The Homelessness

Internally, I asked for nostalgia, I asked to experientially replay life on four wheels, the product of living in a van. I got it. The last chapter of The Home Within saw me wandering around Northern New South Wales in quiet boredom and despair as I waited for transmission repairs on my van in Lismore. I am replaying this now.

Most of my possessions are in the Sprinter van. In the spare car (that I am grateful to have) are a few changes of clothes, a pillow, a thin blanket, my laptop, a book, and a water bottle – almost exactly what I carried with me after the break down in 2017, only this time I was not solely on foot. Upgrades.

During the day I would be social, or wander the main street of Mullumbimby. In the afternoon I would retreat to the forest to rest and sleep among the trees. Having that freedom to move about was luxurious, yet tiresome to drive so far for a safe camp. Local caravan parks and camp sites were noisy and the secondary car did not have blinds on the windows so I found and fought for secluded locations for the night.

I feel a testing and destroying of my self-created ideals during this time period. Coming to Mullumbimby with dreams of securing a creative life and peace in this little town were dissolving. The town itself was no longer a quiet hippy-centric healing hub, it had turned into a playground for the rich and tourists. The roads are packed with traffic, and living here is expensive. The energy of the land here has not changed, this locale a meeting ground of spiritual transformation, yet the flood waters of materialism are rising to match.

I lived in a gorgeous share house for the first five months with two beautiful women, one of whom, a gifted psychic, squeezed from me my own latent talents. Looking back six years when I lived here last, I saw my own gifts coming out and then getting squashed again in my move to Brisbane. Addictions took hold and I was led dough-eyed down paths that I would not have chosen given a clear mind. This story perhaps will unfold to you in the future.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you’ll find you get what you need.[DB1] 

My inner self has been whispering these Rolling Stones lyrics for the last few months. More ideals to smash. The creative life I wanted to live in theatre and poetry gave way to exploring and unfolding my inner psychic landscape. The whispers far back in my being were now being heard, and oh my, how profound it is to listen.

I can say for sure that there is no true way to elaborate this flowering. Language is impossible to convey the inner life. I will try anyway beginning with the following line:

“Pay attention to what information is coming in”

Information, feelings, nudges, intuition, non-verbal whisper, sense, trigger, tactile response. These extra-subtle noticings are what we might naturally describe as energy in spiritual understandings. For some time, I had a sense of a person, or a place, that I could not quite articulate without sounding insane, which for decades pulled me towards silence. This silence resulted in a shutting down of my speech centres and a physical presentation of a tightness around my throat.

I had taught myself to ignore these sensations or avoid them if they were difficult. I learn over and over again, that averting from an internal problem only leads to more problems. Giving myself permission to feel what information is coming in, and has always come in, is like a long held, painful realization, that my life has been extra-sensory and I had been turning away from it. I face it now, and work through the decades-long patterns of aversive compulsion.

More on this later as it unfolds. For now I sit in an air conditioned library, a public reprieve from the oppressive heat outside, and write these paragraphs.

The second week passed and no word on when the Sprinter would be repaired. I needed a break from people and movement, so, like in Lismore all those years ago, I booked a room for a few days to rest and ground.

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 [DB1] You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones