One of the brilliant pieces written by students from The Monthly Masterclass

There is a little known religious practice primarily associated with the Greek Orthodox faith that has a parent placing their child in the spiritual care of a stranger. This is at least how I understood it when I first witnessed a mother purposefully making her way with her baby in her arms to the front section of the church that I attended with my mother, grandmother and sister as a child.

I remember the woman placing her child at the foot of an icon and walking away. As a large section of the congregation stepped forward to attend to the child, I turned to my mother and asked how anyone, let alone a mother, turn her back on a baby? She explained that the baby had not been abandoned – its mother had simply dedicated her child to God in return for her answered prayer.

My mother added that the person who picks up the child accepts to be its godparent, thus taking the responsibility for its spiritual upbringing, especially in the absence of its parents. “But they are a complete stranger” I whispered to my mum, to which she responded that no member of a close community is a stranger. She assured me that the child would be safe no matter who got to it first. She went on to explain that it is not so much the individual who reaches the child but the community that they belong to that provides the spiritual support that all children need and deserve.

Sadly there are many children who are, for whatever reason, left in the care of strangers. The unaccompanied refugee child who arrives on our shores seeking asylum is, in a way, similar to the child who is left at the foot of an icon. The child’s parents or kin look to us for support, but all they seem to receive is indifference and cynicism.

Our community does not surge forward to embrace the unaccompanied minor. Instead it turns its back, accusing strange people from afar of offloading their children on us. We shut our eyes to the prison cell like detention facilities that unaccompanied minors are place in, happy to leave them in the care of government officials, private security firms, and the few who have the decency to hold out a helping hand.

A compassionate community does not stand back and expect the good few to provide the spiritual support that all children deserve — it offers its hand. I remember my grandmother telling me that a strong and decent community functions as one hand, and it is primarily for this reason that I am saddened to see the country that once held out its hand to my grandmother and the many post-warmigrants like her, threaten to push away our newest, youngest and most desperate arrivals.

The ‘unaccompanied minor’ epitomizes all children who are in need of refuge and spiritual care. A strong and compassionate community orientates its heart towards them, holding out its firm, warm and reassuring hand. This is the measure of a true community and indeed the moral standard by which all communities ought to be judged.

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One of the brilliant pieces written by students from The Monthly Masterclass

I love the day after a hangover. Who doesn’t? I call it ‘the hangover-over’ and it’s truly a wonderful day. The outside world gets its colour back, basic shapes and patterns become clearer and you can start living your life again. The bad taste in your mouth finally dissipates and you suddenly find yourself putting on that Sherlock Holmes hat of yours and figuring out why your wallet is completely bare aside from a business card from a girl called Sheena. If we examine the term “hang over,” within it there seems to be the inherent image of a kind of filthy residue dripping over from the previous night. It’s as if your body is unable to conga its way out of a conga-line. Hangovers remind me of those melting clocks Salvador Dali liked to paint as we each become melting clocks ourselves, slumped over the couch, head in our hands, slowly praying for death.

The realm of the hung-over is an incredibly lonely place. Nobody wants to talk to you and, quite frankly, you don’t want to talk to them. You’re forever trapped in a plastic bubble of blah where the only thing worth doing is wallowing in your own misery. A quick text to make sure your friends made it home alive is always a nice gesture however it’s usually only a prelude to the inevitable religious moment of crouching over the toilet bowl like a pathetic praying mantis.

The next day is a different story. As soon as you wake up that very next morning, you are a completely different person. You can feel the haze rising from your zombie-fied corpse and you want to shout “Hallelujah! Christ has risen!” while pumping your fists like you’ve been given a free blender on Oprah. One quick shower and you are back into the world, firing on all cylinders, a functional member of society.

