We had quite the night out, all in green (just for a change) at the local pub, surrounded by faeries and mermaids and draggons and frolicking elves. Put away a few Guinness, and danced a few jigs. I even took home the prize for best-dressed!
And true to tradition, we ended it all in drunken tears and fighting.
Perfect.
It's Purim again! The classic example of every Jewish holiday which boils down to: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat! Remember all the fun from last year?
Since Purim fell mid-week, we didn't doing anything much on the day, but tonight night we're all going out dancing at Glo Dance, and then Saturday Littletree is going to a kids dress-up party down the street and there will be a Rocky-Horror party at my place - we'll all get dressed up as our fave characters, eat a feast, drink a lot of caipirinhas, and watch the movie :)
Meanwhile, here's a gorgeous photo of Littletree (then aged 3) and Butterfly, after a full day at the Tel Aviv Purim street party, 2006.
Happy New Year of the Water Dragon
There has been such a constant stream of so many beautiful people flowing through my house recently, with Wind and Coola living in the flat downstairs, and our good friends Belle and Anasho have been staying, since they are temporarily homeless, as well as frequent visits from an assortment of random hippies and my beloved Ocean.
As group of us got together yesterday for a sacred ceremony to honour the new moon and the start of the Chinese New Year.
We all wrote out pages of our intentions and manifestations for the coming year, I chopped some wood,
We lit a sacred fire, ringed with the surprise rose apples we found growing in the back of our rainforest.
Then we said some prayers and set our intentions before giving the pages to the fire
Then we sat around playing music and dancing and singing before having a yummy feast.
Awesome start to the year!
Last week one of my friends needed people to be in his new music video, so I went along to help out.
I love this song, Loren used to come to the village life drawing classes and play his music for us while we were drawing; it was awesome! So it was nice to come out and support him in making his art, and great to hang out with everyone down by the river :)
Check it out:
Edited to add a link to Loren’s website: http://www.loren.com.au/loren.php
Yesterday we celebrated Purim, the most fun religious holiday ever. Everyone dresses up, gets intoxicated, and celebrates. The classic example of “they tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat!”
So we all got dressed up in costume and went out to the village dance
Littletree went as a gypsy-girl, complete with accessories her Savta sent from Israel (along with a big box of candies for mishloach manot.)
And Purple looked awesome in a get-up of mostly my clothes, along with a wig from Littletree’s dress-up bag. He certainly turned a few heads at the dance!
Of course we had a fantastic time dancing the night away :)
We’re all home from the rainbow adventure now and well unpacked. The gathering was spectacular! One of the most stunningly beautiful sites; and not just beautiful, but logistically perfect and easy – clean water, nice land, soft grass, no ticks, mozzies or leeches, easy access while not being too close to any towns… and awesome people!
Littletree and I drove down slowly, stopping on the way to see the Solar System Drive that you can read about HERE.
There were so many rainbows on the way there, it was almost like magical providence leading us home
We were lucky enough to get there early, before the road was blocked, so I could drive right in to the site to unload our tipi and the poles and everything (cars aren’t allowed to enter the rainbow site after the opening day), and since we’d decided to sleep the night on the road just before coming into the site, we arrived early morning and had plenty of time to find our perfect campsite and set up and get the car out before the day was over. Our faithful van Sunshine served us like a true champion :)
I had help from a couple of people to get the tipi up and was quickly rewarded by yet another rainbow
So we were settled in and ready to work on helping set up the gathering and build infrastructure
The gathering was so full of wonderful friends. I barely saw Littletree as she roamed freely with a bunch of other kids exploring the forest. They all made bows and arrows
and played all sorts of cool games
and made faerie crowns
and did face painting
and attracted butterflies
It’s such a supportive environment for children – no cars or roads to worry about, dozens of supportive grown-ups available, and freedom to roam and explore :D
A local theatre group, Living Light, joined the gathering to give a preview of their performance
I spent a fair bit of time in the kitchen, though not as much as I have in the past, which is pretty good
and we opened up our tipi for chai nights where I made doughnuts for everyone. I pumped out a few hundred organic chocolate-filled doughnuts, and cinnamon ring doughnuts. mmmm
I also did a lot of crochet – I added six new hearts to Littetree’s blanket, I held a couple of crochet workshops
and I even made a rainbow heart that slowly morphs into a square to be part of a patchwork community blanket; a free-form heart that becomes a square was no easy feat, I don’t think I did too badly, considering this was my first attempt.
Since there were several pregnant mamas,
I held several midwifery circles and did ante-natal check-ups
I swam every day in the creek
sang and danced in the magic hat parade
played capoeira and partied around the drum circle by main fire
enjoyed the sunset against the mountains
and watched the full moon rise
It was such an enriching, revitalising experience. To be in nature, to hold hands and chant AUM with 100 people before every meal, to sit in talking circles, and feel supported by my family. I was sad to leave, but I left knowing the consensus for the next rainbow in Australia will be just 2 months away, in January! details HERE
Of course, there’s no way I could fit the whole experience of rainbow into one (or even two) blog posts, and I took many photos, which you can browse on my flicker page HERE.
