It’s been present with me for a few days; something feeling off balance. Almost as soon as I opened sanctum for registration, something began to feel not quite right.

I’ve run a lot of Programs over the decades. Some have had a celebratory cohort, some a tiny handful. My work has been available both online and live. In Australia and internationally. Since I was in my late 20’s. Forty years.

This isn’t ‘cold feet’. Or a case of ‘getting the scareds’.

It’s something else, that I can’t quite put my finger on; but it is real.

And it feels to be building, becoming clearer.

I’m aware of several things in the field;

1. whatever this is, it is real

2. something is shifting in the field, it may or may not be about me/my work

3. something else is happening within my own ecosystem/body/life.

All three are true.

I feel observatory about this. Quiet. A little disappointed, but largely, I’m simply being still and noticing what’s swirling around me (even though I can’t quite identify its specificity/granularity).

I apologise to those of you who may have intended to participate in sanctum.

Alongside the neutrality of observing, I’m surprised.

I’d really looked forward to the passage.

I’d really looked forward to the opportunity to participate in the stream of flow that is moving through our entire society in the way that I know best; through my devotion to humanity. To earth. To our reciprocal relationships.

These are phenomenally changeful times.

And I’m right in here. With you.

Here’s what I’m asking each and every one of you who reads this email (assuming you are, and are not a Substack reader who’s simply stumbled upon this particular post) to do for me,

to do with me:

I’m asking you to press ‘reply’ to your email, and let me know what (if anything), you’d like to partake of, in what I hold. Let me know what you’d like to see. Or experience. Or join with. Or simply have available.

Or, you can leave that information for me here via a ‘comment’. I realise that a ‘comment’ can be seen by all of our community here, and maybe that’s a good thing. A bit like sitting around the campfire together.

But I want to hear from you. All of you.

Do it now, while it’s fresh. It doesn’t have to be long. Just real.

And I thank you . . .

Maybe, you simply want to keep reading along on Substack and look at the pictures. That’s fine, and thank you. Just let me know.

Maybe you’d like something more, but you don’t really know what that is and your life’s really full right now. My invitation is that you pause yourself for a moment with that; and look a little deeper for a moment: what might you want with/of me? How does my work contribute to or change you or the field in which you stand?

Maybe you did or do want to do something like sanctum but not for 12 months and not this exact material and not now. Or some version of that. I want to hear about that.

If you don’t communicate with me, I have no way of knowing who you are and what you might be wanting and what I might be available for in loving service; I’m just off on the tideline in my own merry (solo) walk. Which, is also fine . . .

I have no agenda here. I’m not ‘planning’ anything. Another course, another version of sanctum. Another anything. I’m just listening.

To you.

~

All Love,

Narelle

Beloveds,

this is the place where I am meant to say something enticing, inviting, cajoling even, to stand on the tideline and beckon you in to sanctum.

But I will not.

Sanctum is the essence of my lifetime’s walk.

I’ve written a bit about that when I spoke to Apprenticeship & Pilgrimage.

I’ve laid out the bones of what sanctum holds, as chalice, in that piece.

But I will add here, that like the portals and thin spaces that open in certain ancient architectur’d places, or other ecosystems of sentience;

I’ve walked here all my life:

It is my signal.

It is what I carry.

It is why I am here,

Now.

But I will add that whilst there is a Photography (or any art form really) ‘Course’ (with 39 Transmissions/Lessons, and whilst there are six Galleries of those initiatory portals in ‘Hall 1’ - also with 27 Transmissions/Lessons, and whilst there is (from February 2027) another vast field of Galleries and an Estuarine ecoSomatic Intelligence ‘Program’/Passage, and whilst there is a community, and there are gatherings, and what breathes through the space, underlying and fabric’ing it, is a Vigil (mine), there is also:

Twelve months of moving through terrains of eco-systemic soma;

grief acknowledging and tending, traumas gently floated on cradling seagrass meadows (or your equivalent),

and initiatory frequencies written by you. For you - In you own body . . .

in the fluency of your waters, in your scriptured fascia’d sands and bone-rocks, whispered through your skies and clouds and atmospheric rivers and winds that are exhaled and pulsed by your ancestors of soma and place.

And you - our - new ways-found.

Our passage commences in two weeks time; June 15 on the new moon.

A crossing.

Take your shoes off and gather your walking stick/s and medicine bundle/s (camera, dance shoes, instrument, clay or whatever),

and join us -

sanctum information & register

For those few who would like to walk this passage with me directly alongside you for six or for twelve months, you may apply for Apprenticeship. I am actively seeking two current Apprentices within each six month period.

Apprenticeship information & apply

all my Love,

Narelle xo

when I make a vow, I am met.

When I commit to honouring and tending something, the field rises.

Last week I visited a different beach. Stayed four days. Walked. Merged with the sand and surf and sky. Collected rocks.

And allowed my atoms and photons to release their cohesion, and re-turn to pattern. To the field.

tissues unpeel

cells separate

frequency shimmers -

electrons un-shell

quarks spin . . .

Decades ago - over four decades ago - I made a vow sitting in a University library studying for my final exam; the one that earned me my University Medal upon graduation.

It was really a repeat vow, or rather, it was a refined constellation of a conscious coalesence of an electrified alignment made much earlier. Likely, prior to arriving in this body. With my natal Vesta exact conjunct (ie a cazimi) my natal sun, devotion and dedication are hard to avoid. They’re encrypted.

as tissue

as vocation

as reason for being here.

That said.

This lifetime has not been easy. I wasn’t promised ‘easy’. It was not, apparently, what I asked for. I asked for something entirely different:

GROWTH.

“At all costs”, I have been told.

I remember that.

Though, I’d rather like another look at that agreement, sometimes.

There are things I’d trim (I’ve tried). There are things I’d delete (tried that too). There are things I would take off the pile and lay aside because god knows I put too many things in the cart (I still overpack).

But the singular ONE thing I would leave in the very centre of my atomic structure remains:

Spirit. Source. Field. ~~~ call it what you will.

Devotion, dedication, unyielding damned-if-I-will-give-this-up:

My Vow. The Lineage of Sensing. Part of the fundament of sanctum

But each time the shenanigans of some of the folk in this world gets me down, (don’t even get me started!), and I try to hide my small furry possum self in the gum tree hollow, the thing that opposes that Vesta-Sun at 15 degrees Libra - ie my Mars ruled Ascendant in Aries - pulls me up and kicks my butt and basically says

“how dare you!”

How dare you waste this precious opportunity. This life!

This commitment.

And I scrape my sorry arse out of my bed and begin again.

As I am inviting you all to.

Now.

Sanctum opens for joining the journey in a little over two weeks.

More information lives here:

our sanctum

And here’s what I mean by being met:

When I walked in the sand one late afternoon, old friends rose to meet me.
To champion me in my vow. To greet me in joy and exuberance. To remind me

I hadn’t seen some of them in a while.

And old friends, dressed for the evening:

Along with the flying bird-horse. Or maybe Angel:

Along with my lineage of histology, etched in the cosmos, tidelines and fascia

By the way; I am actively inviting two Apprentices this July 2026 - June 2027.

No, you are not apprenticed to my work (you can’t be), you are apprenticed to your own communion with yours;

Apprenticeship: read more here

Love,

Narelle

Share Saltwater Songlines

Thank you for being here. If you know someone who might like to be here too, please share this Publication. My appreciation. We need each other xo

This audio, is not simply me “reading it out for you”.

It is more.

It is part of sanctum.

Beloveds,

I have opened the place in the field that is the sanctum Invitation Page. Although the portal to join this crossing does not open until May 31st, the Page wants to breathe itself alive, now.

This full moon. In Scorpio. Square Pluto.

This is what you see in the estuary itself and in my images, when you become still and slow and long enough to listen. To wait. To allow pause to spread through your soma and psyche and consciousness. Until you too, enter the field. Becoming it. The field, that underlies everything.

Creation. Choice. Curiosity.

