Dumbo Feather – July 2019

would just keep doing that. But it hasn’t so far. This is where when I’m tempted to go down

that path of, “There’s the problem, I need to fix it, this is what we should be doing,” and like,

well, you’ve spent so many years doing that and it hasn’t really shifted anything. So the big

shifts for me personally have been when I really heavily focused with a great deal of clarity

on the things that are strong and beautiful and bright and light. And they have expanded.

Yeah.

[Laughs]. There’s heaps of ways. My family, we move. We pack

houses, we work railway lines, we’ve done all that. So we’re

walkers. There’s this beautiful thing my uncle always used to say to me: “Walk to know.” And

that’s one of the first things that I know each day that I can do to bring myself into alignment

with the most highest, positive, strongest part of my own being. And then probably the

deeper extension of that, well singing on the top of your lungs with a guitar in your hand isn’t

always possible! At eight in the morning! But music is definitely the second option. And any

chance that I can get to express that energy creatively brings me back to who I really am. That

teacher that I was talking about, the second one that my mum took me to, his main piece of

guidance was always, “You have to know who you are.” And I think that we over-identify with

the human physical condition and experience too much. Whereas if we are more connected

and identified with ourselves as spiritual beings, all of these conversations shift and can

happen in a different way. So each of those activities, the walking, the singing, the writing

music, playing music, just help me to remember who I really am.

Right, and some of the work that people

like you and I do isn’t measured and valued

in the same way. So how do you make sure

that there’s still food on the table in that

world, or how do you make sure that your

business is being taken care of when you’re doing all this other stuff? I guess this last couple

of years has been a rapid period of expansion for me personally and the more I go down the

path the less tolerant I am of situations that don’t vibe with it. Even after our conversation

yesterday I must have tuned in that little bit more because there’s a piece of work in my life

that I’ve been growingly feeling is not happening. And I literally woke up this morning and

was like, “I cannot take another step!” [Laughs]. In this context. ’Cause I just can’t find any

energy for it, any inspiration. I don’t feel alive when I do it. I have to let it go. I can’t do it

because of money, that’s ridiculous. I’m just going to have to trust that this will all be okay.

But it’s funny how those tolerance levels shift. Like the more inner work I do and the more I

do focus on feeling good, ’cause feeling good is important.

No. It’s feeling alive and

connected. Like you are

really in alignment with the absolute most soaring highest part of who you are. And the

more that I’ve done that work and there’s a time where I had given up on feeling good. I was

reading this thing the other day which is a bit of a tangent but it was about the use of drugs

So you were saying you wake up in the morning and tend to your inner world and vibration, like,

I’m interested in the pragmatics of that, how does Lydia do that? Because I know that music plays

a huge part in your life. And I think that I’m even getting to a place where the non-intellectual, the

non-verbal, like, we have to weave that in so much more. We’re trying to squish it out and press

it out of culture by defunding the arts but I think the arts as vanity doesn’t work. But the deeply

soulful is what we need, we were talking about music that metabolises the intangible.

So I’m answering on your behalf. [Laughs].

We were talking yesterday about how there’s a lot of work that’s

important being called forward right now that we can’t put on a

CV or charge hourly for. And we value what we can measure and

what we can pay for. That’s our social system at the moment.

And you’re not talking about feeling good like Instagram and Netflix feeling good.

42

LYDIA FAIRHALL

DUMBO FEATHER