Many people have written about the “hang-over cure” if there is such a thing. Everyone has their own method; their own little secret cauldron of concoctions, and the one that seems to pop up most frequently is grease. Grease, grease, grease is the word! Bacon, eggs, tomato, hashbrowns shovelled into your mouth until your arteries can take no more and your veins flow with Hollandaise sauce. Personally, this approach has never really worked for me. Feeling blocked up with grease actually makes my headache throb even louder. The safest option for me is fruit salad with a regular cappuccino. While I’m aware that it’s probably not the wisest approach and it certainly isn’t likely to fill you up as well as the aforementioned grease feast, there’s something rejuvenating about eating fruit after a night of Hungry Jacks and 3am kebabs. I’m reminded of that ad (I think it was for Gaviscon) where a disembodied figure takes a swig of medicine and the diagram on the ad shows white liquid coursing effortlessly through the body, instantly resolving all its problems. That’s what fruit salad does for me.

My brother sometimes goes with the ‘Powerade before bed’ approach, which is also quite common particularly around sporty people. Powerade is meant to help because of the electrolytes or something but this approach does require a bit of forward planning and not all of us are capable of that. The Powerade bottle needs to be in a placed in an area that’s both easily visible and readily accessible. A good idea is to use your bedside chest of drawers however you certainly don’t want to forget where you put it. Personally, I’d hate to stumble home after a big night out and later find out I was sucking on the family lava lamp to try and ingest the electrolytes within.

A good place to try out some of these methods is Schoolies trips, which many of us have been through before. I remember from my own hazy recollections of Schoolies in Ocean Grove that after the first three days of tequila-soaked mayhem, my friends and I were absolutely craving fruit. In a remarkable moment of solidarity, we all rallied together and marched towards the town centre on a quest for anti-oxidants. We grabbed the biggest watermelon we could find and carried it home like a trophy. As I chowed down on its sweet flesh I remember my body going a state of confusion. “Wait a minute, this isn’t macaroni or pizza. I may have to call my supervisor” my addled taste-buds seemed to be saying.

Some people see the hangover as punishment for too much fun, others see it as an unavoidable part of life and others brag about how painful it was and even welcome the next one. Call me old-fashioned but a morning of puking your guts up and an afternoon of daytime TV and yelling at strangers is nothing to be proud about. Nonetheless, when that next sunrise hits everything is fine again. I’m not really a religious person but if you do indeed see your body as a temple, consider this. Even though the hangover is your Confession, the hangover-over will always be your Absolution. So go in peace…

Tim is on twitter #timmymania

Like others in this tangled time on our planet, I grew up with very strong influences from more than one culture.  These cultures were so different from each other that they could have been different planets.  When the very smells and sounds and textiles of your baby days come from different worlds, and get all woven together in your emerging psyche; yet the underlying rules are spectacularly different (and often opposed) what do you do?  As life unfolds, bits of yourself wind up here, bits over there on the other side of a chasm.  You can vest in one story and reject or bury and mourn the bits that don’t fit (and live your life beset with ghosts).  Or you can try and try and try again to throw spider silk guy-lines between the outcroppings, and create a web that can begin to hold more than one story.

I call it WaysWeaving.  The word was coined for a novella, written in homage to the most important chief in the valley of the highlands of West Papua where I grew up as the daughter of missionaries (American father, Australian mother; more cultural intrigue).  The changes that unfolded over the 40 years that my parents lived and worked in Tangma were colossal, and I honoured Aligat for holding an energy umbrella of “The Old Ways” over the valley, while creatively aligning himself with much of the new.  I have done my best, in my journey through life (and over a fair portion of the planet) to emulate this art; to be a WaysWeaver.

In my late 30s, to my considerable surprise I found myself married with a five year old child and another in utero.  I could no longer explore the possibilities of my world armed only with a backpack and a passport.  New circumstances call for new methods.  I began to read books based on the tremendously exciting work of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist whose importance in the domain of mythology should rival that of Joseph Campbell, because she literally unearthed thousands and thousands of years of hope for the human species.  I can still remember sitting in a chair, reading The Myth of the Goddess (Baring and Cashford 1991), and the sense of discovery, exhilaration, joy.  Wow!  For thousands of years of early human history, we lived essentially in peace!  And we rocked! Cultivation, pottery, arts of all kinds, and ceremony.  Carvings and figurines and pottery from the time, depict ceremony, or are placed in ways, or decorated with patterns, that reveal their ceremonial significance. The central image over a vast geographic area was that of a Goddess, in many forms.

