring motifs were

braided into the text, bringing together the fragmented surface of my narrative,

strengthening spiritual themes. Jung claims, “Symbols of the Self arise from the depths of

the body” (Man 33). He says “It is the role of religious symbols to give meaning to the life

of man.… Modern man does not understand how much his rationalism has destroyed his

capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas, and this has put him at the mercy of the

psychic underworld” (Man 1).

The title of my thesis is a powerful symbol. I settled on the title, The Mandorla,

because its symbolism seemed to encapsulate a central premise for defining the work. The

almond-shaped third space of the mandorla that forms when two circles overlap is symbolic

20 Leigh argues there is a concern for spiritual writers to find language adequate to their conversion experience in a secularised world where religious language has become the fundamentalist’s cliché or the advertiser’s stock phrase (7). This, Leigh says, plunges the writer into the most crucial of struggles: that of finding an adequate notion of God. In psychological terms, they face the question: who am I? (21)

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of complementary opposites coming together, and represented the human–divine space I

was exploring. It is suggestive of other binaries too, such as body–spirit, finite–infinite,

self–Self. But this title proved to be problematic. Most people were unfamiliar with the

term, ‘mandorla,’ and thought I was saying ‘mandala.’ Continuously explaining the title

became burdensome, and a title that brought so much notice to itself seemed precocious. I

decided to rename the project. But when one academic prompted that this confusion about

the title was not a good reason to change it, suddenly, a whole lifetime of parallels flashed

before me, such as the times when I’d spoken and acted in drone conventional terms so as

to fit in and not draw unwarranted attention to myself. I was no longer prepared to do this.

The title was difficult; my positioning of self in the world was difficult; themes of difficulty

and struggle were strewn throughout the project; besides, the journey of the writing of the

thesis had been inordinately difficult, and continually thwarted.

In the beginning there were a number of reasons I preferred the idea of writing in an

autobiographical-fictive form. I felt vulnerable. Writing autobiographically of deeply

personal experiences felt like exposure. Also it seemed too pedantic an undertaking to be

tied to continual truth-telling. I wanted to be free to serve the creative, aesthetic

requirements of the text. But as the project evolved I was to find truth-telling and sincerity

of tone were to become paramount, even though using the verb “to be” was a continual

concern for me. I was always contriving ways to avoid it. In Surprised By Joy the author

C.S. Lewis assesses his own work as “suffocatingly subjective” in its concentration on the

inner personal experience of the writer (x). I too found it unnatural to write using the

personal pronoun, ‘I,’ and disliked spending so much time speaking about my life in first-

person. It seemed solipsistic, self-absorbed. My familial background and motherhood had

trained me at a profound level to be there for others, and the last thing I wanted to do was

speak of myself.

Irigaray explores this propensity of the feminine to reach out to the other. Other

theorists also remark on this.21 Irigaray explains the importance of a woman maintaining a

distinct sense of “I.” She clarifies that the problem for a woman is how to distinguish the

other from herself, or return to herself without flowing into others. She writes that because

women communicate through “air … blood … milk, and even through voice and love,

before and beyond any perceptible thing,” a woman must become able to be, and to remain

an ‘I’” in order to hold a dialogue (Key Writings xiii). This was something that I also came

21 Mason writes, “The disclosure of the female self is often linked to the identification of some ‘other,’” (210). Benstock states, “Female autobiographers are more aware of their ‘otherness’” (9).

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to prize, towards the end of my project. I did come to see how necessary ‘I’ was to writing

my story, and in the end, lost my aversion to writing it.

George Bernard Shaw remarks on how the use of first-person narration has universal

implications: he states, “The man [sic] who writes about himself and his own time is the

only man [sic] who writes about all people and about all times.” Correspondingly, Michel

de Montaigne declares: “Every man [sic] has within himself the entire human condition”

(907). Ruth Ray and Susan McFadden (2001) also refer to this shared sense of “I,” but

describe it in a different way. They claim that because of the living networks that

underwrite every woman’s life story, “To say I think, I know, I believe is to say something

profoundly social, as distinct from individual” (203).

Whatever the personal implications of using a first-person perspective, however, there

were other difficulties related to using “I,” such as trying to moderate the unstoppable pulse

of a continuous first-person dynamic. I had read Rita Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad

(2001), and her pacey, unrelenting lineal chronology in first-person had at times seemed

obsessive. I was always thinking of ways to deal with with this difficulty when I was

writing. Often, I liked to think of the narrative voice in terms of symphonic movements, and

tone and flow. Sometimes I employed the distance of third-person perspective, allowing the

reader to pause and take the story in. Other times I used what Lopate refers to as a “double

perspective,” reflecting on the story and understandings and wisdom that, as he suggests,

“The author is only able to disseminate in hindsight” (Genre 16).

The chronological flow of the narrative is also disrupted through a multi-layering of

the text. This technique allowed multiple points of view to be presented simultaneously, a

style of writing that also reflected the discontinuous narrative of my own life. There are

flashbacks to childhood, marriage and motherhood, developed through retrospective writing

of some length, as well as episodes of looking and feeling forwards, such as the

introduction of my cliff-top unit years before it appears in the linear sequence of the story.

The sequential flow of the story is also disturbed by moments of epiphany, where the

narrative time is bent and stretched and distorted in other ways. Sometimes a moment is

loaded—time implodes and becomes filled with elevated, subtle meaning, such as certain

ashram experiences. There are also episodes of bilocation, as in the visionary experience of

Machu Picchu, and yet in other episodes there is a sense of time out of time, such as in the

boat in Avalon, and meeting Sri Devpuriji.

Despite the presence of these non-rational, imaginal, paranormal elements, however,

sincerity and truth-telling were always upmost in my mind. Yet the art of clear, truthful

representation in a self-reflexive, autobiographical mode of expression is inherently

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complex. While James Atlas (1996) states, “Contemporary readers want to read truth,” and

adds that we live in “a culture of confession” where the very notion of privacy has become

an alien concept (12), the inordinate difficulty of this endeavour of truth-telling is greatly

remarked upon. This is due to the endlessly faceted truth of one’s individuality in a

temporal context of time–space. One’s truth is also affected by the circumspective, shifting

nature of memory and imagination and by one’s subjective orientation including gender,

cultural background and education level.

The tenuous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are documented by numerous

critics and writers such as William Wordsworth, who wrote many versions of The Prelude

and spent a lifetime revising it. He refers to The Prelude as “a poem on the growth of my

mind” (16). Karen Armstrong likewise remarks on how the past changes its meaning over

time as our circumstances change. She writes that her first draft of Through the Narrow

Gate is “very black and angry,” but in subsequent versions she remembers other more

positive things (xiii). Similarly, Armstrong explains how earlier versions of The Spiral

Staircase portrayed “a cheery self-portrait,” and were “possibly an exercise in wish-

fulfillment” (xx). Robyn Davidson as well observes this unreliable nature of memory, and

says that the India she visited in 1978 consists of “images of doubtful authenticity held

together in a ground of forgetfulness” (Desert Places 5).

I also experienced these permutations of memory and imagination in evoking details

for the memoir, such as in the case of writing about my youthful trip through India three

decades later. I had to work at recalling a sense of its reality: the character, the location,

feelings, sounds and smells. I used a combination of research, memory and imagination to

conjure a recollection of its truth. This process allowed me to access deeper memories and a

feeling of the truth of this past. I worked on this a lot, so that in the travel writing, for

example, I used the research to recall geographic and architectural details of place, and

employed fictional techniques such as dialogue, setting and scene to evoke the reality of

moving around and interacting with the landscape, the architecture and people.

Yet, as I progressed in this manner, where accuracy and sincerity of tone were to

become vital, complex moral and ethical issues related to writing about family and friends

arose. Even though inclusions of these other characters are minimal in my work, it terrified

me, and still the anxiety remained. For a long time, I didn’t feel I had the right to discuss

others. It felt like betrayal. Hampl (1999), too, questions whether what happens in the dark

of human intimacy is holy, and belongs to silence (33). Doty (2000) also reflects on

whether a writer should even write of others, and asks whether, from memory or from

research, we can ever know the other. He defines this act of “seeing into” others as an

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interpretive fiction, and partial; because like any biographer, he must sift through what he

knows and emphasise one strand over another, and finally acknowledge there are threads he

will never recover. Yet also he observes, “This is all we have” (31–34). Following the

publication of his memoir, Firebird, Doty finds he has “replaced an inauthentic relationship

… with an authentic silence” and is honestly unable to decide which is better (36).

Memoirist Nancy Miller looks at these difficulties of telling the truth about others,

and explains how it can be cathartic. She argues that as you tell the secrets of others, and

violate family codes, “secret knowledge becomes public shame,” and you separate yourself

from their power over you, even as you return to them in memory (210).

This is possibly something I experienced in relation to writing about my ex-husband.

It took a long time to realise I would have to write about him and wade around in those

memories. When I did begin to write of him, it was even more difficult naming him. It was

a great trial to push through these fears, and I began to wonder if he was some sort of

nemesis, or patriarchal shadow of the divine feminine I was trying to explore. Not naming

him was an unconscious movement of the writing. I did not question this, and did not name

him until the end. All my life I had disguised him, creating him as a character that fitted the

person I was hoping he might be, ignoring so much about him. I have rarely seen the hidden

anger that smoulders inside me in relation to my ex-husband; though when I do glimpse it,

the depth of it always surprises me. Yet I have always been perplexed as to where it is

hidden. In the case of my mother, however, in those final years, I did see my anger, what

seemed her betrayal of me was incomprehensible, and devastating. But as Irigaray suggests,

we women should be daughter-gods in relation to our mothers, honour this primitive

attachment, and not hate her for entering into submission to patriarchal values: “The God

whom we know, and the ones we have known for centuries are men” (Divine Women 12).

Uncovering and peeling back these layers of truth has ended up being a cathartic and

healing process, even though it involved exposing things about myself that I’d never spoken

of, and other things that I was deeply ashamed of. Armstrong also comments on this, and

observes, “Autobiography must be one of the most challenging genres because it becomes

impossible to keep humiliating glimpses of one’s former self at bay” (Through xiii). But

now, four years later, having gone through the many revisions of this project in an attempt

to comprehend my experiences, I am pleased.

Curiously, when I think of it, I had the least difficulty in writing of the various

encounters with numinosum, and the inter-dimensional, light-bearing, diaphanous forms of

my visions. While mysterious, sometimes somehow terrifying, above all these direct

experiences of spirit were strangely familiar and the most straightforward to write of: the

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unspoken language of these exchanges communicated in words that were written directly

into the text with little, if no, revision.

Yet while these numinous experiences of spirit may have seemed familiar in some

ways, The Mandorla is also impelled throughout by a deeply troubling sense of alienation. I

never understood the horses of my initial vision of the thesis, even though instinctively I

knew that this distillation of stampeding energy was powering my PhD thesis. While that

vision is still somewhat of an enigma to me, in the end, I came to see clearly how the

impassioned horses gave some hint as to the urgency of a potent, feeling truth inside me

that was propelling the project. Is there a centre to the writing? I would say that it lies in the

complexity of ambiguities embodied at its heart. Despite my own self-deceptions, lies,

falsity, misplaced loyalties, ego and personality, still there was always awareness, a Self

within me that was there to observe these things. Some would call this conscience. I think

of this subtle, untiring attentiveness inside as the essence of me. Possibly this is at the centre

of the writing.

There is no narrative closure in The Mandorla; the story is dotted through with

moments of illumination, like stars in an overarching sky that are part of a universe over

which there is no control—beaming stars, interspersed also with imploded universes, dying

stars, great loss. On the surface there are the masks I assumed, characters I acted out,

disguises created for myself and others. Yet under these robes, behind the scenes, beyond

the backdrops, outside the script of the play, with its perfect shadow version, within and

beyond all of this, is the subtle breath of the Self, God, the Absolute that all along I sought.

The whole journey had been to become established in a natural living vital mysticism I’d

sensed from childhood, a life-giving Self totally stripped of disguise.

