You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.
You've changed.
It's an accusation, a spiky barb.
How dare you?
We all knew who you were, we'd got comfortable with the space and the shape you take up in our lives, and now you've gone and changed. You're spreading, moving, stretching, questioning, You're settling into yourself. You're accepting fewer excuses, you're offering fewer absolutions, you're giving fewer.
You know the drill, don't change. Stay who you were.
Please, all parts of you, your faith and your body, of course, will be strictly marked on how little or much they have altered over time. But also please keep a tight grip on actual you, on inside that matters.
Please stay where you are and who you were, particularly if it suited us, nurtured us, made life easier for us at every turn, particularly if you being you and doing the things that you were doing allowed me to be me and do all the things that I wanted to do and just kept the world turning exactly as it was. Well, good luck with that, because they call it the change this time of life, and for many of us it can feel like something big is rolling
in and stirring everything up. From this vantage point, when we have a minute to raise our heads and look back, we can see we've already transformed, many times already. We've bent ourselves to fit in. We've been pushed around by our hormones, our bodies. We've stifled ourselves for acceptance. We've opened ourselves for love. We've put ourselves back together after loss. Nothing was ever in exactly the same place again. We grew people inside us, or we fought with the bodies
that could not. We've always been changing, it's been the only constant. We've just been pretending all this time to be static, smooth, reliable, steady. So yes, we've changed. We're changing still. We're learning how to be in this new version of ourselves, testing out our wobbly new grown up legs, realigning what matters, tapping into instincts we've pushed away for too long, the kind promised at the start of every year, free with a gym membership and a serve of shame.
But the new you that understands that the time for standing still and playing nice is over.
We've changed you. See. Hello, my name is.
Holly Wainwright and I am Mid Midlife, mid Family, mid Change. This is season three of our show Mid for Generation X women who are anything but and look, it's not only for Generation X women, actually, but for anyone who wants to sit down with us and have the only kinds of conversations. We've got time for real ones, honest ones, funny ones, curious ones.
No small talk here.
Friends, and over the next eight episodes, the conversations we've got for you are so big it's going to be hard to keep them squeezed into that phone in your hand. We are talking about hormones, We're talking about divorce, We're talking about sexuality shifts. We're talking about invisible illness and dickheads and ambition. But today I am bringing you something that I have literally been biting my tongue and binding my fingers.
Not to tell you about before. Now we are bringing you.
A conversation about transformation and change and so much more. It's about bravery and being wild, and about trusting your gut, about facing reality with clear eyes, and about surviving the unsurvivable.
It's about Gina Chick.
What I found was that I could lit my instincts and teach me what I needed to know. I really wanted to show that there is a way of being at home in the wild.
You know who Gina Chick is.
She went into the Tasmanian wilderness for season one of the TVs shown alone Australia and almost immediately imprinted into the Australian psyche. It is And we talk about this today like we were just waiting for her, And in the flicker of firelight on an unforgiving beach, this incredible, capable older woman revealed herself to be as someone who had lived through so much and lost so much, but every bit of that experience had only made her grow stronger,
love harder, live more. In this conversation inspired by her book, and it's a really good book. It's called We Are the Stars, we talk about all that loss, about all those different seasons of life she's lived through, from being a wild young girl with a baby bird in her pocket, mercilessly bullied at school, to being a starry eyed raver at the peak of Sydney's club scene.
To being a survivalist who.
Falls in love with a man from somewhere else gets diagnosed with cancer at the very moment she's about to become a mother and has three precious years with her baby girl before that sickness comes for her too, and the woman who chose, in the aftermath of unimaginable loss, to change again, to live and live big. This conversation
literally changed me. In fact, quite a few of the conversations in this upcoming season have If I'm honest and I'm going to shut up about me now and introduce you to a truly extraordinary force of nature Gina Chick on transformation. Gina, this fucking book. This book is brilliant. It's heartbreaking, it really is. It's powerful, it's honest. It feels like you, so I want to read you just one little thing going to do?
Lads, look at all of your.
This is so so many like folded over PAGESLFA.
Did you rip any well.
I've got it, as I was going to say to you, because in your book you tell the story about how when you're a kid you love book so much, when you love them, you tear the pages.
Out and eat them.
I could have nibbled on this book, Gina, I could have nibbled on this book. But I want to read you this tiny bit. The context of this is actually very difficult time in your life. When you're telling your friend Kim Farrant, film director friend, you have cancer and you're pregnant, and she says to you, ge, she laughs, which seems you know, that's what good friends do. I
guess in that situation. Gee, she says, when you're waiting to come into this body, the Angel at the gate stopped you with his clipboard and asked what experience you wanted in this life, and you just said, tick every box. That's what this book feels like. It feels to me like if you're going to do something, you don't do it half asked. It's not like a tick the boxes I was on TV kind of book. No, it's nothing like that. Do you think that is who you are?
Are you just all in? And have you always been that?
