Interview Transcript by Lea Groves

Merelyn: Today I’m sitting in a little beautiful spot in the Ovens Valley near Bright in a little town called Porepunkah with Clare Parslow. Hello Clare

Clare: Hello Merelyn

Merelyn: Now tell us a little bit about, coz this is just the most beautiful environment, out there, there are mountains with snow caps on the top of it. So we are near Bright, we are near Porepunkah, what mountains are we near?? Hotham

Clare: The closest one is Mount Buffalo

Merelyn: Mount Buffalo Yes

Clare: Out the front and out the back is Mount Porepunkah and we are 50 kilometres from here to Hotham.

Merelyn: So needless to say if you haven’t been to this part of the world, which is in Victoria in Australia, it is worth visiting.

Clare: mmm

Merelyn: I’ve been here during Spring, Autumn and Winter, I don’t think I’ve been here in the middle of Summer but Autumn is something to see here in Bright, isn’t it?

Clare: People come from all over Australia and overseas; we get a traffic hazard down Delaney Avenue because of all the people taking photos of one another in the autumn leaves.

Merelyn: It’s like an Avenue of Honour, isn’t it?

Clare: It is, yes

Merelyn: It’s beautiful, what kind of trees are they?

Clare: There is Oaks with all the autumn colours and then the evergreens in between those autumn colours, but anytime of year is beautiful.

Merelyn: Just fantastic. David and I have performed here at the Spring Festival and there’s all sorts of things around here there’s tea farms, organic berry farms.

Clare: yep

Merelyn: It’s just fantastic – a most beautiful spot in the world.
Now Clare, I have known you for a number of years now, you started off as being a bit of a Carter & Carter fan

Clare: Still am

Merelyn: Well Thank you. A massive supporter and you and your friend Jenny turned up one year in a big bus

Clare: yes, Victor Harbour

Merelyn: Victor Harbour, In South Australia, Right and introduced yourself as the ladies touring Australia in a bus and that kind of stuck in our minds. The bus has moved on now.

Clare: You called Jenny up as the tambourine person

Merelyn: oh right, yes

Clare: That’s how it got to be a personal connection.

Merelyn: Over the years we have admired each others work

Clare: mmm

Merelyn: And you have been all sorts of things and we will bring this out as the story goes along. One of the things I really admire about you is your capacity of understanding people and your ability to bring something out in people that they might not realise is there. And you do it in a way that is gentle and I think allows people to step into their own growth. One of the other things I love about you is your non-swerving and dynamic faith and in fact when I first met you, I thought you were a bit of a crazy Christian.
But getting to know you – you are not a crazy Christian at all. You do have a perspective on faith that I think is quite refreshing. And we are going to talk about miracles today.

Clare: uh huh

Merelyn: There’s a lot of talk about miracles in the world – a lot of people believe in them, a lot of people are desperate for one to happen, some people believe they can all be explained away via science. Some people are in complete denial. I’m just going to ask you now to take us back to your childhood and tell us about something that happened in life that you very much consider to be an amazing miracle.

Clare: I guess beginning in what I believe a miracle is. A miracle is something I believe is beyond human capacity. So when things happen to me that I know I couldn’t do, or mum and dad couldn’t do and all the powers around me couldn’t do - I understood that to be a miracle. Like learning to read when nobody was teaching me and seeing things happen that fade in your memory with time, that are wonderful, but miracles don’t, they stay as fresh in one’s memory today as they were as long back as I can remember as a little child.

Merelyn: Is part of that do you think because when we are experiencing something beyond our own understanding it has a very emotional element attached to it?

Clare: I think it happens in the deeper part of us that we normally act out of or understand. So it’s so deep within us that it’s written in us. It’s there to stay it's indelible.

Merelyn: It’s creating its own neural pathways.

Clare: Yes. It changes the direction of how you think and feel about something.

Merelyn: Yes – and you’re convinced later in life that these things we are going to talk about now are miracles?

Clare: Totally.

Merelyn: Ok, well let’s start at the beginning.

Clare: Ok.

Clare: I was born in Victoria in a little country town called Tongala, and lived for the first four years on a dairy farm with my Mum and Dad and my step brother and my step sister and then we moved to Western New South Wales where it was very very vast, very flat and very challenging. So our closest neighbour for the next 12 years basically was about 17 kilometres away and the closest town was about 80 kilometres away. So most people would call that isolated.

Merelyn: These days in particular. We do a lot of work outback-outback. That’s a close neighbour but for most people we are very city.