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2. The Idea of the Journey in Spiritual Memoir

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time

(Four Quartets “Little Gidding” 239-42 T.S. Eliot)

The idea of the journey is integral to spiritual autobiographical writing. There are outer

journeys, which may entail travel writing, pilgrimage writing, or journey-episodes through

everyday and ordinary life, and also the inner spiritual journey, operating simultaneously.

The internal spiritual journeying functions whether the author is in prison, as in Nelson

Mandela’s spiritual autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994); in a monastic system

such as Tibetan Buddhist Tenzin Palmo, in Cave in the Snow (1998); on a pilgrimage like

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Crossing to Avalon (1994); travelling across the desert as in Robyn

Davidson’s Tracks (1980); or immersed in the challenges and illuminations of everyday and

ordinary secular life, such as in the spiritual journeys of two ex-nuns, Karen Armstrong and

Monica Baldwin, investigated in the following chapter. Ted O’Reilly describes these

internal voyages of discovery as “something of a non-linear map of consciousness,” and

explains that the “ecology and topography of the inner journey” is no less real than any

other place we encounter out there in the world-at-large. He says, “The tissue of what we

call consciousness is composed of layers of relationships with many aspects of the world,

ourselves and others” (2002, xvii - xviii). For the spiritual memoirist, the writing process is

also part of the journey, as the pilgrim–narrator maps multi-layered, multi-dimensional,

transcendental inroads to Self, Enlightenment, God/Goddess with words.

This second chapter of the exegesis will delve into the idea of the journey in a

number of texts that explore spiritual themes though travel and pilgrimage writing, such as

Patricia Hampl’s Virgin Time (1992); Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978);

Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh (1983) and Martin Buckley’s An Indian Odyssey

(2008). It will, in addition, examine the profound connections to the natural world in the

eco-spiritual writing of Jane Goodall’s Reason For Hope (1999); Robyn Davidson’s

Tracks; and Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), as well as, among other

texts, look at the astonishing spiritual story of Tenzin Palmo in Cave in the Snow and Jean

Shinoda Bolen’s pilgrimage in Crossing to Avalon. Finally, this chapter will look at some

methodologies for understanding the process of the internal journey in spiritual

autobiographical writing.

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Spiritual Travel Writing

Many autobiographical texts explore spiritual themes through travel. Travel is a way of

shifting one’s context to that of “the other.” To stand in a perspective of “otherness”

requires fluid boundaries, and flexibility of feeling and thought. The too self-assured

traveller or tourist can, as Dennis Porter (1991) observes, “misinterpret foreign landscapes

and cultural topographies,” such as found in the “orientalism” and “cultural smugness” of a

whole range of colonial literature (288). Contemporarily, however, as poet and critic Susan

Bassnet (2006) observes, we are witnessing the demise of a world-view that separated self

and other. She observes that masses are in movement around the world with the result that

“theories of race and cultural background, once used as a means of dividing peoples are

starting to dissolve” (236).

Certainly, the travel stories of a number of modern writers are evidence of this

shifting amalgamation of cultural, social and religious perspectives. Peter Matthiessen’s The

Snow Leopard, Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh, Patricia Hampl’s Virgin Time, and

Martin Buckley’s An Indian Odyssey all explore new cultural, theological and spiritual

perspectives through travel. Fundamental to these texts is the positioning of the author in

landscapes of significant spiritual “otherness,” as well as recurring allusions to historical

holy persons and intertextual religious references.

In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen walks two hundred and fifty miles with his

friend G.S. over remote, high-altitude territory in the Himalayas to the village of Shey (13).

Within the intense religious context of the Tibetan Plateau, he wants to sight the elusive

snow leopard, and hopes to find some respite and contemplation. The author includes lucid

insights into Buddhist philosophy, and simple, though Zen-like descriptions of the “roaring

wind, the dark blue sky” and “the glory of sunrise,” where “spider-webs glitter and

greenfinches in October gold bound from pine to shining pine” (75). He refers to The

Tibetan Book of the Dead throughout, which Matthiessen carries with him, encouraging

himself along dizzy ledges, knowing, as this text suggests, that none shall learn to live who

have not learned to die. Yet the closest the reader comes to a sense of a living spiritual

encounter seems to be Matthiessen’s relationship with the Sherpa Tukten—“that

disreputable little catlike man” (47) that most others were afraid of. Tukten acts as

Matthiessen’s guide on the journey back down the mountain, and Matthiessen’s distant

philosophical Zen tone is interrupted and disrupted by Tukten’s shamanic qualities and

uncanny actions, and by incomprehensible real-life encounter such as Tukten thrusting

Matthiessen a stave only minutes before he is attacked by a horrible mastiff.

This same high, holy ground of Tibet is also explored by the twenty-six-year-old

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Andrew Harvey in the 70s, a time when this territory was less known. Harvey explores the

high country of Shey, which is for Harvey: “a pass into another awareness of reality” (14).

Yet although the author describes this journey as, “All day higher and higher into the

mountains… surrounded by them, traveling their inner paths” (36), it is only in the final and

third section of A Journey in Ladakh that Harvey immerses himself in this landscape of

otherness. This happens when, as Harvey says, he is able to go “beyond his clever Oxford

questioning mind” (213). This re-positioning of focus is achieved when Harvey immerses

himself in the enthralling spiritual reality of the Rinpoche: “You… merge with him, you

melt into him…. You become your highest self, which is He” 22 (235). Harvey is awakened

to the possibilities of the spiritual through this encounter and recounts the Rinpoche’s

extraordinary explanation of compassion:

This is not merely a perfection of mind … of the ruthless, nihilistic intellect. That perfection

must be there, must be attained. But not at the expense of the heart, a perfection of love … a

unity of all opposites and paradoxes, that is a mystery of the deepest and most abiding joy…

the unity of Mind and Spirit, of Wisdom and Compassion” (164/5). Later the Rinpoche

explains the face of the Buddha of Compassion (Avalokiteshvara) is your real face. But to see

your real face you must be very calm, you must forget all your other faces, you must be

fearless…. because the face of true pity is so beautiful it is frightening (172).

Patricia Hampl is similarly seeking this sort of living experience of the spiritual

when she travels to the compelling landscape of St Francis and St Clare of Assisi in Italy.

The author hikes with other pilgrims and tourists across the Umbrian hills and wants to

connect with the living spiritual truths embedded in the landscape. Her text is littered with

religious and historical allusions to the miracles and lives of Assisi’s saints, and intertextual

references to the Revelations of Julian of Norwich and, among others, The Cloud of

Unknowing, an anonymous work of Christian mysticism. But for Hampl, “The

contemplative life [is] crazy … maybe nonexistent … in this landscape of truffles and

flowering fennel” (33). Her time in Assisi is “a series of drifting days in a tourist town”

(85), and when another pilgrimage is proposed, Hampl groans: “no more pilgrimages. I just

take a billion notes. It’s like eating too much” (189). Yet despite Hampl’s cynicism

throughout most of the text, at the conclusion of Virgin Time, the reader is left with an

image that seems to counterbalance it. Hampl does go on another retreat—to a small

Cistercian women’s monastery in “beautiful nowhere” (189). Here she glimpses the

22 This process is also known as guru bhava, explored in The Mandorla.

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spiritual depths within: she reflects, “Prayer only looks like an act of language,

fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself. Focus” (217).

In An Indian Odyssey Martin Buckley specifically attempts this sort of shift in focus

as he wanders the ancient Indian landscape, travelling to the various religious sites of the

Ramayana (500–700 BCE), seeking to reconstruct the sacred context of this story. Buckley

inserts summarised sections of the Ramayana in italics throughout, which he parallels and

juxtaposes to his own journey through time–space, where every hill and lake seems

“entwined in some holy text or other” (84). While Harvey wants to merge with the

enlightened state of the Rinpoche, Buckley wants to merge, or rather to “feel the living

truths embedded in the ancient Indian landscape” (149). Buckley says, “When you visit a

powerful place with a powerful spiritual atmosphere, you soak in it. If you are devoted, in

time, you will experience the bliss of meeting God” (168).

Although these texts are frequently defined as contemporary spiritual classics, one

could also argue that they are better located in pilgrimage and travel writing. Except for the

final section of Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh, and the concluding vignette of Virgin Time,

there is no sense of that ache and yearning so central to spiritual autobiographical writing.

Critic Mark Flanagan describes The Snow Leopard as “a powerful spiritual memoir,” but

one could argue that while this text is representative of work in the field, Matthiessen’s

oblique engagement with his wife’s recent death to cancer, and scant exploration of the

long, painful separation from his eight-year-old son, are gaps that leave an unwritten text at

the heart of the writing. Similarly, while Virgin Time is often defined as spiritual memoir, I

would tend to agree with Hampl’s own view in an interview in 2008, where she defines it as

“more a contemporary Canterbury Tales” (27).

Much present-day women’s eco-spiritual travel writing, however, does explore a powerful

spiritual sense through an existential, feeling intuitive relationship with the natural world.

This is evidenced in anthropologist Jane Goodall’s Reason For Hope (1999); Australian

travel writer Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980); and American travel writer Gretel Ehrlich’s

collection of twelve essays in The Solace of Open Spaces (1985). These unique works are

examples of an emerging gendered form of spiritual, environmental literature, where female

authors are seeking deeper and more genuine understandings of self/Self through their

profound connections with ‘virgin’ landscapes of otherness. This “otherness” of the earth

nurtures like a mother, a Divine Mother Earth. Reader (1993) comments on this tremendous

healing potential of the earth: “In this shifting, ecologically fragile world, our connection to

the earth can be used for the benefit of humanity if appreciated and approached” (224).

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Bassnett observes that travel is only a relatively recent phenomenon for women.23

She claims that current trends indicate the tendency to a re-storying of self in women’s

travel writing, (226–239). Bassnett comments on the strong, original voices of late-

twentieth-century female travel-writers and remarks that, in the adjustment of perspectives

to a multi-focal world view, the role of women is immense (237). One may observe that

Goodall, Davidson and Ehrlich are examples of this. All travel alone to untouched

landscapes of otherness, and there discover profound, more authentic understandings of

self/Self, free of disguise.

Goodall travels to the vast forests of Gombe to research chimpanzees, fulfilling a

childhood dream, and there discovers a natural, mystical connection to the pristine, wild,

“virgin” terrain. Alone here, Goodall ponders moral and spiritual questions, and her concern

for the environment, and becomes aware of the magical beauty of the world of nature.

Goodall also refers to the many people who have influenced her development. This is

something Ray and McFadden explain as the “web-like structure in Goodall’s life” which,

they claim, is “an example of how the collective ‘I’ works to explain spiritual growth

through relationship” (203). But Goodall’s solitary relationship with the natural world is

also of import and this opens up new dimensions. Goodall finds there are “many windows

through which we can look at the world around us” (174), such as those the “mystics and

holy men [sic]” gazed through, who saw “not with their minds only, but with their hearts

and souls too” (175).

A deep realism, resilience and responsiveness to the world of nature are also found

in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks. The twenty-seven-year-old Davidson travels two thousand

and seven hundred kilometres with four camels and Diggity, her dog, from Central

Australia to the Indian Ocean. Immersed in this vast presence of the desert, Davidson

explores the “re-storying” of self, and finds deeper layers of self: she explains, “I liked

myself this way. It was such a relief to be free of disguises and prettiness…. above all, that

horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind” (196). This sort of re-

storying of self is an example of what Irigaray is referring to when she declares, “We are

not yet women born” (Divine Women 7).24

When Gretel Ehrlich travels to Wyoming, in the remote reaches of the West for

years, she explores this sort of re-storying of self through an intense relationship with the

23 Bassnett observes that even towards the end of the twentieth century, most travel accounts were explicitly gendered, written mainly by men and about men. Bassnet looks at the unusual life stories of Victorian women travellers: Ladies on the Loose; The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt; Spinsters Abroad and others. She notes the diversity regarding subject matter and style, but finds one consistent line is the notion these women are somehow exceptional. Other recurrent themes include the importance of the everyday; and the differences between these women’s lives at home and on the road (226–239). 24 See Chapter 1: “Sexual Difference” in Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference pp 5–20.

