A Blog for a New Beginning
Every morning outside my bedroom window, the kookaburras shout their delight to the darkened sky. Every morning, their rowdy singing wakes me, and I smile. They celebrate before the light has come, you see. They have faith that the sun will rise.
Every evening, as I’m closing the blinds, I see the bare blossom tree outside my library. There it stands, seemingly stripped of beauty, but come spring, masses of pink flowers will burst forth like a celebration. Like a love song. Enough beauty to make you gasp. The buds sleep in the naked branches, though we can’t see them. They’ve been growing in the dark, nourished by a process we can’t see, a mystery that’s been unfolding deep in the dirt where the roots reach out.
Waiting for spring: the bare blossom tree in my backyard.
Nature is a treasure chest of wisdom, if only we are willing to learn. There are times when her profound lessons stand out starkly. Like the last few months. The book I finished writing, The Legacy of Love, will not be published. That chapter of my life is closed. Thank you to everybody who followed along with encouragement and support over the previous couple of years. I’m so grateful.
Now, to new stories. My heart brews them all day long; each a kind of prayer, stories of love, hope, forgiveness, healing, inspiration, grace and faith. Some, I will transfer to the page, others are inside stories, so to speak. Some are lived, like my work with my sister on Ripples of Love, like the writing workshops I’m holding at the haven that is Cara House with a courageous group of children who’ve survived challenges that would make most of us crumble. Or the choir I’ve joined. Singing alongside others, I live myself into a new story, one where I’m learning, finally, that it’s ok to let my voice be heard.
My sister, Natalie, spreading Ripples of Love.
Isn’t that the lesson of the kookaburras? They sing their love to the dawn, not caring if they wake the sleepers. We too are called to share our love without a care for how, or if, it’s received. What matters is the love song—and the faith that writes it.
Kookaburras raise their voices before the sun has risen, because they know a new day is coming. And so do I.
Dawn outside my bedroom window.
“Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love.”
Psalm 143:8
Remembering Ebony Simpson
“Here she is. A little girl spun from gold, from her hair to her heart-shaped face to her skin and smiling eyes. She grins, happy and beloved, a precious girl, forever nine. This is where she belongs, in a unique space forged from pain and tears and a mother’s ferocious love.
Here she is, Ebony Simpson, although you can’t see her.”
These are the opening lines of a story that features in my second book, Where Spirits Dwell (2011). It is one of the last stories I wrote for that book, because whenever I’d sit down to write it, my heart would shatter.
Almost a year earlier, I’d gone with my husband to visit Christine Simpson at her home in Captain’s Flat, near Canberra. We spent an unforgettable day with Christine and her partner, the artist Günther Deix, basking in the warmth of their fireplace and arms-open hospitality. I was so grateful Christine had agreed to my request for an interview. Though how much better it would have been if I’d never heard of her at all.
The art-covered walls of the Outsider Cafe.
On August 19, 1992, Christine’s daughter, Ebony, 9, was raped and murdered on her way home from school. The appalling crime and the smiling, innocent face of the little girl taken, lodged in the national consciousness.
A box of mementos to remember Ebony Simpson in the Outsider Cafe.
Researching a book about places where spirits dwell, I came across an article about where Christine had moved in an attempt to rebuild her life. Somehow, mainly with her bare hands, she’d created a welcoming home/art gallery/cafe of breathtaking colour and beauty. I marvelled at her courage and ingenuity. And while Christine’s story was by no means a ghost story, it was a story about being haunted by love in a space she specifically created for that purpose, and that intrigued me.
Christine Simpson at her home and cafe/gallery, The Outsider Cafe.
I didn’t know that day that meeting Christine would change my life forever.
I think of her often, especially every August 19, when the chill winter wind calls to mind a mother’s pain that will never thaw. Today marks 25 years since Ebony Simpson died. In honour of Ebony, who rests beneath a rainbow of daisies, my mother had a lovely idea—plant some daisies today, to herald the coming spring and remember an angel whose spirit dwells in a toasty little cafe in Captain’s Flat. To that sweet plan, I add my own offering: a story.