Clare: We basically went to town once a month if the roads weren’t muddy type of thing – so back in the 50’s it was a fairly isolated way of life.

Merelyn: No mobile phones

Clare: No – so it was quite different and quite basic. Mum did all the cooking and she started my brother and sister on correspondence schooling coz they had been at school before we left Tongala. But I was too young and back in those days they started when you were 6 with the Black Friar correspondence schooling. By that time mum’s health had failed and she didn’t even get to finish teaching me all the alphabet. So learning just came to a stop and mum had all sorts of health issues. Yes, so I was pretty much just a little country girl running around enjoying the birds, the sheep and whatever else was around the pet animals we had. Until I was 7 then I had an encounter that I believe was the foundation of the beginning of who and what I am now.

Merelyn: Tell us about that.

Clare: Well it was an experience that I have read about similar things since but I knew nothing of then so I couldn’t have conjured it up in thinking a super woman or spider man or anything like that.

Merelyn: They didn’t have the sci-fi like we do now.

Clare: No, No. So I was just walking along a dirt track, barefoot in a hand me down dress and suddenly I became very aware of the atmosphere changing around me and I looked up and it was like I was in a huge big dome like a sports stadium or something.

Merelyn: Yes.

Clare: There were all these thousands people looking waiting for something to happen in the middle of the arena. I realised they were looking where I was standing.

Merelyn: So you were in this arena?

Clare: Yes I was in this arena. I took a bit more notice and the light inside of that dome made the outside daylight which was midday look grey.

Merelyn: ok

Clare: It was brilliant, brilliant light.

Merelyn: Radiant?

Clare: And then I became aware of a smaller group of people close by me which sort of had a form but didn’t.

Merelyn: Right.

Clare: And there was one in particular that was radiantly white and that one came forward and spoke to me and said “you are a princess and your father is the king” and I looked down at my lowly state of bare feet and hand me down clothes and said well “what am I doing here”?

Merelyn: A 7 year old - good response.

Clare: And the answer was “you must live among your people to learn to rule them wisely”.

Merelyn: Wow.

Clare: And I just melted in joy. Yeah. But they weren’t audible words it was spoken spirit to spirit. I understood the power and significance of who I was and I’ve never lost that.

Merelyn: You know, you of course realise because you work with a lot of people, that a lot of people don’t ever get to that point of knowing who they are.

Clare: hmm, that surprises me coz I thought that was normal until I came out and met other people who I thought would talk to God everyday like I was and they thought I was a loony tune.

Merelyn: A whacky Christian. So when this experience happened what happened next, did you go running home, was it something you were shouting about or was it such a common place thing, not a common place. but so real that it made sense to you that you didn’t sprout about it or was it a combination of both or something different?

Clare: I obviously sprouted a bit as I can remember being laughed at a bit.

Merelyn: I can imagine.

Clare: But it was so powerful, I could have denied my own existence more than that event, I meant it was just awesome.

Merelyn: Have you seen the movie “Heaven is Real”? You obviously haven’t.

Clare: No I don’t think so.

Merelyn: Well you should.

Clare: Well I know it is.

Merelyn: It’s based on a true story.

Clare: I’ve seen a lot of videos over the years.

Merelyn: This little boy has this experience when he’s dying he had a burst appendix and he didn’t actually die on the operating table but he had this experience of going to heaven.

Clare: Yep.

Merelyn: They have Hollywooded it up a bit right, but it’s actually based on this true story. And he was actually the child of a Pastor. He spoke about it as if 'why doesn’t everyone know this?' He said things that he could not have known at his age and the people in the church were trying to say he got the imagery from growing up in church.

Clare: I think I have seen that.

Merelyn: It was just stuff that was really amazing, and then it turned out that there were other children from around the world that had seen the same image of what he called Heaven and Jesus and were able to paint. It’s really this amazing connection.
It’s a really great movie, everyone go and watch it, it’s a little Hollywood but the principle's in it.
It’s kind of like you are saying here you felt as a child, it wasn’t something that you could have imagined it was just something that became part of your heart.

Clare: I believe I knew I didn’t imagine it. There’s a difference, some things you can be told contrary to what you believe and not sure but when you are sure nothing will shake it.

Merelyn: Right – that was one of those experiences.

Clare: I knew what I had experienced.

Merelyn: So moving on from there, I know that was just the start.

Clare: Well taking the lead there, you would think everything got wonderful after such wonderful news.

Merelyn: But we know different.

