Category Archives: Gods Way of Love

‘Summerfest’ 2012

It’s less than a week till we kick off for ‘Summerfest’.

Here are three reasons I’m excited about this year’s event:

1. There are lots of new experiments to try with the environment. They are all based on loving principles so I can’t wait to see how they turn out.
2. This year is less hard, repetitive yakka. More diversity, lots more opportunities for participants to learn things they can implement on their own land. People have the opportunity to learn while they are giving.
3. There has been more interest this year from other groups in the community who may attend e.g. the local Landcare and the local Sustainability group. Newbies to welcome and meet = yay!
4. There is already a great team spirit amongst those who have been involved in the planning and leadership so far. This usually spells FUN for leaders and participants alike!
Oops that was four things I’m excited about!


If you are still tossing up about whether or not to come here is an outline of the programme:

28th November – Swales, Systems & Contour Planting
We will begin the week in a large paddock (around 100 acres) focussing on large scale soil improvement and water management. Methods to be demonstrated and created include: using contours and ponds to redirect and retain water, and building living eco systems to provide fertility and regenerate soil, and seeding of grasses to prevent soil erosion.

 
29th November – Re-generation and restoration of swampy land 
Activity on this day will using some alternate methods to reduce water logging down from the paddock worked on on day one. We will focus on improving water take up through building living systems above ground and planting shrubs and bushes to absorb water.

 
30th November: Swales & Living Systems
Work on this day will build upon swaling that was completed at last year’s ‘Octoberfest’. We will tend to the planting from last year incorporating living systems into swales to create fertility and improve soil.
1st & 2nd December: Various Activities To Choose From


There are three activities to choose from on both Saturday and Sunday. You can choose a different activity each day and have the opportunity to swap between activities during the day at 11.30am.
Activity 1: Waterless Home Gardening – demonstrating several techniques including fibonachi system to maximise sun and water usage of any area, designing waterflow in your garden, techniques to minimize or completely remove the need for watering, mixed planting incorporating natives both flowering and mulching, fruit trees and vegetables.
Activity 2: Nature boxes – positioning boxes for animals and birds according to their particular needs, providing shelter close to food and water. Scouting for suitable locations and some tree climbing will be necessary. 

Activity 3: Creating reptile habitat – Reptiles are often forgotten or even shunned members of vital ecosystems. This activity will focus on providing habitat for reptiles by placing shelter, food and water in close proximity, providing safe transit zones. We will utilize above ground living systems to incorporate suitable living shelters and abundant insect life. There will also be planting for protection and mulching.

 
 

3rd December: Unfinished Projects & Possible Green House Construction
The day’s focus will be on completion of any unfinished projects plus green house construction and waterless seedling propagation. Full details TBA on the day.
 
If you want more information on Summerfest including prerequisite listening and ‘what to bring’ its all listed on the ‘Whats New’ Page of the Divine Truth website.

Hope to see some of you happy campers down there!

P.S. There should also be lots of fun in the evenings. Think: concerts, karaoke, dancing and film nights….

P.P.S. We spent a sometime planning with the leaders team at Kyabra couple of weeks ago . The photos in this post are from that week and were taken by the wonderful Eloisa.

Heligfjall.

Our days at Helgfjall are spent exploring the property which has its very own bakery, sauna, barn, cellar, lakehouse and cabins apart from the main house where Eva and Per stay and the 100 year old cottage that AJ & I sleep in. 

 

We spend hours discussing this idea of ‘Learning Centre’ and gradually without us realising it, it seems that the Centre shifts from an idea to a living thing. 
Per, AJ & Rita – the bakery in the background
By the stream

Per, AJ & Anna dig to the cellar

We gather with the others to make a meal and talk for hours about what it means to live our lives in testament to the Truths we already know, and how we may teach though living example.

