Joseph Campbell
Do you look forward to your next adventure with excitement or trepidation?
I rather like the beginnings of new adventures …most probably because I’ve been adventuring for most of my life.
As a young child, I spent my early years in Malaya, as it was called then, celebrated my 3rd birthday in Bombay and arrived in England only to feel quite out of place.
We stayed for a short period of time in an old castle that had been converted to apartments and my mother, who was of Scottish descent (and had the “second sight”) told me of times when I could be found chatting to imaginary friends in my bedroom.
After my younger brother was born, I frequently holidayed with my grandparents who lived in a 17th Century manor house in Kent. The adventures there included sitting on Grandfather’s tiger skin rug, always wary of those big sharp teeth and listening to Granny playing Debussy on her baby grand piano and getting up to mischief with my cousins in the apple loft.
There were plenty of other adventures had before emigrating to Australia.
So different from England!
The light, the smells, the atmosphere!
We arrived at Fremantle on the West Coast, via the Fairsea as Ten Pound Poms, on a hot, bright November morning… a bright new world to adventure in!
A couple of years in suburban Adelaide and then off to
Tarcoola some 420 km north west of Port Augusta.
Here I was free to roam.
With only 6 other families there, we made our own fun.
I used to ride my pushbike along the road which followed the railway line, often coming across great swathes of Sturt Desert Peas which the train drivers used to pick and take back to Port Augusta.
Here I grew to love the red dirt, the plants of the remote areas and to see and be aware of the energies in this old and beautiful land.
Freedom came to an end at the end of Year 7 and another adventure began…. I caught the train down to Port Augusta and met the family I was to stay with, a couple of days before starting high school.
Talk about a square peg in a round hole…. not one of the happier adventures…..
But that came to an end and off we went again….. catching the
Tea and Sugar train to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and yet another adventure…
3 secondary schools in one year was a challenge, but I enjoyed the core subjects and did well in them, and was the recipient of a Commonwealth Scholarship for the final two years.
Moving house became an art form and still to th
is day, there is a certain anticipation in getting the boxes and newspaper ready to pack up the household effects.
Eventually my parents settled, but at 19, it was time for me to head off on my Honda 450cc for new adventures of my own, eventually replacing it with my distinctive BMW.
There were many more adventures as I moved up and down the East Coast… Brisbane to Melbourne…. Melbourne to Brisbane…. New Zealand…. Brisbane to Perth……Perth to Melbourne….The Nullabor was traversed by road about 16 times over a ten year period.
Interesting people and some fun times…and some scary times (maybe one day I’ll write more about these events). In those cases, it was my intuition that kept me safe and I developed a strong sense of when it was time to move on….
As I moved into more sedate circles that intuition was gradually suppressed. A little too “woo woo” for some of the people I was mixing with….
Working in church schools also helped to shut it down… I didn’t feel safe in discussing the spirituality that I felt or the intuition around events… Although it was at one school I met a person who introduced me to Reiki and began this amazing adventure!
Now I’m opening up to the metaphors in my dreams and tapping more frequently into the intuitive and spiritual experiences. You may have noticed in some of my recent posts…
I’m feeling slightly vulnerable as I’m writing this….. exposing my history…..yet not telling you all.
And that will be another adventure as I open up to myself and allow the good and bad feelings that accompanied all these adventures to flow out onto a different page… perhaps a book for later on……
It’s curious how the mind works… we can overthink a situation or a problem and tie ourselves up in emotional knots, getting stressed or overwrought …. yet when we finally allow ourselves to feel the rhythm of life and go with the flow of nature’s wisdom, we can blossom.