Clare: But in fact it got a whole lot worse. I had horrific things happen to me. Had that encounter not happened I don’t believe I would have survived them physically, emotionally or mentally. I believe the miracle was that God knew what was in front of me and gave me the strength to get through it.

Merelyn: Are you happy to share some of those things?

Clare: Well there was domestic violence in the home, and as I said my mother was dangerously ill and we didn’t know if she was going to survive a lot of situations and because of the unpleasantness with the arguing between mum and dad - my brother and sister became anti me. Because dad was my dad he but was their step dad so they felt threatened by that.

Merelyn: So same mother, different father.

Clare: Yeah, and none of that was mum and dad's fault. Dad was trying to get past a war that had just finished that screwed him up and gave him Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) I was born in 1950.

Merelyn: Right

Clare: He got as far as Borneo I think. And mum obviously when widowed with the first 2 children - she had had a traumatic experience. They were both desperate and clinging and trying to find in one another what only God could give I think. That’s the best way for me to describe that. My sister became very threatened and very angry and at times pretty nasty towards me.
Then when we were a bit older my brother started sexually abusing me and that went on for a number of years. In later years I asked the Lord when I was helping other people how come I didn’t end up on a psychiatrist couch like so many of the people I was helping. And he said I chose to love, I was able to forgive and not hold that bitterness inside myself and it didn’t’ poison me.

Merelyn: You attribute that ability to love to that experience? Partly?

Clare: Yep because I had the strength to rise above it.

Merelyn: Yes. So what do you think the arena was? Tell us in your absolute plain words what actually went on for you in that moment for you. Obviously it could be metaphoric.

Clare: I think it was the opposite of what you were talking about in the video about the little boy dying and going to heaven, I think the Lord gave me a glimpse of heaven I think heaven came to me in some sense of visibility that I could see, feel and smell. I can still see it.

Merelyn: Wow – what did it smell like?

Clare: It’s kind of one of those things, you couldn’t describe.

Merelyn: Yes – how do you describe smell, you need something to relate it to

Clare: The forms that were there and particularly the one that communicated with me I couldn’t describe apart from radiantly white and had a form of a human being, it wasn’t - I knew it wasn’t

Merelyn: Yep

Clare: And I didn’t really know about angels I don’t think.

Merelyn: You didn’t have a Christian upbringing?

Clare: No.

Merelyn: So it wasn’t as if you had these things in your mind?

Clare: Mum and dad said there was a God and you needed to do the right things but the only time I heard the words Jesus Christ was when dad was of course swearing.

Merelyn: Well that’s quite common these days too.

Clare: I can’t ever remember seeing a bible

Merelyn: Right.

Clare: Yes at home.

Merelyn: So amazing place, so as you grew then there were some other extraordinary things that happened.

Clare: When I got to be 16, I started to realise what I had wasn’t enough. My faith was fine to keep me strong but it wasn’t going to get me a job.

Merelyn: You didn’t have a container for this faith did you at this point in time? Was it this container or point of reference - was it this experience that gave you this faith?

Clare: No it became a relationship.

Merelyn: Were you going through any kind of religious?...

Clare: No.

Merelyn: So this was outside many people’s expected religious experiences?

Clare: I guess in religious terms you would call it Prayer Life. To me it was just everyday - God was there and I could talk to him and the wisdom that came on you was well above my capabilities so I knew that had come from above.

Merelyn: Yes

Clare: Yes so when I was 16, I can’t teach myself anything as it all relies on reading and I can’t read so I cant apply for long distance education as we were still living in the bush.

Merelyn: So you were 16 in the 1960’s?

Clare: Yeah.

Merelyn: So you still weren’t able to read?

Clare: Yes I really couldn’t confidently write my name.

Merelyn: There was no DHS to come and step in back then.

Clare: So again a dusty road, so I cried out to the Lord and said “Look you are going to have to give me something tangible that I can hold onto – My faith is really - you know – I need more- I need more – I need more ” and I was crying and crying out from the depth of my heart and that time I had a vision of what I understand now a picture of Jesus imposed on the clouds but it was very - not solid but just an awareness I suppose.

Merelyn: Yep

Clare: Again I felt he was speaking to me, again not audibly but more a sense in my heart that was peace and about 3 weeks later some Jehovah Witnesses came around, they used to go out around the local homesteads and what have you, I knew in my heart that the bible they had, if I could get that God could reveal himself more to me.

Merelyn: Right – reminding people that you couldn’t read.

