Solutions don’t generally come from the middle, they come from the edge. Mythologist Martin Shaw talks of this, of genius living not in the centre but on the margins. If we ignore what the Mexicans call ‘the river beneath the river’, the soul of the world, Martin says, then we’ll end up going around in whirlpools of our own neurosis, individual or cultural.

How can we stay alive to the magic of our homes?

I’m a creature of place. While some seem truly like global citizens, I’ve always been the opposite - a citizen of specificity. Of place. A citizen of a water catchment, a sheltering mountain, of plant friends and mottled morning magpies on my verandah. I’m a citizen of well trodden wandering trails and a swimming hole and a dusk emerging wombat across the road. I’m a citizen of parsley patches and berry patches and soil that is borne from my garden scraps. I’m a citizen of community, of neighbourly reciprocity and friends’ houses nearby that I make tea and toast in.  

How can we tune our nervous systems to the hum of timeless wandering day-to-day?

Last week, I spent a week in a place I count amongst my home country, near where my family holidays near Myall Lakes National Park. As soon as I arrive, my heart and hands rise to meet the screech of the little lorikeets, the sturdy blackbutt trees, majestic paperbarks behind the dunes, the spring dollar birds, the migratory whales, the skittling bug-eyed hermit crabs, the sacred headland. All the creatures. All my relations. I greet the place with the knowing that they know me, at least a little.

How do we make ourselves available to mystery?

Over the last 18 months I received a couple of dreams of an unusual kind. Rather than numinous and symbolic, these two dreams seemed instructional, both telling me that I should move to the Northern Rivers of NSW, even offering helpful details such as a monetary range that I should spend on a house in a community.

This time of year leads naturally to the question of what kind of ancestor will I be? What will be my legacy?

This autumn more than others, I’ve really felt the presence of the ancestors. It’s fitting that I would, this time of year. My Celtic ancestors would have celebrated Samhain, the ‘day-of-the-dead’ (popularised as Halloween), as autumnal leaves fell and dark descended for the winter.

It is often said that the four day solo wilderness fast that is known as Vision Quest is the ultimate act of surrender. Certainly the times that I have chosen to sit on the earth in this way have required me to let go in a very real way… as my physical energy diminishes, as the hours creep by under beating sun or driving rain. It’s surrender in a very visceral, unromantic way. There’s no other way through the eye of this particular needle.

However, while Vision Quest has strengthened my muscle of yielding, in the last few months something has required more surrender of me than even this ceremony - motherhood.

For someone whose life’s passion and deepest enquiry is about how to guide people through an initiatory stage of life, I sit writing on another very particular kind of threshold, one that I didn’t imagine I would experience in this life. Motherhood.