Dumbo Feather

Last trains curve through our mist, buildings lift chins above us, planes circle, hypnotised. The river is a misshapen question, we answer, waking, white air, the love beneath an eyelid. Our molecules crush against pale ether; our songs float on water, fill culverts, push against the scarp. All night we protect the rocks, hide them in our sleeves; and when sunrise wakes us, we lift from earth. I'm floating above the bed, beside you, in a half-dream light shines into. My ears are filled with sounds — lungs expanding, the river expelling life. There are shapes hidden below our skin and each morning I remember you as clearly as blood remembers a vein. Love is cellular, in the sky, and you are still beside me. We will rise and move into the day, encased…

Spring is my favourite season. I see hope, potential and regeneration everywhere I look. Baby animals are everywhere, chicks squawking from their nests. There is a Willy Wagtail outside my window with protective parents that sound the alarm every time I step outdoors. Regeneration isn't a process reserved for the young. Our cover star this issue is Sylvia Boorstein. What better way to illustrate the theme of beyond ego than to feature an 86-year-old woman, radiating inner peace? Sylvia is a Dharma and meditation teacher, who guides meditation at Spirit Rock meditation centre in California. She embodies the antidote to all that is fast, cheap and out of control in our society. During her conversation with Berry, Sylvia explores how to inhabit the mind we each cultivate over a lifetime, and…

At age 50, Rusty Moran has seen his fair share of waves. A former big-wave surfer, Rusty grew up with an alcoholic father and knows first-hand the healing power of the ocean. “All my stars aligned and I've finally got something that's my life's purpose – to help others,” he says. The Japanese call it ikigai: the intersection of your skills and passion with something the world needs. Rusty heads up the Veteran Surf Project, a program designed to support war veterans’ mental health through surfing. They call it the war at home. Suicide rates in ex-serving ADF men are 24 per cent higher than the general population and 102 per cent higher for women. Post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] is almost twice as common in ADF personnel as it is in…

An aeon ago, at the start of my adult life, I dropped out of the science–law degree that I had chosen for no better reason than “having the marks” and entered a tumultuous period of existential and spiritual seeking. I had emerged from a miserable adolescence in the Australian public school system with a broken self-esteem and little sense of who I was or what I wanted in life. A series of magic mushroom trips catapulted me out of the chrysalis of my teenage self into a new world of psychological and spiritual possibilities, but the truths revealed in those partly-ecstatic, partly-nightmarish experiences left me disoriented and caught between fevers of spiritual inflation and crushing bouts of depression that were the legacy of years of high school bullying. I travelled…

“This is one of the freest places on this continent, because we have the ability to be who we want to be here.” We don't have native title here, but we didn't sign a treaty and there's no deed of sale. We created a border circle on 26 August 2019, a few kilometres east. Then on 26 August 2020, we set up a border ring inside a pastoral lease. We built a fire in the middle of the road and blocked the road for about a week. Adani brought the police in and they removed us. My father, Adrian Burragubba, went to Brisbane and put in a complaint to the Human Rights Commission. The police wrote a letter of regret, which gave us recognition of who we are. They said they…

Sally Douglas My mum died suddenly in November 2019. It was a couple of months later that we went into lockdown, and I craved a connection with somebody who understood what I was going through. That led me to a support group called Motherless Daughters Australia, and [as the first lockdown eased in May 2020] Imogen and I ended up going to the same lunch one Sunday arvo at a pub. That's how we met. The first thing was, we genuinely got on well and were quite similar. We were both complete tearaways as teenagers, both rebels at school, we both got tattoos on our hips when we were 14 and we both met our partners at a similar time. I think we both craved that person we could talk to. We'd…