Clare: I didn’t realise that it was all words; I thought it would be pictures and things.

Merelyn: Oh ok. So quite uneducated.

Clare: Totally.

Merelyn: Which is hard to believe now, knowing you as a very educated, smart, intellectual individual.

Clare: I was like a woman possessed, I wanted to buy that book and went and got all the money I had saved up from birthdays and Christmases and what have you and it still wasn’t quite enough but mum saw the sincerity which I was going after this book. So she put in $1.50 and I bought the bible. So they went off. I ran to my room with this fabulous book that was going to open more of God to me. Flopped down on my belly onto my bed and opened this book up and it was just words that I couldn’t read.

Merelyn: Right what was that moment like?

Clare: Horrific
I think that was the biggest threat and test to my faith that I had ever experienced before or since. I could feel myself plummeting like I was falling a million miles and I said to the Lord I can’t do this and he said in a voice that I could hear in my head, if you will read my word every day I will teach you how to read - and he did.

Merelyn: So, everyone out there is going "Yeah Right". And I guess you have had a lot of “Yeah Right”

Clare: Yep

Merelyn: How did you move through that? Because you actually did learn to read without any instruction. Was that, let's get to the sceptics in a minute, right, let's just get the story solidified a little bit more, you know I am a person of huge faith not necessarily religious as such as you know, but certainly my container is within the Christian religion because that’s where I grew up and I understand that but my understanding is perhaps a little broader than that now and I still go HUH? How did this happen? Did you just start, I mean I do believe it, I believe you or obviously I wouldn’t be doing this interview but also I don’t want to limit my understanding of people's experiences by my own.

Clare: I guess the easiest way to understand that it is and ongoing process that is still happening today. How I started to learn to read was reading the bible to the point of being unable to read at 16 and teaching my own children correspondence schooling 10 years later I don’t know

Merelyn: With no formal training

Clare: How do you explain that, how do you explain it?? It’s a miracle.

Merelyn: Did it just start? - it definitely is a miracle because you didn’t have a teacher.

Clare: Well I did I had the Holy Spirit but that is where the sceptics come in.

Merelyn: Right.

Clare: Yeah.

Merelyn: So just the practicality of that, so you had all this book with words in front of it, did you go oh yeah there’s a T and a H and an E and that spells the or did you just have a sense of what was coming through and then it made sense so then that learning.

Clare: No it didn’t – it wasn’t restricted to the bible, everything around me became the classroom and the Holy Spirit was with me for every minute of every day and I would look at things and say teach me how does this work, what does this mean and I didn’t just learn how to read I learnt about the universe and when I was quite young my sister and I had a debate about the Blue Roof. which is a book I would like to write about. and I was looking up at the dome that I called a roof.

Merelyn: From your vision.

Clare: No just looking at the sky.

Merelyn: Oh ok

Clare: And she mocked me and said there is no roof up there. I said yes of course there is I can see it and its blue. She said No, No, NO, Its nothing its just atmosphere it's nothing. I wasn’t about to doubt what I thought I could see. So I thought I would take that to a higher authority. So we will see about this, we will go and ask mum. So we waltzed into the kitchen and found mum and to my horror mum actually laughed at me and thinking I was cute but it did a lot of damage to my confidence of what I could believe what my eyes were telling me.

Merelyn: Yeah right - this was before you were 16.

Clare: Oh Yeah I was still only about 8 or 9.

Merelyn: Right.

Clare: And I did have a sense of falling that day and I think that’s where doubt kind of came in a little bit. Anyway Mum knew everything so I believed what mum said but I thought that’s really weird I think I can see that but obviously I can’t. And then many, many years later when I was about 38 I was sitting not really watching TV but the TV was on and I was knitting I think and I started to realise that there was a conversation going on, on the television with scientists talking about the ozone layer and how we were kicking a hole in the ozone layer and as my consciousness of what they were saying came to me, the Lord said “How can you put a hole in nothing?"

Merelyn: Right

Clare: And that falling feeling sort of like a trampoline came back up in me, the confidence I had seen something as you can’t kick a hole in nothing.

Merelyn: Right

Clare: And the Lord said to me if you were talking to a child who couldn’t read or write and didn’t have any understanding of what a scientist was would you talk in terms of a protective layer over the earth being an ozone layer or would you just say it was a roof?

Merelyn: Yeah right

Clare: And at that moment I made a commitment I said “Lord I will never ever doubt you again” I don’t care how many sceptics there are in the world if I know that I know I will not budge. And that was another big step forward for my faith to be on a solid foundation.