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landscape there. Ironically, the “arid” earth is “engorged with detail, every movement on it

chillingly sharp” (7). This is a place “of torrential beauty” (53); and it is “a clean slate” for

Ehrlich. Its “absolute indifference [steadies] her (4), and though at times “she feels numb in

all this vividness” (51), in this place where communication is pared back “to the skin and

bones of a thought” (6), Ehrlich rediscovers the unpretentious, living depths of pared-back

self without disguise.

The landscape is spiritually nourishing. Ehrlich employs religious metaphors to

convey this blessed nature of the earth from which we receive wisdom and divine

nourishment: the landscape is “sacramental, to be read as text” (71) and she says, “We are

supplicants, waiting all spring for the water to come down” (75); later Ehrlich adds that in

Navajo mythology, the “rain is the sun’s sperm coming down” (83). Her spiritual

orientation is both indigenous and Christian. Ehrlich writes, “Christians see artificial

divisions between sacred and profane, unlike the native Americans who become diviners,

visionaries, healers” (105), but then when she describes the divine gifts of the landscape, it

is in terms of the Eucharist: “the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue it is wholeness …

placed under my tongue … enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come”

(130).

This highly religious relationship with the landscape with which one’s self, mind,

thoughts, feelings and spirit are shared, is likewise evident in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks.

Davidson emphasises this idea through her central motif of nomadism. Davidson writes

about “Aboriginal feeling” for the land which, she says, “no amount of anthropological

detail can begin to convey.” The land is everything—“their law, their ethics, their reason for

existence” (167). In an ABC audio interview (2014) just before the release of the film of

Tracks, Davidson states: “Nomads are the most grounded people in the world.” She

describes this as “an existential at-homeness in the landscape that all nomads have.”

This sacred-feeling25 relationship with the landscape reveals a mystical realm that is

immanent and naturally accessed by attuning to the earth. One sunrise, Davidson finds that

some moments are like “pivots around which [her] existence turns.” Another time,

“camping in a dustbowl” in the desert “under a few straggly trees,” Davidson recounts how,

having suddenly thrown her clothes off to join the camels rolling in the dirt, she has “the

most honest hour of unselfconscious fun” she has ever had. She writes that this does more

for her “aesthetic senses than the Taj Mahal” (196). For Goodall, the world of the forests of

25 This is in contrast to the feeling in relation to ‘desire’ that Dennis Porter remarks on in his investigation into twelve male travel

writers from the eighteenth century to the modern period in Haunted Journeys. Porter finds that, while these accounts are diverse,

“all are typically fuelled by desire and embody powerful transgressive impulses.” Porter refers to Freud’s views about the powerful

links between travel and the libido. Porter claims that according to Freud, the libido is a “dynamic but obscure energy within a human subject that insists on satisfactions of a kind the world cannot supply” (8).

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Gombe seems “hung with diamonds, sparkling on every leaf, every blade of grass,” and she

“crouch[es] low to avoid destroying a jewelled spider’s web that stretched, exquisite and

fragile, across the trail” (173). For Ehrlich, the power and energy of the landscape of

Wyoming is transformational: “the air between people is charged… [and] nights become

hallucinatory dreams, prescient” (7).

Pilgrimage Writing

Pilgrimage combines travel and the spiritual quest to specifically explore a divine form of

“the other” both without and within. This form of journeying occurs in just about every

major religious tradition. Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism have all developed

complex pilgrimage cultures. Reader argues that “pilgrimage is one of the most common

phenomena found in religious culture today, ranging from sites that transcend any national

or cultural boundaries, to regional and localised sites that may conversely affirm cultural

belongings” (3). American author, film maker, Phil Cousineau (2000) also remarks on its

current popularity; he claims that as the year 2000 approached, more people were

embarking on pilgrimages than at any time since the Middle Ages (xvii).

The importance of the pilgrim’s journey where, according to Cousineau, “we follow

our spiritual compass, and get back in touch with our earth, our roots, ourselves” (xv), is

confirmed historically. There are numerous ancient pilgrim trails to Rome, Jerusalem,

Santiago de Compostela and Mecca, among others. Some of these much-travelled pilgrim

paths are explicitly symbolic of the pilgrim’s journey to enlightenment, such as the hajj—a

Muslim’s pilgrimage to Mecca; or the one-thousand-four-hundred-kilometre trail including

eighty-eight temples on the Japanese isle of Shikoku—a Buddhist pilgrimage trail

representing the pilgrim’s journey to enlightenment.

Culturally diverse theological, literary and mythological texts also emphasise the

importance of the pilgrim’s journey, or in Christian terms, they represent life as a journey.

Examples include Italian, Dante’s Divine Comedy; Spanish, St Teresa of Avila’s Interior

Castle; English, Bunyan’s allegorical representation of the spiritual journey to

enlightenment in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678); and the Russian classic, The Way of a

Pilgrim, about the anonymous pilgrim who seeks to reach enlightenment through constant

prayer.

The biography of Dianne Perry, who travels to India to become a Buddhist

practitioner and is re-named Tenzin Palmo, is also a type of pilgrimage and this journey

recounted in Cave in the Snow is specifically subtitled “Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for

Enlightenment.” Palmo initially studies in the monastery but later, under the guidance of

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her teacher, isolates herself for twelve years in a cave in the snow to undergo a strict

regimen of prayer and spiritual austerities. In this story, Palmo challenges the present

Buddhist idea that you cannot reach enlightenment in the body of a woman. She says, even

though legends of Dakinis, a multitude of female Buddhas such as Tara, and some Buddhist

mythologies pay homage to the notion of women’s Enlightenment (125), there is no proof

that these women actually lived (127). After emerging from her cave in the snow, Palmo

appropriates the spiritual intensity of her Buddhist journey to re-story her connection to

Christianity in Assisi, and she discovers a revitalised understanding of the Christian saints

such as St Francis and St Clare of Assisi, and St Teresa of Avila.

While Palmo undertakes her spiritual journey within the context of the Buddhist

tradition she also has a lot of freedom to explore this path in her own way. This subjective

sovereignty26 is also apparent in many present-day seekers who are undertaking their

spiritual journeys alone, and in distinctly unique ways. Liliane Voye (2002) comments on

the popularity of Catholic pilgrimage destinations such as Santiago de Compostela,

Chartres, Lourdes and Medjugorje, and says that these traditional pilgrimage sites now also

come within the province of “popular” religion (115). Voye emphasises the importance of

this for Catholicism, even though the secularisation of these sites decreases the power of the

church to control and impose behaviour (133). Reader also remarks on the independence of

modern seekers, and points out, “The eternal living legacies of saints continue to be

honoured by contemporary pilgrims” (18). Swatos and Tomasi (2002) also comment on this

and explain that a visit to a punitively holy site is an experiential way of touching the

numinous. Like Voye and Reader, they emphasise the subjective autonomy of this

encounter, advising that “new spirituality values personal experience as a key to religious

meaningfulness” (208).

This approach of contemporary pilgrim culture is an example of eminent sociologist

Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) “liquid modernity theory” which refers to a cultural condition

where innovation has become an essential part of life, work and thought. Bauman explains

how the rigid frameworks of convention are being disempowered in favour of a more

liquid, fluid and flowing relationship to life. He claims that “we are witnessing the revenge

of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement” (14).

This mirroring of liquid modernity in modern pilgrim culture offers something that

26 Subjective sovereignty is a term I deployed after reading Margry’s Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World where Margry points out that during the early 1960s, individuals increasingly withdrew into the private sphere and attached greater importance to their “subjective autonomy” thereby giving rise to new forms of religiosity (153). But I wanted to suggest something more than personal autonomy. Subjective sovereignty implies not just the idea of individual freedom and self-sufficiency; it indicates specifically that the royal dominion of divine revelation is not within powerful establishments; the final stage of our fairy tale is within the individual. Our castle of dreams is within the Self; the Divine ‘Other’ is within.

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Reader refers to as rebirth and return: “Rebirth to a new life involves healing the wounds of

bereavement, loss and disruption” (222). Reader says, in accessing the liminal, “the ideal is

felt to be real, and the tainted social persona is cleansed and renewed” (57).

In Crossing to Avalon (1994), Jean Shinoda Bolen explores this mode of travel

when she visits ancient pilgrimage destinations such as the holy well of Chartres. Bolen

explains that she “receives a gift of the earth, where something gives like a Mother” (29).

She claims these gifts of the earth are due to the telluric (magnetic or cosmic) currents that

snake through the ground, represented as serpents. These gifts are received

“kinaesthetically,” where her body is like “a tuning fork, or a dowsing rod” (28). Bolen

believes that communing with Nature is a sacred dialogue, upon which our spiritual

development as a species depends (31). Later Bolen describes earth attunements such as this

as a heartfelt experience (240).

Marion Bowman (2009), who observes the “integrative spirituality” of modern

pilgrims, also looks at this “awakening to the Earth” (38), especially in Glastonbury. She

notes the manifold meanings and diverse nuances attached to this place by different groups,

and describes it as a “multivalent pilgrimage site for a variety of spiritual seekers” (161).

Bolen also explores Glastonbury, where she proclaims “the ordinary world and the

otherworld seemingly overlap” (126). Bolen claims that “rituals take place within sacred

time and space” (121), and asserts that “some landscapes affect us like dreams, or poems, or

music” (126). Lyn Hume and Kathleen McPhillips (2006) look at experimental approaches

to spirituality such as these. They observe that because traditional religions, especially in

the West, have lost their spiritual efficacy, contemporary seekers are looking for “re-

enchantment.” Hume and McPhillips explain this in terms of bringing back the imagination

and the possibility of magic into everyday life (xv).

In an essay, “The Goddess Tour,” Bob Hodge (2006) explores this sort of re-

enchantment and magic which includes various contradictions and distortions of the

dimension of time. He says “Modernist time is linear, but postmodern time bends and plays

tricks” (133). When Hodge goes on a spiritual journey to various Mediterranean sacred sites

connected with the ancient goddess culture, he experiences a warping of the dimension of

time; he discovers the Goddess is still a living force in the caves and murals from before

10,000 BCE in the French village of Magdalene (35). Similarly, when he returns home, the

Goddess continues to exist in a shrine for the Goddess of Tenerife in their front room, and

images of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the car. Hodge asserts this is “the space–time matrix

of the Goddess” (30–31).

Hodge explains this attunement to the ancient spiritual power of place as a process

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of using both mind and body, whereby knowledge, emotion and spirituality meet and

interact. He says, “One repeats ancient actions in ancient places in the modern world” (30–

31). Like Bolen, Hodge’s exploration of these traditional religious sites reveals the depths

of an ancient spiritual script laden with meaning that exists beyond usual time and space.

Hodge comments that some places, such as a series of sites built around the idea of Atlantis,

are representative of the place of the axis mundi—the meeting of heaven and earth.

McPhillips affirms that postmodern religion encourages a disintegration of old

dichotomies such as fact and fiction, real and imaginary: she says “perimeters are fluid and

flexible” (xvii). This is evidenced in the works surveyed as well as a number of popular

pilgrimage narratives such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-seller, Eat, Pray, Love (2007). Gilbert

questions her place as a woman in the traditional Western paradigm and travels to Italy, and

to India, to the ashram of her guru, as well as to the paradisiacal world of Bali in order to

explore the fluid boundaries of her spiritual, social, intellectual and cultural context in the

world. Gilbert comes up with her own unique mix and discovers a deeper reality of “self.”

In Travelling with Pomegranates (2009), Sue Monk-Kidd is, similarly, exploring these fluid

boundaries of self/Self. Accompanied by her daughter, she travels to various sacred

destinations such as Eleusis in Greece, sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, and Ephesus

in Turkey, where the Virgin Mary was said to have lived out her days. Monk-Kidd looks at

deeper authenticities of self, especially of a feminine divine Self, as well as her relationship

with her daughter.

