Surviving by Pulling Away the Crumbling Foundations of Lies.
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I fled my childhood home of rural Australia before I was 20 years old, alone, with a red suitcase bigger than my dieting body, and nobody in a London Tube station who would help me carry it down the stairs.
I was running like a deer (in retrospect, with a stamped visa and shuffling in immigration lines and smiling dutifully at uniformed border staff; such is the stilted polite luxury of running away when you’re upwardly mobile) from violence, from relationships with boyfriends and brothers and fathers that reverberated backwards into eternity with the tinny vibration of holes in walls, spitting in faces, clothes torn off, rage, broken howling brown men so beaten by a system that they’d eat their own women alive and violate their young.
They had arrived by plane, in Australia, some years before. Their hearts enlivened by the heat, the dashing floods, the electric storms, the crackling bushfires. They understood this. Hoping the beaches would bring a tranquility to their souls, sunshine to their fists, and peace to my mother. It didn’t. And so, 15 years later, I ran.
I stayed away for many years in the damp and polite haven that was seaside Britain until I was called back by more uniformed, bored faces. To ask the questions that make women sink to the darkest pits of their stomach. The ones designed to spread in the airlessness of their cringing shamed body and drown their lungs to stop their breath.
What did he do then? Did you cry out? Did you fight back? Why didn’t you tell anybody? Are you making this up?
Still I spoke. Still I spoke. As one by one my whānau, my family, turned away. The old story. I was supposed to drown. The truth was stained and shamed them.
In those two weeks, I lost all things, all people, I excavated and pulled away the crumbling foundations of all of the lies and poured them onto a detective’s yellow notepad. I saw it as a gift to my one-day daughter. That she would only ever need to run into the wide blue horizon.
In the end, this is all that was left.
***
Australia is the driest livable continent on Earth.
And there are many reasons why a person — otherwise sane — would take a lighter and set fire to a patch of trees. Or drop a cigarette along a dry bush track. Three months of the year, it is common to be on alert for a bushfire wanting to swallow your home and all your jewelry, and maybe your children too.
What is most important to do is to know your seasons, and be prepared to set alight, first, the fields that surround you. They become ash — they cannot catch fire and be destroyed more than once. Firefighters call this back burning.
What is vital is that you know when a wildfire is coming, and that you are prepared to raze yourself to the ground — if necessary — to survive.
It matters most that you get there first. That you burn yourself alive as soon as you see the smoke.
***
It may also be helpful to know that the great and wise eucalyptus tree survives wildfires. The heat of flame cracks and flings her seed pods wide to grow from the ashes, and she bleeds oil down her soft green arms. It is both medicinal and intoxicating.
May you too bloom so radically.
***
Kelsey Avalon is a Maori-Australian holistic counselor and writer, living in post-Troubles Northern Ireland. Taught from childhood the ‘old ways’ of Polynesian ancestral wisdom and native spirituality of her warrior people, witnessing unspeakable abuse and running wild in the arid landscapes, Kelsey practices the art of ‘korero’ — stories that are felt in the bones, spoken for those who have had their voice taken from them — and writes of cultural trauma, spirituality, love, recovery, feminism, diaspora and identity. She is also a practiced astrologer, and has found her way by the stars, everywhere from the pyramids of Egypt to the jungles of Peru. Her first book Moon Magic: The Ancient Art of Divine Timing Made Modern, was published in 2016.
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