Merelyn: Yeah

Clare: But of course as I learnt to read I found out from the scripture that I am a child of God that I am a Princess because he was a King.

Merelyn: Yep.

Clare: And a thousand other things just confirmed what I had been told that nobody else had told me.

Merelyn: So would you describe these moments as epiphany moments?

Clare: Oh Yeah.

Merelyn: Where the light went on.

Clare: Yep.

Merelyn: You just started having them very young?

Clare: I personally Merelyn, I believe that everyone does but we get talked out of them.

Merelyn: So do I.

Clare: People teach us to doubt rather than to believe.

Merelyn: I agree. Children do see a lot of things and we often dismiss it as childhood fantasy.

Clare: Yeah.

Merelyn: Yeah.

Clare: Or make them feel silly.

Merelyn: Yeah.

Clare: They are frightened to talk about it and if you don’t talk about things you lose your confidence in it, you lose your memories of them and it's not active faith.

Merelyn: And we are influenced aren’t we by everyone around us because I opened this conversation early on by saying when I first met you I wondered if you were a whacky Christian? Now for me to say that... coz I think I’m quite an open person, but I still boxed you.

Clare: mmm.

Merelyn: Cause of the type of language that you were using and I thought that you were going to be one of these people who said it’s like this and that’s the only way it's got to be and I didn’t want to have that kind of fundamentalism put on me but of course. and you and I have talked about this before. that the language that we use can sometimes be a barrier to people, can’t it? But if we get below those words or above the words or through the words, through the words is probably a better way of describing it. If we get through the words there’s often common ground that we find with people and they may then start to express themselves in a different way and you see something really different about them that might have a commonality with how you think but the words have stopped us from being able to really communicate.
That happened with us when we started to get to know you – I remember saying to Dave one day when you girls were visiting “I’m not sure if I want to bring up too many topics as I don’t want a religious discussion with these girls” anyway of course that was my limited thinking. The more I discuss with you Clare and also with Jenny and David we are often talking way broader concepts that any of our words allow us. And sometimes we will go "hang on a minute what do you mean by that word? - that means this to me" and so often we get hung up on that and it stops us from really connecting with other people. Would you agree??

Clare: Oh totally and what you were saying before about me sounding umm using language that you found a bit over the top - you having the confidence to share that with us gave me insight into how that would sound to other people and as much as I think that my way of living is very normal for a Christian I have learnt that it’s not. So if I sound abnormal and of course they are going to think I’m unbalanced so I’ve taken that advice from you and tried to be more realistic in how I speak in general terms about things. One other thing that I think I’d like to share with you that I think could help a lot of other people and I’m not talking about the wounded ones. I’m talking about the people looking at them. as you said what you see and hear we tend to put people in a box.

Merelyn: You’re not talking about the what ones? – was it wounded did you say?

Clare: Yes This is for the people who are looking at the wounded. One time when I was actually at an act of Worship I did have a vision, my eyes were closed so I knew it was a vision. I felt in this vision that the Lord was coming towards me and I thought oh this is wonderful like great stuff and he was so much taller than me that my face would be where his kidneys would be, kind of well that area. I saw a gaping wound that was all bruised and bleeding and horrible. I realised if he kept coming towards me that my face was going to go into this ugly horrible wound with his gut hanging out sort of thing. I almost turned away and I felt the Holy Spirit restrain me saying of the Lord “This is my body, where I am bruised and bleeding is where I need you most” - and so I allowed him to bury my face in that yucky mess and ever since then when I look at people, I don’t see ugliness I see woundedness. I try to get the other side of the wound to find out why they are hurting and why they are angry and why they are being nasty to me. That has been an epiphany that has helped me get into places where people are too scared to ask for help because they think they are ugly.

Merelyn: Yeah

Clare: I don’t see that... All they see in me is love coz I’m not looking at something that’s ugly I’m looking at a woundedness and that has helped me enormously. So if people can see past what’s coming at them and try and figure out why that person is reacting it’s so much easier not to be angry and react the same way.

Merelyn: We all don’t have the benefit of these amazing epiphanies probably because most of us have had it beaten out of us by society - you know we can’t talk about that. I think we are in an era now where we can fortunately explore these things a lot more openly but I think the renaissance in all of that time really closed all of that down and we were burning people at the stake for being witches if they were challenging our stories.

Clare: I reckon I would have been roasted.