I finally got the videos from the Unschooling Conference talent show edited and uploaded. The whole show was fantastic, I enjoyed it immensely – I would love to have filmed the whole thing, but I just have a couple of clips.
Here’s Littletree’s act – I only filmed half of it, and sadly the audio isn’t so great – you can mostly only hear the clapping and backing music; the lyrics are a bit hard to make out. Basically the song was one she made up about how the world is in danger and it needs saving and god gives her the magic to save nature with music.
Here’s a mixed clip of a few different acts
you can see more pictures from the conference at http://flickr.com/groups/australianunschoolingconference
Littletree started going to circus classes in town last month. She loves the hula hoop best. I went along to watch this week – I was amazed at how good she is with the hoop; even hooping while walking over the balance beam, and doing two and three hoops at once!
Here’s a little video clip of her hula hooping
The little village we live in is very old and historic, and there’s still lots of quaint throwbacks to its former glory, like the post office with it’s 1908 sign, and the village dance.
I don’t go out dancing that often, but I do try to get to the village dance party every month (well, yeah, for some people going dancing once a month would be a lot!)
I got all dressed up and ready to boogie
It’s so nice to see the local youngsters out on the dance floor
This month we grooved to the phat tribal beats of Ganga Giri, drum, bass and digeridoo.
It’s an alcohol-free event, but the local herb shop makes a herbal punch and chai, and there’s always a cake stand with a range of gluten-free organic cakes.
There’s always a few kids running around outside, people hanging about chatting, fire twirling.
Littletree was running about, playing with the other kids; we all had a great time.
It’s so nice to be a part of these old traditional village events ;)
One of Littletree’s friends gave her a pair of hand-me-down tap shoes, which Littletree is completely enamoured with.
She doesn’t really know how to tap dance, but she’s been avidly watching YouTube videos and practicing.
I’ve not posted for a while… my computer has been playing up, and then our phone line was playing up and we were without internet for 5 days.
But of course, we’ve been busy as usual, last weekend we went to the Adventure Circus’ Right to Homebirth Tour. It’s a great homeschooling family circus, travelling down to the Homebirth Rally in Canberra, putting on performances to raise awareness along the way.
Since I was on the door, and then helping out with their little girl while the show was on, I didn’t get any photos of the juggling or magic acts, but I did snap a few shots of the fire show.
The kids all had a great time, Littletree loved it, and even got up to do some hula hooping.
We all had a great night, and it was great to meet Firespiral and her lovely family :)
I can’t wait to see them when I get to Canberra for the Homebirth Rally. Speaking of which, if you can’t make it to Canberra, Homebirth Australia has extended the deadline for getting a virtual rally ticket.
In following on from my last post about our trip up to far north Queensland for the Australian Rainbow Gathering (which you can read HERE), here's some more highlights from the journey:
Regular drum circles in the evening
Me drying my hair after a swim:
I brought a pretty extensive first aid kit with me, both herbal/homeopathic and allopathic, so I found myself treating lots of minor injuries and illnesses, including this chamomile tea eye-patch:
We had some spontaneous lessons - Littletree decided that we would save her pocket money while we were at the rainbow (there's no where to spend money there anyway) and she wanted to work out how much money she was saving, which led to discussions about multiplication tables. She was fascinated with the idea and quickly learned the 1, 2 and 10 times tables, as well as a bunch of the 3 and 7s. When it started getting tricky, we moved on to using groups of pebbles to work them out.
Purple played his silver flute a lot and impressed us all with how good he's getting
Here's one of the things I crocheted - a rainbow striped hat that took me about 4 or 5 hours. I also added some sections to Littletree's blanket and made myself mohair leg warmers.
In rainbow people can really show their true colours :)
We had a resident hygiene hand-spray cowgirl
Hair-wrap workshops
and the best breakfast ever - here modelled by the most gorgeous woman
And of course no rainbow would be complete without an all-night mission to make more pizza than 100 hippies can eat!
The oven was awesome - made out of an old barrel and structured with stones and mortar made from termite hills, it survived four rainy seasons and is still going strong!
The beauty of rainbow magic was that one brother had a vision to make pizzas, and then 2 other guys showed up to help that turned out to be an Italian chef and an American pizza chef!
And what rainbow mission would be complete without some funky music and a bunch of people dancing!?
Okay, there's more, but this post is getting way too long. I'll save the trip home for another post tomorrow. You can check out the full album of photos on my flickr page HERE
Posts
All Comments