Reader (1993), who observes this boundary-crossing nature of postmodern

pilgrimage, classes himself as an academic nomad, or pilgrim, travelling along the borders

between anthropology, sociology, history, and religious studies (14). One may observe that

the earth–divine journeys of contemporary pilgrims are full of such contradictions and post-

rational realities, which include intense connections with the earth, as well as ancient sacred

sites. In this, as Turner and Turner point out, “The body acts as a contact point for

communication with the “supernatural other” through visions, apparitions and miracles

(146–156), just as it did for the medieval mystics. Lucas and Robbins claim that these new

understandings of self and spirituality, spirituality and the environment are leading to social

change and political activism (97).

The latent metamorphic potential of the human–divine body is laden with alchemic

possibilities to discover, and rediscover far-reaching and close-up imaginal27 worlds within.

These surveyed texts all demonstrate that the divine other is not only out there in virgin

27 In biology, “the imaginal stage” is the last stage of metamorphosis in an insect’s life cycle when it attains its final, fully mature, adult form and becomes what entomologists call an imago. Imago is Latin for “image; idea; appearance” says one online source: 366inscience.tumblr.

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landscapes and sacred sites, the divine other—Self, God/Goddess, enlightenment—is also

layered within.

Methodologies for Understanding the Journey in Spiritual Memoir

The title of my project, The Mandorla, is symbolic of this divine–human ground of

enlightenment—the goal of the spiritual journey. The symbolism of the mandorla, though

little known today, is central to many traditions. In Christian medieval theology and

religious iconography, the mandorla is the almond shaped aureole of light surrounding the

entire figure of a holy person. The mandorla, Italian for almond, was used for the figure of

Christ, The Virgin Mary, the saints, the apostles and other holy persons. The shape is often

seen over the central entrance of gothic cathedrals. It is also the shape of the vulva, the

portal of birth, and “a universal symbol of the Mother Goddess, representative of an outline

of her vulva” (Bolen 116–117). This is also represented by the Sheela na gigs, symbolic

Celtic stone and wood carvings of naked women exhibiting an exaggerated vulva, and

which are often found in Ireland and Great Britain on church and castle walls.

The ancient symbol of the vesica piscis, also a mandorla, forms when the edge of

one circle touches the centre of another. In sacred geometry, the vesica piscis is symbolic of

the womb of the universe, in Christianity it is the fish symbol for Christ. The mandorla is

also found in Buddhism and Egyptian mythology: for example, it is the eye of Horus. The

Hindu equivalent of the mandorla is the symbol of two triangles overlapping, symbolic of

God aspiring to human, and human aspiring to God. Where the two overlap, the thousand-

petaled lotus is said to flower, representative of enlightenment. In Christian terms, these

intersecting triangles form the Star of David, or the Seal of Solomon—an alchemical

symbol representative of the combination of opposites28 and of transmutation; this symbol

is also representative of perfect balance and divine love. In indigenous traditions, the space

of overlap between complementary opposites is also important. The overlap between night

and day—twilight and dawn—is considered spiritually powerful in Aboriginal learning

(Kwaymullina et al. 33). In nature also, “when opposites meet, a dynamic synergy occurs,”

such as “where high ground meets low ground, where sea meets land;” all through nature,

when opposites mix, they create something new that is better than either. It is not a

compromise (Kwaymullina et al. 206).

This divine–human ground may be accessed naturally in moments of illumination.

But to become established in this perspective, often a lengthy spiritual journey is required,

so as to unlearn all the complex and hidden things that prevent us from experiencing this.

28 In the semiology of the Seal of Solomon fire is represented by the up triangle, and water by the down pointing triangle

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The Katha Upanishad explains “the path [to Self] is narrow as the edge of a razor” (61).

Carl Gustav Jung also alludes to the difficulty of the spiritual journey. He says:

Unfortunately the spiritual journey is never straightforward. It is made up of fateful detours

and wrong turnings. The right way to wholeness is via longissima, [the longest way] not

straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a

path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terror (Jung On Christianity 184).

This notion that spiritual journeys involve an endlessly long and difficult process is

widespread, and described through various theoretical frameworks. Jung describes this

personal, spiritual journey towards wholeness as a spiraling circular path, where one is

constantly “circumambulating” the Self, in order to become a separate indivisible unity or

“whole.” Jung terms this process, “individuation,” a process that does not shut one out from

the world, but gathers the world to oneself (Memories 395). Yet, he clarifies, this process is

also an “opus contra naturam,” meaning “throughout this journey one must make a

conscious effort not to act instinctively” (Memories 395). Clendenen explains that for Jung,

Hildegard of Bingen was the only person to achieve individuation (44).

American mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell has similar notions

about the endless difficulties of the spiritual journey, which Campbell (2008),

controversially, compares to the “Hero’s journey” (Hero ii). Campbell claims there is a

constantly recurring motif for the hero’s journey in all the world’s great mythologies and

legends, including the stories of the Buddha, Moses and Christ. He terms this the

“monomyth,” and defines three stages: first, the mythological hero receives “a call” and

passes over a threshold. Next the hero enters something like Dante’s dark wood midway on

the journey of life, and must travel through many trials, before undergoing a supreme

ordeal, and receiving some sort of apotheosis. In the final stage, the hero returns to the

world to restore life in some way (Hero 1-16).

A number of theorists, however, reject Campbell’s model. Charlene Spretnak says

that, unlike men, women do not have the luxury of undertaking extended spiritual journeys

such as these because, as mothers and caretakers fully immersed in the business of everyday

and ordinary life, they don’t have time (396). Other feminist theorists such American

academics Ruth Ray and Susan McFadden (2001) also reject Campbell’s model, suggesting

its stages represent a distinctly gendered view of development, which is possibly classed

and raced as well. They propose alternative, relational models of the journey based on the

concept of growth through connection and relationship (210).

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Spretnak describes a feminine approach to spirituality as circular (396). Of note is

that this circular form of the journey is commented on not only by many women, explored

at length, but also by a number of men.29 Ray and McFadden use the metaphors of “the

web” and “the quilt” to propose a more natural, flowing, everyday process of spiritual

growth. Their methodology foregrounds the notion of the “relational webs” that are integral

to the process of spiritual development for women. Analogous to the female medieval

mystics’ emphasis on the virtues and charity, Ray and McFadden’s model views spiritual

development in terms of how one’s “relationship towards others grows and changes, in

terms of understanding, connection and empathy” (203). Contemporary theoretical

explorations of sainthood also foreground this notion of charity and service such as

examined in Edith Wyschogrod’s (1990) thesis on sainthood as “radical generosity,”

involving care of “the Other” in radical ways (xiv); and Derrida’s notion of hospitality

(2002)—“Hospitality—this is culture itself” (361). McPhillips (2003) asserts,

“Postmodernity is concerned with describing a new ethics, centred largely on right relations

between Self and Other” (Postmodern 4).

Yet this said, there is much evidence across the ages of female saints and spiritual

seekers progressing through the heroic stages of spiritual growth that Campbell suggests.

To reach the paradoxical centre of St Teresa’s interior castle, “terrible trials” had to be

endured. Irigaray also seems to refer to something of the heroic in suggesting that the

challenge for a woman is “to remain ‘I,’ and not always be pouring out in to the other. And

certainly, to reclaim the depths the primal, feminine—the women’s story30 that Sylvia

Brinton Perera (1981) asserts is still be written (93–94)—something terribly courageous is

needed. Marija Gimbutas (1991) likewise stresses this importance of reclaiming the power

of the original feminine.31 Irigaray proclaims this also. She says, “We need a God … our

subject, our noun, our verb, our predicate” (Divine Women 11).

The recurring motif of heroism in relation to progressing spiritually is numerously

apparent in the writing of mystics and saints, and also a recurrent motif throughout Monica

29 Jung’s individuation model is circular. Eminent American literary critic M.H. Abrams (1973) controversially claims “autobiography and the circuitous journey are the central forms of Romantic and modern literature from Blake to D. H. Lawrence” (see preface to M. H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism ix). Abrams terms the journeys of pilgrims and prodigals, such as the Prodigal Son, the “great circle” (141). Leigh (2000) also notes this circular trajectory of the spiritual journey which he argues is often impelled by a pivotal childhood experience such as Black Elk’s entire vision, which flows from a childhood vision for which he struggles in vain throughout his life. T.S. Eliot’s autobiographical poem Four Quartets ends in this way as well: “to arrive where [he] started and know the place for the first time” (47). 30 Perera cites the myth of “The Descent of Inanna,” the Sumerian queen of heaven and earth (9), as important for modern women because this oldest known myth recounts a connection to the Goddess in her primal reality. According to Perera, this initiation is essential for modern women in the Western world because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld—in exile for five thousand years (8). 31 Through extensive research into a pictorial script for the religion of the Old European Great Goddess, 6000–3500 BCE, Gimbutas claims the four-thousand-year matrilineal age was an epoch where life was lived in harmony and peace, and in accord with the creative energies of nature (xv).

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Baldwin and Karen Armstrong’s texts. These women-religious ex-nuns travel to the edges

of reason to confront new and challenging boundaries of self that hold the potential to

rediscover lost and forgotten aspects of self, and a feminine face of the divine. While the

heroic is definitely apparent in their memoirs, also central is the notion of compassion.

Armstrong, a spiritual warrior who is now spreading her “Charter for Compassion”

throughout the world, asserts, “Compassion is central to all religions” (Spiral 329). The

following chapter will investigate their contemporary spiritual memoirs recounting life-long

vocational, existential, spiritual journeys. This is the lens through which I view my own

spiritual quest in The Mandorla.

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3. Case Studies of Feminine Divine Journeys

Traditionally, many saints and mystics undertook their journeys within the context of a

spiritual vocation in a monastic setting: St Augustine, St Hildegard of Bingen, St Francis

and St Clare of Assisi, St Birgitta of Sweden, St Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich,

St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, and St Thérèse of Lisieux. These mystics

practised austerities, such as the discipline of monastic rule and bodily subjugations, to

ensure their relationship with the divine almost completely eclipsed human nature. This

supported the process of kenosis, or recollection, a system whereby one’s personal self was

eradicated, believed to be required for being “oned to” God.32 Each of these mystics

reached sainthood. Their spiritual legacies are immense. Interestingly, however, while they

practised within a strict monastic order, in addition, they each had a highly developed sense

of autonomy that derives from an omnipotent, omniscient voice that comes from within.

In this final chapter, I examine the unique, contemporary, spiritual memoirs of two

women religious who also exercise a sense of autonomy in relation to their spiritual path:

Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall (1949), and Karen Armstrong’s Through the

Narrow Gate (1982) and The Spiral Staircase (2004). These memoirs are written in the

field of women’s modern spiritual memoir, and the normative site of spiritual power—the

monastery—has diminished in relevance. I have chosen to examine their memoirs because

these women document life-long, aching, spiritual journeys that traverse to the edges of

madness and reason, and this is also where my own life story is located. Having applied the

strictures of ashram dharma and religious practice to much of my marriage and family life,

experientially, I understood how it involved, “set[ting] one’s teeth grimly and just

carry[ing] on by the will, without paying the slightest attention to how one felt” (Baldwin

223). Also, I knew how and why these women would be willing to eliminate everything of

themselves so as to reach the mystical heart of the Divine, of Self.

Armstrong and Baldwin are both searching for a deep inner sense of authenticity

and truth. Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall, described in a review at the time as one of the

“strangest and most disturbing experiences a modern woman ever lived through” (Leap 3),

documents the torturous personal process Baldwin undergoes as an ex-nun in the world,

after twenty-eight years of living in “the strictest possible enclosure” (7). Karen

32 “But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right naught that is made betwixt my God and me” (Julian of Norwich, Revelations V. 27.).

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Armstrong’s Through the Narrow Gate traces a similar, though slightly different journey.

Unlike Baldwin, Armstrong comes in to contact with the outer world after being professed,

though the severities of monastic Rule are extreme, and through these, Armstrong attempts

to destroy her ego and obliterate every aspect of personal thought. Her sequel to this, The

Spiral Staircase, follows Armstrong ex-convent journey which, like Baldwin’s, is

diversified, challenging, often lonely, though finally fulfilling.

