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Emilybellish, Byron Bay (2026)

10/10/2025

I’ve been out on Arrernte Country, feeling the honest balance of being both held and tested. Grief as present as delight. The immeasurable privilege of this experience is my navigation for action. I was in the company of fifty or so women dancing on red earth, moving from dawn until far past sundown.

It was work. Testing me. Adoring me. So much is being offered. Ease sometimes felt masked as the trickster. An education. I have so much to learn.

The days were up to 40 degrees. On the last night there was an electrical storm who conversed with me til daybreak. I hardly slept, listening to its every breath and pause, it held the teachings I’d waited my whole life to hear.

This is my work. I’m trusting more in my integrity. What it means to truly feed, to give first to a place that is holding us so generously. Some days I ache to be held. Other times I yearn for aloneness as I slip into the tin-shed kitchen, stirring the pots whilst spirit dingoes stand guard.

Sometimes my heart spills open in ways that might look unprofessional to some. I cry easily. I cherish depth. I value togetherness, I crave solitude and my truest inspiration is born in the dance between the two.

My eyes have a language of their own. I’ve been told my directness and clarity can sometimes be mistaken for abruptness. There are days when I have oceans of patience, and others when I have hardly any at all.

I don’t plan menus; my creative spirit can’t breathe that way. The food that comes through me is alive. It’s medicine, brewed from the energetic exchange of this space, this time, this gathering. I trust the process.

I listen deeply to the pulse of nature and the group, to the organism we become when we move and eat and sleep as one. Storms erupt in our hearts, our small selves scream for attention, so I make slow cooked chicken soup and we all cry with gratitude for the way it soothes us.

I don’t wear an apron. My clothes are marked with spice, fat, and story. Burn scars lace my hands and arms. I feel safe in the chaos, in the calm, and in the spaces between. I’ve learned not to take things so personally. I highly recommend communing with a midnight storm. It’s all a liquid mirror.

10/10/2025

“I need you to be a Queen” were the words my teacher, mentor, and friend Amit spoke to me at his last retreat in Australia earlier this year, such challenging invitation on so many levels.

Amit has been a force in helping me find my voice and speak and sing with clarity about my inner world. The raw and messy revealing of being human. His work is deeply profound, and I continue to feel the guidance of his teachings in the way I move and relate and commune with others.

This work has taught me so much about collaboration with people as well as with the many parts inside myself. It has been a powerful gear shift in my own growth.

This cake was an afternoon offering for Amit’s ten-day Wild Roots Journey at earlier this year ~ a black sesame, cacao, and sour plum torte, drizzled with black tahini maple glaze and topped with smashed raspberries.

10/10/2025

I’m prone to chase a market that smells of smoke, sweat, and fried things, where the air hums thick with chatter and spice. The kind of place where I can perve on old men hunched over tin tables, drinking coffee so short and so black it borders on myth. Outside, kids dart through puddles, a rooster is tied to a motorbike, someone’s shouting about tomatoes, and fish scales glint across the dirt floor. It’s chaos. It’s perfect.

I enter slowly. A market is an easy place for me to drop straight into presence. My senses take over. The deeper I go, the more alive I feel. I watch as hands measure by memory. Voices barter, argue, laugh. Everything is layered, breathing, an ecosystem of motion and story.

Sometimes someone catches my eye and sees my curiosity. I’m in. I trust the generosity of these exchanges. Sometimes it’s clumsy, all hand gestures and bags of apricots. Other times, it’s an easeful flow that eventuates in sitting on the floor of a family’s kitchen. Marketplaces lead to invitations home. Shoes off. A chipped cup in my hand. Steam on the windows. The room thick with oil and onion and something ancient.

The grandmothers are always present here too, sharp-eyed and sure-handed in the kitchen. They cook like they breathe, without recipes or hesitation. I watch and learn. My teachers. A splash, a handful, a laugh, a scold for the cats and the kittens or the neighbour. No-f**kery queens, cheeky, wise, unbothered. These markets and kitchens have shaped the way I move through the world.

I’m still learning how this kind of hospitality fits inside my sense of belonging. Sometimes I stay for weeks with strangers who become family, who cry when I leave. I love that kind of intimacy, the kind that proves our common humanity.

These images are from an adventure to Tunisia a couple of months back, where markets are among the finest and hospitality feels boundless.

06/10/2025

We call it retreat,
it calls us home.
The gathering of bodies and earth,
of river and stone.

The shape of belonging is easy to recognise,
in the way the Sheoaks cradle us,
and the way sand sinks between my toes.
Laughter leans into silence,
easily, unrushed.

Time is never ever spoken of here,
and it’s perfect. A rearranging of brain cells, a making sense of things old way.

Days spill open with the call of a cooee downstream and we have a choice about how we want to listen.

Nights fall soft beneath a blanket of the glowing universe and we eat fireside. Slow cooked stew straight from the iron pot. And it’s always perfect. Human bodies having an experience. Blessed with fortune.

~ an honour to nourish the crew at RETREAT season after season. An honest and real treat. Grateful for my dear friends at who get to journey alongside with here, and grateful for this stellar snap by my honey love

06/10/2025

I’ve been drawing a river of love hearts on my coffee cup. My third cup of coffee, upon my third flight, on my way to Mparntwe.

I’ve been given a window seat for the third time today. A revealing mirror of my inner landscape stretches below me, crimson expanse, a transmission of resilience, of undeniable truth, of very, very old stories. Red earth stories.

