A Wild, Holy Madness

It is a wild, holy kind of madness—being an artist.

I’m not sure many reeallyyy get it, unless they’ve lived it.

The 2 a.m. wake-ups to answer a whisper you can’t ignore. The quiet sacrifices. All the nos you say to make space for the guttural, full-fire yeses that live deep in the marrow of your bones.

It’s not always pretty or easy.

But it is sacred.

And I wouldn’t trade it for a thing.

~

If someone had of told me I was moving back to Tasmania to write a book, I would have laughed.

Not a “not a chance” kind of laugh—more of a “this kind of makes sense but also… are you fucking serious / do I haaaave to” laugh.

Sometimes, there is nothing we can do but throw our heads back and giggle at the sheer insanity and ferocity with which some things insist on pouring through us.

~

I was moving home to put my work out into the world. To facilitate large-scale women retreats. And to fall madly in love.

Writing a book wasn’t on the cards—until the deck was laid out in front of me, inside a home that had been as many things as I hope to one day be.

~

The first home built by horse and tree on the Tasman Peninsula.

Once a post office for convicts.

A grocery store.

A museum.

A home for many artists from faraway lands who somehow found themselves at the bottom of the world.

~

I looked around this beautiful, old, yellow house nestled in the small fairyland of Koonya. Stared at its 1980s wallpaper peeling from the walls. Its cracks and crevices. The stories echoing from inside its frame.

And I decided: there would be no better place to set free to the ones that lived inside mine.

~

And so it began. A 9-month journey of writing Word Bone Woman; the book to hold us all.

346 pages inscribed with holiness, meaning, discovery.

Born of land, lineage and the long echoes of women who came before me.

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At times, it felt like an act of reclamation—to write words on ancestry, the body, the sacred—upon lands that had long known the opposite.

To write on a wooden porch where the convict who brought my bloodline to this land might once have stood to collect his mail.

~

Times are changing.

I am faith-filled.

Hope-filled.

And completely, in love with the land that raised me.

~

Writing this book upon her soil felt like a silent thank you.

A quiet, now spoken prayer.