It's a really good question and the answer I think is fairly obvious from my time on alone and also from this book. I am absolutely full throttle and have been ever since I can remember, so from the youngest age, I've always been Yeah, full on. I used to have a motto and I think I was in primary school and I wanted to have a T shirt that said this, which was grab life with both hands and stuff it
in your mouth and on the back, don't choke. Maybe I was in high school, but I can remember like I've always whatever life has been offering, I've wanted it. I haven't wanted to miss any morsel of it. And I've never been afraid of life. And that's probably a lot to do with my parents, that lack of fear, but it means that whenever there's an opportunity, I'm much more likely to say yes than no. And if I am going to take that opportunity, I am going to do it to my last breath.
I was going to say. I think one of the things about getting to this point of our lives and looking back that obviously you have had to do to write this book. Often we've lived many lives. You have definitely lived many lives. There's the life that you lived obviously as a child in Javis Bay, a wild child in the literal sense of the word. There's the bully kid in your teenage years at school. Then you find your family almost in Sydney in the queer rave scene
in the nineties. Oh my god, I love those chapters so much, and then we'll get to midlife. But I wonder if when we look back at that, we think, did all those things make me who I am? Or was I always this person? And you think you were always this?
Yeah? I think we come into life, into our bodies with like a fingerprint of our personality. And I've been lucky enough and blessed enough to be able to explore those I've had a life of privilege in that I grew up loved and I grew up in a house where time was a commodity that was valued with family, so there was a lot of family time. I grew up in a house where my creativity was fed and fostered. And I grew up in Jervis Bay, I grew up
in Paradise. So I had the privilege of being able to express these facets of my personality and have them fed. And you know, I've been able to follow a lot of them, and just even one of them is unusual, but I've managed to be able to. You know, I have so many that are actually quite weird and weave them into a life.
It's interesting, though, So you've got these different lives. One of the places I would love to ask you about jumping into is a lot of the big adventures. As established, you've always been having adventures, but it's somewhere in your late thirties forty ish after you actually have quite a terrifying health episode that you decide that you are going to go to tracking school and you're going to really
jump into this sort of survivalist world. And that changes the direction of your life in several ways because you travel over there and you meet Lee and then he ends up being your husband and the father of Blaze. What made you decide at that point in your life to make that jump?
So one of the things that I talk about in the book, and I probably I think I don't actually mention this explicitly. I trust my gut. The sort of scary health episode that happened when I was I think at thirty was after like a whole bunch of experiences where I didn't trust my gut, and I think it nearly killed me not doing that. And in the aftermath of that, I got it, I learned it. And so then after that, whenever I would sort of have an opportunity or a crossroads come up, I wouldn't ask my
head what the right decision was. I'd actually ask my belly or the wolf in my belly, and if the wolf in my bally said do this, then I would do it. And I wouldn't even ask any questions. And so when it came to going to track a school, at that point, I think I would hear the name of a school, or i'd hear the name of a teacher. I'd hear the name of something, and it'd ring me like a bell, and I would know, Oh, I have to do this. I don't know why. I'll find out later.
The first time I heard about track of school like, oh, wow, I don't even know what that is, but I'm going to have to do it, but it's not yet. And then I heard it again a year later, and it rang me even deeper. And that was when I said, oh, I really need to research this now. And I looked it up online and went, oh, my god, this is amazing. There's this school where you can learn how to track and how to stalk, and how to make fire by rubbing sticks together, and how to survive in the wilderness
with only your hands. Basically, it just sang to me. So for me it became choiceless in that moment, I actually didn't have a choice. Then it was just a matter of, well, how am I going to get myself there?
Because I guess if people who aren't super familiar with your story and who met you on alone and saw how capable you are in the bush, we've talked about how you were always massively drawn to nature, like in the book you talk about as a little child, how obsessed you were with creatures and bringing the outside inside and having a snake in a mouse cage and a bird in the thing in your pocket at school and
all those things. But you had spent a good decade living a very urban Sydney life, like in the middle of Sydney, living near Taylor Square, partying every night, building this sort of tribe of very interesting, great artistic friends. But you were a city person at that point. And I wonder if it's I've heard you say that you've always felt like a wild thing in a human's body, and I reckon lots of women feel a bit like that,
but they've spent a lifetime taming that wild thing. Is it trite to say that these moments where you were like getting to the end of that time where you'd I mean, I don't want to spoil everything for the book, but you had a bad relationship, you'd had to dig yourself out of a financial hole by working your butt off. Obviously it was always very determined in that the wild was calling you again. Was it about getting back in
touch with that wild person? And how can some of the women listening to this learn how to listen to that?
