Heartskin Stories

Copyright © 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Written and illustrated by J.M. Levar

ISBN: 978-1-4525-0314-1 (sc)

978-1-4525-0897-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960102

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Balboa Press rev. date: 04/11/2013

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Preface

Silence

Tea and Biscuits

Fairies

Veils

Carpet Bag

The Pearl

Wanjana Rain

For my family.

Acknowledgements

These stories have been inspired by women and men who have enriched my life with their presence. My heartfelt gratitude goes to them.

I also wish to include my mother, who kept me nurtured and sustained with her cakes made of unconditional love and my father, for his courage in the face of political oppression. I must also include my immediate family, for believing in me and sharing my worst and my best, as well as my friends and my extended family, for sharing time. They are the most precious gifts we have. They have been and are a constant source of inspiration for me.

A special thanks to Stanislav and Christina Grof for Holotropic Breathwork. You have inspired the world to breathe as one.

My heartfelt thanks to my friend and breathwork mentor, Pauline.

Thank you to my editor, Colleen Clay, for her patience and encouragement and to the wonderful people who read my stories again and again, to dot the Is and cross the Ts.

Thank you to Michael Hemming for bringing the illustrations alive with his magical touch in photography and computer graphics.

I also wish to thank the people from Balboa Press who have been instrumental in the completion of Heartskin Stories.

Thank you to everyone who helped me through my process!

List of Illustrations

Silence

No. 1 Silk Kimono

No. 2 Tears of the Buddha

Tea and Biscuits

No. 3 In Camelot

No. 4 Umbrellas

No. 5 Trilogy Mandala

No. 6 Arthur and Morgana

Fairies

No. 7 Strawberries

No. 8 Broken Wings

Veils

No. 9 The Veil

No. 10 Pierced Heart

No. 11 The Harem

Carpet Bag

No. 12 Lydia’s Spell

No. 13 The Demon

No. 14 In the Bag

No. 15 Imiria

Pearls

No. 16 Pearls

No. 17 Between the Sky and the Sea

No. 18 Fishers Mandala

No. 19 Lustre

Wanjana Rain

No. 20 The Outback

No. 21 Walkabout Mandala

No. 22 Hearts Dancing

Preface

My name is Jadranka Milica. Nine years ago, I began to compile this book from memories of past experiences and recent encounters in my life.

Heartskin Stories is fiction inspired by true events and people I have met—amazing women who told stories about themselves, people they once knew and about faith, courage and grace in the face of overwhelming odds.

These were ordinary people who took me into the extraordinary, not because I was different or special, but because I was predisposed to their language, one beyond tongue and dictionary. Heartskin Stories is my interpretation of what I came to understand as encounters of a transpersonal nature, where archetypes, fairies and gods are real and their impact omnipresent.

As a child, I loved fairy tales and magic. I was born in Croatia, a country with a rich storytelling tradition. My family emigrated to Australia, where the landscape itself—white trees, red earth, purple sky and bush, all dense and mysterious—took me dreaming. In such a dreamscape, my interest in the mystical did not waiver but grew. Myths and mythology captivated my imagination and I lived my life with one foot in fantasy and the other in the real world, where what mattered turned out to be the illusion.

The encounters continued. Inspired by the grace of the storytellers, I began to write down the stories. In the process, images of past meetings surfaced in a new light. Despite cruel traditions and myths of loss and punishment, these women’s stories taught me the grace in forgiveness and the healing power of beauty.

They have inspired me to follow what has heart and meaning for me: To be part of the healing wave that is cleansing misogyny from the bodies of men and women and to give my voice to a new myth, one of integrity and intimacy.

The stories Silence and Wanjana Rain are some of the more recent. The others are drawn from past travels and are written from memories spanning back thirty years. They are in no particular chronological order; they are vignettes, glimpses into the extraordinary in us all. For some of the stories, I have combined several of the sources and several people to produce a fairy-tale version of ancient oral traditions of their culture. Others are a narrative from a single person’s perspective.

Silence- page 1 calligraphy.tif he was there each day, pale and frail, like a delicate Japanese porcelain figurine, dressed in a silk kimono. She would sit on a bench by the river. Our eyes met frequently as I passed her on my morning walks. We began to nod to each other as I became accustomed to her presence.

I was visiting the tropical coast of Australia, house-sitting at a friend’s home near the Brisbane River; the invitation to live in Queensland had come at the right time. I felt broken and betrayed. My twenty-year marriage had come to an end. There were no children and never would be. My home and security vanished from under me. It was as if my heart had been ripped out, leaving a deep wound of rejection; pain and anger poured out. I walked the streets in a hateful haze. I walked. I marched. I paced the pavement until I began to crumble under the weight of my inner rage. The only thing that seemed to calm me was the sight of an elderly Japanese woman, sitting by the river where I walked. One morning, I noticed that the woman wasn’t at her usual spot. I felt disappointed and promised myself that if I saw her again, I would take the time to have a chat. A few days later, there she was again, a still and picturesque figure seated on the familiar bench by the river. The design and sheen of her silk kimono reflected the surroundings, subtly changing colours and patterns like a kaleidoscope in the morning sunlight.

Hello, I greeted her.

Hello, she responded, bowing her head to me.

I missed seeing you, I told her. May I sit?

She smiled softly and bowed.

I joined her on the bench and we chatted about nothing and everything. Her name was Michi. She was from Japan and had come to Brisbane three years ago to live with her brother, who had a good business, as she put it and was generous to her. I asked her how she liked Australia. She turned and looked directly at me and smiled before she said, I am thankful to have seen this beautiful place. A soft breeze was blowing. We watched the water sparkle and eddy in places as it flowed past us.

Breaking this gentle mood, a car drove up and parked in the parking lot behind us. A youth emerged from the car to put some rubbish into one of the bins on the riverbank. In the few moments he was there, we could hear his car radio loudly relaying a news broadcast from a war-torn country. Sounds of violence violated our space; sounds of people in pain and gunfire, though distant, had a disturbing effect on me. I became agitated. The young man drove off, taking the noise with him. I was glad he had gone. As silence enveloped us again, I took a couple of deep breaths, exhaling rather loudly.

Michi spoke softly, It is good to breathe like that. People need to breathe deep … to heal. Much sadness in the world, much pain! People are feeling this and are very angry. They lash out.

There seems to be violent confrontations in so many places in the world, I commented.

As she rose to her feet, Michi repeated, Much sadness in the world. I must go now. And then she bowed to me and said, Perhaps I will see you tomorrow?

I nodded