A brave new world June 24, 2010
Posted by Liz Mead in : Into the new space , add a commentWho’d have thought the image of Parliament House – used in a lesson plan last night 23 June– would be a glimpse into a brave new world for Australian Politics. Our first female Prime Minister. Bring it on Julia
And you guys thought a trip to Canberra might be boring!
Ring them belles…ya gotta… February 26, 2009
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , 1 comment so farIt’s the end of the month and I just trawled through the Spam queue associated with my last post. I don’t know if I’m frightened or exhilarated.
I don’t know how Spammers spam, and I dare say there is an automated something that does the thinking for them…but something in the title or the content triggered a surfeit of the weirdest “stream of consciouness” one has ever read. It would have made Joyce’s Ulysses proud! Or in the very least provided the starting point for an excellent porn script.
I got a message from one of my readers today. What the?!! I have readers???
Well, in all honesty, the “reader” is a dear friend I met in my workplace who has kept in contact. As a thoughtful, clever young woman – whose finest gift is Love-ability - this friend, Belle let me know she was reading and enjoying such spam-worthy words. Bring it on Belley-Mac-Bellestar!
I was gratified. Belle knows how to write.
My posts are now punctuated, as if on an internal bio-rhythm, by the month. As if magically, there is a yearning to spout some new thought, frame it reasonably sensibly, and then shape it into a manageable structure, to send out to the void. God! I think that was a line from a hollywood movie that featured online communication. Save me from filmic cliches! Is my porn-inducing script just the beginning?
What the hell. Cliche, smeeshay (yiddic type word spelt phonetically). I am as cliched as they come.
I have just joined a local theatre and am about to audition for a middle aged woman’s role!
Therefore, of course, I watched the Oscars because they were on. At this point it wasn’t too dificult to connect the timing of the Oscars with the grand conjunction of my own thespian pursuits (enough to make any decent astrologer blush). I had to watch them.
And just to add cliche to smeeshay, I then followed up with a dose of “Tootsie” out of my DVD collection. Of course this was just to ensure I was wholly in the mood for my new life as a suburban star… (Please note, with all due respects to Dustin- God! isn’t Phillip Seymour so much better – Hoffman, that does not make me a drag queen, or a nun-botherer!) …. Sigh.
Soooooo – no great thoughts this month. It’s Dad’s birthday tomorrow.. I’m gratified that I can memorise 2 monologues a 24 hour period, and I am feeling pretty chuffed about most of my life.
loveya belle thanks for not being spam xx
All the world’s a stage…… December 15, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Coming Back , add a commentI attended a workshop on the weekend called “Play of Life”
The training program is run by my very dear friend and her husband who designed and created it. For information on the program – you can visit their website.
It’s a program that grew out of the disciplines and philosophy of psychodrama wher
e the client can “show” rather than “tell” issues and life situations they need to deal with. By “showing” their current and ideal situation utilising a 3-D stage/play of small figures and props, they see for themselves the role, relationships, dynamic and often the first step to making it better.
It reminds me of the old fashioned sand-play, but taken to the next level. The program involves various techniques. One of my favourites was a technique to envision the ideal solution to a problem then envision what helps you move towards it and what enables you to move away from it. You strengthen one, and lessen the other. By using a series of well structured investigative, diagnostic questions a person can glean greater insight into their own patterns, roles and limiting behaviour.
We spend so much time creating our stories and narratives. And part of that creative work includes filling in the untenable gaps in life and our ideals. We plug up the holes with addictions, defence patterns, and often unrealistic mental constructs. For me, drinking my way through grief was better than facing the black hole of loss.
With this program I could “show” myself and another (witness) what was really going on. I could get out of the area of talking/telling /language and go straight to where the emotions and memories live. That’s why it’s so powerful – one can’t lie (that is if you’re serious about fixing the problem.)
For me, the wealth of the program can be encapsulated into the 2 main insights I took away:
1. That we can only change our own behaviour and we can often begin that change with a small step.
2. That we play roles in life -some helpful, others not so helpful. Once we are able to describe that role and see it for what it is – we can change it, just as one assumes and drops a role on a stage.