Yeah, I love that you've asked me this. Anything I say, I'm not saying this is the way the world is. It's the way my world is. But for me, what is true is that we are stone age creatures in modern bodies. You know, the vast majority of the information in our DNA comes from hunter gatherer ancestors. If we've been Homo sapiens for three hundred and fifty thousand years, the three hundred and forty thousand of those years we were hunter gatherers. Like that is this enormous like well
of information that we contain within ourselves genetically. And now we're in this world where we live in boxes and we get our food in packets, and we can't hear the storms coming and we can't sense the information coming of the weather we're not hearing the birds telling us what's going on, but we're designed to connect in on that level. We are designed to connect infinitely with this web of life. So that is actually our birthright, and I think women can really understand that. I think that's
why so many women garden. And it's not just women who garden. But the thing that I think happened when I was out on a loan and my journey resonated with so many women is because they could say, that's me, that's an extreme version, but I know I get that feeling when I'm out gardening, I get that feeling when I'm hanging out with my kids. It was more that there's this familiarity that we have with our wild essence, and we live in a world that tells us that
it's suspect and dangerous. But women, deep down, we know that's who we are. We have that resonance. And the thing that I find really sad is that because we are on the tail end of this patriarchal culture that views women's wildness as suspect and other and dangerous. I like that you say we're at the tail end of it. Yeah,
But because we are on that tail end. The messages that we have got as women are that our wildness, our uncontrollableness, our ferocity, our rage, our messiness, our creativity, our life force is terrifying. And so there are all of these structures in place to keep us small and obedient and behave and be good girls and behave, and you know, and so for me, what I see is that it doesn't take much for women to start to remember and for that wild creature that's in all of
our bellies to wake up. It just needs to be whispered to and to have its ears scratched, and to be sort of like hab its nose pointed out to a full moon, and to be able to be let out on a wild beach at night, and to maybe go for a walk in the bush and maybe take its shoes off and get out in the garden. It doesn't take much, and we do start to like stretch out of our buy cages that we've been put into and to believe in that voice that we all have, because it's a bit like tinker Bell, you know, you
know how tinker Bell. Everybody had to clap to wake tinker Bell up, that wild animal creature wise part of us just needs us to believe in it and then it starts to plump into life.
I think I've seen you say that. After alone, there were a lot of women of a certain age, probably the a who are listening to this, would come up to you and say thank you, because also you were a representation of a grown up woman, as I like to say, rather than saying we're middle aged or any of those awful words. Who is competent, who is brave,
who is unabashed and all those things. And it's something that we all sort of need to see because we're all being sort of pitied a little bit and told we're.
A bit useless.
Oh my god, it drives me absolutely bomb because where do we get to see the real us on a billboard? Like we get told that Demi Moore looks amazing and she's had what seven hundred and fifty thousand, a million dollars worth of plastic surgery to look amazing. We get to see the news articles where someone of a woman of a certain age is like, Oh, she wows in her bikini body. That's how we get marketed as long
as we can wow in a bikini body. For me, one of the most amazing things that happened from alone. Is I say this in the keynote speeches, that I'm in a lot. I feel like there was a jigsaw puzzle shaped piece in the zeitgeist and nobody knew it was there until I told my story and suddenly it was just suddenly like whoa. And because there was this jigsaw puzzle shaped piece in the zeitgeist, it meant that when alone happened, and it did happen, suddenly women got
to see themselves. They got to see a postmenopausal woman who's got wobbly bits and wrinkles and silver feathers and swears and laughs and shows her rashy thighs and isn't interested in marketing and is barefoot and can connect with nature in the way they relate. But it's also vital and creative and sexy and articulate and beautiful in that raw way that an older woman is beautiful. And I say older and I own it. I'm not talking like, you know, let's all be like so glad.
You brought that up, because I wanted to talk to you about this, Like change and transformation is part of nature, right, And it seems to me that you've always known that. We talked to the beginning like you are who you are, but you've also been through some extraordinary transformations and we'll
get to some of them. But a lot of older women are told don't change, like your face shouldn't change, your body shouldn't change, your demeanor shouldn't change, don't be too scary, don't be too outspoken, don't be too experienced, all of those things. And I saw you saying I don't know where I saw you saying this, so excuse me, but that when you were younger, you were a bit glib about aging, and that you were like, it's going
to be great. Who doesn't want to be wise? But it is confronting when you do see yourself changing, And you said something really great about that. You also have that voice that speaks to you unkindly sometimes but you've got to come back, So how have you reflection?
So for me, that thing about the glib is so hilarious. And I get really annoyed because I'm around a lot of younger women all the time, and I say, oh, you know, aging is great and women should just age naturally and blah blah blah blah blah, and I, you know, I love the wrinkles, and I'm like, yeah, please don't tell me how to age until you've been here, and
you know what it's like. I'm sorry, but your opinion actually doesn't mean squat saying how women should age or how we should feel about our aging bodies and our aging faces. You have no idea how confronic it is until the estrogen falls out of your body and with it collagen, and suddenly it's like time lapse photography of watching this, like this portrait is a portrait in the act attic and I'm it. And so I was that glib. Oh yes, because my face basically didn't change, It really didn't.
I could have been generic something between twenty and fifty, you know, And so I was really glib. I was like, oh, yes, I'm fine with aging. And then menopause happened, and the time lapse of menopause changing things was super confronting. And I have an absolutely strong strand of vanity.
Absolutely you have your adiva, which I, yes, I so do and I think many of us do. But that's something else I meant to be a bit ashamed of.
But yeah, and again, so it can.
Be hard to see yourself change.
Oh my god, it is. And so then to have that voice, because then there's this whole narrative of like, I should be okay with it, man, that the messages that I'm getting from billboards and from society are that women are attractive as long as they are botoxed and as long as they look twenty five. And to be an older woman, as long as you still look thirty five, then you're valued, and you're valuable and you're attractive. That's
what I'm being told. But I should also be told that I should age naturally and I should be graceful in that, and I should be able to embrace that.