This chapter will explore in detail Armstrong and Baldwin’s spiritual journeys both

within the monastic setting, and particularly after leaving the convent, concentrating on the

healing processes they undergo in order to find a more authentic voice. This will lead to an

exploration of the feminine face of the divine, and the human–divine ground of mystical

experience, as well as the significance of these things to my own writing in The Mandorla

and to my contemporary life.

A Monastic Vocation

Initially, Baldwin and Armstrong are full of idealism and feel called to a religious vocation;

both are seventeen when they enter the convent. Armstrong is inspired by the “magical”

school headmistress, Mother Katherine (Spiral 23–24), and wants to leave “this emptiness

of the world and follow Christ!” (Spiral 37). She says, “I wanted Him with a desire that was

frightening in its urgency” (Spiral 38). Her body, she describes as being “clumsy and

unformed for love,” but “pitting [herself] against more and more difficult ideas,” she

discovers she “can fly” (Narrow Gate 33). Armstrong wants to become part of the new

convent family “burning with love for God” (Narrow Gate 72). Baldwin’s feelings for the

mythic are ignited by Le Morte d’Arthur read in youth; and later she is won over by a

sermon when she hears: “nuns and monks did not enclose themselves to escape

responsibilities, but to continue… the hidden life of Christ” (253). The contemplative orders

represented the blazing centre of the living body of Christ and this seems the very highest

way of living to which a human being could aspire. One Benedictine father tells Baldwin,

“Mysticism is the outcome of man’s craving for and endless seeking after some way of

experiencing actual ontological, quasi-physical contact with God;” he explains, “what

feeling [is] to the body, so mystical knowledge [is] to the soul (291).

Achieving mystical union in the monastery, however, involves total war against the

body and natural desires. Baldwin describes the great self-restraint required to allow ‘The

Rule’ to mould you: the silence, fasting, vigils and the practice of “custody of the eyes,” so

stringent that to raise them even momentarily, without strict necessity, was a minor breach

of Rule (200). Similarly Armstrong, who enters the convent when the traditional regime

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was at its worst in the 1960s, just before the Second Vatican Council reforms, refers to the

convent atmosphere as “frigid, sometimes frightening” (Spiral 34). The Rule of St Ignatius,

on which her order is based, requires “obedience to be blind,” so Armstrong tries to

“abandon thinking altogether” (164).

Baldwin explains that the rationale of this extreme discipline is so as “to attain

unbroken application of the mind to God” (200). Armstrong reasons, “What were a few

hardships if they led to a close relationship with God?” (Narrow Gate 2). Linked to the idea

of discipline is suffering, considered “one of the most valuable things in spiritual life and

nothing, except perhaps humiliation, is comparable to it” (Baldwin 132). Both women are

aware of the long-suffering in St John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul, and St Teresa of

Avila’s journey, who endured her trial, Baldwin says, “for over twenty years” (222). Yet

neither Baldwin nor Armstrong do experience the spiritual consolations of suffering:

...every morning when you awaken; [the suffering] will worm itself into your thoughts when

you go to prayer: curl like a cold snake round your heart as you sit through your silent meals in

the refectory: make you weary at work… and even haunt the hours that should be spent in

sleep (Baldwin 175).

The Rule, discipline, suffering, and pain are connected to the crucifying practice of

Kenosis, or Recollection, which requires one to go on and on “emptying your mind of

thoughts and images, so that your faculties were kept free from the memory, thought and

desire of everything but God” (Baldwin 14). For instance, the first thing Armstrong sees

when she walks through the noviceship door is a text on the wall—the saying of a saint: “I

would grind myself to powder if by doing so I could accomplish God’s will” (Narrow Gate

135). This sacrificial culture and necrophilic emphasis on death pervades much of monastic

life. Armstrong is taught, “It’s only when there’s no self left at all that God can fill us

entirely with Himself” (Narrow Gate 93). During Armstrong’s profession ceremony, she is

covered with a heavy funeral pall cloth, symbolic of the death of self. She quotes, “‘You are

dead,’ wrote St Paul, ‘and your lives are hidden with Christ in God’” (Narrow Gate 182).

Here, the goal of the spiritual journey—mystical union with the Divine—

necessitates the annihilation of a personal self and personal agenda, it requires that one be

clothed only in the diaphanous virtues. The complex virtue of silence is paramount: exterior

silence first, gentleness, absolute noiselessness; then interior silence, which is, Baldwin

says, “imposed upon one’s memory and imagination, one’s likes and dislikes, sufferings

and joys…” (177). Armstrong finds silence in the convent lonely (Narrow Gate 94).

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Baldwin’s experience of silence is extreme: “Silence can be harder than fasting. It can

weigh you down like an iron chain. It can bore you almost to screaming point” (177).

While all virtues are necessary, humility, a characteristic virtue of Christ, had to be

practised to “a heroic degree.” Baldwin is told, “Once you get to the point when you

honestly want to be humiliated and looked down upon, you will find your soul flooded with

what are known as ‘spiritual delights’” (275). Father Baker, the leader of a retreat at her

monastery, tells Baldwin: “Blessed Angela of Foligno declared that the surest and quickest

way of reaching [mystical union] was to go on and on beseeching God to grant it, ‘humbly,’

‘continually’ and even ‘violently’… until he [sic] gave it.” Father Baker adds, “She even

went so far as to say one could wrest that particular grace from God by the intensity of

one’s desire” (291).

Leaving Monastic Life

Ten years after entering the convent, Baldwin wonders whether she has made a dreadful

mistake. But it is only twenty-eight years later that she leaves. “A vow to God is a very

solemn matter,” she answers when asked how she could have stayed in the convent when

every detail was, as she said, “savagely against the grain.” She answers, “The discovery that

one had made a mistake was hardly an excuse for backing out” (301). Armstrong struggles

in a comparable way not to confront the unthinkable idea of breaking her pledge. She says,

“There were days of blackness … confused troubling dreams … fatigue aching in my body,

in my mind too…. My soul. Tired of life” (Narrow Gate 244–245).

Both Baldwin and Armstrong do eventually leave the convent. Unlike the medieval

saints, however, who are authorised to challenge the ecclesiastical system through the

messages of God or Goddess in prayer and visions, Armstrong and Baldwin are incited to

act by the powerful instincts and messages of their bodies. Armstrong’s breakdown, seven

years after entering the convent, is a moment of truth that allows her to concede to her

existential crisis and break her vow. For Baldwin too, it is only when the messages of her

body become extreme that she knows she must leave: a feeling of “unmeantness” goes “in

crescendo,” and sweeps over Baldwin until she wonders whether she is losing her mind

(301).

Despite their supreme effort and personal resolve to continue in the convent,

Baldwin and Armstrong both find the body is in control. Armstrong reflects how the “mass

of emotion, bodily impulses, and disorders and the murky subconscious” cannot be

controlled. She finds this “humbling,” and it “brings a kind of peace” (Narrow Gate 280).

Baldwin, too, comes to trust her intuition and listen to her “Urges” as she calls them,

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capitalising this word. Baldwin says that all her life she has been subject to these instincts,

which operate from a “prosaic spot” somewhere in the pit of her stomach. She reflects how

all her worst mistakes had resulted from not listening to inner urges. Baldwin clarifies that

if the Urges are obeyed, no matter how crazy, it always turned out for the best (251).

Canadian feminist and Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, believes that reading the

messages of the body is a vital source of wisdom in restoring the unity of body and soul, a

unity that can lead to personal transformation. She examines this subject in detail in The

Pregnant Virgin, claiming that the body is the medium through which the soul enacts itself

(61). She says that the wisdom of the body speaks through symptoms of illness, wellness,

balance and breakdowns. Woodman explains, “While one may justify anything with the

mind, the body cannot lie” (25). She highlights the importance of raising activity from an

unconscious instinct into a conscious action: “only then can we bring “Light to Matter”

(127).

After leaving the convent, Armstrong and Baldwin both endure a long and difficult seven-

to-ten year period of drifting and moving until they locate themselves in a place that feels

right. Themes of loneliness, confusion, displacement, rejection and nomadism are recurrent.

There are no formulas for the journey ahead; Armstrong says, “I’ve got to be myself, and I

don’t know who I am” (Narrow Gate 255–256). Baldwin likewise struggles to define

herself and her place in the apocalyptic landscape of war-torn England in the third year of

World War II. In the convent, her “outside was turned in,” but now as she says, she “had to

switch completely” (302). Baldwin wanders between various places and a lot of the time

feels lost, describing herself as: “simply one of ten million or so unwanted elderly spinsters:

dull, hard up, dressed in other people’s clothes, without background, belongings or home”

(219). Both women find it hard to move on from their social–cultural–religious

understanding of self that was formed within the monastic setting.

Woodman looks at this tendency to cling to one’s habitual life and the familiar, and

so resist personal growth. She explains the dangers of identifying with a particular persona.

She says, this “obliges us to repress our genuine feelings and prevents us from acting on

them at the right time and place” (Narrow Gate 22). In Graceful Exits (2003), a book of

essays examining Catholic women’s departure stories, Debra Campbell says that these

stories of ex-nuns provide maps that have helped other women to envisage their own

mobility within a Catholic culture that did not encourage women’s departures and spiritual

migrations (x). In one essay in this book, Ferraro and Hussy comment on the psychomachia

that especially troubled Armstrong’s cohorts in the convents in the 1960s and 1970s where

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“every step of their journeys in the world is affected by what has happened inside the

convent” (117). Woodman as well comments on the difficulty of stepping outside the

paradigm: she says, “Many people in our culture are attempting to suffer these

transformations alone. But without any ritual container and without a group, the aloneness

is almost intolerable” (Pregnant 30).

Baldwin and Armstrong struggle with feelings of entrapment, disempowerment and

a fragile sense of self. Armstrong reflects on this at length in The Spiral Staircase. She

notes how in the convent she had found herself in “a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in

which she struggles mightily, but fruitlessly to do what she is told.” But also after leaving,

she describes how she “continued to follow goals that were not right for [her]… and so

again got in the wasteland” (269). Although Armstrong can now “fall in love, wear

beautiful clothes, travel, make lots of money,” none of these things excite her (275).

Instead, she feels “sad and wracked with great regret, and wonders if she had tried harder

she wouldn’t have had to leave (6). Baldwin’s adjustment back into a world is equally

challenging and lonely. Baldwin asks why things had ended in failure after her mighty

effort to follow the way of life she had once so honestly believed in (306). Baldwin “hates

[her post-convent] existence” (206), and “at the day’s end, the strain of struggling through

twelve plain hours of life… completely [wears her] down” (244).

In The Pregnant Virgin, Woodman explains the importance of being able to move

on, otherwise life becomes a network of illusions and lies (15). She says, “If we have lived

behind a mask all our lives, sooner or later—if we are lucky—that mask will be smashed”

(25), and suggests that a life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of

illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual (20). Debra Campbell looks at

how women have developed their natural instincts for flight into a whole array of finely

tuned migratory skills. She quotes Mary Daly, who says ‘women are capable of cultivating

their migratory skills at home, in confinement, before they begin their actual migrations, or

of migrating within their own imaginations without ever physically actually leaving home’

(Campbell 18).

The boundaries of Baldwin and Armstrong’s ex-convent, nomadic journeys are

continually re-shaped and re-directed by the fact that what is burning inside cannot be

betrayed. In The Spiral Staircase, after what is labelled an attempted suicide, when

Armstrong swallows too many sleeping pills, Armstrong recognises that for years she has

felt increasingly insubstantial. She says, “I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts [and]

… nothing seemed to matter very much” (126). But this experience is a “watershed” for

Armstrong. She feels different (134), and like others from post-war Britain of the late

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sixties and early seventies, who had sought “personal transformation in Kathmandu, drug-

induced trips, and Indian gurus,” Armstrong too finds that she has “faced the unthinkable”

(173).

