The second volume of Surrender Now, ‘Adventure and Awakening,’ will be ready to launch on Sunday October 3, 2021.
This story is about what happened when I recovered enough from the addictions and fixations described in the first volume to let go of my situation in life and start something new completely.
I left Melbourne in pursuit of something radically different from what I had experienced up until that time. I wanted to break free from the habits and patterns that formed my sense of self, and live out an authentic and meaningful existence.
So I went with no plans to the tourist town of Byron Bay. There I encountered many strange and magnificent human beings who opened up new ways for me to understand how to live in nature, leading me eventually to withdraw permanently from contemporary society.
The story describes what set me out to discover how to live in harmony with nature, and my personal experience of the miracles that got me there. All that I have written about really did happen, though I have taken liberties in the telling of it; my own thoughts and impressions frame the encounters that took place, and my perceptions as a narrator are not always reliable.
My intention in writing is to share the gift of awakening that I have received through the inward and outward journeys to which I have devoted the last decade of my life. Through the story you are to read, the familiar misery of my comfort zone transformed rapidly into the intentional pursuit of adventure and contemplation; everything I had hitherto understood as ‘me’ and ‘self’ and ‘real’ rapidly became unravelled and spun into something else completely.
This transformation is, importantly, a deeper order of emotional healing than I have described in my writings so far; the story is about surrender, and the miraculous journey that one takes upon oneself when surrender becomes a way of life and practice of being in the world. This requires commitment, and is rare.
It is also rare to have seen what I have seen, to have found the places that I found, and to have met the people who changed the course of my life forever. I hope I can do justice to these miraculous encounters in the telling of these stories.
This work is dedicated to Raphael, of course, because his life was the greatest miracle that I have ever known.
Goodbye to Melbourne
Oh, that February of 2013, my last month in the city that had I had lived in all my life, bore such an unusual heaviness and languor to it that I shall never forget. The days were burning hot, unbridling even the staunchest of heat-lovers, and the evenings transformed into endlessly balmy nights that saw me sojourning on foot to the old haunts of the city and mentally saying goodbye to the places I had known well in my youth, with fondness and contempt sitting side-my-side in my heart.
Goodbye to Percy’s Bar, the drinking-hole of my undergraduate years; goodbye to the skyrise flats of Carlton and Collingwood, to the giraffe-speckled play equipment of the Fitzroy Gardens, to the scummy-chocolate froth of the Yarra River surging beneath the Princes Bridge and the sunburnt stonework of Federation Square.
Goodbye to grimy old Flinders Street Station and its chamber beneath the clocks where I squandered my adolescence waiting for people who would never love me back; goodbye to those cosmopolitan laneways that once were hip and edgy, now ruined by their own charms like some ageing harlot who is forever dabbing blush upon herself, holding her own gaze in a compact mirror.
Goodbye to the gargantuan light-towers of the MCG, which had overcast my whole life with their coruscating fluorescence, and goodbye to the various oddities of architecture that bear out the Australian Ugliness in their manifold and relentless lack of scope and dimensionality. Goodbye to the artifice of it all, to the illusory identity of Melbourne itself; goodbye to the stage-prop of this city and the society it pretends to maintain. Goodbye to it all.
Jonas
Suddenly I took comfort in the great uncertainty I was navigating through, for that uncertainty itself was a kind of freedom: I didn’t know what would happen, for sure, but I knew that if I carried the radiance of this smile in my heart, whatever I did next, then only good things would happen here.
I sat up from my reverie, after a time, and noticed an exceptionally handsome young man – blonde, in his early twenties – sitting on the other side of the tipi, holding in his left hand a pair of tiny chicks the same colour as his hair. He was stroking them gently and whispering words of comfort. I knew better than to be shy when it came to exceptionally handsome strangers doing interesting and peculiar things, so straight away I got up from the cushions and went over to see the little chicks for myself.
“What are their names?” I asked him, for I liked to be forthcoming.
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” said he, without any hesitation. He had an accent I could not place immediately, either Scandinavian or Central European.
“Can I hold one?” I asked, holding out my right hand. Without saying anything he simply dropped one of the chicks into my outstretched palm. My heart melted a little, right then and there; the tiny sharp feet treaded tremulously across me, and I stroked the chick’s downy feathers gently with my other thumb.
But then he did a poo straight in my hand, and the boy said, “He’s just a little scared. Come back to daddy.” So I passed Tweedledee (or was it Tweedledum?) back to the young man and set about washing my hand. I was surprised to notice a distinctly Australian twang in how he said the words ‘scared’ and ‘back;’ he must have spent quite a while traveling here to have picked up that way of pronouncing things.