Merelyn: I’m sure I would have been roasted too. So for those of us who haven’t opened up to these amazing insights, what’s your advice there? What you are doing is you have stood back - like Mother Theresa - who must not have seen the ugliness.

Clare: No.

Merelyn: Because how could she work in the slums of Calcutta with the ugliest parts of life, not ugly people because that’s not their fault that they were there but the ugliness of what humanity can do to humanity. So she’s obviously stepped back and you have stepped back because you can then look at the bigger picture and go ok what’s really going on here?
What’s your bit of advice because what I think for me what you’re describing what I too love to describe is an ongoing connectedness and whatever words you use Holy Spirit, Lord, Jesus, God, Universe to me it’s all the same it’s just a dictionary issue.

Clare: Even if it's only written in your DNA, it's there.

Merelyn Yeah – I know you think that way too but you use those specific words and that’s great and I understand that, but for a lot of people they haven’t got that connectedness and they are quite frightened of it. What’s your advice, you had this openness as a child and it never got shut down even though it was threatening - the lid was on a few times.

Clare: Well the threatening usually strengthened it because you have to rely on - as in going back to the beginning; if you can do it in your own strength it’s not a miracle. Obviously the more times you are saved, rescued, helped, and you know it’s a miracle the more confidence you will have that it will be there next time you need it. So it’s a faith-building thing.
It’s interesting we are talking about centuries ago that we would have been burnt at the stake for talking about such things - are going to happen before they happen and stuff like that. And it’s interesting that we have open dialogue now but actually we are in the process of Christians being shut down to talk like I’m talking.

Merelyn: In some areas.

Clare: In some areas. So I think it is more important and timely that you and I are having this discussion because whether people believe that I have a relationship with God or not is not a bother to me. How I demonstrate that to them is my responsibility. If I can be me and not bow and try and become something just because society or anybody else thinks I should be different then I will be true to - whether it's my DNA, whether it's my God or whether it's my ethos of what’s right and wrong. Personally I’m being a truthful, honest, caring, loving person and that can never be bad.

Merelyn: Beautiful

We are going to wrap it up in a minute because you have just said it all right there and as you said earlier your choice to express that is love and there is nothing else other than love when we get right down to the basics.

Clare: It’s what we all crave.

Merelyn: Yep. So I really thank you for being brave and a little whacky. Let me redefine the word whacky - it's certainly your openness and ability to express that and I guess I’ve seen in you in the years I’ve known you that people are attracted to that love and however they get to that - it doesn’t matter. And the people that are still acting out of their small frightened self are the critics and condemners and they have to find their own pathway to love so you can let that go, which is amazing. A lot of people can't because we are still acting out of that fear. So thank you for being an Ordinary Angel.

Clare: Thank you

Merelyn: And I know last night when I suggested I interview you, you weren’t that thrilled with the word angel well I said let me be the judge of that. You are ok with the word ordinary. As you are aware this is about encouraging people and you have pretty much summed it up. Thank you. As I like to finish each of these interviews I’m going to give you the opportunity to ask me a question.

Clare: I was going to think what I would ask you when you mentioned I had that choice but I still haven’t thought. I guess I’ll wrap it up where we started, how do you like the Ovens Valley and in particular Bimbadeen.

Merelyn: Bimbadeen being the little part of land that is your home. I think Clare when I visit here it’s a very healing place.

Clare: Good

Merelyn: And I know your ethos is for healing and that’s out of love and you are a kindred spirit with me in many ways. We have been talking hot houses and sustainability and reducing chemicals in our life and the effects that western diet are having on society and I love that here you are working towards an environment that is healing in more ways than one. And often we have to start with our bodies, don’t we, because people, we can be so locked down in our bodies and so confused by what’s going on in our bodies that sometimes the spiritual part of our life gets caught up in the physical and I think here is going to be a place where all of those needs physical, emotional and spiritual are going to be healed.

Clare: I'll say amen to that.

Merelyn: Thank you very much.
This is Merelyn Carter we have been here with Clare Parslow at Bimbadeen in the wonderful Ovens Valley.

Merelyn’s writing is supported in part by the sale of her books. Autobiography - ‘The Deepest Part of Me’.  ‘Inspire’ – inspirational reflections for your life’s journey.  ‘Stories behind the Songs’ and her first children’s picture book ‘To The Moon and Back - Grandma’s Rocket Ship Adventure’. To find out more about her work and to support her through the purchase of her writings and music, please go to www.carterandcarter.com.au