Late one afternoon (just before dusk at 3pm) AJ & I don snow shoes and walk out into the woods where huge birch trees reach up tall to the sky while heavy snow tugs their branches earthward.
into the woods…
We still ourselves and let the silence envelop us. Eva & Per call this place a ‘church’ and I feel their meaning.
There are already many messages for me this trip but so far the reoccurring tug on my soul is about how seldom I make space in my life to deeply long for God, to let Him Love me. In the quiet, pre-dawn hours where jet-lag finds me alert and alone I quake at the potential of this connection with Him. I am surprised to find how much I still fear His Love. And here again in the snow subdued woods, at the place named ‘holy’, I know again that God is always there – between the moments, in the space, His presence, His Love, like the hulking calm and peace that immediately surrounds us in the snow subdued woods…. He waits – a quiet immense presence ready to envelop us in Love the moment we invite Him into our hearts. 

Mine these days is a trembling heart, awake to possibility, enlivened by the passion in those we meet, awed by the Infinite Care I feel guiding my life. It is a heart that feels so humbled by the Love that I must breathe deeply here in the forest. I must breathe to stay present and not run and hide like the small, unworthy child  I believe myself to be.

Brave.

The bears are sleeping at Vilhemina, hunkered down, preparing to raise cubs in the spring.

We arrive at night by propeller plane.
It is snowing as we cross the tarmac and I am grateful for the jacked loaned to me by one of our welcoming committee in Gothenburg this morning. We have travelled all day; on three separate flights, joined by friends along the way.
Anna & Anna join us in Gothenburg

Joy & Rita join us for the final flight from Stokholm to Vilhemina

on the tarmac

Eva meets us and bundles us into a warm, waiting car to cover the distance remaining to her and her husband, Per’s, new home. 

We wind our way along a road lined with birch and fur trees, their branches bravely holding up under the 40cm of snow that has fallen in the past week. Ice and softly falling snowflakes reflect the light from the headlights as Eva drives us north. 
Already I know that we have landed in a wonderful place, so strange, striking and crazy beautiful. 
It takes us 40 minutes to drive to ‘Heligfjall’, which means holy mountain in the language of the indigenous Sami people. A people who believe, that no land is ever owned except by God.
Heligfjall lies in south Lapland, just a few hundred kilometres shy of the arctic circle. It is the place that our friends, Eva and Per, have chosen to make their new home and to create a place of learning and growth they hope it will become a Gods Way of Love Learning Centre.
We turn into an arching driveway that just last week bore the prints of a passing lynx, and the small 2WD car fails at this final leg. So we walk to the house in the snow, dry, white and thick below our boots, and still falling gently upon our heads and faces. Per greets us with a warm hug and we pass into the kitchen complete with combustion stove and candles burning.
We have been up since 4 am and by now are bone tired but still we sit in the cosy kitchen for hours more, till past midnight, listening to the story of this couple and their adventures and turmoils of the past few months.
Per has spent his life a company man, a successful engineer working for a large car company. He has been accustomed to working amongst men and machines, to variables, which are concrete, controllable and fixable.
He tells us of a decision he made to finally remove the armour around his heart and soul, and to and heal emotionally. Within a few short months, this man with a Masters degree in Science but no experience in classrooms, now finds himself the Principle of a local high school. In this tiny outpost of community, where the local industries are fishing and hunting and teen pregnancy, unemployment and alcohol abuse are common, Per has challenged himself to become a leader and a creator of new possibilities for the youth that frequent his new office. His days are now filled with different, less controllable variables and he will freely admit that the armour is challenged and falling away. 
As Per tells his story I can feel what a gift this tiny school has been given. These people, this community has engaged his heart. What better gift to offer youth but a leader who is humble? A person who listens not just to the nuts and bolts of their stories but one who feels the nuance and hardship and wants to work with them to find new solutions. 
And we all reflect on the perfection of Gods Laws that always bring us exactly what we need in order to heal and serve well. The gifts are ever present and if we only trust in a Wisdom far greater than our own, not only do we receive but so often the opportunity to give our own gifts is created. 
My heart nearly bursts at the beauty and power of God to alter our souls towards joy if only that we follow our hearts in humility and a desire to love. But such journeys commence with sensations that feel like risk, and loss, and it is too easy to panic and clamour to know what next strange thing may lie just over the horizon. Courage is needed to take our first steps outside of what is comfortable and familiar, and I believe we will be called upon again and again to dig deep, and breathe hard and have faith. We may quake in our boots many times if we are to stay the course.
We finish our tea and smile at our friends. These people are brave – and it inspires me. 
  
