I was watching the brand new biopic based on the life of singing artist and women’s activist Helen Reddy last night and it was so good, a real spirit-lifter and revisiting the music of the era was priceless. I grew up with her music ever-present in the soundtrack of my early childhood yet had no idea she was such a tour de fore of the 1960s-70s counterculture movement. Her song “I Am Woman” (which, according to the film, she had to fight tooth-and-nail to get released and initially tucked away on an album, relying on women requesting it get played to the radio stations…which they did in their thousands…to get it heard) is still the anthem of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This post isn’t about Helen Reddy so much as about some of her qualities, seen from the bigger vantage point. From that place, I would describe her and others like her (so many of them musicians because that has tended to be the area where activists would “get active” and heard, though less so since so much of it became corporate) in these terms. She was an early Indigo, a forerunner of the Eighth Wave and an agent of the Aquarian Age.

What do I mean by these things? Well, popular viewpoint in new age circles has it the indigos arrived as a wave of “active” young starbeings (by the way, we are all from the stars, when it comes down to it) that began to be born from about 1987 onwards but I have long maintained that there were many that predated that wave, as a sort of fore-runner to prepare the ground for the grand changing of times (and I count myself amongst them). For instance, I would count Einstein and DH Lawrence and just so many writers, artists, Bohemians and alternate idea deliverers of the early twentieth century amongst their ranks because they cracked the ceiling of the old paradigm and let new light in. Many of those born since ’87 have yet to become “active” as in to become activated or activate anyone else but others were simply born that way, road-ready as it were and I have been spotting them for years (when you are one and you feel like you are in an “odd” minority for years, you can’t help yourself noticing like-souls who think outside the current box). They are people who are simply wired differently to the mainstream, such that their very presence in a room can cause others to shift about in their seat, initially in discomfort (but shift is still shift) or to question what is otherwise taken for granted, and often they lead their expression with their art.

The Eighth Wave (see the quantum history books of Dr Carl Johan Calleman for full explanation) is something I have written about before as the wave (obviously!) before the now active Ninth Wave of the Mayan long count. Whereas the Ninth is all about unity consciousness, the pinnacle of the piece, the Eighth was a correction wave, an alternate current to the way things had been for so long, thus all about reinstating balance in a heavily imbalanced world. So, to this day, it is the fuel (or cosmic impulse) that feeds the women’s movement, women’s lib, MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the call for sexual orientation equality, etc. It is the call of “time to pay the piper”, as in, let’s put things right, get fair, tip the balance and has been/remains a necessary stage in righting all the gross imbalance in the world. Ultimately, it is a passing phase because unity consciousness is the destination point (once these agendas are met) yet the Eighth Wave is the means of getting there and people such as Helen Reddy were part of that movement at the point it first started gaining momentum from the late 1960s onwards. Their preparedness to stand up, be seen, call out the unfairness and (in her case) sing loudly about it, gathering other women’s attention, was such a necessary part in, guess what, the steady movement towards, and preparation for, The Age of Aquarius.

Of course, musicians and artists were singing and talking about the Age of Aquarius back in 1968 but they sill had a way to go…about another 50 years, for all their “here it is” optimism. That said, we may never have got so far without them and its one of the reasons I’m so fascinated by, and drawn, to, the music and musicians of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (my era, as in, when I was born into this crazy out-of-kilter world). I often wonder if I could ever have coped with this world for a second if, like my siblings, I’d been born into the monochrome austere and highly gender-tilted world of the ‘50s…I am a colourful Aquarian child through and through. I even suspect that my pre-birth self made it a condition of coming that I not arrive a moment before the Love Revolution got underway, hence why I was the late conception of the four of us, in the very summer that happened. Joking aside, there is a truth to that as I feel very much “of” the Aquarian Age, a hippy child-into-adult all my life, and the years in between have been a long hard slog of trying to turn up the dials of its vibration ready for the full effect to click in (as per my last post) from about now onwards, we speculate. If astrologers are right, the winter solstice this year should mark the beginning (proper) of the Age of Aquarius, for all its frequency has been fuelling the arts, and certain artists, for decades.