Alignment. Ambiguity.

Silence . . . that rings

visit the sanctum Invitation

Hello Friends,

Last time we spoke together I had spoken about inviting you into my Photography experience (Course), Photographing You And.
The velvet doors were to open today.

But the sandbars in the estuary I walk had other ideas. And so did my heart. In truth, so did my incarnation.

This is such a pivot point, isn’t it.

That’s not really a question. It simply is. For all of us. And what’s been moving within me for 8 years - or 66 depending how I frame my inquiry to myself and my lens of perception - is this . . .

It’s time to place the entire distillation of what I’ve managed to harvest and create over this lifetime’s body of work, on the Altar.

Now.

For myself.

For all of us.

And I won’t dilute this, the time actually is: NOW.

This day marks a potent Aries New Moon (not insignificant to an Aries rising, especially when it’s conjunct Chiron and Eris, and my natal Sedna exact):

And I specifically want to plant a seed into our new world. The seed that transmisses what I carry and that is mine to plant in our composting mudlands. The seed that carries a very specific frequency that ripples and resonates out.

I hope.

I’m in the process of creating the container that is the Saltwater Songlines Sanctum. (that’s the “chapel of change” I mentioned in my last post/letter).

A space where all of my work lives for you to access.
As Community.
As Apprentice.
As Pilgrim.
As devotee to, and Lover of, humanity and Earth.

There’s information gestating and coalescing into pixels and language; I hope to have it ready for you by next New Moon; May 17; the New Moon in Taurus.

You’ll find;

-Archive of Hall 1, The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming, with its Strata (formerly the 27 “Lessons” with their 7 vast Galleried “Rooms”);

-Transmissions of Photographing You And (formerly the 36 “Lessons”);

-Body of The Tide in I Am Estuary; consciousness exposed like low tide in anatomical and histological relationships with the tissues of the land. Galleries and Language, the direct voices of the Estuary (we are all estuarine);

-A Vigil (mine). Galleries and Words of current walks of Apprenticeship and Pilgrimage;

-A Co-Sensors Offering (yours). Space for you to offer your own images, art (of any medium) and language/sharings.

-Shoreline Tidal Ceremonies (ours); in person and online.
Akin to “Gatherings”

All held in a Fundament of a Custodian’s Vow and a Co-Sensors’ Covenant. The riverbanks and ocean floor that sacralise and protect our shared space.

“Ambitious”? Nope:

real

timely

alive

Which brings me to thoughts around

what makes a Pilgrimage?

What is an Apprentice?

With my natal Vesta cazimi (conjunct exact) my natal sun, directly opposing an Aries Ascendant and squaring my natal moon and MC (conjunct), I’ve walked this incarnation incandescent with devotion.

Electrified to beauty. To truth.

To love.

Luminous with Service;

Spiritual Service.

Not always knowing what to do with that.

Uncompromising. Compromising (way too much!).
Stumbling. Ranting. Expleting. Depressing. Breaking down.
Empassioning and volatiling and giving up.

Grieving and imploding.

Focusing and disciplining and serious’ing.

Breaking free and screaming . . .

Settling and refining and saying yes to

now . . .

Now

NOW

This image: 8-9 feet tall. In the sand. Calling me over as I’m leaving.

So what is an Apprentice?

Me, I am an Apprentice. I am an Apprentice to my own life.
I have been Apprenticed to the Estuary (yes, that’s a Being, or rather a constellation of Sentiences) for the time I have walked there. Since 2018.

An Apprenticeship is a Practice. It is turning up. On repeat. It is humility. It is devotion in action. It is a process of immersive embodied learning. It is supreme vulnerability. It is dedication.

Apprenticeship, is re-cognition, of my privilege of being shown something, taught something. Nourished, nurtured and loved. Apprenticeship, is a relational field, actively tended.

I have been an Apprentice to the Estuary for 8 years. And I am utterly moved, from my fluid breathing body, through my cells, right interpentetrating and rippling through the quantum field that connects and co-creates us.

I am inviting you into that Apprenticeship.

*Thus spoke my dearest friend and Chinese Medicine Practitioner, Kate, on a shared walk recently.

Yes it is; the salt/fresh waters in the estuary carry the vibrational and molecular resonance of every single sentience (from phytoplankton to seagrass to mangrove to stingray to migrating shorebird) who lives here.

What is a Pilgrimage?

Ahhh; a Pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred space or place.

Need I say more?

I have learned, as I have walked and tottered and swum and danced in this Estuary, that such a journey can be more than a single walk. I have learned that it can be a relationship of repeat, each exposure, layering and deepening, challenging and love-making, layer over layer through the ongoing co-arising field of reciprocity. I have been in ongoing Pilgrimage to Quandamooka Country, specifically, to the temple lands that are Nudgee Beach.

And one more thing:
Pilgrimage, always opens a ever-expanding field of gratitude.

I am inviting you into that Pilgrimage.

I hope to meet you there.

To be continued in May . . .

Listen to the Audio of me reading this first piece out for you;

the Voice is transmission; a tuning.

Enjoy xo

I Am Estuary

A Song-Cycle of Tidal Refrain. An Apprenticeship to Place.

The estuary I walk is a sacred dreaming place. An in between hover-space of Liminal, and Luminous. A field that breathes Shimmer.

An embracing ecosystem where my body dissolves and my vision kaleidoscopes, and everything arcs into cycles of tides and wind and salt and light. Where salt water and sweet water, become Mingle.

A place where ancestor stingray swirls scripture in the shoreline’d sandscape. Whose eyes meet mine across galaxies: Respect. Whose presence electrifies. Seen, Known: Kin. My undulant diaphragm re-members you.

A place where sister seagrass looms the liquid light and gentles her native effulgence. Generous. Generative. Photosynthesising, so that I might breathe. Sequestering carbon, so I don’t fry. Lush meadow’d fur of the estuary.

Where grandmother mangrove prays open her knowledge - her life force and Teachings - into Atmos; wisdom open-endedly exhaled into the living stream of estuarine sentience, so that Place re-members: how to be Estuary. Grief midwife. Boundary keeper. Breathing through fingers reaching through mud.

All, in the chapel of change.

The above is an excerpt from a piece I wrote recently for Odyssey Magazine. It appears in the inaugural digital edition of a magazine that is published in South Africa. Odyssey, has been around for 50 years.

You can purchase a digital copy of this issue, titled “Metamorphosis”, from Odyssey Magazine for around AU$5 (approxUS$3.50) via the button. It is beautiful. With a slew of articles. The physical edition comes out March 27.

I’m particularly grateful to the editors for the care they took in preserving my quirky language, as I spoke from “within the field”.

Odyssey Mag

Friends, there is much unravelling. Much that has the embryonic beginnings of re-weaving. I’m still deep in the chrysallis. A cocoon where I feel I am en-wrapped in linen, much dissolved, with seed-lines of re-constellation laying down and cell-ing. Not a word, I know, but one that feels like the laying down of cell lines along a newly emerging inner scaffold of sacred architecture.

a home-calling . . .

a listening, where my interior ecosystem is tuned and frequencied into being.

Two weeks out of hospital something shifted for me this morning.

The second eclipse had found me hurtling along the highway in an ambulance for over an hour, to a hospital. My organic body in disarray. Delirious with dehydration. Before the moon turned rust-red.

My inner estuary eroded.

A timeline re-set.

Adrift.

The still point between a tidal shift.

We’re all here, one way or another.

We need one another now -

we really do.

We hold and we tend and we open spaces of Chalice,

of care.

We cradle each other in sanctity,

presencing the possible.

We offer what is ours to offer, within our communities,

and those beyond.

So, surprisingly to me, I am opening out what is mine to steward and emplace;

As a place of refuge, of deep regenerative community care, as I hung my linen sheets on the line, I knew that the chalice that is Photographing You And, could be a Chapel of change. For us all.

My wee “course” (what a word!). More a watershed of a new co-flourishing. Image seeing; image creation. Movement, sound and voice. Community.