And so there's all of these messages what ends up happening, and what ended up happening for me was like, all of a sudden, my body looks different, my face looks different, and that unkind voice just starts going, oh my god, there's me, me, me, And so what I do when that happens is I've just like, for me, the interesting thing isn't that that voice is there, because I think we all have that. It's like, what do we do with it when that shows up? Instead of making that
voice wrong? Well, I shouldn't feel that way. I do feel that way. It's not all of me, but I have that voice that is horrified on some mornings looking in the mirror, telling me I shouldn't care, or that they shouldn't have that vanity. I'm like, sorry, it's true, it's not in me. So for me, the part that I focus on is my vitality. It is how much life force is available to me. Now, if I am at a period in my life where I'm sick, I
don't actually have much life force. If I've been through a huge time, I might not have much life force. So how do I feed the life force that I have? And those like small things like for me, asking what is the most nourishing thing I can do for myself today? Like instead of going how can I look after everyone else's needs? What is the most nourishing thing I can
do for myself today? That is going to feed my vitality, because when someone has vitality, when we are brimming with vitality, it's like for me, it's the antidote to that voice that says you should look a certain way. And I notice when I notice someone who identifies having vitality, I don't judge them like I don't notice their looks so much.
Thing about that is because I agree with you so much, is that when my cruel voice starts, I do the things that matter to me about holding onto whatever youth means is like staying curious, staying interested, staying creative, staying moving, like not atrifying like that's and I know that that's when I'm my happiest and I don't feel as bad
about what's going on on the outside. But the mean trick there is sometimes feeling bad about what's happening on the outside stops you from viewing all those things because you're just solutely secure and absolutely and they should hie.
Yeah, it's like I don't want to go outside because I feel like I'm basically just a potato sack with eyeballs at the moment, Like, you know, why would I possibly go out? And I think that then to be able to have some practices that we can do inside that are gentle and that do feed our creativity, because for me, our creativity that is life force, our creative force, especially as women, that is our life force, is our
creative function. And so to find the smallest ways that we can actually feed that and you know, just those tiny little baby steps, and it might mean that like yet today I don't want to go outside. Tomorrow I don't want to go outside, But maybe I can go out in the garden and get my fingers in the dirt. Maybe I can just get into the practice of just weeding.
I love that beautiful focus where we can bring all of our presence to some creative act, and that for me is such an antidote and a way to build our inner fire and our inner resources to then be able to take the bigger steps into the world.
What has nature taught you about aging? Because I wonder if that's given you some perspective on that the rest of us might not have.
Absolutely so for me, being in connection with nature means being in connection with cycles of death and rebirth. Everything in nature has a season. Everything you know, a mountain sees and takes a bit longer than a flowers season, but everything has a season. So when we're out in nature, nature is this amazing mirror that shows us us, whatever
the story is, whatever our hamsters in our heads. We can go outside and we can sit quietly and put the phone off and let our eyes go soft and let nature come to us with its stories, and we will find our own stories reflected as metaphors wherever we look. So I find that when we're in walls and when we're on social media and on our devices, we're in the echo chamber of the algorithm. We're either in the echo chamber of our own algorithm or in the algorithm
of our culture. And it's completely artificial, completely artificial, and it's nothing to do with capital our reality. None of those stories are true, but we believe them because we don't have a greater context. But when we go out in nature, we are designed to be able to see to a horizon, an infinite edge. And when we see an infinite edge, whether it's a horizon or whether it stars, we get a sense of ourselves as a speck of
dust in an expanding universe. We have a sense of context where we are not the most important thing, and that then gives us some space to be able to put our own timeline and our own stories and our own aging in the context, in greater context, in greater timelines, in geological time, in the tree life cycle, in the forest life cycle, in the things that are rotting away
in the leaves, at our feet. And I find that the more we open ourselves up to the wisdom of nature as it is unfolding, and it doesn't care about us, it's not prioritizing us for those lessons. They're just there. And what we see is a There are no mirrors in nature, so we don't ever get to see ourselves in the way we see ourselves in mirrors. We don't get to judge our own appearance in that way. In nature.
The best we can do is look into a pull or a creek or a river or something like that, and then you've still got ripples, You've still got nature all around. One breath of wind and it's gone, it's distorted. So we don't have that judgment and that value system.
We also in nature, we don't have the value system of anything being more important than anything else, which is part of our the echo chamber of our own algorithm, is that we're more important, or some lives are more important, or some stories are more important, and blah blah blah. But when we're in nature, that all burns away. And so what I find is that if the hamsters and the head miles are happening, if I get out and get into nature and take myself for a walk for
an hour or two hours. Those lessons and that context has given me such a completely different perspective. I have a sense of myself. I have a sense of myself in relationship with capital, our reality, rather than in the fantasy of my own crazy stories.