EBONY IS HOME is the story I wrote about Christine and Ebony and a love that never dies, in Where Spirits Dwell. For a golden-haired girl, forever 9.
Inspiring lives
The world seems to be on its knees right now. Sorrow abounds, and a sense of futility and despair in the face of so much human suffering. I understand. Seeing the images of stricken children in Syria last week undid me, along with most people. Apart from the practical ways we can help (I donate to Oxfam every month, some amazing Facebook friends are on the frontline with refugees), we each must find our own way to process these events. As always, I find hope in stories, in particular, the stories of individuals who’ve endured deepest pain with compassion intact—they’ve borne witness without closing their hearts, even though in many cases, tragically, they did not survive the persecution they recorded.
I believe these illumined souls carry a piece of the puzzle that will heal the world. The gifted Etty Hillesum was one. A Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, she poured her soul into eight diaries between 1941-42, documenting how her world darkened as Nazi oppression spread into Holland. In one entry, after a Gestapo officer threatened her, she wrote, “I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does … I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion, and would have liked to ask: ‘Did you have a very unhappy childhood, has your girlfriend let you down?’”
On July 1, 1942, she recorded a kind of prophetic vision: “I am in Poland every day, on the battlefields, if that’s what one can call them. I often see visions of poisonous green smoke; I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life.”
Bearing witness: Etty Hillesum
When a roundup of Jews took place, Etty volunteered to go with them to the work camp, Westerbork, the last stop before Auschwitz. Etty, who had certain privileges, could move freely between the camp and Amsterdam, so she transported letters and medicine to and fro, ignoring many possibilities for escape. Finally transported to Auschwitz with her brother and parents, she is said to have thrown a postcard from the window that said, “We have left the camp singing.”
Etty was 29 when she died at Auschwitz less than three months later—her family also perished. What strikes me is that, somehow, her inner light was never dimmed. “I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution and oppression and despotism and the impotent fury and the terrible sadism. I know it all,” she wrote in her diary. “And yet—at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breast of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective … That is my attitude to life and I believe that neither war nor any other senseless human atrocity will ever be able to change it.”
My prayer is that more of us—all of us—learn to live as instruments of peace. Such is how we can contribute. “We should be willing,” as Etty wrote in her final diary entry, “to act as a balm for all wounds.”
Sources:
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hillesum-etty
Sacred Journeys: A Woman’s Book of Daily Prayer, by Jan L. Richardson (Upper Room Books, 1995).
Traveller in time?
Relaxing in a blue velour armchair in a dimly lit room in 2002, lawyer Steve* was about to meet his bloody end—as it had taken place almost 1900 years before. In the midst of past life hypnotherapy, the married father-of-two had seemingly uncovered a previous existence as a commanding Roman legionnaire. “We were in a canvas tent discussing the battle-plan. Everything was under control. There was the clinking of swordplay outside as the men sharpened their skills,” he recalls. “I felt upbeat, excited and confident.”
While Steve remains unsure of what to make of his experience, this much is certain: the memory of what happened next has forever changed the course of his present life. At the hypnotherapist’s prompting, he projected forward some days to the battle, but was unprepared for the “incredibly powerful feelings” that consumed him. “I was totally gutted, perhaps in both senses of the word. There were thousands killed—friends, loyal followers, youngsters. It was all my fault. I could barely speak. My eyes were red and wet with tears,” he says. “The feeling of personal responsibility and guilt for leading the men into a massacre was unbearable. The weight of despair is impossible to convey.”