Art, music, books and master teachers are things that really matter to these women, both in

and outside convent walls. For Armstrong, books “evoke religious experience” (Spiral

323); she remarks on “mini-seconds of transcendence… stirred deeply within,” while

exploring a dusty tome (Spiral 322), and comments on the transformative effects of a late

Beethoven Quartet. Baldwin is equally transported reading Malory’s La Morte D’ Arthur,

and the music of a Tchaikovsky waltz “stir[s]” her “strangely” (18). They also reflect on the

inspirational gifts of master teachers. For Baldwin, “the rare words” of one old nun, who

sees peace of the soul in terms of silence, “were always charged as if with something from

the silence” (176); and “the words” of one Benedictine father, who speaks simply, leave a

very deep impression because all he says is “so obviously steeped in prayer” (290). For

Armstrong, Mother Katherine, the headmistress of her Catholic Girls’ School, who has

“frightening, passionate eyes” (Narrow Gate 39), has “given up the world for God,” but

“He [has] given it all back to her a hundredfold” (Narrow Gate 42). And Mother Bianca, a

very old nun in great pain, has a “transfiguring smile,” and is “superhuman,” yet also she is

“very human” (Narrow Gate 185). Armstrong says “[Mother Bianca] is stripped, emptied—

all those things they’ve been preaching to us as ideals for years;” and Armstrong concludes

that Mother Bianca is a saint (Narrow Gate 202). The idealism that impels both Baldwin

and Armstrong’s spiritual journeys is a yearning within them, which they find is also

reflected, nurtured and encouraged by inspirational art, music, books and teachers.

The recurring motif of heroism throughout both narratives suggests the “superhuman” effort

that is required for these spiritual journeys, which pushes these women to the edge of a type

of madness, far beyond rational thought. When Baldwin questions the “sheer lunacy” of

Absolute Obedience to convent Rule, one Dominican Father refers her to the story of

Charge of the Light Brigade. That is just where the heroism comes in, he explains: “the

idea, you see, is, that you do what you’re told, no matter how certain you feel someone has

blundered. To ride fearlessly into the jaws of death without reasoning why adds splendor to

your obedience” (100). And Mother Bianca’s endurance through the great trials and pain of

her monastic journey is, for Armstrong, “heroic” and “superhuman” (202).

Themes of the heroic are recurrent throughout all three memoirs. When Armstrong

enters the convent she is “embarking on a mystical adventure like that of Percival and the

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other knights of the Grail” (Spiral 269), and when professed as a nun, she feels “like the

heroes of myth,” having come through an ordeal (Spiral xv). The process of kenosis, where

“one’s worldly-self [is] smashed to pieces,” she explains as being “rather like the twelve

labors of Hercules” (Spiral 135), and during the course of her convent journey she observes

we are “engaged in a continuous bloody battle” (Spiral 284). Baldwin says, “Religious life

lived fully generously, is a life of heroism” (199); and to become a saint, one had to practice

humility “to a heroic degree” (182). She clarifies that “real spiritual adventures take place in

the centre of the soul.” Baldwin tells how one Jesuit urges the nuns to “‘go in’ for humility

as people in the world ‘go in’ for sport” (275).

Even outside convent walls, when Armstrong and Baldwin leave the monastic

setting to experience what ironically becomes a more genuine sense of a spiritual journey,

still the recurring motif of heroism is apparent. In a Jerusalem television documentary

series, Armstrong has the sense of “being on a quest” (Narrow Gate xv) and experiences the

spiritual longing that had impelled her to become a nun. And in The Spiral Staircase, she

specifically parallels her own ex-convent journey to the ‘hero’s myth’ (300-302). Baldwin

too feels “like an explorer on the verge of setting out, full of the spirit of adventure” when

she leaves the convent. And later, noticing the reinless horses of the hero’s chariot on a

triumphal arch in Hyde Park, observes that she too wants to “ride fearlessly into the jaws of

the destiny” that was meant for her (290). Then finally, when Baldwin discovers

somewhere to settle down, she feels “like a triumphant hero” when arriving to take up

residence there (312). Possibly one of the most potent allusions to heroism, however, is

Armstrong’s final words in Through the Narrow Gate, which thrusts this ambivalent motif

to the foreground of her story: she says, “Religious life is about love and love is about risk.

Perhaps none of us risked enough” (281).

Finding an Authentic Voice

After leaving the convent, Baldwin and Armstrong are delivered into a greater sense of

authenticity, deeper understandings of self, and other possibilities of living and spirituality

through a process of moving on, and being flexible and open to change. This method of

journeying is in line with Bauman’s late modernity theory, a process whereby the rigid

frameworks of convention are disempowered in favour of a more fluid and flowing

relationship to life, where social disintegration is defined as being as much a condition, as it

is the outcome of this new technique of power (14).

Yet this process is not random. As Baldwin points out, “one should take reasonable

means to ‘fit in’ to the jigsaw puzzle of life in exactly the spot where God wants one” (302).

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For Baldwin, the yearning inside that had inspired her to want to travel to “the very source

of that Infinite, Absolute Force that created and preserved the world” (256), continues to

prompt, guide and sustain her journey in the modern world outside of convent walls:

The contemplative’s place in the Mystical Body [of Christ] was at the white-hot centre of the

furnace: … [a place where] a soul would be in a position to do really tremendous things for the

salvation and sanctification of the world (256-257).

It is the loftiness of ideas such as these, and the gap in the reality of what is, that

propels both Armstrong and Baldwin’s post-convent journeys. “Imagination is the bridge

between body and soul, says Marion Woodman. “To have healing power, an image needs to

be taken into our body on our breath. Only then can the image connect with the life force.

Only then can things change” (Coming Home 42). Yet reaching some sense of a resolution

of this innermost intention involves many beginnings and endings, death and new life for

both women.

The motif of opening and closing doors, entering through new portals, is recurrent

throughout Baldwin’s memoir. The convent door that closes and locks behind her is “a

guillotine cutting off everything she has known for the past twenty-eight years.” Similarly,

it is in the graveyard, a place symbolic of death and endings that a significant door is

opened for Baldwin. Her depression and sense of displacement is, all at once, “whirled

away” (79), with a precognitive vision that reveals Baldwin’s place in the world. Without it

being ontologically asserted, one is led through the imagery to apprehend the divine: the

light is “dazzling;” the privet, “ablaze…” (80); and Baldwin is to be the holy sacrament, in

her “smallest mouse-trap of a cliff-top cottage” (81). “By it and through it … in [her

cottage],” Baldwin was at last, “quite simply going to be [herself]” (82).

In the same way, the closing of one door leads to the opening of another during a

stay at her invalid aunt’s house in Hove, a place she detests. Here, Baldwin withdraws to

her room, slamming the door on her “inner citadel” (279). But it is here that she realises the

birth of her memoir, the writing of which brings a sense of purpose and healing:

Picture to yourself, then, my excitement when, on withdrawing… I discovered therein,

bubbling and seething like a witches' cauldron in the depths of what I believe is to-day known

as the subconscious mind, something which obviously just couldn’t wait another minute for its

release.

There was only one way of effecting this.

I sat down, took up my pen and began to write (280).

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Armstrong also opens and closes many doors, moving beyond the impasses of

convent life, the frustration of a failed thesis, as well as an unsuccessful school teaching

career. And Armstrong likewise finds writing Through the Narrow Gate, more than a

decade after leaving the convent, is a healing process. Writing it is “a watershed” and after

finishing it she longs once again “for the heightened intensity and transcendence that the

convent had promised to give” (Spiral 214).

In a discussion of I Leap Over The Wall in Graceful Exits, Karen Armstrong

observes that Baldwin’s memoir is a precursor to an emerging genre of women’s literature,

one in which a female narrator with an identity and niche that has been carefully defined by

an institutional church writes herself out of that identity (6). In The Spiral Staircase,

Armstrong claims that the great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path

you go astray. The hero has to set off alone, leaving the old world and the old ways behind,

and venture into the darkness where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his

own monsters, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal. Armstrong suggests

the grave consequences of not doing this, and refers to the waste land in the Grail myth, a

place where people live inauthentic lives and do what other people expect (301–302).

Marion Woodman describes this dark place where one wanders alone in order to be

transformed in terms of the chrysalis, which is analogous to St Teresa’s model in Interior

Castle. While Woodman claims that “very little in our extroverted society supports

introverted withdrawal,” she suggests “it is essential if we are to find ourselves” (The

Pregnant 21). “In the psychology of the creative woman, there is a profound split between

their imagination and body. For the creative woman, the imagination is the real world,”

Woodman says. “The forsaken body has to claimed, cherished, inhabited, before it

surrenders to becoming a vessel for creativity” (Pregnant 48).

Spirals and Metaphors

While Armstrong and Baldwin’s post-convent journeys continually move on to different

places and occupations, what is also significant is that these journeys consistently circle

around the same themes and, as Armstrong observes, “[repeat] the same mistakes” (Spiral

xviii). Twelve years after her departure from the convent, while writing Through the

Narrow Gate, Armstrong believes that she will in some sense be a nun all her life and in her

sequel to this work, she finds she has come full circle: she says, “I tried to break away from

the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied

in writing, thinking, and speaking about God and spirituality” (Spiral 142). Later,

Armstrong realises that this never having fully integrated with the world is what has

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allowed her to come close to the centre of things (Spiral 305). This spiralling form of the

journey is central to The Spiral Staircase, the prologue of which is T.S. Eliot’s Ash

Wednesday. The poet’s slow and difficult, upwardly spiralling journey of spiritual recovery

in this poem becomes for Armstrong a vivid image of her own journey—“a complete and

satisfying fit between her own inner and outer worlds” (142). She says, “I am turning again,

round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the

light” (306). Armstrong notes that stairs frequently symbolise a breakthrough to a new level

of consciousness in mythology; and reflects that although for a long time she’d believed she

had finished with religion, in the end she found that life had led her to the kind of

transformation she had been originally seeking (Spiral xvii-xx).

This circular journeying process is evident throughout the journeys of both women.

For example, the suffering style of convent life, once intolerable for Armstrong, afterwards

becomes an important aspect of the human journey: “If we deny suffering it is all too easy

to dismiss the pain of others” (Spiral 306); she later says, it is in becoming sensitive to the

needs of others, that the spiritual human being is born (Spiral 315). Similarly, the virtue of

silence, agonising in convent life, becomes an inspirational space and a sanctuary for

Baldwin “after twelve hours of plain life” (280); some moments of silence are suspended,

bearing pre-cognitive visions, or rapturous glimpses of an ancient past. For Armstrong,

“Silence and solitude strip away the skin, breaking down that protective steel of

heartlessness which we cultivate in order to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed in a

suffering world” (Spiral 333-334). While writing and researching, the “enveloping quiet”

becomes not a “deprivation, or symbol of unwanted isolation,” but a “Presence, which

settle[s] comfortably” (Spiral 283), like an absent friend who fills your mind and heart more

than when they are physically present” (Spiral 337). And for Armstrong, spiritual

experience, so elusive in the convent, becomes accessible while studying theology; and she

experiences “glimmer[s] of transcendence,” or moments of “wonder and delight that

momentarily illumine the whole page” (Spiral xv).

Historically, this spiral form of the journey is noted by numerous others. In ancient

spirals, a right spiral is male, a left spiral, female according to Gimbutas (ix). While

Armstrong’s vision of the spiral journey circles in an upward direction, Charlene Spretnak’s

vision is of an ever-expanding outwardly spiralling journey, at the centre of which is a

creative self-love and self-knowledge (397): she says, “We have barely tapped the power

that is ours. We are more than we know” (398). Like Spretnak, Davis and Weaver also

depict an outwardly spiralling journey. But this is in contrast to Jung’s spiralling path of

individuation, which circumambulates inwards, towards the centre. David Leigh also

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describes a circuitous, spiralling spiritual journey where, like Armstrong’s view, the story

ends where is began but on a higher level (5). This upwardly spiralling depiction of the

spiritual journey is, perhaps, reminiscent of Dante’s Purgatorio where, as Armstrong

observes, souls climb to the beatific vision of God around the twisting, spiralling cornices

of Mount Purgatory, each of which constitutes a further stage in purification (Spiral 140).