Cynic
Maybe you are feeling a touch cynical about all this supposed good fortune, and I totally get that. Once upon a time I was a cynic as well. You might be thinking that I was getting myself into trouble by pursuing a lift with a stranger in his car to an out-of-the-way hippie commune with a sketchy reputation, and about whom I had no knowledge save for a cursory introduction from a stoner I had met a few times on the Byron foreshore. From a purely rational viewpoint, I was behaving like a reckless idiot; but you forget that I was in a situation where I had nothing to lose.
What should I have done otherwise? Why should I not trust this stranger to take me to the Rainbow Temple, at least to see what the place was like? I had already missed the shuttle bus back to Byron Bay, where the only safe haven I had was an abandoned tent that I shared with a few wandering backpackers whom I had met only a week previously. I had no attachments to speak of and had all my valuables with me.
As to the question of trusting Baden and the young couple who were sharing a ride with us back to the Rainbow Temple, I had no reason to mistrust their intentions. I could tell just by looking at them that they were genuine, kind people. Baden had assured me that there were dormitory beds available at the Temple, as most of the residents – including the proprietor, Guy — were out at Lewis Walker’s place in Tabulam, preparing for the corroboree out there the following week.
Nigel and Neil
Nigel had the sort of air about him that seemed as though he was dealing with, or had dealt with, a messy marriage breakdown or disputes with or about children, so I decided not to pry into his personal life. Sometimes you just get that impression from people who are solitary and perhaps a little lonely for company; those are often the people who pick up hitch-hikers, I discovered, just to intersperse their solitary routine with a new person and a new story.
Both Nigel and I were as surprised as each other with how well we were getting on – me, a young drifter moving into a hippie commune, and he a well-heeled professional with long experience in business. When I pointed that out to Nigel he laughed a rare laugh and said, “Well, takes all sorts.”
I decided to go visit Nigel’s friend with him after all, and we snaked along up Fox Road for another kilometer past the driveway leading up to the Rainbow Temple.
“I call Neil my oldest friend,” he told me as we passed through an open gateway onto a flat lawn, “Because he’s really quite old. He was my art teacher back when I was studying painting at college – that’s how long we’ve known each other. Just to let you know, Neil is quite hard of hearing and collects ugly paintings.”
Neil’s house was set on stilts, and was a rather unassuming weatherboard structure dating back (it looked to me) to the 1970s. The rain had abated, and I glimpsed the form of Neil peering out at us through a window before dashing around the side to open up the side door to us.
“Hallo there,” Neil called out to us as we ascended a set of concrete steps, leading up to his patio and the entryway to his home. “Come in, come in,” he said amiably, gesturing us through the door, “Surprised to see you, Nigel. But it’s never a surprise really.”
The main part of the house was an open-plan kitchen and living room, with tremendously ugly paintings hung up on every patch of wall. There was a lovely view over the forested valley below us, and a long table by the window where Neil invited us to sit down.
“Who’s up for a cuppa?” he asked eagerly, and we both said yes.
“Now, who are you, young lady?” asked Neil from the kitchen, as he busied about the kitchen getting the tea things ready.
I remembered that he was hard of hearing, so replied in a loud voice, “I’m Zora. A… a hitchhiker. Nigel picked me up outside of Byron. I’m just moving in down the road, at the Rainbow Temple.”
“Eh? What’s that? Sorry, I didn’t catch everything. The Rainbow Temple? I’m a bit hard of hearing, you see…”
Eventually, after a lot of fussing around and good-natured banter between Nigel and Neil, we settled down with a cup of tea each and a plate of assorted biscuits. Neil kept trying to offer me the biscuits but I would always politely turn them down, being a militant health food freak averse to processed foods of any kind, and then Neil would look at me like I was batty and then offer me one again.
This was a strange situation to discover myself in, perhaps the weirdest of many things that had happened to date. Now that dealing with transients and hippies and their endless spliffs and stoner banter and reggae tunes had become the new normal for me, having tea with these two was rather like being back in the company of my dad and his friends. This was somewhat incongruous but not at all unpleasant, as I have a certain fondness for chatty people who like to drink tea and look at art.
We discussed some of the ugly paintings (which nobody, not even Neil himself, pretended to like) but I admired his collector’s instinct. He collected houses in the bush, he told me, as well as ugly paintings; he had another place out in Tenterfield – “This’ll Do is the name of the place out there,” Neil told me, and until ten years ago he had owned half the valley we could see below us.