I love workshops that enable learning – specifically if that learning is going to make my life more loving and expansive. With my love and background in theatre I loved this sort of learning especially. I’d also done psychodrama before with very helpful results and so I was surely in my element.
The group was comprised of insightful, humble, loving individuals. These learning groups always are. People that want to grow are invariably interesting. The group were a microcosm of society and a rich mix of types, some introverted and extraverted. Some were willing and able to externalise their insights in the feedback sessions – no matter how painful. Others were able to witness someone else’s work, without having an opinion – not interpreting, just reading the signals and signs. We all loved it.
Mainly because the 2 days were facilitated by a delightful individual – a friend to many of the group. He is a young man – committed to caring and enabling the growth of others. A man who’d found a great vehicle for insights into his own process, the meaning of why we do what we do, and a way he can help. He was getting his trainer “P” plates, and he passed with flying colours – and well deserved.
The first night of the weekend, I was so exhausted I virtually collapsed asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. And I dreamt.
I dreamt of a stingray threatening the safety of my twin sister and myself. We were swimming in unclear, opaque 
water, and I warned her of this hidden threat To avoid contact with Stingray, I urged her to scramble onto a pier out of the water. My sister, though, remained in the water and was touched as the Ray nudged past and around her. Instead of dying, or being stung, my sister rode on the back of this huge magnificent beast – as if were a flying carpet. And as she did, the Stingray morphed into something less ominous and more graceful. It grew a neck and head of a swan, which my sister caressed.
I took the memory and elements of that dream into the 2nd day of the workshop. On this day I set up my ideal future – including the chance to love someone again, and to live in a fuller way. My intention, in this play of life, was to shed the role of fearful resigned loner and assume a new role of courageous giver and lover.
For me the Stingray’s beautiful transformation was testament to this desire. Change and growth were possible, if we stay immersed in the emotional water – despite the lack of vision and clarity and fear of being hurt.
Now totems in dreams are a big part of my psychic library. And both the Stingray and Swan evoke stronger intuition, protection and discernment. My own more pedestrian associations link it to the sudden and surprising attack on a well known Australian naturalist who was fatally pierced in the heart by a Stingray. No guesses there about my own lesson.
Later that night, when I returned home I spoke with my sister Gab over the phone. In tandem, we romped through the events of our respective weekends. She told me of her delightful stay with dear friends at Noraville, on the Central Coast of NSW; I told her of my weekend – the people I’d met, the insights I’d gleaned. Just as we were about to phone off.. she said,
“Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. The group went snorkelling today over the rocks at the end of the beach, as the tide was low and one of the blokes saw biggest stingray he’d ever seen. And even though it scared the life out of him, there was something extraordinarily beautiful about it.”
Happy birthday September 23, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , add a commentWhen Bloke and I shared an early birthday years ago – his in September and mine in October- I commissioned an astrological (natal) chart for us both. It was done by a delightful guy from Queensland, David, a friend of my sister. I listened to it yesterday, in my car, whilst driving to work.
A Natal chart shows the planets in each of the 12 houses governing our relationships, our careers, our family and our home etc. As a Libran coming up to a birthday this month, it was like listening to a report card at the end of term.
Am I doing well? Meeting my potential? Have things happened the way they should, the way he said they might? Is there anything in this science of the stars?
My own proclivity for things “other worldly” apparantly grows out of some innate skills I was born with – psychic and intuitive skills and a strong connection to higher learning or arcane wisdom. I believe these skills get a “kick along” as a result of events in life that skew, threaten or validate our belief system. Transforming events like marriages, like deaths, like separations, or fortuitous events that guide or help us further along the path and push us up or out to another level. Events that align us to a truer purpose or message.
Librans are all into alignment – we like to balance, straighten, organise and collaborate to get things right. There’s a bunch of us at work, all coming up for birthdays this month ( proof that the traditional Christmas holidays, occuring 9 months before, are an annual festival of baby making across all generations).
Yesterday, I met with one of my fellow librans and 2 librarians to talk about a collaborative knowledge and research program using Wiki technology Our aim is to build on the information associated with one person and one event, so that the organisation creates a storehouse of connected ideas and stories, threaded together as knowledge.
