Helen Martineau's Blog

Part 1 - an Introduction Our life on earth is framed by our birth and our death. From our soul’s point of view, it’s an amazing journey we undertake to help us to progress spiritually. Our spirit is like a light always shining ahead of us; our body is always in the now. The soul is a mediator between the two.   And this has implications: We came from spirit and will return to this our spiritual home. During our physical life our soul retains a connection with the spiritual realms, even if we aren’t conscious of it. Before we are born our spirit gives us a blueprint. It’s the purpose of our incarnation. Our soul chooses to incarnate into a certain family, place and into certain conditions. What we encounter throughout our lifetime needs to be experienced so we can work with and fulfil the requirements of our blueprint – for this life. In the big picture it’s part of a continuing process for the soul. We have lived before and we will live again in a new body. What we br...

                                                   The battle for and against assisted suicide, what used to be called mercy killing, is always fierce and heartfelt. But in the State of Victoria in democratic Australia an act to make it legal for the terminally ill is close to being passed in parliament’s Upper House. And then it will become legal. In some countries it is legal already. To take the responsibility for ending a life, even your own, is momentous. And there has been plenty of passion around the euthanasia debate, with valuable and compassionate considerations on both sides. These are widely accessible and most likely you will know them. I want to look from a different direction. Humans have a complicated, conflicted and often irrational attitude towards taking the life of another human being. There’s a universal injunction against it that lies a...

                                                                                                                                A world of difference Society on Gethen is ambisexual. That is, for most of the time people are androgynous, but once a month at the time of kemmer they become sexually active as either male or female – they never know which it will be. This is the setting for Ursula K Le Guin’s stunning sci-fi novel The Left hand of Darkness. In her mutable fictional culture, the rigid gender divisions we hold have no relevance. I think ambisexuality is worth a close look when the issue of equality in marriage is a hot potato for politicians and a sourc...

My first meeting with Sheila. In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable. My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual. Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name). Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being...