The year, as Steve saw it during the regression, was 111 AD, yet the misery in his words is as palpable as if he were mourning last week’s loss. Whatever forces were at work when Steve took his journey in the Jason recliner, the topic of past lives has enthralled Westerners at least since 1952’s (since debunked) case of a Colorado woman who recalled meticulous details of living as a 19th century Irishwoman named Bridey Murphy. On the net, you’d need a whole separate life just to explore all the websites the subject has spawned. If you’re game, $14.95 is the price to download software that purports to unearth your past lives—one brief credit card transaction, and the rest is history.
Or is it? Whether the memory is true or not is irrelevant, according to Melbourne hypnotherapist Dr. Frank Jockel, PHD. Anxiety, physical pain, fears and phobias, he claims, can melt away with the recollection of a past life. “People look to past life therapy because they feel stuck in a rut, they’ve been to psychiatrists, psychologists, clairvoyants and fortune tellers searching for an answer,” says Jockel. “A client who’s a doctor had a pain in his neck that had been there for a quite a while. During past life therapy, he saw himself being chased by a mob and someone threw a stone and it hit him in the neck. Ask the question ‘Did it actually happen?’ Who knows? But has the pain in the neck gone? Yes.”
Would this work for me? I don’t have a pain in the neck to contend with, but what plagues me—an obsession with King Henry VIII and his six wives—certainly might feel like that to my Tudor-tired family and friends. One glimpse of historian David Starkey on the TV and the blood drains from my husband’s face and he flees, shrieking down the corridor like the ghost of Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, is said to do. Starkey’s bricklike Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII commands my bedside table, and in the kitchen, my trusty Music From the Reign of Henry VIII cassette (yes, cassette) means a volté at breakfast time is never out of the question. Not even a 750-piece puzzle depicting all of Henry’s hounded ladies is beneath me.
Could this fascination endure because I once walked among them? The idea has accompanied me since childhood, and now, with the image of myself in rustling damask reignited, it was time to finally see if I’d lived before.
“Anne Boleyn” dances outside Hever Castle, ancestral home of the doomed queen, in 2014.
First stop was Sydney psychic Kate Barnes. The willowy strawberry-blonde who claims to have channelled Michael Hutchence for Australian Style magazine, describes herself as a medium, healer and clairvoyant—the latter, she explains, means “sight with your eyes” so she’ll view my former selves projected like a film before her open eyes. “I’m looking at a jungle environment,” she declares in her thick-as-the-bush Aussie drawl. “I’ve got a feeling I’m in South America.” It’s an ancient civilisation, probably Incan, and I’m unsettled by her vision that I’ve “had one child torn away” from me for child sacrifice. That heartbreak is likely to make me an over-vigilant mother today, Kate advises, and I’m eager for her to leave that life behind.
My Year 12 major artwork. Why does it feature an Incan pyramid?
“You’ve been a singer!” she suddenly announces, “I can hear this ooaaahh. It’s very operatic: oooahhh.” As she outlines my glamorous life in late 1800s France or England as a “statuesque” chanteuse with a generous cleavage, I’m reminded of my enthusiastic warbling at karaoke—minus the gowns and “many male suitors” that I was formerly accustomed to. As our 90 minute session progresses, I learn that I’ve belly danced in the Middle East, been a courtier at the Palace of Versailles, a jolly 17th century pirate on the Caribbean seas whose ship was swamped by a massive wave (huge waves are my recurring nightmare) and a revolutionary French poet/journalist by the name of Charles Monseurrat. Kate senses that many of the people around me were guillotined in Charles’s lifetime, and I can’t help but remember the red birthmark at the back of the neck that myself, my mother, sister and daughter all share. Chillingly, Kate also met the spirit of my late Godfather. I tensed at her spot-on descriptions of his distinctive gestures, appearance, and her perception of how he died. But where—I had to inquire, when Kate wonders if there’s something she hasn’t “picked up on?”—was my Tudor life?
Is a swashbuckling past behind my passion for the sea?