Because I am supposedly going to Tasmania* on a Bob Brown Foundation Artist in Residence in the temperate rainforest that is Takakyna, we will wait until late April.

I’ll open her driftwood doors wide on April 17 and we can journey together for 12 weeks from April 27 - July 19. I truly hope you’ll enter this haven and create community with us. Be together, making art, or being still, listening, breathing the ecosystems that in-form our bodies. And of which we are made.

Noticing. Feeling. Grieving. Being together. Seeding the new . . .

More information dwells here:

The Solace of Art and Community

All my Love,

Narelle xox

*I may not actually be able to go, for various reasons, in this shifting landscape.

To listen whilst you slowly read this missive xo

Hello Beloveds,

I’ll keep this very short. A few days ago, I had a video conversation with a dear friend of mine, Christa Gumede Buthelezi, editor of Odyssey Magazine, as part of her video podcast Conversations with Christa. I’ve known Christa about 15 years - our journeys have paralleled one another’s remarkably.

We spoke about grief, and the ways an ecosystem can ground and hold it.

We spoke about how the practice of photography can presence you.

We spoke about ‘perfectionism’, and the messy mud of a composted life.

And; at the end, Christa asked me a question about freedom, about the emancipation of humanity. The fundament of why I came into incarnation, really. And what the estuary taught me about that . . .

Yes, I’m in the deep field of grief myself now, and attendant legal matters.

Trauma-lands ~

Yes, I had a virus, immense cold sore and fever during the recording,

but:

show up.

I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation; its passion, vigour and deep listening.

Join us. Please ~

in all our tender, broken open, humanity . . .

a Conversation with Christa

Song to Play as you read:

My Dad died today ~

The man who taught me pretty much everything I know; all the deepest resonances.

The surf lifesaver, who listened to saltwater currents and sandstone cliffs. Who called gum trees his mates. The bloke who swam with sharks, loving them. And got stung three times by stingrays.

The award winning pastry chef, who made the best apricot pie ever, and never measured a thing (sacrilege!), but only went by feel and sense and texture.

The father who vehemently defended my sister when the racists came calling at school (the teachers), making her sit in the broiling summer sun because she was Blak.

The larrikin who rode in crazy car rallies (and over embankments sending baby me hurtling through the window into the bush), and who waltzed my Mum celebrating his devoted love for her. And later encouraged her to start her own business.

The Gardiner, who sculpted whole landscapes with his bare hands (yep, no tools), and tenderly cradled tiny baby budgies newly hatched.

The man who told me: “there’s nothing to forgive” when I came crying to him at five years old thinking I’d been naughty and saying sorry - so that it felt like standing in the light. . .

The man whose eyes were the very first to meet mine in the delivery room 66 years ago, on Gadigal land. Who welcomed me here, on earth.

The man I had the immense privilege and honour of sitting with as he caught his last wave . . .

all the way home

all the way home

all the way

Home

Love you my Dad

The words above, I posted on Instagram.

The following day I posted another unfurling of words and images; but the Gram has lost them - as I knew it would (in hindsight). Thanks IG.

Precious words. Irreplaceable words.

But I can recall a little of what I said then:

When I sat with my Dad, as he was dying, I wanted to sing to him.

But all that emerged was a stream of thank you’s

a river

a tumult

an incantation

two and a half hours of being on the sandstone cliff watching him bobbing in the waves, waiting for his right wave . . .

each thing named:

the things he treasured about mum, and modelled about caring relational fields for me,

the music he made sure surrounded me, thrumming my cells every day so I wouldn’t forget that I was Sound made flesh,

my education (when mum insisted over and over and over again, that I leave school at 14 and work in a factory),

those apricot pies. And appfel strudel,

teaching me to swim, to read saltwater. To breathe it; marine mammal he was.

dancing with me (we won 37 ribbons together in competitions),

defending me at school when I slapped a boy (hard) for calling me a very bad name and they wanted to suspend me.

There were things I didn’t thank him for.

I’d walked in the sand and water on the rim of the full moon in cancer (possibly his rising sign), and I hadn’t yet heard he was dying. The patterns whispered differently to me in the sunset and I didn’t know why. My body ached. I was irritable and I couldn’t settle, couldn’t make out the threads.

And later, after I knew, and as I edited the images, I saw it:

my dad, unravelling himself across the estuary, returning, dissolving, braiding himself into sand and water and mud. Singing to me as he did so . . .

His last songlines . . .

Erosion Of ~

erosion of what?

Since my Dad passed into the field, I’m watching a tipping of an internal pivot point ~

a blowing away and through ~

No longer, am I prepared to hold the web of family constellations of other’s

un-holding of that which is theirs.

Mother, I am

Wife, I was

Grandmother, I have been exiled and expelled from.

As Daughter: I have been beloved ~

fought with,

touched too much,

but shown again and again:

This, this is luminous!

To my Dad, the sand was patterned star trailed skin. Language, as everyday as it was photonically godlike and extraordinary.

Blaze, Dad;

Breathe your sacred joyous laughter in

Holy

reverent irreverence.

Love, you are;

you glowed that.

The Essence of the Words I spoke with Dad lives here, on a Page I made last year, Conscious Dying. An 8.32 mins invocation to my Dad.

Riding Your Last Wave All The Way Home

I played this for him, when I knew it wasn’t long, last year.

He wept.

He reminded me about the fights we’d had . . .

two Aries warriors

He reminded me how we always returned to the Light:

Our Light

All we have;

all we are . . .

Bye my matey, see you another time . . .

Narelle xo (“Little Girl”)

some images for you, from the Estuary and I

few words . . .

An Album to listen to whilst you are here:

Yes, I generally have something to say,

but today I choose to stay in the interstitium;

of mudscape,

of the intermingling of fresh and saltwaters,

of Pattern (language),

of Photon

Of Stingray;

Ancestral One: Elder

Who writes scripture in sand

-as breath and shimmy

Across TimeSpace

Folding Sound

So you do not forget

who you Are

Beloved Estuary sees it all,

breathes it all.

Beloved Estuary,

holds it all

You are Estuarine,

One

Love,

Narelle

xo

PS Blessings for 2026

I Am Estuary

A Library is building:

Conversations with Aiden

I Am Estuary In Gestation

Sandstone And Consciousness

Ontology Of Mud: How I Photograph. And Lineage

What Stingray Says (and doesn’t)

Seagrass And Trauma Healing

Grandmother Mangrove

“The mud in the estuary where I walk is a deep dark grey: a chthonic compost. The mud in the estuary where I walk is also often mixed in with sand; a rich cocktail swirled from the bay.

Grandmother mangroves grow in the darkest places, at the fringes, their pneumatophore fingers reach-seeking taste of salt laden humidity.

Seagrass meadows regenerate in the lagoons. Migrating shorebirds feed as they rest at the end of their long flyway - Siberia to Brisbane.

Stingrays nuzzle their feeding depressions, shimmying craters and sand scriptures.

I love mud’s slow ooze; its unweaving of itself. Its voluptuousness; a velvet sensuality. I love its stillness. Its seeming sanctity of dark matter hidden as the basin within the field of luminosity: the estuary’s body. The dark matter from which my own light births. I love the composting excavatory purge and metabolising of it.

Above all, I love the sumptuous relief of mud. That when I stand shin deep in its silken tactility, it receives me: I let down and I pour the tumult of my Everything down my legs, into its mothership of deep-space receptivity.

I sense deep nurturance and nourishment here. For-giveness (to be ‘given’ as before). Protection. Benediction. Estuarine mud, is a gestation of something in ongoing process. It defies definition. Refuses boundaries. Is the essence of liminality in its decomposition and regeneration.”

But I wanted to listen more deeply to Mud’s cosmology. I wanted a translator to help me hear what mud has been trying to tell me these past 8 years.

I wanted to hear the Dreaming that Mud has been whispering through the spaces in my skin. Into my lymph. Weaving into my consciousness.