“Sold the place up on the hill over there for nearly seven hundred thousand,” Neil told me, gesturing vaguely across the valley. “That was five years back. Tell you what, when I bought the place in 1976 it was a third of that, on twice the acreage!” and he crowed with good-natured laughter.
We stayed for three quarters of an hour until Neil said, in the way of country people, that we’d better be getting off now, shouldn’t we. I quite enjoyed our visit and asked if I could come back and visit for tea again someday.
“Of course, of course!” said Neil with a flourish, in a way that made me feel that he preferred his own company.
Bangalow Cafe
What I came to dislike most about this job, over time, was the level of lying that it involved me doing. To give the impression of being a responsible person to the management staff, I couldn’t really tell them that I lived nearly an hour away, deep in the countryside at a notorious hippie commune, with no vehicle of my own to get to work and relying on lifts from strangers who picked me up on the road. So I made up the story of living somewhat closer to Bangalow in the small town of Federal, where I lived with an imaginary partner who gave me a lift to work.
I had to furnish this blatant lie in all the casual conversations I had with the other café staff. The front of house workers were mainly European backpackers, who were kind but inattentive. I found them deeply boring. Furthermore, in answer to some innocuous question about what I was getting up to over the weekend, I couldn’t really tell anybody that I was heading out to sacred indigenous lands way out on the road to Tenterfield for a gathering with my transient acquaintances living on the fringes of society. I just had to make up something normal on the spot, like having dinner with my partner’s family or something like that.
So, the lying bummed me out, and also the mammoth dickhead of a head chef who worked in the kitchen. He was a British expat – a Pom, we called them – with an execrable temper and a mean, sarcastic way of talking to the front-of-house staff. He was short and fat and covered in awful tattoos. Sadly his short fuse was not at all an unusual characteristic in the hospitality industry, but in my phase of adventure I had grown more sensitive to pervasive negative attributes in people than I had been in Melbourne, simply because I had been meeting primarily with such kind and generous people through hitch-hiking and sleeping rough on the Byron foreshore.
Bushman
The person whom I was talking to introduced himself by name — but his name didn’t matter to me by then: I knew him only as the Bushman.
Actually, the Bushman had driven down from Kuranda, Far North Queensland, with the dog he now introduced to me as Cedar. He described himself as a permaculturalist and community builder. This seemed like an opportunity to offer my Brief Spiel, which I now embellished with the various escapades leading to this very corroboree.
By the time it got dark it was just the two of us talking, and I suddenly remembered that I was a Somewhat Attractive Young Woman and the Bushman was addressing me like an Interested Man. I hadn’t been in this kind of situation for a very long time, and attempted to make myself seem as alluring as possible.
I was wearing a transparent floral playsuit with a bikini top underneath, which wasn’t particularly flattering when I was walking around as my posture and figure were somewhat middling. But the Bushman had only seen me lying down, and the outfit made my legs appear longer and shapelier, and my face was almost pretty when I was not wearing my daggy eyeglasses. So perhaps I was truly coming across as more alluring than usual, for the Bushman was showing not only interest, but apparently enjoyed sharing in my incessant chatter and silly jokes.
Eventually, not halting in the flow of conversation, the Bushman stood up and offered me his hand. We walked under the moonlight across the soft, fragrant grass by the riverside, taking the in the expansive soundscape of the swiftly-flowing river and frog calls mingling with the throb of djembes and guitar melodies from the revelers.
The Rocky River
As I walked slowly through the darkness, listening to the reverberations of dance music recede gradually into the stillness of the wild night, I suddenly felt – for the first time since arriving here – safe on this land, and deeply connected to it. I was listening to it and it was receiving me. This was a surprising phenomenon to feel part of, the first time I had felt connected to a wild place.
Here we were in the bare wilderness with only a few permanent dwellings, most of which were located on the ‘taboo’ area that I had not seen for myself. And the land was starting to speak to me, filling my heart with its reassuring presence, though the magnitude of feelings associated with this place were wilder and more intense than anything I’d ever experienced before. I felt it surging up from the earth beneath my feet, heaving through my belly and crackling in my heart; I had to pause several times as I walked back to the tent to breathe, refocus, clear the static in my head.
It was awesome and humbling and intense and fully embodied, the sense of connectedness to the land that I experienced that night, alone in my tent. But I wasn’t alone at all, it felt like; though I lay with my eyes closed, bundled up in a sleeping bag, I could see the trees overhead and around me as forms of shifting light. And I could hear/feel the lapping river as though its alluvial gold-filled waters were part of my own bloodstream.