For as much as I was enjoying her recounting of some of my 600 (!) costume changes—it’s like the MGM wardrobe department has flung open its doors to you for a personal frock-up—when my moment arrived, it was bittersweet. “I can see a removal of collar for a beheading,” says Kate, delicately miming the gesture. If I hadn’t been Anne Boleyn herself—his famous second wife, whom Henry sent to the block on trumped-up adultery charges—I’d been her lady-in-waiting, she states. These words should have made my blood run cold, but coming as a postscript, it was just like chancing upon a beloved, long-dead relative in a well-worn photo album.
Before leaving, I ask if there is any past life explanation for my current fear of driving. In a heartbeat, Kate sees me steering a red-cross ambulance and dodging bombs in some war-ravaged city. This is exhilarating but doesn’t go far towards explaining my terror. When I mention the scene to my mother her dry response is, “I don’t see you driving an ambulance in this life, a past life or a future life.”
Instead, I steered myself towards kinesiology. Energy kinesiology works on the principle that “muscle testing” can identify imbalances in different structures of the body. The practitioner asks a yes/no question and the resistance of your muscle, usually a forearm, provides the answer. This is a novel method of accessing past lives and I can’t imagine what awaits me at the southern Sydney apartment of kinesiologist Sherry Mead. A gargantuan dream catcher dominates most of a wall, and I wonder what lives we’ll net today.
Answering that proved complicated , but warm-natured Sherry showed cool efficiency in keeping track of the interminable folders, information sheets and lists she had to consult in tracking my past lives. “Muscle testing is our tool to follow the path or to find the story,” she explains. Via what is essentially the method of elimination, Sherry established that I’d been a swordsman in the Spanish royal court in 1521 (right year, wrong country) and a 9-year-old Greek girl in 1013. I thanked Sherry, but more than ever; I was drawn to the bright light of hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy is the quintessential past-life experience, as Steve discovered. “I had been pretty risk averse in my life and reluctant to push myself forward and stand-out from the group,” he says. “The Roman legionnaire experience certainly showed why I might have retreated into a shell. Soon after this experience, I felt that perhaps there was a reason for my ‘blockage’ and it was okay to move on and start asserting myself.” He soon grasped a new professional opportunity and moved interstate with his family. “There is a new energy, excitement and happiness. Now I stand up for what I think is right.”
That’s settled then: I will go under. Imagining my ancient self skipping down velvet English hills, I make an appointment with Sydney hypnotherapist Marlaine Nicholson-Smith.
“Hypnosis is like the dream state but awake,” Scottish-born Marlaine informs me during our pre-session chat. “I have to quieten the conscious mind to access the subconscious. The memories are there within you but a lot of us don’t want to remember, or don’t now how to remember.” For the first few moments in the recliner’s plush embrace, as Marlaine’s hushed voice instructs me to feel “heavy as lead”, I’m remembering only that I’ve left my mobile phone switched on in the next room.
The pesky thought eventually recedes during the guided meditation, where I’m to imagine myself walking down a golden path, inhaling a rainbow of multi-hued “mists.” Soon, I’m plunged into a swirling spiral and when I emerge at the other side, I’m supposedly inside a past life. Then—nothing. But pictures do emerge as, ever so slowly, I lose awareness of where I am, and start to completely inhabit the landscape in my mind. Still, when I listen back to a recording of the session, my answers remain mostly monosyllabic and the vivid detail reminiscent of the most intriguing past life recollections I’ve read about is absent.
During hypnosis, I’m advised to “inhale” a rainbow of multicoloured mists.
I “see” a barefoot young woman with long dark hair, and an empty stone cottage, but there’s no one around—it’s like a ghost town. When I’m asked for the date, there is a long pause before my clipped “1500s”—of course I’d say that, in my hope. Yet, propelled to the day I departed this mundane life, a tear stung my eye as I watched this girl whose features were never clear die in her childbed. Marlaine later assured me that memories are often hazy: “Often, you don’t get a proper picture, you just get a feeling that something’s there.”