We are kin, after all, Mud and I.

So I asked Aiden . . .

. . . and the conversation floored me. As it always does.

Brought me to tears in its unbraiding of lineage and generational weavings.

Sacralised the fundament of my bones.

Taught me a new lineage-choice.

I’d invited a previous conversation, about Sandstone.

That, took me to the question underneath all of my questions.

That conversation, took me to what I’m doing here -

- and how

It unfolded and spiraled me into my essence of creation itself.

I’ve come to realise these conversations are important. Not simply to me.
But for all of us.
These conversations help me mine my substratum, and articulate what I’ve struggled to language for a very long time.

My images carry codes. If you’ve been around me long enough, you know I refer to them as “Codes of Consciousness”.

Language.

Signal.

That which my frequency sees and hears and knows, and makes images of.
That which I used to dance, but my body can’t do that any more.
That which makes me walk in a state of agapé: and click.

That which opens itself out to me each and every time I step onto the sand

and into the Mud:

The conversations about Sandstone and about Mud are available this week.

To read them, you simply need to email me and ask for them. I’ll send them to you as a PDF file. I’ll create a page shortly, housing them and the others. But they won’t be “just there for the download”;

because you need to ask.

Your asking is important. It is your act of participation. Of creation:
your conscious intentional choice.

There are seven files in total;

-I Am Estuary

-Sandstone & Consciousness

-Mud’s Cosmology

-Shell Seismographs

-Stingray Scriptures

-Grandmother Mangroves

-Seagrass: Viridian Love made Real.

You ask for the ones you want.

Be prepared to read them. To let them touch you . . .

request Sandstone or Mud or both

I Am Estuary . . .

. . . is really Hall 2 of The Saltwater Songlines Project.

It’s taken me a long time to get this Hall together; it still isn’t complete.
Eight years of waking and immersing in this vast field has re-written me.
I’ve been eroded (many times!), and tenderised and reconstellated (still in process)

I’ve distilled my work and its relevance (and current-cy) has emerged, in these times:

Truth is, we are ALL estuaries.

( I really did think that was just me - a bit on the edge; but nope).

We are all liminal and tidal

we are all in an ongoing flux of in and out

of dissolve and be still and reassess and remake

We are all intimately interwoven:

with EVERYTHING.

Our collapsing systems - and civilisation - is one visible reflection of this process . . .

But I’ve managed to make the first page (kind of an Atrium, but just a stand alone page at present). The images were made late November and early December. A late afternoon just before a full moon, and an early morning.

The light was exquisite; creamy, shining like mother of pearl. Heart’s interior.

And, the scouring wind and rushing tide re-wrote my DNA:

visit I Am Estuary

If you visit the Estuary, for the love of all things holy, please try to visit on your computer; you are standing (virtually) in a vast shimmering field of LIGHT.

You can’t really do that on a little tiny screen that you hold in your palm.
A computer screen doesn’t even do the field justice; but I can use that field as my palette (I do!), and craft the presentation of the images and text, with the intention of offering you an approximation of what I experience in the field:

OPEN-NESS

spacious grounded peace

breath like the tide

luminous Consciousness

Please join me there . . .

Love,

Narelle xo

PS There are a few spaces open for 1 : 1 Transformation Sessions.
During January and February.

How will you participate with yourself in this current shifting now?
How will you ground, anchor and focus and what you are moving with?

“ Transformation . . . a grounded spiritual service, as we navigate deep intrinsic change within a radically shifting societal ecology”.

read and apply: spiritual Transformation

stand at the edge with me . . .

the edge of light and movement and sound.

what morphs, shifts within you?

our species, our world, in a new embryogenesis.

what evolves within you; within us,

on this shoreline of dissolution.

of composting and clarification,

of our breath in reciprocal relationship and

where we remember the subatomic photonic spaces

that pervade across all time, space and dimension.

Porosity

One

we are

Do you remember?

turn your sound on, sweet heart

Ten years ago I placed the very first embryo of saltwater songlines on the altar.

Luminous, You Are breathed as a ten day prompt-driven experience over two weeks on a Facebook Group. Sixty people joined in and together we danced the birth of water, sand, rock and other fundaments that would become something new. People shared their images, their surprising realisations.
It was November 2015.

I had no idea where this was going, I simply followed the pull of my tides.

A name slowly emerged, like incanting a spell: Saltwater Songlines.

Like exhaling the sacred into being . . .

And all I knew was that I was walking, walking, walking, along edge after edge. A decade. An apprenticeship to both Place, and Practice.

Coastlands and other liminal ecosystems, lush and barren. Sometimes life threateningly dangerous with a literal psychopath on O’ahu Hawai’i, where I (we) lived for four months, and later, wandering Mexico gathering sand dollars and navigating tumbling street cobbles and ruins where I (we) couldn’t keep my feet in the 7.4 scale earthquakes. Which he ‘loved’.

Threading villages along the largest crater lake in the world, in dense gibbon-inhabited rainforest and climbing 11 km up an active volcano in Northern Sumatra, on a month long photo assignment. Immediately followed by and preceding the shell-shocked grief of imminent rupture on the freezing shores of Finland, photographing a dear and beloved colleague.

Day after day along purple-gold sand beaches on the west coast of Aotearoa in wind that near blew my hair off my head. Lava fields and seals and basalt beaches in Iceland, directly after Uluru and desert oak sentinels and red earth and sacred caves and paintings. One end of the planet to the other.

Far North Queensland gorges with crocs and wild boar, seen and dodged; Tasmanian red lichen’d rocks. Sandstone scripture on rockpool’d shelves; Language from star ancestors in fleeting stingray’d mud.

Living on a sailboat.
Learning to drive a van.

An Estuary; who became an intimate partner, Teacher. Lover. Mangroves and seagrasses and migrating shorebirds, stitching tides and sandbars, in abrasive winds and stinging salt. Sea Eagle hovering above as we danced: suspended.

Ten years.

Over one hundred thousand images.
Dozens of films.

The Saltwater Songlines Project:
a life.

My life.

everything hangs on this . . .

And I wasn’t expecting to do this, but here She whispers;

open my doors ~

we need one another.

we need to stand at the edge and loom the liquid light

we need to weave a new Story

tell a new tale.

We need to breathe and breathe and breathe a-new

photosynthesis of starlight.

We need to sculpt the unsculptable:

we need to give form to

Love . . .

The images I make carry codes

‘codes of consciousness’ I’ve always called them.

The images are star trails of ancestors and that which in-forms us:

Source itself.

Your source. And mine.

They are language. A ‘language without sound’.

except they aren’t and I’ve had to learn to translate and articulate what my body knows as I stand on the shoreline:

you are saltwater

you are a songline

and on your remembering, everything hangs

So on this new Moon in Scorpio, I am re-opening

Photographing You And

That which was born from Luminous, alchemised in the crucible of Practice. That which was torqued and pulverised, seared and distilled. Refined.

Essenced.

Sanctified and altar’d.

Present-ed.

a gift.

I do not know what I am doing with Saltwater Songlines, but let me say this. Early next year, I leave again. South, to a land that calls me home. With Maia.

And this time I won’t be back.

Something is completing, a cycle.

And the tidal flats must clear; be exposed to no-thing.

All I do know is that I am wrapping up Saltwater Songlines in its current expression. The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming, will find its new meander forward early in the year. Riverine. I don’t yet know what that will look like, although I do know it will still flow. It must.

And I will let you know what that looks like and how you might join me.

I also know that as I harvest and curate I Am Estuary, that body of work - seven years walking and immersing in an ecotone of liminality - will open.

But I don’t yet know what that will look like, either.

Possibly a communal gathering space of some kind.
We are, after all, all estuarine.

So, this is your opportunity to be together, in Photographing You And.

I’m opening the doors this new moon (now) and we begin in just ten days:

December 1st.
And walk together through February 22

12 weeks. 39 Lessons.