In a moment, more of conversation with the Mighty Gina Chick, but first this short break. So Blaze's story begins, and you're I think you're forty when you have Blaze. You're nearly forty one, yes, And you have Blaze. And you and Lee had been living in Bondai with your beautiful friend Stevie, and you move back down the coast, and it seems for a while idyllic, so idyllic the way you describe. You were living on a property for a while, and you'd started beginning to run what will become the
Rewilding camps. Am I right? And so kids are coming to the camps, your friends can come. You're living this beautiful life, Blaze. Well, tell me about Blaze.
I shouldn't. My little munchkin. So Blaze was a really extraordinary kid, and everybody says that about their kids. But like she really was an extraordinary kid. I think because I went through so much to get her here, and I did so much work on myself when I was going through, you know, pregnancy with cancer.
So you were diagnosed with cancer when you were in the early stages of pregnancy with Blaze. And you explain this so in such beautiful detail in the book, the decisions you had to make about what treatment to take in order to save your life. Said that she wasn't an orphan when she was born. Almost, well, the other that's when she was born and you have the treatment, as you say, when she was born, you lost your hair.
You were both, we were both born from them and the chemo.
But then you're in remission and you're.
And then we were down. Then we were living in the country. But she always had this silence to her, you know, that thing of they you know, babies come in with the personality they've got. She was like a universe, you know, there was a universe looking out of her eyes. She had this incredible stillness to her, the incredible calm, and this incredible presence. And so when we were living in the bush, and of course babies will take the
life of the parents. They've got and we were living in the bush, and so she would know the calls of all the birds and she'd say hello to them, and she would know the scat of all the animals because Lee would say, oh, that's from a bandicoot, and that's from a wombat, and so she would just point them out, and she became so connected to the bush that the bush wasn't afraid of her, and then animals would just come, and the birds would just come, and
she had this incredibly rich life of connection with nature. And that was our life as well. So yeah, it was incredibly idyllic, and it'll come to an end.
I wanted to ask you about your wonderful parents later because I love the descriptions of Christmas at Javis Bay. But that is when you find out that Blaze has cancer in her stomach.
Yeah, No, it wasn't actually at Christmas. No, it wasn't long after. So, yeah, but finding out, I saw the lump in her and I'd been sort of going, oh, belly's a bit big, and then I felt it, and yeah, it was like I knew immediately because I'd felt the cancer in my own breast, and you know, when I talk with people who've had cancer. Once you've felt cancer, once you've felt what that feels like, then it's your fingers know. And as soon as I felt it in her, I knew, and yeah, that was big.
You write again so beautifully and clearly about this looking the unimaginable in the eye. Well, it's not unimaginable to you, of course, about how you had to become very clear, very centered, very calm, like I'm the one who's dealing with this. You stay in ronin McDonald house, You have
all these different experiences. I wanted to thank you for when you write the chapter about the day you had to say goodbye to Blaze is obviously it goes without saying that that's just the most unimaginable chapter, but the respects you show for the reader you also you actually write in the book this bit's going to be really hard if you want to skip ahead. And I know personally so many people who are going to be very
grateful to you for writing what follows. Yeah, because it's not only you, like, it's not only you and your family. It's a lot of family stories, and they because people are so scared to look that in the eye, that the unthinkable loss I think they're going to feel very seen by that story.
Yeah, I hope. So. I mean, my my attitude and my process with death is that it is horrifying and unutterably beautiful, and it is both is it is that all at once, and so whenever I'm writing this, it is bringing all of it, you know. That's and that's how I do it. And after we lost Blaze, I did write, you know, quite a lot of posts on Facebook, and very quickly in the beginning, people would say, I'm sorry for your loss, and I don't need that. Let's
have a conversation. And so I would write these posts and each post would be going into the grief but then coming out of it, and like the people who would read them would start to trust me that it was like, well, this is going to be hard, but where we're going to go on the other side is actually going to be beautiful. And so it very quickly turned into these amazing conversations with people sharing their own grief and their own loss and speaking about grief in
a way that I think our culture doesn't. You know, that there isn't a we don't have what I would call nourishing rituals and conversations for grief, like we have a very like our whitey way of doing it is so disconnected from indigenous ceremonies and rituals and the wisdom that comes with those ceremonies and rituals and what people actually need to be able to metabolize grief. Like we've stuck it in a box and we've you know, put flowers on it, and we've said I'm sorry for your
loss because it's all too hard. And for some people it is too hard, and I totally respect that, which is why I write in that bit of the book, you know, if this is too hard, just you know, skip ahead. We'll catch up with you. But for those who do want to find a language for their own grief and their own loss, there's something about losing a child that lets us access our own grief. And I find that if conversations about grief are held well, it's like there's so it's such a part, it is such
a part of our lives. It is such a part of what we're talking about with menopause, Like we're grieving our faces, we're grieving our bodies, we're grieving our sexuality, we're grieving our birthing ability. We're grieving at like it's like, holy shit, death's coming up fast. Like we're grieving just in that one way, and in every day, in every way, things are dying. Every moment is dying into every other.
