Alright, settle down everyone. Peter here taking over the keyboard for a minute (or two – I type very slowly).
Jo’s been telling anyone who’ll listen—including her mum Julie and anyone else who reads this blog—that I lack a “spiritual side.” She reckons that because I’m usually found muttering at our Victron battery management system or figuring out why the fridge is throwing an E3 error at three in the morning, I’m completely unattached to the higher realms.
I’m here to set the record straight.
How can Jo say I’m not involved in religion? If spending hours trudging through soggy (and bloody cold) Victorian scrub, silently praying my calf muscle doesn’t snap, just so she can log another “Lifer” bird on her Merlin app. I am told, by Jo at least, that a lifer is a good thing…..not a sentence! If that isn’t a holy pilgrimage, then I don’t know what is!
Our travels through the bush have turned into a full avian crusade. Jo’s obsession with birdwatching has reached near-biblical proportions. You haven’t truly experienced a spiritual epiphany until you’ve stood in the freezing drizzle near Nagambie while your wife stops dead in her tracks, gasps like she’s seen a miracle, and whispers, “Peter… look! A flock of hoary-headed grebes – and they walk on water!”
I’ve stood by as she marvelled at a flock of forty black cockatoos swirling over our Kokoda caravan at Indented Head, and I’ve watched her stare in absolute awe at black swans waddling around and grazing in a paddock alongside sheep near Kirwan’s Bridge like a scene straight out of Noah’s Ark.
Here are some of the birds that we have “captured” so far in our journey…
If that’s not communing with the divine, mate, I don’t know what is. Besides, I practice my own quiet, practical religion on the road every single day:
- Lighting a silent (LED) candle each night and praying our Cinderella incinerating toilet doesn’t trip a sensor in the middle of the night.
- Bowing in reverence before our Kalahari blanket whenever it pumps in more amps than the 800 watts on the roof.
- Giving thanks to our Carawater reverse osmosis filtration setup for turning grey water back into usable water so we don’t have to live in a crowded caravan park. As a side note I am now trying to work out how to get it turn grey water into wine.
Which brings me to Jo’s latest creative explosion. Between running online therapy sessions from the van bedroom, doing community development work, and promoting 4D evolution, Jo has somehow found the time to release her brand-new single and music video “You have a spirit”. Jo actually wrote the song when she was 19 years old after supporting a client who was grieving the heartbreaking loss of her child. To see her fully bring it to life with the help of an AI mixing software after all these years later out in the Australian bush is pretty special.
And when Jo decides to let her spirit fly, she doesn’t do it by halves.
She whipped out a set of glowing LED Isis wings—yes, full-blown light-up wings—and started dancing under the stars while our drone hovered overhead capturing the whole thing. Naturally, I played my sacred role: watching her perform from inside the van while enjoying a nice single malt spirit and keeping one eye on an NRL Tigers game.
So, with this song, Jo, has answered her own accusation: yes, I do have a spirit. And as the song says, souls gather where they fly. Mine just happens to gather wherever she flies —which is usually near a bird hide.
Go check out Jo’s new video clip, turn the speakers up, and let your own spirit fly!
Looking forward to the next time we gather!
Peter (and Jo)
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