Informal (and irregular) online Gatherings for us to meet and stand on the virtual shoreline together. A tidal community.

Your opportunity to be with me, and to ask me your questions.
Any questions (within reason).

At a generous and generative 10 year celebration and appreciation reciprocity

There is no ‘later’ :
this is ‘one day’

Come!

Narelle xo

PS Question: is this just about ‘making pictures’?
Answer: No! It absolutely isn’t just about ‘photography’ (if it was, we may as well all go home). It’s multimodal, born of Spirit:

sensing, relationship, a way of being, the sentience and rights of ecosystems. Art - in all its forms . . . (dance, writing, sculpture, music, song . . . mothering)

information and portal

“Narelle’s work is sensitive, intense, intelligent and unique. Her courses have those same qualities. Her provoking offerings challenge me to think and feel deeply about the subjects and they guide me into the very depths of my imagination. They are not just about photography, but about so much more. They are profound life lessons to which I will refer back to for insights and inspiration.”

- Esmee, Photographer. The Netherlands. From Saltwater Songlines 2018

---

“The artist Narelle Carter-Quinlan, has developed an arts practice from her perception of our ‘embryological origins’ in work she calls ‘Embodied Ecology’.

Already gifted with an ability to somatically experience her ‘body’s waterways’, she has researched how this directly connects her to, and communicates with, the flow of waters outside her body - her local ocean, lakes and rivers.

Her long practice of refining sensitivity to the permeability of fluids and fluid patterns and forms outside the body and those within has become a detailed, anatomically sound understanding of the ‘interface of spirit and materiality.’”

- Beverley A’Court, Chapter 6 contributing Author in Ecopoiesis, A New Perspective for the Expressive and Creative Arts Therapies in the 21st Century. Edited by Stephen K Levine and Alexander Kopytin 2022. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, UK.

---

What if we could press the re-set button.

What if, from the very beginning, we saw space and light held and contained differently? If we saw the architecture of our first breath incarnate - our own shaping of the sacred - held. The uncontainable - spirit - cradled.

Sanctified.

I’ve been reading “The Winter Vault” by Anne Michaels. And the engineer overseeing the reconstruction of Abu Simbel - whose desire line is architecture - tells his beloved:

I want to build the room I wish I’d been born in.

And immediately I see it. And I want to write it.

So, I pick up my pen and my journal, and I do.

And as I enter this journey into the numinous, the wondering arises;

what if this is real?

what if I could re-set the start point as Here?

what would change? what would be completely different from this Initiation and along this arc and trajectory?

My vision is fresh. Luminous. Butter soft and muslin caressed. It is loved and quiet and marinated in gentle sunshine. Lemon curd and a single white-potted palm tree; a stone terrace outside.

My vision is spacious.

The field is quiet, respectful. Time is suspended . . .

The space does what sublime and simple structure does:

it breathes the holy.

It is a container of the consecrated,

like a Temple:

a simple nebula for my small body, arriving.

That is, after all, what the builders of Temples set out to do; to hold the thrumming of the Everything - that which cannot truly be contained.
But does, anyway.

So my invitation to you, is to write - or speak as incantation - the Room in which you wish you’d been born.

Literally, spell it out*

Tell me about the light; colours.

What is present; the walls, floor,

Tell me what you breathe, smell, the air

what the textures are, the tactilities of space,

and the palpable sounds that touch your tissues.

How has your sense of time coalesced here, into a Now - ?

What in-forms you - as space and time bend around your flesh and the earth’s - and draws you near, and into, the holy nexus that is This Place?

Describe to me, in detail, how you wish you had been welcomed.

And then for yourself, tell how it would be different travelling forward. . .

as choiceful, aware, creative Consciousness, breathing itself alive -

in flesh, bone and blood. Spirit incarnate.

You can share what you’ve written in the comment section below, if you like. I’d love you to do that. We are all, unto each other.

Or, you can email it to me. I’d love that, too

xo

*Abracadabra, a child’s game at spell’ing, means, in ancient Ahramaic:
“create as I speak”. Avra KeDabra. Original text can be found here.

By the way, if you missed the Listening To Sandstone meditation from a recent post, here it is. You can find the full Galleries (remember that your computer will offer the best viewing experience by far!) via the button:

Chapel Of Kangaroo

Listening To Sandstone:

The images in the Chapel of Kangaroo Galleries are made on Yuin Country.

The images in this newsletter/post were made on Darkinjung Country.

With immense gratitude, I honour and pay my loving respect to the traditional Peoples of these lands and seas, most certainly past, together with present and in our now emerging. I particularly thank the ancestors of Darkinjung Country for their protection, guidance, warriorship and celebration, and their ever present support.

My hand on my sandstone heart.

Narelle Christene xo

Please read the Words.

Thank you xo

Symmetry is not a given. Nor is it the only lens of perception.

I inhabit a spine that spirals. We all do, but there are parameters that allow an upright organism to function with ease around a riverine-sandstone midline.

My body doesn’t inhabit those parameters.

Instead, it carves its own exploratory riverbed through unmapped terrain. Country that I must constantly way-find and navigate as if it is precarious.

Because it is.

The spinal asymmetry that is known as “scoliosis” is a broad brushstroke of convenience. The reality, as a beloved colleague at QUT, once said to me over coffee, is that this particular spinal expression has its genesis in a multitude of factors, and its expression - and indeed individual experience - reflects that.

Each human whose spine spirals like a galaxy coursing through them, will experience that pathway, and its sequelae, uniquely. Like a fingerprint. In bone. In balance. In vision and hearing. In heartbeat and breath. In the lab measurable work it takes to even stand erect, expressed through muscle fatigue and recovery and in the balance and gait studies, to name a few. It takes, on average (depending on the studies one reads), approximately 37 % more energy just to stand, in a scoliotic terrain. Before I even take a step.

Human gait is contralateral. Meaning it spirals. A spiral overlaying a spiral. Sometimes in opposition.

I’m fighting the spiral as I walk.

Over decades, this is exhausting. And tissue eroding.

Part of that landscape of gravity-space navigation, elicits a more vigilant nervous system. And one more easily perturbed, both in soma and psyche.

Why am I speaking to this? And why now?

Many of you here, know me simply as someone who makes pretty pictures. Who writes about that. And tells a lyrical Story. Someone who walks coastlines and ecosystems of liminality.

Except my ability to walk is collapsing.

And:

I wasn’t always this person.

Once, I was a Yoga Therapist. A damn good one. Exiled from the community of my lineage for my refusal to refrain from teaching from my Practice (you can only teach Yoga from your Practice!), I walked the dangerous edge of evolving my own work. Integrating the languages of my long formal academic research in spinal pathology, rigorous dance training and developmental movement patterns, and all within the relational field with the land itself. In image, in metaphor. In the transgressive evocative language of poetics.

As the senior Editor of a renowned Scientific Publishing House that once (in 2019) sought to Publish my lifetime’s body of work through them, put it;
“We need more of your science Voice here, Narelle. Not the poetry”.

I crossed boundaries;

And I paid for it:

Academically, and

In the Tradition of my lineage (twice in fact: in yoga and dance, two completely different lineages, but the latter is a story for another time), and

In the systemic patriarchy and capitalism that defines this time of “his - story”.

Refusing to get a “jobby-wobby” apart from the barest of essentials to survive. Because to do so, self-betrayed the very essence of who I am and what I came here to do. To attend to myself with. To hold space for. To Transform!

How naughty of me!

How blasphemous to the patriarchy of systemic structure and control; that which attempts to define and sculpt the expression of the “allowable”.

I was subversion itself. I was a threat.

I am a threat. (even in my family. especially in my family).

So threatening, apparently, was my life’s work and my approach, that I was formally “banned” from teaching in yoga studios of my lineage, both here in Australia and internationally (a ban still in place today). And those Teachers who dared to host me abroad? Well, some of those were either threatened with being struck off, or with their studios being closed.