The second life I recounted—intended to pinpoint the origins of my fear of driving—flowed better. This time I’m a stable boy of 15 in the days of Roman chariots. He’s as happy as Larius until the day his master invites him to take the reins, for a lark, and the horse and chariot veer wildly out of control, throwing the youth and condemning him to be reborn centuries later as a bus-bound writer with a thing for strappy shoes that lace around the ankle. To curtail my fear, Marlaine suggests that I reimagine the event with a happy ending, then “One: feeling your body return to normal. Two: feeling your spine against the chair, and three: wide awake and refreshed.” I snap my eyes open and drag my tingly, leaden limbs from the chair, thinking all the while that it would have been fun to continue for just one more life…
What? More Romans?! A chariot accident may explain my fear of driving…
Barry Williams, the editor of The Skeptic, the journal of the Australian Skeptics association, soon bursts my bubble: “Self delusion is one of the strongest attributes that all human beings have,” he cheerfully tells me. While he immediately poo-poos the psychic reading—“she was never going to tell you that you were a common rag picker who spent most of his time with his finger up his nose”—and my brush with kinesiology–“one of the looniest things people have come to believe”—hypnosis makes him pause for breath. “It is on the fringes of science … the hypnotist is giving you permission to behave how you wouldn’t normally behave, make a fool of yourself if you like.” (Here, I chose to remember the celebrities who cross-dress for TV hypnosis specials, rather than my own purposeful utterings about a crashed chariot.) “You want this to be true,” he sums up. “It’s the same as when people see pictures in clouds.”
But that’s not so bad, is it? Bombarding my vague and pregnant sister with tales of my spiritual quest recently, she surprised me with a decisive: “You know what you were. You don’t need to ask anyone.” Perhaps, I thought, sinking into the couch with my latest guilty pleasure—Robin Maxwell’s The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn—you could have told me that earlier.
* Not his real name
No answers: the mystery of my fascination with Anne Boleyn remains. (Image Hevercastle.co.uk).
Author’s note: I was commissioned to write this article for a Sunday supplement more than a decade ago, but it was never published. My sister suggested I post it, so here it is, a little dated in parts, but hopefully still of value. Something that’s definitely changed since I wrote this is I now believe more in the idea of “simultaneous” lives, rather than “past” lives … more on that later!
Heal With Your Pen
The words came to me in a meditation. I wrote them down: HEAL WITH YOUR PEN. Since that morning, almost a year ago, I have come to understand so much more about what those four words signify.
Heal with your pen. At first I thought that was a pointer for my own life, that I would heal myself by writing my story, that I would evolve—progress on the spiritual path and thus “heal”—through sharing my experiences, be it in books, blog posts or on social media. Yes, I thought, that feels right.
I have always understood the healing power of stories.
But there was more, I realised, as I began to meet women who have extraordinary life stories they are bursting to explore. I say “bursting” because of the readiness with which they shared their life journeys with me. In a way, we seem magnetised to each other. What an honour. One of these women, Lisa, has become a dear friend (a true Spirit Sister rediscovered!) and I am honoured to be writing her biography this year. What a task, what a joy, what a story.
“Spirit sis” Lisa is on the left.
All the women I’ve met share this in common: I marvel—marvel and bow down—at what they have endured, and how they have emerged on the other side, as teachers of love and grace and resilience. Meeting such women made me wonder; Am I to use my pen to serve them? Will I write, edit or publish their stories? All three perhaps? Me, a publisher?! I don’t feel like anything is impossible with spirit at the helm.
Lately, something else has become apparent. I am being drawn to HEAL WITH MY PEN by encouraging others to do the same. In this scenario, my pen will offer tips and pointers to help people heal themselves by freeing their stories. For example, later this year, I have been asked to talk about writing and storytelling to children who’ve suffered trauma. I am thrilled to do so.
I have also been sharing my story verbally at a couple of talks. So to heal with my pen has permutations, as I am discovering. Thinking of stories, and of the healing power of sharing them, reminds me of something I read the other day. There are myriad names for that universal force that connects us all: many call it God, others call it the Universe, some describe it as Divine Intelligence, in scientific circles, it is “the field,” in Aboriginal culture it is “the Dreaming” and in certain Native American traditions it is the Great Spirit. Ultimately though, all the names can only point to that unfathomable vastness that cannot be contained by any name, as the Tao te Ching teaches: “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” I accept that, and yet I love this description I came across in an old prayer:
God—that is, that which goes by many names and none—is “the author of love.” And love, of course, is the ultimate story that heals.
Beautiful graphic by KSH Creative.
Introducing AWAKEN
Dear spirit sisters,
The final chapter in my last book, Love Never Dies, is called “The Path Winds and I Follow,” which describes both the trajectory of my daily walk around my neighbourhood—with its hills and curvy footpaths—and the trajectory of my spiritual life.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling that the path unfolds before me, and the universe, in perfect divine timing, places signposts to guide me on the way. I’m directed where to go next, step by small step. And so it was that one day, maybe in late 2013, I was flicking through Oprah magazine, and an article about her seven favourite soulful reads caught my eye. I shared it with my sister, Natalie, and we decided to read every one of the spiritual books on her list …
I am not sure if we could have imagined then, that some three years later, Natalie and I would be publishing an inspirational book of our own. It’s called AWAKEN: The Search is over, and it’s full of insights that we’ve gleaned during the last few eventful, eye-opening, heart-expanding years of finding our way back to our true selves—of heeding the call of the soul.
A proof copy of Awaken, hot off the presses!
I find it extraordinary because, even though, ostensibly, it was reading Oprah’s list of soulful books that eventually birthed AWAKEN, if I travel far, far back into my memory, I know this is a path I’ve been on since I was a child. As a little girl listening, entranced, to my mum’s stories of premonitions about the deaths of loved ones, I was on the path. As a child fascinated by spooks and mysteries, I was on the path. As a schoolkid who yearned to connect with something vast and all-encompassing that I felt lay beyond our world of the senses, I was on the path. As the first-time author who published Spirit Sisters, a collection of women’s experiences of the paranormal, I was on the path. As the magazine journalist who had the chance to interview Deepak Chopra and see Wayne Dyer on stage a week before his passing, I was on the path.
My first book, published in 2009.
And so it continues, and I am happy to surrender to the Divine Intelligence steering the ship—AWAKEN, the first book Natalie and I have co-authored, represents the manifestation of our joint decision to allow this Divine Intelligence to flow through us, unhindered. Many of the insights it contains arrived via Nat’s meditations, from a realm beyond the three-dimensional plane of our everyday lives. We call it a little book that creates big changes, and our ardent hope is that it helps put you on your own path back to your soul.
With my sister and co-author, Natalie.
Love,
Karina x
New lease of life
- At April 17, 2016
- By Karina Machado
- In My books, This writer's life
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I am sitting in my hotel room in Melbourne, where, outside my 8th-floor window, the light is just beginning to soften, turning gently golden, before twilight falls. The oval across the road is silent now, though seconds ago it was busy with the jagged shouts and cheers of an AFL match.
The view from my 8th-floor hotel room in Melbourne, as dusk begins to fall.
Melbourne sits serenely in my heart. It is a city I could live in, though that’s not on the cards for now, or perhaps ever. I’m content visiting when opportunity allows. I’m here this time to record my books as audio publications with Bolinda Audio, an experience I’ve loved. “Meeting” my interviewees again, “hearing” their voices (albeit it “through” me) and wrapping myself once more in stories that first hijacked my heart years ago, has been something magical.
As ever, I feel honoured that I was entrusted with these powerful personal stories, and reading them, I’m reminded with excitement how one would make a wonderful feature film, or basis for a novel, and another could be an entire memoir. It’s inspired me to re-establish contact with my open-hearted subjects, to find out what they’re up to now, learn how their lives has evolved since the moment snap-frozen within the pages of my book.
It’s also illuminating to revisit the yarns from my new perspective, since the spiritual path I’ve travelled since writing them has led me to some new perspectives. For instance, I now understand that love, forgiveness and compassion are our primary functions in life, and that our consciousness creates our reality through our beliefs. However, this doesn’t cast doubt on my subjects’ stories, on the contrary, now I see them as more profound than ever. Each experience fits, somehow, perfectly into the puzzle of each interviewee’s multi-dimensional self.
All set to begin recording the audio version of Spirit Sisters, my first book.
And I do believe we are multidimensional beings, and that there are some events that befall us on Earth that we will struggle to understand from our limited perspectives, or perhaps never understand at all (while we are still in our bodies). That’s part of the reason I love reading about near-death experiences (NDEs). The people who experience an NDE almost always say that the secrets of the universe were revealed to them. In a fraction of a second (in our terms) they understood it all … yet that knowledge was not theirs to keep for the journey “back”.
As you can see, I still love a good mystery. I still love the thrill of a spine-tingling story. These days, though, the tingles aren’t usually of the scary variety. Which brings me back to Melbourne, and part of the reason it’s so special for me. Last August, I flew to Melbourne to attend a two-day lecture by US author Wayne Dyer, which I found brilliant and life-changing (goosebumps aplenty!) A week later, I was stunned to learn that the “father of motivation and inspiration” had passed away—at his Maui home, of a heart attack—exactly one week after he’d poured out his final lessons to us. He was 75.
Seeing the late Wayne Dyer in conversation with Anita Moorjani in Melbourne last August.
For I did get a sense that Wayne was “pouring out” his final teachings, and we, the audience, were drinking them up thirstily. I felt very, very lucky to be there—I couldn’t work out why that feeling was so strong in me, until Wayne passed away and then I understood. I’m forever grateful to Wayne and his teachings, which have helped steer me on this spiritual course, which is ultimately back to my heart. To me, following a spiritual path is about finding your way back to yourself, to your own connection with the divine, and taking flight into your life from that perch.
Now I’m back in Melbourne, helping my books soar again, this time in a new way. It’s a new lease of life for the series—2009’s Spirit Sisters, 2011’s Where Spirits Dwell and 2014’s Love Never Dies—and I’m thrilled that they’re going to find new audiences. As I wrote at the end of Love Never Dies, “the path winds, and I follow.” Let’s see where it takes me next.
Love,
Karina x
Stories, stories everywhere …
By the side of the road on my morning walk today in a quiet, bayside suburb south of Sydney, beneath an unblemished summer’s sky, a treat: a mirror, tall and rectangular, plain if not for the words scrawled in pink lipstick down its centre. Sadly, of these, I can only recall the beginning: “Dear mum and dad, I am going away in search of love …”
I paused briefly, surprised, before continuing on my walk, but then, just metres down the road, I had to turn around and take another look. My dog, Remy, looked at me as if to say, ‘Why are you going the wrong way?’ By the time I’d returned to the mirror, it had reeled in another passer-by. I was going to take a picture to try to record the words but I wouldn’t have been able to make them out with the light reflecting on the glass. Some of the words had also been wiped away, but one part described how the writer wouldn’t have mobile access wherever she was going, so anyone wanting to get in touch would have to take up old-fashioned pen and paper. “God forbid,” she wrote, cheekily.
On the top right-hand corner of the mirror, there was a note written on white paper. It said “free to good home,” but asked that whoever claimed the mirror see “the family” first as the mirror had much sentimental value and they wanted to make sure it went to the right place, with the right people. In all of my years as a connoisseur of kerbside treasures, I’d never seen such a thing!
For the better part of an hour, as I trudged the well-worn route home, I thought about the mirror. Who was the author? How long ago had she written her lipstick letter? Why did she write it on a mirror, instead of paper? And where did she leave it for her parents to find? I was tempted to knock on their door just to find out.