My picture of myself is dying in every moment. But because we're so terrified to have those conversations, we're actually hanging on to the things that hurt us instead of having like a fluid and dancers language for letting go that has to come from talking about death. That's the root of it. And if we can talk about death and just shift our perspective a little and shift our our sort of our fluidity a little, that then ripples
out into every corner of our lives. And that is one of the main things I wanted to do with this book. I really wanted to do that.
You've done it because it's not in any way like glossing over it or being God. No, it's the opposite. But you talk about some of the rituals that you know that you and Lee and your family, and it's actually beautiful. You write about how the women and your family just kind of came together on the day that you have your ritual for Blaze at home and looking around and seeing the women cooking and bringing all these things together and thinking about all that losses, and it's amazing.
I want to read you a little bit about because you also write amazingly about how other people's reactions to your grief, which you've just touched on, really is that, especially in the immediate aftermath, they all wanted you, almost expected you to fall apart. And you live in a small community. Everybody knows you, and everybody knows Blaze, and everybody is devastated they were, And you're kind of like, in public, I didn't do that. That wasn't what I
needed to do. But you also don't shy away from saying you know in private you absolutely have keened and wailed and screamed and screamed for the will to bring
her back. You write about choices and change transformations. You're talking about the decision to leave the home where you'd lived in with Blaze, not always obviously you'd been in the bush, but then in her in in the last period of her life, And you say, I see a future where I choose this path keeping a house as a shrine to her three year old self, tending and dusting and trimming its lawns and lighting its candles, house
where neither of us ages. I could hide here forever, cutting myself open again and again on memories and regrets and the shame of the undone and the unset and the actions I can never rescind. And when I read that, I was like, you chose to absolutely do the opposite of that, and you lived on, and you and Lee made the decision to separate, which you also look at
with a very clear eye. There's a portion in the book where you say that, even though you think you might be imagining it, you can see in his eye that maybe there's a tiny part of him that blames you. You talk about knowing that you're too old in inverted commas to give him a baby. So you decide to separate so he can move on with that and you can move on to something new. Talk about change and transformation. Tell me a bit about that process.
So yeah, I mean, the thing with Lee and I is, from the moment we met, we made a choice to show up and take responsibility for whatever our part was in our dynamic. And we have done that over and over and over thousands and thousands of times, and that level of honesty is so confronting, and at various times it's probably been confronting for both of us. I know
it's been confronting for me. But also when there's that level of honesty, it means that you can trust the other person because I can trust, I will absolutely trust that he will tell the truth. Well, what about marketing? There is no, Nope, they're no, absolutely none. And there was well sometimes a little bit of a gloss and an airbrush for Bill Lovely, but nope, there was no
marketing and still isn't. And what that means is that level of conscious relating meant that no matter what was going on, we would both turn up and tell the truth, even if it hurt the other person, no matter what that was. And so for me there was like there was hugely confronting because there was the like, I can't have any more children and he desperately wanted to be a dad again, and that capital reality of that is I can't change that. I can't hate him for that.
That is who he is, This is who I am, and so like, I just have this thing that I don't want to waste energy on a fantasy ever, Ever, no matter what my story is, no matter what I reality I think I should have or I deserve or whatever, if it's not capital reality, it's a fantasy. And if it's a fantasy and I'm wasting energy on it, I'm not going to be able to move forward in my life. The choices I make are not going to be effective.
And so even though it was painful to see that, you know, and we tried every possible way to make it work, but I like, ultimately he needed to be a dad, and I wanted the best for him and me, which means there's like, wow, we got to points like, well, actually this is it. We can't we just can't. You know, these ovaries are not going to be doing anything anymore. You know, they might make Homo Simpsons three Eyed Fish, but that's about it.
And as people who are a little bit familiar with this story know that you and Lee continue to be very much family and run a business together too. And he went on to meet Hannah, and there's a bit in the book where you're like you were there when he first meets her and she's walking away and you can feel the energy and you're like, are you gonna let that ass.
Walk out of your life, and he didn't. He didn't.
And you talk about how you and she a family too, and yeah, they've got beautiful girls and you have. And the thing that I didn't know and loved reading about a little bit towards the end of the book is what your life was like before we all met you alone, because the book actually finishes before alone. Yes it does, which I like, the writer in me is like, I wonder what the publishers thought about that. Yeah, but it's really interesting. But your life was You moved back to Sydney,
am I right? And you were basically breaking your year up into traveling, into running the workshops with Lee, into doing your dance workshops, dance meditation workshops and all those things, and having like your life. I don't know, I just got this sense of a life well lived. At every turn you've lived, You've not lived through because it's still obviously with you, this unimaginable loss of your child and your relationship, but your life was still moving ahead and you.
Absolutely my life was great. And I didn't move back to Sydney, so I'd have four months of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, running five rhythms programs, five rhythms workshops part of the Huntress like taking women out shooting bows and arrows and looking at archetypes of power and dancing in the dancing in retreat centers and it was amazing.
So four months of the year doing that, then four months of the year with Lee running the Rewild your Child programs and vision quests and rites of Passage and the wilderness and sleeping next to a fire, which was amazing. And then four months of the year I'd been my bus and my bus would be up and down the coast and I'd go and visit people in various different places. But I didn't actually have a fixed abode at all. So yeah, I was really like before alone, I was
really happy with my life. My life was great.