Except I found a home. In New York City, where my work in the curving river of the spine, flourished. For three years I lived and worked part time in this vibrant electrifying city, with an equally thrummingly alive community, sharing yoga, anatomy and its relationship with ecosystems.

Until I didn’t.

I was offered the opportunity of an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” US Visa for five years. But, my daughter was pregnant with her first child, and as I sashayed down Broadway, fresh out of teaching a class, she’d call me, in distress. “I miss you. I need you.”

I came home.

My daughter had her first child, whom I helped deliver, and a further two children, whom I have never met.

My daughter estranged herself from our family two years later.

Ten years ago.

And something very deep shifted in me. I experienced an evisceration as my core womb and entrails were burned and scooped out; the sensation known in Chinese Medicine as “running pigs” searing through my nerves.

A year of breakdown.

Without my Spiritual Teacher pulling me through at all hours of night and day, I would not be here. That is a fact.

A divorce followed.

An abusive relationship/”marriage” with a diagnosed psychopath and “extreme and severe” NPD in Hawai’i, Mexico, NZ and Australia (called how to run whilst you’re trying to re-make yourself). Another “divorce”.

Another breakdown.

More DV upon return to my home, ending in hospitalisation (last September) and a near death experience (NDE); necessitating multiple police reports for extreme verbal sexual assault from another offspring.

Escape. In a van ( after a 7 year fight for partial property settlement).

Return.

Preparation for more leave taking. Which will be the last. Not this planet:

Just the realisation that a karmic timeline and agreement has come to fullfillment. That I am allowed to go. That it truly is time to release.

That I can - and must - let go holding that which is no longer mine to hold.

The grief flowing through is profound.
For my lost, or abandoned, work most of all.

There is a film “The Arrival” starring Amy Adams, with the question “if you knew what was going to happen, would you do it anyway?”

Yes, I would, apparently.

I did.

My son deeply wanted to share this film, loved by him, with me. He did so on my 60th birthday, six years ago. We watched it together, tears flowing . I watched it over and over again. The resonance, timeline destroyingly obvious.

As I prepared to marry my husband, at just barely 21 years old, I said to him;
“I will not do the ‘til death do us part thing with you.” Instead, I insisted that “If either one of us begins to destroy the other, we leave.” I held my two hands up, fingers gently interlaced, and gently unravelled and separated them, to demonstrate. I saw it clearly: a diverging dirt road, becoming two. Without timeframe, sans context. He was not impressed. But: I was better at boundaries then. Or maybe I just knew how to read the landscape.

In a Sydney birth centre four years later, after an intense (euphemism) labour of 28 hours, my newborn girl lay on the sterile green sheet on the floor between my legs; a field of battle with blood and tissue and fluids. Her wee head turning in even wee-er jerking movements, as her eyes sought mine. Contact! BOOM!

And what I experienced in that moment was her saying to me;

“Well, mum. You’re here. I’m here. And . . . we’re going to do this noooowwww!!”

And I ran.

Every part of me tearing, screaming down that hall:

“Nooooo!!”

Figuratively, of course.

For: I saw the sunder.
I saw the hellscape that is ripped apart “estrangement”. Ghosting.

Sixteen months later, I’m sitting in my rocking chair with my newborn son. Nursing him. We live in the Blue Mountains now, a very long way away from my native Coast. A being appears in front of me. Immense compassion emanates. I’m cautious. Deeply unsure what is about to be communicated to, or asked of, me.

And I am told that he will leave. I am told when. Shown how. And whilst that particular pathway indeed was walked through and around, the inevitable happened.

My son left six months ago.

Amidst cruelty and abuse.

I’m sitting in Session with my Clinical Psychologist, the one who diagnosed the C-PTSD. She is acknowledging and celebratory and encouraging:

“Yeah, but yay you, after all this, you’re still standing!”

Not any more.

My body began to crumble on my 63rd birthday.

Cracked ribs (rolling on a shell making those swimming in seagrass images)

Thoracic facet joint impaction.

A diagnosis of Stage 4 Osteoporosis.

Teeth crumbling and evidently also facial bones.

A heart being squashed, side-lying, under a thoracic scoliosis concavity.

Haschimotos flare ups.

Other autoimmune diseases that are multitude and largely “undiagnosable”.

Bilateral cataracts (and other visual anomalies, tricky for a photographer).

Crippling knee pain. Bilateral Osteoarthritis.

Gluteal tendinopathy.

Reflux to the point I felt I was being garrotted. Every single day for 6 months.

Legs so weak I totter and the 8-12 km walks become 200m or half a km, with quadricep pain and breathlessness, that leaves me dizzy and faint.

And lest we forget: very few folk engage with my work.

I cannot begin to tell you how that destroys my will to live.

This is what overload looks like.

Or soul sundering grief.

This is how relentless trauma songlines itself through a system.

“Rehab”, I’ve decided to name it. So that I actually make myself do it.

If I call it “Yoga” (which it is, wobbly partial poses on my trestler), then I won’t do it.

Rebellion.

Despair.

Disgust.

Or, more accurately: grief.

That soars through me, released from my tissues in floods and gushes so that it drenches me completely, incapacitating me utterly after a single pose.

Yoga.

This thing that my body has known intimately (without the name) since

four

years

old.

Yoga: A prayer.

My temple and my medicine.

My thing to fight,

and to remember exile.

Yoga, that through which I must re-meet and re-make myself.

Or die (I hear the faithful quiet whisper of Soul).

No drama.

Just tender compassion amidst the anguish.

The very ordinary: my body.

I stand at the trestler with my elbows bent and my palms pressed together:

shoulder openers.

l bend one knee a little, reach back with both inner and outer surface of my opposing ishcial tuberosity. Then the other side. The gentlest rhythm.

I feel the skin (periosteum) of both my inner and my outer rib surfaces bilaterally lengthen, the three layers of intercostals awakening. Remembering their sarcomere relational fields. I sense the very beginning of the individual lobes of my lungs gently ungluing from their slumber.

My lungs begin to find their energetic pathway of connectivity through to my upper arms; my throat softens and widens; shoulder tips broaden and the embryological spirals from my manubrium through my upper arms/lower arms/hands and fingers, have their opportunities to re-carve their fluid blueprints through my organism. Which begins to re-awaken the diagonal figure-of-eight through my torso, and its wave-spiral through my pelvis and legs and feet. All the way through to the skin of the outer blade of my foot, the inner heel skirt, the inner and outer edges of each toe finding itself on the mat. My big toe mound and greater trochanter; a long galaxy arm of spiral, meaning my knees can return to their embryological origin of “no joint yet” and find the beginnings of femur and tibial plateau and patellar seed. My kidneys soften, and rotate; whispering their connection with my spine. My organs remember their pact with my spine in anterior buoyant support.

And I remember, how my body is how I found a safe pathway to be here, in physical form on this planet, when I panicked as a tiny child, wanting “out”. My body and my sensation and listening to that sensation, was how I got to feel safe enough to remain here . . .

I remember, now.

*“Medicine I must take”, were the words my dear and truly beloved yoga Teacher of near two decades, spoke to me, in reference to my practicing yoga within my scoliosis.

It is this same man who, allied with and at the behest of, the “President” of the Australian Association of my lineage at the time, exiled me. On the basis of my teaching of yoga, from my Practice for my physicality. The only Practice I knew to Teach. The only Practice I was allowed to gain a certification in. In the US. Not in my own country.

Beloveds,

I wanted to slide in through the glimmer, and place a wee meditation on the altar. Our Altar. For you.

Sandstone. Your body. Sound, movement and the subatomic field:

As promised, I made a wee Audio for you to go with the Chapel of Kangaroo:

Listening to Sandstone.

You can find it on the Chapel of Kangaroo page. You can download it too.

If you visit this page, you’ll find a wealth of images soft and surreal, to soak in, together with Story. As always, far better on your computer - as noted in my previous post, but I understand both the “convenience” of and the addiction to “phone”, even though it’s not wired into our neural net; yet!