Some spiritual practitioners believe there is compendium of arcane wisdom referred to as the Akashic Records. It is a warehouse of wisdom, life purpose, lessons and stories lived by the brave souls who trod the earth one day light years before and after us Yet, we get to tap into that shared wisdom through our dreams, through divination; they appear as flashes of insight, archetypal art and myth or random co-incidences and events of synchronicty.
I’ve always found Librarians to be a “higher form” in the workplace. I find them gentle, clever, kind, insightful and generous, in pursuit of truth and knowledge. There’s something noble about that pursuit.
Our librarians live in a glass library. Above the library a void reaches skyward, passing through, and surrounded by 3 floors of open-space-workstations, in other words, there are no walls anywhere. Central to the building, the library is a testament to learning and education. In reality, these poor darlings who work beneath the void, are battling noise overload, as they sift through the brittle static and crackle that comes with worker conversations in the air above and around them.
So as I listened to the whirring crackling noises emanating from my car tape deck this morning, I sifted through the information housed in this astrological reading. David, although a young man, has also died in the ntervening years. And as his voice reached me over the air waves, making predictions based on my natal chart, I got a chill. Yes, he portentiously predicted the inevitable separation of a significant man in my life 11 years from the date of the recording.
But in that whirring and crackling noise that accompanied this kind and encouraging reading, I realised we’re all connected in cycles, waves, sound, light, learning, truth and knowledge. The wisdom plays out through us, around us, in us and over us, again and again and again.
So to all my libran companians and all the splendid teachers and wise librarians in the world, may your road be wide and long and bring you home safely and wiser for the journey you’re on.
Writing my way out April 30, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Yellow , add a commentLife goes round in circles.
It is this process of repeating things that creates the pattern of our life. Some of those patterns are unique, but most are reminiscent of other, collective or universal patterns. In these we share histories, geographies, myths and dreams. They may have a different personal colours and shades but many of our life patterns are similar to other people’s. I find this immensely reassuring.
As individuals we repeat certain lessons, behaviours, or thoughts for as long as they serve us. Even negative patterns. After that, we try new ones. Now this is nothing very earth shattering, but it always surprises me, in those unguarded moments to actually see the patterns – like wind washed sand, circles within circles of filigree lace.
We repeat patterns because they are reassuring and sustain the image we have of ourselves: as successful, caring, creative, provocative, entertaining, funny, serious whatever. They’ve worked before and will work again – for this is the concept of self-efficacy.
One such useful technique I have is to write my way into new life situations. I have done this a couple of times in the past, and I believe I’m doing that now, with this blog. The result of the writing will be known much later. 18 ago I was in a bit of a mess. I was depressed, alone and retrenched from a job I had enjoyed immensely. My brother had just been married and following the wedding I decided to go home to the USA with my sister Cate, her husband and their twins who were 3 at the time. I stayed there for 6 months. Blissful and joyous.
Over that time, I wrote. I wrote 2 stories. One was called “How to make a career out of choosing a career to make” and the other was a stream of consciousness, regarding my own fecundity and depression. In that second story, I played the central character who thought she was a turtle, who deposited hundreds and hundreds of egs, and the second character was a psychologist called Stephen who tried to address this psychosis. This story I kept private and no-one knew of it at all.
It repeated itself, however in the following way. 5 years later I married a psychologist called Stephen. Like the theme in my story, we had trouble conceiving. As one of many treatments we visited a chinese herbalist who prescribed – you guessed it, crushed turtle shells. Of course I discontinued treatment and alas remained childless. At the same time Cate sent me a postcard out of the blue, with a picture of a turtle. This turtle was part of a polynesian myth in which she gave birth to all the peoples of the south pacific, hundreds and hundreds of eggs. Neither Stephen nor Cate knew of my story. Nor had I read the polynesian myth before.
I love that sort of synchronicity. It doesn’t change the outcome, but it does change the energy around it – marking it as moment of significance.
Several years ago, a psychic I have seen several times, told me my life was an open book. The first half was written but the second was completely blank. I asked if this meant I was going to die. She told me that it was blank because that half had yet to be written.
So let’s see where the Blue and Yellow Post ends up. Perhaps a year or two from now, there will be a pattern, like another pattern, reminiscent of a further pattern. And I’ll know it had served the right purpose.
See you in the next chapter
