Holidays are holy days. They are days and nights of journeying and learning. They are going away from home in order to return home to myself. 

Holy-days are not one neat, small story bundled into one. They are a cornucopia of the little stories, the little blessings, the tiny miracles, the shifts and the moments.

What if I just told you some of these little stories? Would they all thread together so you might know just a little of what it was?

Sitting in the tree with my big sister. Talking and laughing and getting each other. Her laugh makes me feel like she totally and utterly gets me. When we were kids, we were so connected we were more like twins. It kinda feels the same now.

Waking up in the morning to the most beautiful dawn in the world – there is always a soft fog over the paddocks and between the trees. The dog and horses are always outside waiting. It is quiet and heavenly.

Little sis & her lil pony, Storm

Having a huge lunch beneath the trees. Large, mismatched tables with white tablecloths. Twenty brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Family.

Just some of us.

Sitting out by the campfire every night. Perfecting how to cook a marshmallow. Talking. Laughing. It’s my very favourite thing in the world to do at night.

Planting a crystal grid all around our farm house with my sisters, cousin, niece and nephew. My niece and nephew showing everyone in their pure, precious way how to listen to crystals through your ears and heart. My beautiful, intuitive nephew planting the generator crystal, blessing it, breaking a stick over his leg, and cleansing the home with his clapsticks. Sacred wonder. Hawks dipping down, circling to watch over us.

Finding a hippie healing+crystals+bookstore opened up in my small-town home town. Walking in to find one of my friends from school is the owner. It’s been twelve years since we were adventuring in astral travel and spell-creating. So beautiful that she’s still doing her journey and living it… and that I’m still doing mine. (Yay! I can move back there now, knowing my kind of store+people are there.) Going back again and again for talks and healings and chai tea. Best.ever.

Waking up in the morning to go climb my favourite tree. My Dad drives up to the house on his motorbike. “Where are you Leonie?” he calls. “Up the tree!” I call back. He comes out to stand beneath the tree. Some things just never change. And I like that.

My little sister and I giving my grandmother and nan a spa day in the sun – using gorgeous moisturisers to nourish their skin that’s been living for ninety years. Holy and blessed.

Mamma-kins!

Not being Goddess Leonie for a while. Not even being Leonie. Just being Boney – my childhood nickname. Stealing bear hugs from my dad. Playing “four in the bed” with my mum and sisters in the morning. Climbing my favourite tree. Just being quiet and still and not working and not thinking. Making campfires the most important part of the whole day.

Motorbike riding with my 15 year old cousin Lokkie up into the hills. Only slowing down to give each other a big, happy grin before careening off again. I remembered just how zenned out I feel on a motorbike, feeling the wind all around me, and the grace of the earth beneath me, and the flowing movements like a fish swimming.

Missing my love like a bear misses its cave. I don’t want to be all crazy love song, but he really is my starlight.

Going crystal shopping with my sweet sister-in-law Sharne, and her full moon belly where  her daughter is growing, getting ready to bloom. Taking photos of her floating in her pool, the sunlight dancing all over her like stars on a night sky.

My beautiful big brother taking Sharne and me to a secluded beach. I photograph them together, laughing and holding each other and the belly where their daughter lives. They are all white and drenched with blessings. A dog swims out into the sea beside us. 

Crystal gridding the land with my mum in the sunset. Rainbow colours of calcite beneath trees. Making a labyrinth on my family’s farm with cousins and siblings and children. It sits by a rainforested creek bed, beneath white gums. We are undoing all that has passed, and blooming our beautiful new tomorrow. Feeling the energy shifting, changing, blooming.

Going to a beautiful, secluded beach with my big, beautiful tribe. My dad has organised a surprise lunch date for us all there. We sit beneath leafy fronds by a swirling turquoise sea, blissed out and happy. I photograph my tribe. How is it that family teaches us how to love so utterly what could be complete strangers? Family is not just my kin-kin: it is the people they love too, and the distant threads that weave us together. All the ways that our cells could light up at seeing each other.

Playing the “who is my cousin” game with my cousin Sherrin. She has the most beautiful laugh in the world that warms me up like cumquat syrup. I am teaching her that in Proserpine, the town named after a Goddess, we are all related. We are all cousins. To prove the point, another cousin pulls up a chair to our table at the airport. As we walk through security, a security guard is a cousin. We take bets on the air host being our cousin. And the reason we know our cousins here in Proserpine? Because our elders are still here, still remembering, still knowing all the ways we are connected and intertwined.

And maybe if we still had the elders of this planet around, they could teach us too how related we all are, how we actually are all each other’s family, how our genes sing to each other too. How at the end of the day, you are my cousin too.

I think everyone in the world should have a big brother like mine…

I’m not kidding, cuz. I don’t think we’re really that far apart. Proserpine is just a microcosm of the world.

The End.

{The End is a Leonie Trademark of finishing up a story. I say it all ze blinking time. It all started because of Chris. I’d tell him a hilllllarious story (to me), and finish it… and he would say “Is that it? Where’s the punchline honey????”

So now, it’s all about saying The End so he knows when he’s supposed to laugh. Because he’s awesome, and always does. As long as he knows it’s The End.

The End.}

And home again. But this time with this little dream in me that has remembered who I am when I’m on the farm. The parts of me that wake up at sunrise, because the sun is calling me out to play on the dew-kissed earth, playing with the animals. Playing.

I remembered how to play again, like I always have.

The child inside me is not so far away.

For all these gifts and more – I am crying as I write this.

Thank you farm. Thank you Proserpine. Thank you for teaching me who I am.

Love, as wide as the Proserpine sky.

xoxoxo

P.S. I’m slowly adding more photos to my Facebook album if you’re up for more holiday journeying goodness.

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