Because it’s always about songline’d Story.

And, it’s always about relationship;

it’s always about choice,

and it’s always about creation.

Listening to Sandstone offers you a recalibration.

Beauty, harmony, resonance.

Peace.

All Love,

as you enter this vast field

in open presence with yourself

Narelle xo

PS I’ve opened a few spots for Transformation Sessions:

Step into the Field

Music to ponder:

today is the full moon in Aries. This moon has me electric;

She is conjunct my Ascendant, the sun conjunct my natal sun to one degree (yes, it’s my solar return tomorrow). She squares my MC and my IC. And it’s also my Mercury return as Mercury enters Scorpio. Oh, and that Chiron-Eris conjunction in Aries; that’s conjunct my natal Sedna. Just in case I didn’t quite get the message.

This is NOW. It is all systems go. For me, at least.

As we mourned the physical passing of Jane Goodall, many of us have seen her words on film, as she shares her mission of “Hope”. As she expresses that you find yours, and that each and every person makes a difference. Matters. (we are, after all, Spirit in form. We literally, matter)

If you could distill your presence here to one single word, what is that word?

What is it!

And, as is both my challenge and Jane’s open field, how will you “make a difference”? What is your weave to the fabric?

Mine is Beauty.

Expressed through six and a half decades, via dance - two and a half of those in traditional Middle Eastern Dance; through the reverent study of anatomy; in wonder filled wanderings across the planet atop Swiss Alps, in Norwegian Arctic tundra, sizzling in Greek olive groves and in Australian creeks and bushlands. To name a very few. It carves its journey through the sacred terrain of birth giving and child raising; meandering through years of gemstone jewellery design and making, learning to listen to consciousness made manifest. Beauty has underscored my devotion to the ultimate Temple: the human form as it listens and shapes and sculpts itself through what is called Yoga, always juxtaposing with the chapels of Place:

the ecosystems of the body and the tissues of the land.

Expressed in image making. For over five conscious decades.

Beauty.

Deep Beauty.

So today, on what feels alive and electric, I open for you

You won’t find the page listed on my website in the Navigation yet.

It’s for you.

I am still to record the Audios that go within the page; the voice is holy. It carries transmission. And I am too vibrating with everything happening in our world to do that right now. Hopefully that will be recorded later this week.

But I am telling you something:

Please do not bother going to the Gallery if you cannot make the simple effort of going via your computer. Please. Your phone will not show you the layered images (you simply won’t see them as you scroll your merry oblivious way). The formatting will distort, where images and text overlay fluidly.

You don’t have to get gussied up and get your sorry arse to a physical Gallery. You don’t have to transport yourself to a physical space and spend hours in the getting to and from there, nor the physical time being there:

You just have to crack open your computer.

Consider that your reciprocity, your “ticket” of admission. Your “Payment”

It is respectful of myself, my time and energy, my skill and my craft

It is respectful to the field that is Place, Ancestors and yourself.

We have become too rushed and too willing to feel entitled.

I invite you into a more spacious field. Of Beauty. Of Love.

If you can honour that, be welcomed into

The Chapel of Kangaroo

A Sanctuary.

All Love,

Narelle

xo

In the end I did not go to Tasmania.

My knees,

my heart,

our world ~

My knowing.

I went, instead, through a different portal.

Through the sandstone of my bones, through a flooded paperbark landscape, through the dark places that live in black and red composting and tannin’d waterways.

A pilgrimage.

Eight weeks, with Maia.

Returning on the exact day’s anniversary of last year’s NDE. (Unintentionally).

When I thought my entire photography practice was over (a story for another day), I made image after image of cathedralic sandstone altars, rockpool’d necklaces from Neptune (or Aphrodite depending whom you believe), and a journey whose shadows I’d seen two-near-three years ago working with a Shaman in individual ceremony. Right into the heart of chthonic family Songlines.

For now, I want to share with you a 5 minute WIP film, best viewed full screen.

Some notes:

I drove my 7m (21 foot) campervan on a narrow dirt potholed road literally right through this drowned paperbark forest; the black waters coming up to the road edge, after weeks of rains. The floods had just subsided.

And what opened out and surrounded me, hung open my jaw, and my heart.

I camped my van right in between a vast burgundy tannin lake that whispered constantly, and the liminal black waterscape of the ancient trees. Hoping there wouldn’t be more rain.

I walked the edge of the paperbarks the next morning, where sunlight rendered the illusion of suspension. Image after image. Reverent. Amidst repeated warning signs for red bellied blacks and tigers and browns (all venomous snakes if you aren’t from Oz). Carefully watching each cautious step. Listening. Sometimes I could sense them; smell them even. They were close.

Later there would be the giant goanna I failed to see, that I near stepped on, who swiftly wove his way across my foot and caressed my ankle/shin with his long tail on his way. I was lucky. A bite is not so nice (due to bacteria in their mouths, resulting in necrosis and potential amputation) and a tail whip also not a great encounter (which goannas are known for) .

But this was a sign of something else; a gift. An act of deep kinship and of initiation.

Of in fact, protection.

Four days. Photographing, filming, wandering. Processing. Deep chthonic excavation of my mum and her mum; an ancestral archaeology. Rage. Grief. Healing. Compassion. Forgiveness ~

It was not easy.

The lake beckoned . . .

This is a short version of a (three times) longer film to come, with spoken word voice-over Story. But I wanted to share this piece with you all in this now.

We are all, each other’s babies . . .

Love,

Narelle xo

Music attribution: Iluminar by Porangui

It feels important to me to add, that although I made my 56 day Journey alone, I walked and drove with support. Primarily with the Old Peoples of Darkinjung Country, and with Kangaroo. My heart singing with you 🙏

And, with four dear humans:

a beloved friend and colleague in Melbourne who carried my firewood when I could barely walk and who took me massive grocery shopping (and carrying) twice and helped load my van up slippery stairs;

a precious ex-client and “new” friend, whom I met in person for the first time, who brought me food and carried everything to my van fridge just prior yo leaving Melbourne;

A deeply dear colleague who lives in the US, who kept badgering me with WhatsApp messages when I was shell shocked and in extremis, “how are you!!!”. Because she was worried (without knowing any details). And who sent me the great gift of her notes from her own recent pilgrimage’d journeying in her own camper truck;

And my Acupuncturist, and family-you-have-when-you’re-not-having-family, who unfailingly kept vigil and message contact.

And the fifth element: dear Maia, my Van.

We are never alone.

Ever 🙏🤍

More images - and Stories - to come.

somatic interface - and map

My body knows itself on this rocky edge where blue waves lift seaweeds up and up and up, and sunlight films on the skin of saltwater pool-lands. Where tender neptuian necklaces rest in the luminous ebb.

My knees and ankles re-find their cohesive and prorioceptive tongues, and my animal organism settles and streams itself alive;

Sensate.

Articulating its intimately woven

Knowing -

That it is

home.

Body. Rock. Water. Weed.

Human bodies of organs, bones, fluids, know themselves through entwined intimacy of Place. It is our native tongue; twin elements we are.

Beloved of each other.

Belonging

Longing

Love

Marine Body

draped in emerald algae

breathing viridian photons

Beneath: the fundament of

Rock -

cradle of

stability

Ancient.

Witness.

Love (again)

Rinse Your Brain;

Let saltwater’s fingers stream through the corridors of your neural tissues ~

All Love,

each one ~

each, an expression of Consciousness, experiencing Itself.

I love you,

Narelle xo

PS there are many more images - Substack has a limit apparently - and many more Stories. Later. Possibly when I return home and can resize the files with ease. And create a proper website Gallery for you.

Playlist to soak in (yes, made at Merimbula).

And I have some news coming soon, too. Stay tuned 😘

Dear One’s,

this is an experiment, since I’m on the (long) road somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne, and creating this on my phone.