I know these stories. And my womb drops with relief.

My feelings are big and expressive today. I’ve been laughing, loudly, and crying too. This landscape. This soundscape. This fluttering in my heart and depth in my womb.

In three days I’ll bleed upon this earth. Blood will seep deeply, and I trust our intimacy will arise as it naturally wants to.

It’s the third time this morning I’ve listened to John Craigie’s album. There’s a song about miracles, another about karaoke, another about Burning Man grandparents, and other songs about so many other aspects of this strange, precious existence that we call life. I love it.

I keep drawing a river of love hearts on my coffee cup. And my mind wanders towards three shooting stars. I look up and catch the eyes of another passenger, both of us exposed, for the briefest moment. And It feels good to be seen. So easily we can infect one another.

06/10/2025

A marriage ~

I’m on black wallaby country, there’s a family of them over way staring deep into my soul as I sit creek side.

The ice from surrounding mountains has melted and is gushing forth, transformed into streams of flowing silky water. It tickles my toes and wakes up my body.

The festivities are in fulls swing. I’m in the company of Irish and Persian families, q***r Canberra folk, earth building friends, desert sisters flown in from the red earth and those other guests whom I have yet to meet. I feel a comforting sense of belonging.

I love merging cultures, decadent plates of baklava, posies of flowers arranged in op shop vases, chocolate stout home brew, sheep’s head broth bubbling on the stovetop and more than enough dry wood cut to keep the fire burning for the next week or so.

I’ve been spending the past couple of days cycling round and around the homestead kitchen and out by the fire. Tending. Preparing. Huge pots of goodness. Delicate delights. I’m happy.

We’re all here in wonder and devotion to the celebration of love and union.

And the wattle! I’m totally and utterly smitten with their truth and expression. They’re everywhere I look… dancing with the scribbly gums and reaching up as high as the red gums. They sing to me: “Be bright, be bold, be beautiful, support the community and ecosystem, and thrive in being all of you.”

~Written waterside a few days back whilst having the honour to cook at the wedding festivity for my dear friends Ahmed and Miriam. Their wedding cake was seven layers of Persian inspired love, sponged together with rose honey cardamom cream, slow roasted strawberries, blueberries and pomegranate jewels. Eaten layer by layer, in prayer and delight ♥️

22/08/2024

Naked and alive,
Cooking fresh fish on fire

Next to a Magdalena chapel,
Upon a crystal laden mountain

Surrounded by goats and ancient forest nymphs,
Peaking over the Aegean Sea

🖤 Summer in Samothraki

11/01/2023

Ancient ancestors
You behold me in awe,

I feel safe here, upon your rugged surface,
Upon your high brows veering towards the sun. Perched here I am, where you’ve got my back.

In your embrace where no prejudice exists, please let my mind run through you, let my senses become intoxicated in only you.

Teach me your tales spoken in language that only my heart can translate, I long to listen.

Tutor me in patience with my trembling balance, show me how to trust my path, how to laugh - with my self.

Coming back to my core,
Coming back to my core,
Reminding me that play is my prayer.

05/03/2022

Hello friends and family. Thank you thank you thank you for your messages of support and concern - I am safe and well. Doing my best to lend my human self and my skills to the community right now as we navigate this devastation as best we can.

Roads cut off, horrific landslides, choppers overhead evacuating communities from the hills that surround my home. Water contamination, houses ruined and washed away, businesses broken, thousands of people displaced from their homes and family, native animals and livestock dead.

Yesterday I hiked through the rain up to the end of left bank road and delivered a pouch of to***co to an old fella named Eddie. He was stoked. He told me that his panty has never been so full, thanks to the amount of food that’s been donated by foot to him earlier this week. He’s got enough toilet paper for weeks but no toilet, he’s got cans of beans but no stove top or gas to cook himself a meal. With his floor still covered ankle deep in toxic sludge, he told me that he’s just grateful that his asbestos filled walls didn’t crack open. Eddie hasn’t had enough money to even register his car for the past two years but he’s grateful that the buckets surrounding his rusty gutters are gathering enough water for him to take a wash. The road up to Eddie’s place has been slashed into pieces and no vehicles are able to access him or his neighbours homes. Most of the homes up there are requiring days of human power and hands on rubble and mud removal…I’ve never smelt or seen anything like what I experienced yesterday. As time goes on, these people in their homes will continue to face horrific health concerns with mould and toxins breading rapidly. Eddie is one of so many who are faced with unbelievable conditions whilst simultaneously experiencing shock, isolation and exhaustion
*continued in comments

13/08/2021

Creamy polenta with black sesame, dehydrated lady fingers, red plum jam, purple lilly pilly, tahini drizzle and . on the road

13/08/2021

Spending mornings lost in tea rituals, afternoons foraging and evenings cooking on fire, nights conversing with the stars. Simple living coupled with profound abundance.

Here be an afternoon bounty of Warrigal greens, nopale, prickly pear, pandanus, juicy pig face fruit and salty stems.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer so beautifully writes in Braiding Sweetgrass ~

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Gratitude for all that is in existence 🤍

Emilybellish

10/10/2025

10/10/2025

10/10/2025

06/10/2025

06/10/2025

06/10/2025

22/08/2024

11/01/2023

05/03/2022

13/08/2021

13/08/2021

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