After this break, the rest of my life changing, DNA altering conversation with Gina Chick, well, I want to get to alone because, as we say, it isn't in the book, but speaking about change and transformation, I can't imagine very many more profound changes also happen to you. At around fifty van you become and I know you'd hate the word, but a celebrity basically because as you expressed at the beginning of this, and I couldn't agree with you more. There was a hole in the culture with your name
on it. You captured that imagination from here. What did that experience have suddenly becoming very visible give you and what did it take?
Great question? Yes, I still laugh when I hear celebrity. I keep looking around going wait, what, oh you mean me? Or when I'm doing TV stuff and they do this thing in TV which I didn't know where they call whoever the people are who are going to be in front of the camera the talent do They call you the talent and they're like, oh, the talent's over here, and I'm like, oh wait, that's me. Oh I'm talent. Oh my god. It's just so strange. So Alone was
really beautiful. When I went out on Alone, I made a vow of veracity. I thought, the only way I can do this is if I tell the truth and I'm going to keep the camera rolling no matter what. That's the only way this is going to work. Because if I'm editing in my head, if I'm second guessing, if I'm filtering, then you're only going to get half of me. And I can't do half of me. Not capable of half of me. I can't even do like,
you know, eighty or ninety percent. I mean, I only know how to do all of me, which meant alone was terrifying because to be able to say, Okay, well, I'm going to be out there and I'm going to film myself for five or six hours a day and hand it over to other people to turn into stories. But all I knew was that if I just tell the truth, then whatever those stories are, they going to be me. They're just going to be me. So that
was a big choice. That was a big decision. But it also meant that once I'd made that decision, there was only one course of action, which was to show all my inn its, you know, to show everything, to show every part of me, because that's how I live. And what that meant then was as my journey unfolded during those ten weeks, people because it was once a week, people got to actually, in the beginning, oh my god,
that hippie chick, she's dancing in the mosque. We give her a day and I'm like, you know, oh my god, that hippie chick.
Id you.
But then week by week they started saying wait, there's something what she doing, There's something really different. And what it was was like, what I was doing is what all the women who are out there in their gardens and hanging out with their kids know, which is just like I was just connecting. I was receptive and because there was that jigsaw puzzle shaped piece in the zeitgeist. And then I told my story and then that conversation got loud for the first time, and women started hearing
each other having that conversation. And the way I see it is it is actually nothing to do with me. It is nothing to do with me. It is about the story. It is about that story that needed to
be told. You know, in our culture that women are either young and hot or crone, you know, and that there's this whole strata of fucking amazing womanhood where where wise and we're fierce and we're creative and we're receptive, but we also pretty much have no fucks left to give, and we've been refined and we've been sort of hammered by the anvil of either child rearing or just life as a you know, in our twenties and thirties, and now here we are with these gifts to bring to
the world, and we get told by the world that we're invisible. Fuck that as absolutely fuck that. And so by not being that, by making the choice to sow myself a possum coat from forty possum pelts and wear the thing in like Aela from you know, Clan of the Cave Bear, it's saying, yeah, you know, you what, we can be iconic. We might have some wrinkles and some things and a fat ass and all the rest of it, but we can still bring our own magic
to the world. And it's actually not about me. I'm a placeholder for something that I think women all get to in our fifties when we're like, okay, well we've done the thing where we're looking after everyone else. We've graduated from that. Now what what We're just supposed to just curl up and be invisible and die. No, like,
now we're actually we've got it all. And so the amazing thing that's happened is that because that tuning fork in the zeitgeist rang so strongly and so loudly, I keep on being given a platform because the story wants to be told. It's not my story, it's everyone's story. I just happened to be the placeholder. I happen to be the one that can actually, you know, sity with you and make worse.
You're very good at doing that. Yeah.
Well, like I believe in the story, but I'm also I really know it's not about me. And so this book, even though it's my story, it's actually not about me, that Journey On Alone, is not about me. It is about what I want to do is to in my words and in my offerings and in the places that I do get invited to speak or to share, or to sing or to dance, is to help women wake up to what is alive and possible, because it's really hard to aspire to that which we haven't seen true.
It's really hard. And so by being this wild, weird, messy, barefoot, you know, hippie kind of freak, what's happening is women are saying, oh my god, that's me. I can do that, and that's why they're coming to approach me. And that's why every single person who approaches me, I will look them in the eye and I will ask them their name, and I will say would you like a hug? I see you. It's not just oh yeah, okay, we can
do the selfie. It's like, I see you like you are me and I am you, and you're having the vulnerability to come up and say hi. Then that is fucking a gift and amazing and so let's do this together. And so together we get to stitch a new story. And that that is how alone has changed my life. And that is where I get the energy to keep doing this thing, because because I know this story wants to be told, and it has chosen me in this moment. And who knows how long this moment will last. Maybe
this will be over in six months. Okay, great, but I'll just keep writing books and hanging out in the bush.