Eva and Per will tell you such things are not comfortable or easy. But their growth is evident and adventure hangs like an excited newcomer in the air at Heligfjall.

Fear Is Not Our Ruler!

Wow! AJ & I just arrived home after a full day of absolutely awesome auditions for our first God’s Way of Love concert to be held tomorrow.

I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge all of you who auditioned. It was so amazing sitting in that hot, dusty and very ordinary hall, feeling the buzz build throughout the day and watching something extraordinary unfold. Thank-you for following and sharing your passions. You inspire me.

I loved the little rush of ‘invincibility’ I observed in many of you realizing that you were bigger than your fears.

It reminded me of an important Truth, that positive possibility can only grow and creativity is free to come out and stretch her legs whenever fear ceases to rule our lives. 

As AJ said tonight “Today was a good day. Its always a good day when people challenge their fears”

You are all so brave and so talented to boot. Look out world!

For anyone interested in attending:

Gods Way of Love Concert – Sunday 8th January 2 -4 pm at the Murgon hall – open to all.


Free admission with a free supper provided by the Hospitality Team to follow.

How To Hold a Dream

We live in a culture that regularly scorns innocence, passion and vulnerability. All too often we ‘water down’ our true selves in favour of a version of self that suits the cynical and image-focussed landscape in which we live. We are taught to view the preciousness of our childhood dreams and creativity as childish, as too idealistic and unrealistic. [1]
I was taught early that my extremely emotional and expressive self was befuddling and bemusing to my parents. I learnt to be ashamed of this part of myself.
My huge desire to make the world a better place, to extend love to others and change lives for the better, I relegated to an idealistic pipe dream after spending ten years working in our health system and over two years in the Middle East. I came to believe that to be worldly was to face the harsh facts that the world is irretrievably messed-up, that lasting change and peace is a naïve concept. I learnt to judge and be angry instead of grieve the suffering I saw everywhere I went.
When Yeshua began work on the constitution for God’s Way of Love Organisation and as we began to talk about our future vision I had to face how much disillusionment I still carry about the way our world works and how resolute I feel so many of us still are in our decision to deny God and love, to judge our childlike selves and to stifle our creativity in favour of ‘fitting in’.
It seems that to truly embody this vision of ours I must have the courage to grieve my feelings of hopelessness, my belief that the world can’t change. This conviction of mine comes not only from my experiences in the past 30 years but has its roots in a time when a great dream was lost, when Light living in one man was extinguished through murder and a group of people grieved deeply that the presence of God’s Love on earth was so brief. It lived on only in a few of us, and to a much lesser degree. Our devastation was complete and my loss threatened my will to live, my faith and my hope. It broke my heart in a way that now it seems cleaved in two. The wound is covered over by scar tissue and yet underneath is still raw and weeping and excruciating to touch.
To make way for hope and creativity, I must grieve my loss and I must also cease to regard my childlike self in the way that my parents and environment taught me to. We learn to treat ourselves harshly and with reserve to avoid the pain of our wonder, excitement and imagination being stifled and judged by others. We reject ourselves so that we do not feel the grief of how rejected we were by others in our innocent state.
Our tears will free the sparkling children, full of wonder, big ideas and dreams, who are still waiting there within us. We can all learn to be trusting children again – only this time we can come to rely on a God of Love who accepts us as we are and delights in our childlike inventiveness and wonder.
When I consider God’s Way of Love as a vehicle for me (and all of us) to reconnect to this state; as a place that will welcome our tears at past dreams dashed, and teach us to hope again with vulnerable hearts no longer afraid of loss, I am moved beyond words.
I quietly tremble and let my heart release its fear. I allow the tears of my past Great Loss.
In order to hold our dream in my heart I must repair my faith and trust once again in the power, patience and endurance of Love. I must let my tears flow and allow their tracks to create pathways, passageways that may deepen and lead me back to my excitement, spontaneity and creativity.
May the passage of all our tears teach us the wisdom of letting go of expectations and control. May it rebuild in us strong roads of faith, faith in the unfailing strength our Father and the unending generosity of our Mother.
May God bless the beautiful child within you today,

Mary

[1] Emily writes cool stuff about this here & here