It promises to be a very different era and musicians like Helen Reddy (not all of them female, there is a long long list and I would count, say, the Beatles as early players) paved the way for it by implanting the seeds of new ideas into people though music (and yes, also through art) so that we would be ready for the transition into something very much more liberated and authentic, more spirited and true to our highest part. So, I just wanted to bash out these few words on this topic, which is always one that fascinates me when it sparks to life in conjunction with some artist, writer or musician that I find out some more about than I previously knew and then realise “ah, one of us…”, as in, they have been helping, for years, to plant important seeds that now (and her death this year has sparked new interest and exposure to her special frequency…she came in at No 2 in the Australian charts this year with her 1972 anthem “I Am Woman”, exposing a whole new generation) come to fruition. This post is a deep bow to their lives, their contribution, their determination to follow some calling or thread that went contrary to the hard-edged paradigm that made the rebel of them. I am deeply grateful for the stamina and vision, often the heavy toll upon their lives, that it took. To me, such people are the signposts of the rapidly turning wheel of history.

I have always been fascinated by history and the patterns it plays out; I very nearly did my degree in it until something in the delivery of the subject caused me to very suddenly drop it and change subjects in the second year of uni yet (in my own inimitable fashion) I remain fascinated by it. These curious times seem to remind me, daily, why this life-long interest was always destined to, one day, make me into the fascinated observer of such interesting days to be alive. Being able to pull back and notice the trends, the dots to join, the threads that speak bigger meaning, on a comic scale, is where I am happiest these days and it fills me with such enthusiasm that I can easily see why I chose to be alive in these times; yet I take my cues from intuitive “knowing” more so than history source books these days as I almost compulsively join dots across subtle cues and behaviours, noticing the bigger picture forming. Perhaps, in years to come, the terms I use above (Indigo, Eighth and Ninth Wave, Age of Aquarius) will be better known as tools used to better understand this so-important phase in history…this transition era…only, surely, that very word “history” is already dead in the water.

We all know, don’t we, that history is always written by the reigning conquerors, a distortion which tilts the truth whereas we are, surely (at last), headed for a time when we are all destined to be winners, together. When we distort the story, one way or the other, we soon-enough begin to convince ourselves of its truth, if it is repeated often enough; but then the distortion becomes our next prison cell, out of which we struggle to see daylight. The twists and turns of my own life have taught me, the hard way, how to reach the point of telling my own story through the eyes of all parties as fairly as I can…because it is the only way it could be told that didn’t continue to distort me, at my very roots.

Such distortion is not the exclusive zone of a male version of the story; because distortion comes when any one “side” gets to choose the mode (and the filters) of delivery. For a time there, the momentum would seem to have suggested that women were after flipping the term “history” around to become “herstory” and perhaps it took that degree of sheer determination to push forwards against thousands of years of well-established, gender-based tyranny but then, after all, that would have just been another distortion, a tyranny of perspective, in the end. Really, what we are aiming for, together, is “ourstory”; a truly Ninth Wave phenomenon. With heartfelt thanks to all those of the Eighth Wave, who questioned and agitated the story we were being told sufficiently for light to penetrate through, we then graduate to the next level. From there, we get to tell the story of ourselves, together, even as we write it and no one wins or distorts to the exclusion of other. Whilst truth will always remain, to some degree, a subjective thing, the very allowing of the subjectiveness…peaceably…leads us to a new, curious, intelligent, open-minded, accepting, inclusive way of spinning stories that feed a better future rather than always seeking to claim the victory of the past (note: hanging onto our past woundedness like a trophy to keep waving about can also be a way of trying to dominate the current story) or control the future. When it is all about feeding the future, together, then we grow that story like we might tend a seed in the soil and the story itself is organic, not twisted this way or that by the hands, or hurts, of anyone. Without winners or losers (or even loss of individuality…this is important; it is no one’s place to suppress this) the story is simply, collectively, “us”. I look forward to us telling it together.