Rainbow Gathering
At the bottom of the big hill was a little creek; laden as we were, it would be difficult to cross. We knew that we were close to the campsite now, as we could see a tipi a little distance away on the other side, with a stream of smoke pouring out of its funnel. We sat for a moment on the bank of the creek trying to figure out a way to get across with all our stuff.
As I paused to look around, I was captivated by the mysterious and dream-like quality of the place that they had chosen for the Gathering; it was the land of bunyips and yowies, densely green and silent. Anything could happen here. The place was magic.
Presently, we decided to attempt our way across the creek over some stepping stones. They looked slippery and perilous, as I was not very sure-footed at the best of times, but Leigh assured me that we could manage to get our stuff across in a few rounds.
With Leigh on the stepping stones in the middle of the creek, I passed him our bags from the bank which he cautiously tossed over on the other side. Once everything was there, he darted across, and I wobbled over the stones myself. My left foot sploshed in, but I managed to catch myself before slipping over. Leigh grabbed me by the hand in that moment and steered me safely over to the other side.
We approached the smoking tipi with a feeling of delight in our hearts. At last we had made it to the Rainbow Gathering.
“It only took us twenty hours from Lismore,” I laughed. Had we been normal people, not distracted by the pretty sky on magic mushrooms and too caught up in storytelling to notice an hour-long digression from the main highway, our drive from Lismore would have taken no more than about two hours.
“Slow and steady wins the race,” returned my sagely companion; “I feel right at home already. Here we are in Fairyland.”
Aiya
As I settled down by the Sacred Fire on a nearby log, I noticed a girl sleeping next to the fire, wrapped up in an old blanket; just a surge of black hair sticking out of the blanket, and nothing else of her visible. Bemused, I sat down nearby, as quietly as I could, and set about warming myself amongst the remnants of last night’s fire, now just a pile of white ash and gleaming coals.
I set about gathering some sticks to rekindle the Sacred Fire, but most of what I could find lying about me was somewhat damp. So I pottered around for a while, finding whatever dry tinder I could; thankfully there were a few dry logs that someone had helpfully placed under a tarpaulin nearby, so eventually I had enough to construct the semblance of a fire with what little skill I had in the manner of fire-building. I never was a scout. Presently the girl woke up.
“Good morning,” she drawled, in an accent that was something like a gypsy, something like a queen. Then she stretched herself out, her joints cracking extravagantly around the neck and elbows. I could tell that I was going to be friends with this person already. She had deep, intense eyes to match the charcoal black of her hair, and wore a long dress that had formerly been white, but now appeared greyish. I never saw her change out of it.
“Good morning,” I returned. I’m Zora. Welcome home,” I added, as we had not encountered each other at the Gathering yet. She must have arrived yesterday evening.
“Aiya,” she told me, sizing me up from her bed by the fire. “You need help with this?”
She was referring to my pitiful attempt to rekindle the Sacred Fire, of course. All the sticks I had gathered and the dry log I had pulled out of the tarpaulin were just heaped upon the simmering coals in a jumble, not setting alight.
“Yes,” I grumbled bashfully. And then Aiya oozed out of her blanket, looking noticeably refreshed from her open-air sleep, and scuttled over to me by the fireside. She squatted by my pile of tinder, undoing the mess I had made and arranging things properly, all the while chattering to me as though we were old friends.
“This is your first Gathering? I am from Israel. I have been to plenty, all over the world – Europe, America… and my mother is Yemeni. This is the first one I have come to in Australia. This is also very… small Gathering, I see. Not like in Israel. At Israel Rainbow Gathering last year it was nearly one thousand people – Palestinians and Israelis all coming in peace. Not like they tell on you the news,” she uttered, facing me with a stare that was both intense and kind, as the Sacred Fire now danced with new flames; “They want us to believe that hatred exists in this world, that people are divided. But it’s not true,” she closed, firmly.
“I understand that,” I responded, chewing over her words. “I guess there are a few arseholes here and there, but from my experience too, people are mainly good.”
“I have seen people behave like animals, vicious dogs. I have seen this with my own eyes. But this behaviour has no permanence; everyone is essentially good. One has to remember that, and not speak to the violent nature in people. We just address them as brother and sister, even beyond the Gathering. That is how we make the Rainbow.”
I was awed by the effortless mysticism she brought into our early-morning dialogue by the Sacred Fire, and felt an immediate kinship and sisterhood with Aiya. She was about the same age as myself but so much wiser, so much more awake to the human character.
Any thoughts so far? Let me know in the comments below.
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