I don’t really do technology. I’m a wave form in slow motion, made of the frequency of sandstone and saltwater. As I stand outside the beach cabin I booked for 12 days, my soma and psyche unhook themselves and unravel. The bones in my face become both part of the cliff-faced headland at the beach’s end, and part of the ongoing unfurling blue green in front of me. I stand up straight; my organism re-membering itself.

Relief.

Sovereignty.

home ~

The Roos are everywhere; 15 surrounded me all at once this morning as I partook of the Gospel of Kangaroo:

Rest on the ground in the sun

Listen to unravel of waves

Breathe salty air

Close eyes

Be

They demonstrated for me with the precision of a very senior Iyengar Yoga Teacher, and I am already a devout Practitioner in the Chapel of Roo.

As my eyes remember their near 7 decade history of scanning the real (ie the coast not the screen), I watch the colonisation of my optics flit from crest to crest. Never settling. Never quite connecting sun-saltwater-eye-heart. Missing that extended few seconds that it actually takes for my nervous system; (your eyes are part of your brain, remember) to *receive* the flow of luminous glassy green transparency - for that fluid field to actually *land* in my physical heart.

*this is what it means to be a human being*

I’m contemplating running (not “offering”, actually Teaching and transmissing!) an eco-spiritual photography experience (workshop) here.

A short residential offering.

Right in the beach.

Listening to place.

Sandstone and sea and country

Practicing with Roo ~

Narelle xo

sometimes I sigh. And I chuckle. And in this time, I looked up and said, ‘really?’
But in these exact now times, my bones and fluids knew: YES

Of course.

As you all here know, I’m leaving the land of subtropics. Two weeks now.

South. Not Tasmania (the great southern land breathing closer to Antarctica than I’d like to spend a winter within, in my van), rather, to a rural(ish) area near vineyards in Victoria. In a warm housesit on acreage for 6.5 weeks.

With brumbies. And a Siberian Husky and Groodle (=bear dog). And a catty.

So when my friend spoke to me, learning forward with her brown eyes gently searing into my pineal gland, and reminded me - on repeat - about Transformation, I got it. Sometimes I can be s l o w.

We are on the cusp, dear Ones. It’s a long cusp. A very edge-ful cusp.

But it’s here.

now.

And it’s time.

Not time to panic. Time to choose and time to stand still and then to move incisively forward. Photon by photon. Choice by choice. Love by love.

Clarity by clarity.

Exhale . . .

I’m typing this hours before the Solstice. You will be reading it afterwards.

The axis stills . . . Earth holds her breath.

Choice point, vibrating right through you.

Transformer I am. Unfortunate name, yet that’s what my Spiritual Teacher called it. He Trained 50 of us, globally. That’s it. Decades ago; these times ~

And I’m standing here right now in this turn of the weave, in this eye of the needle, as we r e a c h and we ask and we weep and we yearn with every wave form within us:

what do you want?

I mean it

Bottom line. right now. get your head out of the way and gently lay your panic aside. exhale ~

be the stillness and the thrum and the compassion of sandstone and the aching call of the humpbacks (the whales, not those of us with scoliosis), and the tender caress of the sun rippled seagrasses, and the enfolding love of Grandmother mangrove ~

listen, within every space between every cell, and tell me

what you want. who you are. what you are choosing to travel to and create. Now.

can you hear the sound, between the spaces in you ~ ?

the sound current

Transformation Sessions have unfurled. Three individual spaces.
Over four Sessions, each one of you. Between July 21 - August 28

Read more, stay in your body, listen to your breath and notice your presence:

Transformation - real

If this is for you, now, reach out to me. Set this up now, so that we can begin within the riverbanks available to us, held by land/s and warm mammals.

All my love,

Narelle xo

Know that I love you. Know that I see you. Know that I hold us all

woman of the sea

Dear Ones,

I didn’t plan this particular missive this morning; deep within the balance of preparation to leave, and rest. In fact, what you’ll read below, is what I am about to send out to those who signed up for my photog course as it completes. But as I typed, it all evolved. and I realised that it needed to come to all of you.

to the All, of you.

There are no pretty pictures this time.

Read on . . .

Know that I truly appreciate you walking this path with me. We are community, threads of weave connect us.

A gentle reminder:

if you're in the currently completing photog course, I need your reflections, now. Please;

whilst my Dharma in this lifetime is a clear path, cutting a fine line through chaos, collapse and distraction, I am not a separate being:

I am One. With all things. With all consciousness.
With you.

In a passionate conversation with my very dear colleague, Stephanie Gottlob in the US, we spoke with one another about "Nature" as conscious. As sentient. And the languaging of "stewardship" of ecosystems needing to go much further. Of the essentiality for a paradigm shift of mindset.


We are not "stewards". This is hierarchial. It is privilege. It is arrogant and mostly folk don't even see that. It is species-ism and it is colonisation of soma and psyche. Whilst we languaged it differently, this is what we spoke within.

I've spoken with Steph these past five years (she has lived in a van for many years often in wilderness - moving, sounding, listening; when I was living aboard a sailboat over a two year period - soaking in tidal rhythms of sea and atmos and undulation), and we spoke about what it truly means to live entwined WITHIN "nature".

Steph asked me, what will it take for folk to take this next step, out of "stewardship" and into something truly new.

I see the issue clearly. Whilst ever we experience ourselves as separate, we will never truly immerse. We will never truly listen.

WE ARE NOT SEPARATE.

I've been banging on about this since I was 4 or 5 years old.

But I don't have a "Platform".

The same (often good) people are elevated, their voices amplified. Accoladed. Continuously.

Some of us work more quietly, below the surface:

IN THE MUDLANDS.
with stingrays and seagrass and shorelines and sandpatterns.


I raised the utter necessity of humility, with Steph. I raised listening. Really damn well LISTENING. And above all else, I raised the essential open field of :

I DON'T KNOW

I don't know.

The willingness to stand in that luminous, chaotic, open, terrifying, ego-stripped space is essential.

When I was 21 I had my first breakdown;
I could no longer function in this human demand of "separate".

yes, we incarnate in a body. yes, we "individuate". And this, is essential. Because unless we do, we cannot experience the fractal that we are. The very specific granular part of consciousness that we came to experience. To explore. To come to truly KNOW. Through, and only through, our direct and VISCERAL felt experience.

Our world is falling apart. By our own stubborn hands.

We grasp at "what is the solution? How can we attend to nature? How can we avert this and make this better?"

But those are the wrong questions.

Drop it.

Just DROP it!

And be truly deeply humble. KNOW, that you are IN a relational field with the sentient being who is earth. With all your beloved kin; here.

At twelve years old I sat in my parent's back garden, despairing. I asked for help, weeping. And what emerged was a circle, like a cartwheel, of all the animals and beings in creation, surrounding me, sending spokes directly into me.

One ONE O N E

O
N
E

I am One.

I am part of all living things.

A circle
A fabric.

WHOLE.

And I am never alone.

how could i be . . . ?

So here is my invitation, my provocation. My Challenge to you:

If you have participated in this photog course (and you may not have, even if you signed up), for the sake of all things holy

tell me:

what have you received within yourself (not as extraction),

What has changed within you, in relationship with this field of images and questions and practices?

And if you have not participated, or simply didn't sign up,

what is it that forms a deep, deep knowing within you, that this is real? How do you see that reflected to you in what I present? (This helps me immeasurably - turns out we do need witnessing and we do need our Others! And we certainly need collaboration, co-creation/co-arising and feedforward)

What do you need more of, from me, now?
Less of?
What do you need - from me - differently?

And how will you engage with yourself in relationship with that, with all things?

With consciousness itself, as you/the field that we are, shifts and morphs?

Will you step up?

Will you take respons-ability for creation? For your own experience?

If you've been in the photog course, please do email me directly.

If not, email me anyway.

Stephanie and I have a series of conversations coming for you, September or October, as our journeyings allow.

With love and care,
and with passion,

Narelle xo
PS, Stephanie and my previous conversations live on my (in hiatus) Saltwater Songlines Podcast. On Spotify, Apple etc and also here