The discovery made me think of how stories surround us, how everything and everyone has a story to tell, from A-list celebrities to lovelorn teenagers living in redbrick houses in a sleepy, leafy suburb. Over the years, I’ve written about both kinds of folks, and everyone in between, and am always honoured to be entrusted with their stories … In my new book, coming in July, I explore the idea of stories as powerful healing tools. In the face of heart-cracking loss, the story of a loved one reaching out—in myriad magical and personal ways—can become a steadying, grounding force, whether the experience is shared with others or simply kept private and close.
I am fortunate enough that many wonderful subjects shared their moving stories with me for the book I’m excited to see published this year. It will be the last in the non-fiction paranormal/spiritual trilogy that began with Spirit Sisters in 2009, so now, being a storyteller, of course my thoughts are wandering in the direction of finding new stories to tell. It’s already inside me, I know, it’s just a matter of uncovering it.
Lucky, then, that there is inspiration everywhere. “Dear mum and dad, I am going away in search of love …” If I follow her, I wonder, where might she take me?
My walking buddy, our four-year-old rescue dog, Remy.
Entering the home stretch
On a quiet Friday night at home, with Better Homes and Gardens for company, I’m thinking about my next book. I’m thinking about the importance of solitude and “thinking time” and how those things are so often at a premium in a writer’s life these days, especially when said writer also has family and another job to attend to. So many writers could relate, I’m sure. One of my biggest enemies is tiredness, and I know I’m not alone there either.
Today I wrote 1500 words and that’s something to be thankful for, but it was the most curious thing. I was battling a debilitating fatigue that only seemed to worsen as the day progressed. Thank God I managed to go for my walk, first thing, but then I just couldn’t understand why I had to take to my bed—twice!
Then it struck me: my sister and her family left for an overseas trip yesterday, and what I was feeling was entirely like jet lag. Could it be that somehow I was tuning into her exhaustion? We are very close, so it seems possible to me. Anyway, am feeling better now and positive about my ability to finish my new book in time for December deadline. I’m also looking forward to spending more time blogging and interacting with readers.
I can’t wait to set my third book free and hear your feedback!
Reclining Lady by Raimundo Madrazo
A weekend in Melbourne
Hello again, and welcome to my revamped website! For this wonderful transformation, I must thank the lovely and multi-talented Allison Langton, from Big Print Little. Allison did an amazing job of somehow intuiting exactly what I wanted for my website, and making it come true. I can’t thank her enough.
Speaking of Allison, though she’s based in Melbourne, I had the good fortune of meeting her at one of three library talks I gave there this past weekend. Allison dropped by Mill Park, but I also spoke about Spirit Sisters and Where Spirits Dwell at Eltham and Watsonia libraries (both attended by my supportive friend and fellow author, Wendy Dunn). Thanks to my kind friend Suzanne, Queen of Non-Procrastination and marketing and media coordinator at Yarra Plenty Regional Library, for organising this, for driving me around and for the endless laughs … it was so much fun!
Thanks to Lyn, the lovely librarian at Watsonia for promoting my appearance, and for the beautiful gifts!
Here I am alongside a bronze statue of I Can Jump Puddles author Alan Marshall, at Eltham Library.
It had been a while since I’d gotten out “in the field,” so to speak, to discuss my work and meet readers. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy this. One of my favourite aspects of this is how me talking about my interviewees’ experiences often opens up the floor for people in the audience to reveal their own stories. I love sitting back, listening, as others unspool a personal story that, up until then, they have usually kept close to their hearts. It’s a privilege to know they feel comfortable enough in that forum to share it with us.
On the topic of sharing stories, it’s time for me to go, as it’s Halloween eve and I have to prepare to tell a yarn of my own tomorrow night, at a live storytelling event at Cronulla’s The Brass Monkey. Despite the date, there is no spooky theme to the evening, but when I noticed that it was Oct. 31, it seemed I was fated to take the stage (gulp). Wish me luck!