These representations of a spiralling journey are also resonant with sacred

geometry’s spiralling pattern of the golden mean, a specific mathematical configuration of

growth repeated over and over in nature, such as in the nautilus shell, the sunflower, cacti,

and the unfurling of a fern. Possibly this spiralling trajectory is the natural path of growth

for the human soul too. In a Melbourne Age interview, “Changing The Habit” (2004),

Armstrong explains, “In most mythological systems, a staircase, like a ladder, is a symbol

of a change of consciousness. One may observe that it is through a spiralling, multi-layered

process that Armstrong and Baldwin build up evermore complex understandings about their

own reality, identity and relationship to the world. As Mother Walter explains to

Armstrong, what had seemed “inconsistent and paradoxical … blend[s] harmoniously in

God’s greater vision” (Narrow Gate 163).

This procedure of embracing contradiction and paradox may also be described as

assimilating the metaphor. Metaphor means “a crossing over,” says Woodman. “We need to

ingest our metaphors with as much respect as we ingest food. Both act as transformers”

(Dancing 70). Woodman claims that metaphor brings about a total response—emotional,

imaginative, intellectual—and that in taking the imaginative leap, we embody the metaphor

(Dancing 192).

This is just what Armstrong and Baldwin do, and the quest that began when

entering religious life continues along new pathways that neither protagonist could ever

have anticipated. The deepening paradoxical nature of Baldwin’s authenticity, and her

relationship to the world is suggested through the use of opposing metaphors including a

snake, mouse and cat: “Nuns … are the most devastatingly neat, clean, quiet, tidy, well-

behaved creatures in existence,” Baldwin tells us (207); but when a “forlorn little

mouseling” in the convent choir stalls dies in her hand, just before Baldwin leaves monastic

life, it seems a metaphor foreshadowing Baldwin’s convent closure, and her own dying

faith; when Baldwin emerges into the world she feels like “a small and dithering mouse that

[has] strayed in among the turbines of some gigantic engine room” (17), and in her

graveyard epiphany, her home is “the smallest imaginable mousetrap of a cottage.” For

Baldwin, mice, like nuns, are symbolic of simplicity, gentleness, strength and courage, and

above all, humility: “Success or failure in [religious life] depends … on … one’s attitude to

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humility” (275). Yet when one uncle stoops to refer to nuns as “semi-demented spinsters,”

here, as in other similar situations Baldwin “unwinds [her] coils like a cobra and strike[s]

back” (215):

Nobody who studied [the saints] could fail to see that, … the life lived by nuns and monks was

one of intense and—in the case of the saints—even passionate love. …if people in the world

had any idea of what … the mystics describe as a life of union with God… the queues of

people begging for admittance outside convent doors would stretch for miles (215-216).

Bound up with these journeys to discover their own authenticity is also the notion of

discovering the Self, God. Armstrong is led back to some form of religious life through her

broadcasting and writing career and comes to embrace an interfaith dialogue. In Judaism,

she finds the law brought God into the minutiae of daily life, whether eating, drinking,

cooking, working or making love (Spiral 74). Her spiralling journey leads her to religious

values that emphasise kindness and compassion, and a view that appreciates “the sacred

dimension in everything around us—including our fellow men and women” (302).

Baldwin also finally experiences the living spirituality she had originally sought

through her mythical connection to the landscape: “Places have always meant more to me

than people,” she says (257). Baldwin’s language becomes pantheistic as she drinks in the

wild country of Scotland “like a strong wine,” and it “intoxicates” her (142): “the unearthly,

desolate beauty … with sunset hues of copper-rose and dusky violet” (142). When

travelling to Cornwall, the “air [is] thick with story” (172), and Baldwin “soaks in the

atmosphere,” and “sees with the eyes of her heart” (227). In Trevelioc, the location of her

“little cottage-in-the-clouds,” Baldwin finds her soul opens “wide to the secret things that…

[float] like gossamer spells among the rocks and trees” (294); and when she takes up

residence there, her relationship with the landscape climaxes into a sort of symphony, in

which “everything seems to be taking part” (313).

Both Baldwin and Armstrong conclude their memoirs having resolved in some way

what they set out to do. They question, existentially, the rigid, long-held traditions of how a

spiritual vocation may be explored. New paradigms are investigated, intuitively, where the

metaphor of “fluidity or liquidity,” is fitting to understand the nature of this era of

“transgressive, boundary-breaking, all-eroding modernity” (Bauman 6). In Womanspirit

Rising (1992) Carol Christ states, “Women are engaged in the immensely important and

exciting task of recovering and discovering the shapes and contours of our own experience.

We tell each other stories which have never been told before, stories utterly unlike the

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stories we have learned from the culture” (229).

Women’s Contemporary Spiritual Journeys

This idea of gender particularity is something Woodman explains as “the alchemical fire in

which femininity in our culture is burning in order to give birth to the psychologically

conscious feminine” (Pregnant 100). Irigaray asks, “Why shouldn’t [women] have a God

who would permit them to achieve their genre? So that heaven can come down to earth…”

(Divine 11). Irigaray suggests, “Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which

could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through” (Ethics 7). She believes that gender

specificity could be reached through a particular way of entering into relation with the other

(Key ix). Both Irigaray and Woodman’s theories imply the potential for a divine–human

marriage, unlike the dominant discourse of medieval theology, although it is noteworthy

that there are female mystics whose visions and direct dialogues with God or Goddess

suggest alternative views. Sabina Flanagan (1996) explains that St Hildegard of Bingen was

fascinated with the feminine role in the incarnation and believed man and woman together

formed the perfect human being (120). Julian of Norwich says: “In the self-same point that

the Soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained … from without

beginning” (40), which seems to locate sensual–physical and divine–spiritual together in a

way that infers a human marriage may also be divine.

The notion that the marriage bed is also potentially a sacred shrine had always been

central to my own spiritual philosophy, yet there is a yawning void between this reasoned

view and what happened when I attempted to bring this metaphor into my own life. The gap

is terrifying and greatly surprised me. The journey of traversing this gap is documented in

much of The Mandorla, where the aridity of the social–familial landscape that I was to

navigate throughout marriage and beyond seemed impervious to the symbolic imago Dei33

within the feminine intuitive depths of my feelings and the heart.

Irigaray would attribute this situation to a lack of gender specificity. Woodman also

writes about the importance of a return to feminine consciousness, not to be confused with

mothering. She highlights the importance of the integration of body, soul and spirit, and

says that this feminine consciousness is evolving in many men and women as a cultural

phenomenon. Both need to go through into darkness to bring the feminine to consciousness

33 Imago, Latin, meaning image, as previously noted, is used to refer to the final stage of the metamorphic process of insects. Christian theology also refers to imago—imago Dei, where Jesus is the “radiance of [God’s] glory [and] the very image of God’s substance” [Hebrews 1:3], which we as human beings, divine-human beings, carry within. Jung introduced the term imago into psychology, to describe a process whereby individuals form a personality through identifying with imagos that emerge from the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of mythical figures and scenarios (vii, 76).

228

(The Virgin 10), and “accept the consequence of our lives being turned inside out” (The

Virgin 53).

Adrienne Rich 1982) remarks on the images of pre-patriarchal female goddess cults

showing women that power, awesomeness, and centrality were theirs by nature (32). She

says, “We as women are only beginning to uncover our own truths,” and claims that the

politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve deeper, and this

truthfulness means “heightened complexity” (347). St Hildegard of Bingen’s vision of

“Ecclesia” depicts the power and wisdom of the feminine. Also of note is that in the

Gnostic Gospels, women were visionaries, and were central to religious life. Mary

Magdalene—Magdalene meaning tower—is placed right at the centre of the mystical life of

Christ.34

Feminine spirituality throughout the ages, including Marija Gimbutas’ work on a

pictorial script for the Old European Great Goddess, is a celebration of a blossoming earth-

based spirituality such as the new imaginaries for the feminine face of the divine depicted

by Jantzen and Woodman, and others including Irigaray, Spretnak and Christ. Jantzen’s

discourse particularly accentuates a feminist symbolic of “natality and flourishing”

(Becoming Divine 2), a notion that she claims has considerable biblical basis in both the

Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (Becoming Divine 157). Woodman also, who draws

on Layard’s research on “the Virgin Archetype”35 defines “Virgin” as that aspect of the

feminine, in man and woman that is rooted in the instincts, with a loving relationship to the

Great Earth Mother. Woodman says the virgin archetype has the courage to Be and the

flexibility to always be Becoming, and that men and women who relate to this archetype do

not make mothering synonymous with femininity (Pregnant 78). The iconography of the

Black Madonna, which goes back to ancient times, is also a powerful symbol of the

feminine face of the divine. Woodman states the Virgin of Montserrat in France especially

presides over marriage, sex, pregnancy and childbirth, and exemplifies the intersection of

sexuality and spirituality: “the Medieval Benedictine monks of Montserrat saw their craggy

mountain, lush with flowers, as an image of the Virgin herself” (Pregnant 121).

Symbolism, Dreaming and The Mandorla

A sense of God or Goddess in “virgin” nature is something that I’ve always experienced. In

the absence of extended family, I felt a deep sense of belonging in the bush and on wild

34 BBC Documentary on Compass, “The Mystery of Mary Magdalene,” 14th April 2014. 35 John Layard’s study of the Virgin Archetype makes clear that the word virgin is not synonymous with “Chaste” in either Greek of Hebrew origins. The symbolic meaning of the Virgin Mary, like a “virgin forest,” is one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled, untouched, where the world of nature is representative of God (80).

229

remote beaches. I felt strong and full of love and freedom there. As a child of the 70s in

Australia, I had once believed implicitly in the equality between the sexes. It wasn’t until

my divorce ten years ago that I was to recognise how thoroughly the feminine aspect of our

humanity, including compassion and intuition, were excluded or undervalued. It shocked

me to take in the hateful attitudes towards women that I was later to realise had grown out

of five thousand years of patriarchy. And still, despite this modern age, what is still of note

is how methodically the qualities associated with the feminine have been suppressed,

including intuition, visions and dreams.

Symbols, metaphors, visions, dreams and the imagination are central to an

understanding of this inner mystical world that embraces the paradoxical human–divine

ground where physical and spiritual awakening belong together. Jung advises that symbols

that rise from the unconscious and are expressed in myth, dream and fantasy are produced

by people’s deepest feelings and attitudes. According to Jung, “the modern embrace of

scientific rationality has produced an illness of the soul, a lack of meaning that can only be

cured by a return to myth and symbol” (Christ and Plaskow 2). Here, the tradition of

dreaming, honoured by first nations’ cultures, such as the Aboriginals and Native

Americans, is of import. More than ever, inspiration, guidance and healing are needed to

restore the dying earth, toxic oceans, poisonous waterways and polluted psychic space

overloaded with materialism and greed. My dream of Machu Picchu also warned of this

crisis point for humanity and the earth.

Charlene Spretnak says, what is needed is a spirituality that “enables us to feel a deep

connection between one another” (397). This spirituality is grounded in the wisdom of the

heart, and experienced in moments of illumination, but to become established in this place

requires the “verdant green” of a soul that has become alive to Self, alive as a human–

divine being. It requires the subjective sovereignty of the individual, and like the

metamorphic process of an insect in the pupa stage, involves a type of kenosis, shedding

old layers of a personal self to reveal our human–divine imaginal stage of growth. One may

discern that this natural, metamorphic process is the final alchemic stage of becoming fully

alive to our divine–human life.

The semiology of the mandorla, formed when complementary opposites come

together, is representative of this place, a place where the ongoing paradoxes of finite and

infinite, the self and the non-self, the body and the spirit might be resolved. Jung, Irigaray,

Woodman all comment on the importance of “learning to live the paradigm of opposites

(Woodman, Dancing 211); Irigaray says, “Working for the construction of a feminine

subjectivity and a culture of two subjects, we are really working towards the liberation of

230

humanity itself, and towards another time of our becoming humans” (Key xv). Woodman

describes how our present-day challenge, our modern mystery, is learning to live the

paradigm of opposites such as mind–body; masculine–feminine; sexuality–spirituality; life–

death are held in balance (Dancing 208-211).36 Jung also writes of the prime importance of

surrendering to paradox, of “embracing in love all opposites” (Woodman, Dancing 212).