Art and spirituality have travelled hand in hand for longer than any of us could usually imagine, and to a WaysWeaver mind this is exciting.  If we did it before, we can do it again.  We can choose paths of peace.  They are a familiar place, and we recognise them.  It’s important to know, I believe, that when we get our hearts and hands into materials, colour, we are standing on the side of Peace.  This is very literal.  When as a craftsperson or artist we immerse in our work, we begin to calm, maybe to hum or sing, to enter a space that we could call meditative, or Shamanic, or the wavelength of true prayer.  This can also be conducive to community and shared wellbeing.  I facilitate a Women’s Felting Circle and the way that we engage while felting is quite different from how we would chat over a cup of tea.  Art serves community wellbeing.

 My particular interest is traditional Women’s skills, and it’s no surprise that these are being re-vitalised by so many in our time.  The psyche calls for what she needs.  Knitting, crochet, mosaic, felting, arts from a thousand lands.  When we engage in these skills, we “hold hands with the ancestors.”  This hand of mine that pulls a needle through a stitch, and winds up the slack in a figure 8, as my tribal “mother” Dorkat taught me so long ago, how many hands through time have made that motion, created a netted bag, a useful beautiful art?

How many hands have laid out wool, wet it and rubbed and rolled it to felt?

How many hands have fixed tiles to a surface and grouted between to make a picture out of fragments?

These arts all go back to an ancient time of peace and belonging.  And I believe that when we engage our hands and eyes and minds in these creative acts, our brains re-connect with a deep Ancestral memory, when we were/are predominantly peaceful, and vitality and creativity can flourish.  We are “home.”

The variety of artistic skills we have developed is exciting, because each will, in its own way, wend a slightly different path home.  Art is always connected to Metaphor.  The net of the Highlands, in which women carried their babies, as well as the food for the day, was also a deeply significant symbol of the whole cultural fabric of old.  When a person creates a mosaic, I imagine this could be a profound metaphor for healing after a fragmenting experience, or a celebration of putting together many colours and textures into a new whole.  Felting, with its use of water, its tactileness and its freedom, expresses something quite different on the psychic plane, from weaving, or quilting.  Knitting in my mind has a resonance with Prayer Beads, and interestingly, it’s become a wonderful avenue to global involvement, as in the initiative Knit-a-Square.  Spiritual significance shines in day to day actions and objects.  And their everyday importance “grounds” the sacred.  This is the world illuminated through the eyes of a time when our deity was the primeval Goddess of Life, Death, and Regeneration, and her realm was right here on earth.

Art also helps to create the context for heightened energy.  This can be subtle.  For instance, we have a beautiful hand-made mosaic platter by our front door, where we place leaves, stones or feathers that we pick up on a bushwalk.  Set in honour on this platter, we take notice: “Look at this!  How beautiful!”

I recently learned of an arts project in a nearby town, (Hurstbridge) where community members are collaborating to commemorate the original steam train of the area, by covering a metal fence with an enormous whimsical crocheted train!  (yarnbomatraintoallwood.webs.com)  This is another example of how art heightens energy, and adds value to culture and community.

And I believe that art will always augment and create context for the kind of intense heightened awareness that ceremony can bring.  Allied with theatre and music, as well as more traditional means to invoke our connection to Spirit, it can help us to states of consciousness that are familiar and necessary to our psyches, as a species.  We have been performing ceremony, in community, for time beyond telling.  These times of intense “connectedness” serve us, and perhaps as we invite ceremony back into Western culture, some of our mental illnesses and dysfunctional substitutes will fade.

The domains of Art, Culture, Ceremony are what I love.  Through them, I WaysWeave.  In a time when on a global scale, our communities are becoming more and more of a mixing, colliding, melding milieu of cultures, I hope this may mean more than a personal exercise of making sense of my experience.  We all have much to offer.  Those of us who grew up as I did, dispersed in the chasms between our true loves, may find that we are particularly suited to a kind of creative speculation that is in service of our Planet, our finding our way Home.

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