When I asked my daughter what I should ask you, because she obviously watched alone with me and she may or may not go to your odd school, she said, which is a very simple question, But I think it actually isn't because I think it's to do with another reason why I think you resonated so hard with people? She said, why does she think she lasted so long out there? And I wonder if one of the things
that people also really loved about you is that. And I saw your friend Stevie saying this on Australian story. He said she wasn't surviving out there, she was living like it was like you weren't just ticking down the days. I mean, I'm sure you were. Sometimes you weren't just ticking down the days. You were existing in the moment. And that's something that a lot of women wish they
could do more. Rather than rushing through the list of the things I've got to do today, tomorrow, right now, before I'm forty, before I'm fifty, before I'm da da dah, before while I'm still relevant and interesting, whatever it is, you were there in the moment. And it it also feels, especially having read your beautiful book, that it was also apparent that all these experiences, these very profound experiences that lots of us have had in different levels, in different ways,
that was why you could do it. Oh yeah, it's the levels of experience that meant that you could be in that space. You weren't sort of out there and obviously also knowing how to handle yourself in the bush was very helpful, But you weren't sort of out there just going got to get through this, gota win the money, got to get through this, got to win the money. You were living. Yeah, how do we all get a bit better at that? Oh?
So, yes I was living, and yes I was in the moment. One of the things I realized out there is that discomfort is necessary for resilience, and our ability to be with discomfort is actually that is our resilience there, And in a society that pathologizes discomfort, where we have infinite distracts available, as soon as we feel even remotely uncomfortable, we are being dumbed down. We are being you know, our skills of being able to respond to challenges are shrinking.
And then what happens is it's very hard for us to be in the moment because the moment is often fucking uncomfortable. Being in the moment doesn't mean skipping around in bliss. It means being able to be with every single feeling that is inside me right now. And there's a lot of feelings, like we have golf, there's a whole universe of them in there. And so for me, what that meant was whatever I was feeling, I just
gave it permission to be. And I think that the more we can allow that whatever our emotional state is, it's not wrong, it's not bad. It's not broken, it's not suspect, it's just who we are. One of the things that I love saying on my workshops is like, is there ever a tree that's the wrong shape? Is there ever a cloud that's too cloud? You know, we are part of nature, We are grown from nature's essence, and we are no more or less important or weird
or strange than any tree or bird or fish. But a meaning generating function tells us that what we're doing or we're feeling is wrong or bad or suspect. As soon as we hear what we should be doing, we are getting told that how we are is not okay. And so for me, part of being able to deprogram that is to start to turn that thing around that says that I should be different. Whenever I hear that word should, I'm like, no, that's not my voice, that's
someone else's voice. No, go away, what's the need that's underneath that? Because if I can take responsibility for my own needs, no one's going to rescue me. That's nobody's job. No one's responsible for my needs. I'm responsible for my needs. And so by taking that authority and that autonomy, then I'm reclaiming that part of myself, and then by you know, looking at what I should be doing and actually is this what I need? No it's not. Then fuck it off,
you know who? Like, No, life's too short, our energy is too precious to be doing stuff that actually isn't giving us nourishment. So for me, like, the more we can say, what is the most nourishing thing I can do for myself right now, one hundred times a day, not for someone else, not for my kids, not for my mum, not for bloody world peace. What is the most nourishing thing I can do for myself right now?
Means that I am taking care of the organism that is going to be doing all of the looking after. But I'm feeding myself and I'm filling up my own batteries, taking responsibility for my own needs, which means I'm much more able to be in this moment, in all of its emotions, in all of us, all of its strangeness, in all of its wiggliness. And then from that, because I'm not trying to run away from whatever's in here, I also have access to the joy. I'll suddenly start
hearing the bird, I'll have this creative impulse. I am now engaging with Capital our reality and life as it really is, and myself as a being connected to life, and that is a moment I want to be in love that. Thank you, Gina.
This has been amazing. I could talk to you for a week.
If you're anything like me, you're going to be thinking about that conversation for a while. I fell in love with Gina chick joining that chat, as everyone who meets as surely does just a little bit, because being around someone with so much vitality and life force is seductive and inspiring. But I told you that it had changed me, and then so I'd better tell you how it was.
Capital our reality, as you heard in that conversation. The way that Gina can walk up to some of the most heartbreaking, complicated issues and just call it like it is is extraordinary. We're so caught up always in how things should be, the way we should behave, and how other people should behave, and whatever everyone else thinks about our choices. But living in Gina's Capital our reality world is to push that off and make calls based on
what is. And I'm doing that now. I am all what would Gina do Whenever something comes up and it's remarkably free anyway, if you love that as much as I did by Gina's book, it's really bloody good, as I'm sure you've gathered by now. There's a link in the show notes for where and how, and if you really loved it, tell your friends, share this episode with someone, review it, leave a star or five.
I would be very grateful.
And look, I'm learning to ask for what I need And welcome back to your show mid next week. I'm talking to a formidable international fashion guru who's well ordered and picture perfect world was suddenly smashed to smithereens by.
You guessed it, hormones. See you there.
Massive thanks to my Mid's team. My EP name of Brown Our produces tolysabezaz Andal black Man, sound design and audio production of Tom Lyon, and social media video production by Josh Green