The Mandorla, the third space, exists both within and beyond duality, and is a

paradox such as Underhill explains: “Man [sic] is poised between … the Spiritual and the

Natural Worlds” (14), yet there is also a third factor, “Divine Reality,” within which these

opposites are found as one (26). The mandorla represents this third space, which is

representative also of the ecstatic ground of the saints. It is a place where we might

experience a “vivid life springing up” (Underhill), or the plentitude of what we can be

(Irigaray 4), or Hildegard’s veriditas, the “eternal green freshness of the Holy Spirit” (Jones

5), or being “oned with God.” This profound yet simple wisdom resides in the overlap

between human reality and Divine reality, the space of overlap between Self and self. To

become established in this place requires a spiritual journey through which we attune to

aspects of self that are also in line with Self. In this space we become whole. It is also

something we may experience when we Stop. Breathe. Listen. Feel.

36 This subject is also explored in Woodman’s The Pregnant Virgin (14).

231

GLOSSARY of SANSKRIT TERMS

Abhishek: A ritual bathing offered as worship (puja) to a statue or other representation of a deity.

Amrit: 1) The nectar of immortality; the divine nectar that flows down from the sahasrara when the

Kundalini is awakened. 2) An area in Siddha Yoga meditation ashrams and centres where refreshments

can be purchased.

Annapurna: (lit., filled with nourishment) 1) The great Shakti depicted as the goddess of nourishment and

abundance. 2) The dining halls in both the Shree Muktananda Ashram in South Fallsburg, New York, and

Gurudev Siddha Peeth in Ganeshpuri, India.

Arati: 1) A ritual act of worship during which a flame, symbolic of the individual soul, is waved before

the form of a deity, sacred being, or image that embodies the light of Consciousness. 2) The name of the

morning and evening prayer that is sung with the waving of lights, in honour of Bhagavan Nityananda,

twice each day in Siddha Yoga ashrams.

Asana: 1) A hatha yoga posture practiced to strengthen and purify the body and develop one-pointedness

of mind. 2) A seat or mat on which one sits for meditation.

Ashram: The dwelling place of a Guru or saint; a monastic retreat site where seekers engage in spiritual

practices and study the sacred teachings of yoga.

Aum: The primal sound from which the universe emanates; the inner essence of all mantras (also written

Om).

Baba: A term of affection and respect for a saint or holy man.

Bade Baba: (lit., elder father) An affectionate name for Bhagavan Nityananda, Swami Muktananda's

Guru.

Bhagavad Gita: Lit., "song of the Lord." One of the world's treasures of spiritual wisdom, the centrepiece

of the Indian epic Mahabharata. In its eighteen chapters, Lord Krishna instructs his disciple Arjuna about

steady wisdom, meditation, the nature of God, the supreme Self, and spiritual knowledge and practice.

Bhagavan: (lit., the Lord)

Bhakti: The path of devotion; a path to union with the Divine based on the continual offering of love and

the constant remembrance of the Lord.

Bindi: A red dot worn between the eyebrows marking the location of the third eye, the eye of inner vision

or spiritual wisdom.

Blue Pearl: A brilliant blue light, the size of a tiny seed, that appears in meditation; it is the subtle abode

of the inner Self.

Brahmin: A member of a hereditary social class of India, from which Hindu priests and scholars have

traditionally been drawn.

Chakra: A centre of energy located in the subtle body where the subtle nerve channels converge like the

spokes of a wheel. Six major chakras lie within the central channel. When awakened, kundalini shakti

flows upward from the base of the spine through these six centres to the seventh chakra, the sahasrara, at

the crown of the head.

Chiti: The power of universal Consciousness; the creative aspect of God.

232

Dakshin Kashi: (lit., south field) A beautiful, twenty-five-acre field in Gurudev Siddha Peeth, the Siddha

Yoga ashram near Ganeshpuri, India. The field is ringed by a tree-lined path, which is used for walking

contemplation.

Darshan: Seeing or being in the presence of a saint, a deity, or a sacred place.

Deva: A deity or god.

Devi: The great mother Goddess; the beloved of Shiva who represents Shakti, or cosmic energy.

Dharma: Essential duty; the law of righteousness; living in accordance with the divine will. The highest

dharma is to recognise the Truth in one's own heart.

Ganesh: The elephant-headed god, also known as Ganapati. Son of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati, he is

worshipped at the beginning of any undertaking and in many festivals as the god of wisdom, the destroyer

of sorrows, and the remover of obstacles.

Gunas: The three basic qualities of nature that determine the inherent characteristics of all created things.

They are sattva (purity, light, harmony, intelligence); rajas (activity, passion); and tamas (dullness,

inertia, ignorance).

Guru’s feet: The Indian scriptures revere the Guru's feet, which are said to embody Shiva and Shakti,

knowledge and action, the emission and reabsorption of creation. Powerful vibrations of shakti flow from

the Guru's feet. They are a mystical source of grace and illumination, and a figurative term for the Guru's

teachings.

Gurumayi: The affectionate name for Swami Chidvilasananda by which she is most often called. She

received the power and authority of the Siddha Yoga lineage from Swami Muktananda before he passed

away in 1982 and is the current Siddha Guru and head of the Siddha lineage. Chidvilasananda literally

means the bliss of the play of Consciousness.

Karma: (lit., action) 1) Any action—physical, verbal, or mental. 2) Destiny, which is caused by past

actions, mainly those of previous lives.

Kashmir Shaivism: A branch of the Shaivite philosophical tradition, propounded by Kashmiri sages, that

explains how the formless supreme Principle, known as Shiva, manifests as the universe. Together with

Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism provides the basic scriptural context for Siddha Yoga meditation.

Kriya: A physical, mental, or emotional movement initiated by the awakened kundalini. Kriyas purify the

body and nervous system, thus allowing a seeker to experience higher states of consciousness.

Kundalini: Lit., "coiled one"; The Goddess Kundalini; also, the power of spiritual evolution in a human

being. The dormant form of this spiritual energy is represented as lying coiled at the base of the spine;

when awakened and guided by a Siddha Guru and nourished by the seeker's disciplined effort, this energy

brings about purification of the seeker's being at all levels, and leads to the permanent experience of one's

divine nature.

Mala: A string of beads used to facilitate a state of concentration while repeating a mantra.

Mantra: A sacred invocation. Sacred words or divine sounds invested with the power to protect, purify,

and transform the awareness of the individual who repeats them.

Maya: The power that veils and obscures the true nature of the Self and creates a sense of differentiation.

It makes the universal Consciousness, which is One, appear as duality and multiplicity.

Mudra: hand gesture

233

Muktananda: Swami Muktananda (1908 - 1982) brought the Siddha Yoga teachings and practices to the

west in the 1970s on his Guru's behalf, giving the previously little-known shaktipat initiation to untold

thousands of spiritual seekers.

Nada: Spontaneous inner sounds that may be heard during advanced stages of meditation; nada may take

the form of sounds such as bells, the blowing of a conch, and thunder.

Nadi: A channel in the subtle body through which the vital force flows.

Prana: The vital life-sustaining force of both the body and the universe.

Pranam: To bow; to greet with respect.

Prasad: A blessed or divine gift from God or the Guru.

Puja: Worship; actions performed in worship; also, an altar with images of the Guru or deity and objects

used in worship.

Rasa: 1) Flavour, taste. 2) A subtle energy of richness, sweetness, and delight.

Sadhana: Leading straight to a goal; a means of accomplishing (something); spiritual practice; worship.

The sadhana of Siddha Yoga students, which begins with shaktipat initiation, includes active, disciplined

engagement with the essential yoga practices of meditation, chanting, seva and dakshina, along with

focused study and contemplation of the teachings.

Sahasrara: The thousand-petaled spiritual energy centre at the crown of the head, where one experiences

the highest states of consciousness.

Samadhi Shrine: The final resting place of a great yogi's body. Such shrines are places of worship:

permeated with the saint's spiritual power, and alive with blessings.

Sankalpa: In the Siddha Yoga tradition, sankalpa means intention in the sense of a prayer or resolution

formed for the attainment of a spiritual purpose that is for the benefit of all.

Satsang: (lit., the company of the Truth) The company of saints and devotees; a gathering of seekers for

the purpose of chanting, meditation, and listening to scriptural teachings or readings.

Seva: Lit., "service, honoring, worship." In Siddha Yoga contexts, selfless service: work offered to God

and the Guru, performed as a pure offering, without attachment to the results of one's actions and without

desire for personal gain.

Shakti: Spiritual power; the divine cosmic power that creates and maintains the universe; may be defined

as the goddess Shakti.

Shaktipat: Lit., “descent of power, descent of grace.” In Siddha Yoga, the initiation that awakens

Kundalini Shakti, the inner spiritual energy in an aspirant.

Shri: A term of respect that means sacredness, abundance, beauty, grace and auspiciousness, and signifies

mastery of all these.

Sutra: Aphorism; a condensed and cryptic statement that usually can be understood only through

commentary. In India, the major points of an entire philosophical system may be expressed in a series of

sutras.

Sushumna: The most important of all the nadis; the central channel, which extends from the base of the

spine to the crown of the head. It is the pathway of the awakened kundalini.

Swami: a term of respectful address for a sannyasi, or monk.

234

Tapasya: 1) Austerities. 2) The experience of heat that occurs during the process of practising yoga. The

heat is generated by friction between the senses and renunciation. It is said that this heat, called "the fire

of yoga," burns up all the impurities that lie between the seeker and the experience of the Truth.

Tattvas: In Kashmir Shaivism, the basic categories or principles of the process of universal manifestation

from pure Consciousness to matter; that which is the essence of each stage of manifestation.

Turiya: The fourth, or transcendental state, beyond the waking, dream, and deep-sleep states, in which the

true nature of reality is directly perceived; the state of samadhi, or deep meditation.

Vata: the principle of kinetic energy in the body.

Yajna: 1) A sacrificial fire ritual in which Vedic mantras are recited while wood, fruit, grain, oil, yogurt

and ghee are poured into the fire as an offering to the Lord. 2) Any work or spiritual practice that is

offered as worship to God.

235

NOTES

1. The epigraph to Chap. 1 of The Mandorla is from an interview with Michio Kaku, entitled, “From Universe to Multiverse,” pub. 18 March, 2011.

2. The Rainer Maria Rilke quote on p. 10 of The Mandorla is on p.18 of Letters to a

Young Poet. This letter was written by Rilke on 16 July, 1903 at Worpswede near Bremen

3. The Dhammapada quote in the epigraph to Chap. 3 is on p.44 of The Dhammapada

4. The Jiddu Krishnamurti quote in the epigraph to Chap. 4 is on p.135 of Jay Michaelson’s Evolving Dharma

5. The Rilke quote in the epigraph to Chap. 6 of The Mandorla is on p.3 of Rilke’s The

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

6. The quote by St Thérèse of Lisieux on p.67 of The Mandorla may be found on p. 291 of Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall

7. The American Indian Blessing in the epigraph of Chap. 7 may be found in

“American Indian Prayers and Poetry” on the First People website.

8. The Rumi couplet in the epigraph to Chap. 8 is quoted on p.30 of The Spiritual Couplets of Rumi

9. The Eckhart Tolle quote on p.108 of The Mandorla may be found on pp.88-89 of

Tolle’s The Power of Now.

10. The quote in the epigraph to this chapter by Aurobindo Ghose (1949) is quoted in the introduction of Andrew Harvey’s The Return of the Mother p.1.

11. The St Thérèse of Lisieux quote in the epigraph is from Chap. 4, p.42, of St

Thérèse’s spiritual autobiography, Story of a Soul.

12. The Rumi quote in the epigraph is found on p.36 of Rumi: Selected Poems.

13. The Ntozake Shange quote in the epigraph to Exegesis Chap. 1, “Writing the Self,” can be found on p. 175 in Christ and Plaskow’s Womanspirit Rising

236

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