Annette VanOldenbarneveld, is a Canadian artist, writer, editor, jewelry maker, musician, and philosopher. She is passionate about her music and also the environment and all living creators that inhabit this planet. If you ask Annette what she wants for the world in a sentence she would say that she wants to save the animals, expand consciousness, use distant energy healing, and live in the truth.
Can you tell us a bit about your childhood? Where you grew up and what was life like as a child?
I grew up outside of Sault Ste Marie, on St Joe’s Island. At two years of age, my mother took refuge from an abusive husband, and left behind a fortune the two of them built together. They had invested in a 53 acre estate together, in Ancaster, Ontario, on Butterroad. St Joe’s Island had things like peaches and cream corn fest, tractor parades, pudding stone and farms. I grew up across from the lake and spent a lot of time hiking, canoeing, taping maple syrup trees, things like that.
How old where you when you started to play guitar and write music? Do you have any role models that inspired your song writing?
When I was around 10 years old, we moved into Sault Ste Marie, across from Bellview park. I began to involve myself with the United Church Choir, with Bob Jones as the director, the brass bells, piano lessons, and touring musicals. I also studied piano and early theory with my brother in law, Don Holley.
In my early teens I joined the Sault Youth Theater and studied method acting, while performing at least two plays a year. In my early teens, grade 9 and 10, I was in a highschool guitar class with Mark Gough as the teacher. This teacher had us in a class with white bricks, and the highschool artists had painted Pink Floyd the Wall, with the face that looked like it was coming through the wall at you. We learned a lot of pink floyd, how to write songs, and a few of us were chosen to be part of DunnPlugged, the highschoolcd that Mark Gough put out from time to time. Mark had asked us at the beginning of grade 10 guitar what we would like to learn. I wrote, how to write a song. That ended up being our final exam. I wrote Be Aware, and it was chosen to be on DunnPlugged.
I want to ask you about distant energy healing and what are your beliefs on the subject? Do you think we can do energy healing and if so we will see it happening more frequently?
Actually, Distance healing is something I am very familiar with. I always had a natural drive and ability to perform Reiki and even qigong at times, upon animals, and people when they are in need. After coming across a couple of distance healing books in a second hand shop, I found myself in a situation where I could not get to a bird that had been injured by flying into the wheel of a bike. I felt helpless. Went to try to meditate on what I could do, and I had happened to have put the distance healing books in my bag with me. I started reading a part about sending a blue healing light to the hologram that you form of the subject. I did this all night. Connecting roots from me to the ground, pulling up healing light, drawing it in through my crown chakra from the universe and surrounding the hologram of the bird that I saw laying injured in the distance. In the morning the bird had flown away.
What is expanded consciousness to you and what is the collective consciousness headed for?
An expanded consciousness is our ability to conceive of the context of our own perspective. Universal consciousness is the breadth of information available to those who channel it from the universe, many people don’t realize they are doing this, but every ‘idea’, impulse, vision, intuition, is coming from our connection to universal consciousness. I know that my own consciousness has expanded at a rapid rate in the past few years, I do see a pattern of this happening in people around me. I also see others who enslave themselves in addiction, guilt, fear, denial and ego, who have rapidly regressed, into what I have come to understand as non existence. I believe the collective consciousness will end up being a balance between all those elements of consiousness that make up the whole.
What is truth?
Truth is any aspect of anything put under the microscope of doubt and justified on solid critical thinking and logic. Opposite truths may both be true, and wisdom is having a sense of peace about the truth of these contradictions.
Do you save animals now at the moment from the unconsciousness of mankind? What do corporations have to face in the years to come?
Yes, I help in anyway that I can. I believe that animals are non human persons and should be respected as such. Corporations have been operating under the dangerous assumption that land, animals and humans are unlimited resources, and they are not either resources, or unlimited, let alone unlimited resources. The challenge will be to find profitable goals that blend innovation with the direction of inward progress.
Are you writing any books, articles that help us expand our level of awareness and do you have any projects in the works that gear towards that with any of your art forms?
Yes. I have produced and written an art/poetry book entitled Our Gilded Being, A Ressurection of the Sacred Feminine. It is a blend of 3 women who are both writer and artist. The main themes of the book are self awareness, relationships, culture, the environment, and time/death. This book will be self published in the coming year.
I have also been contributing poetry to a book published through the Womankind Center in Hamilton on. It will be coming out at the end of 2013.
The next CD that I will come out with is going to be a tribute to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women who Run with the Wolves. A work that delves deeply into the feminine psyche.
I am also working on a book called Right of Passage. It is a story about a dance with dangerous love and addiction along with the understandings/challenges that face building a firm foundation after traumas.
There are several other aspects of my writing plans that focus on using the creative arts experience that I have with that of my education in political theory and psychoanalysis.
What is your most profound message to the world at this moment and are you excited for the planet or do you think we have much more suffering to come?
“I love my country, by which I mean, I am indebted to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. So many cunning sons and daughters, our four mothers and four fathers, who came through hell and high water, who came singing through slaughter, so that we could behold, breathlessly, the sight- how a raging river of tears, cut a grand canyon of light.” –AniDefranco
Where is Annette going in the year ahead?
Much of the work that has been taking shape for the past 6 years, since graduating from Algoma University, is going to be exposed to the public this year. I have plans for music, writing, art, event production, community involvement and it is going to be exhibited with a passion that has continued to burn, even through the darkest passages. I believe it will light the way to great things.
By the end of next, I would like to take my first trip. I would like to support the elephant nature foundation, because for the same price as a trip to a resort, I could volunteer in a rustic and raw place that rehabilitates elephants. I would bath them and feed them, bond with them. At the end of each weeks stay, the guests/volunteers trek with the elephants to sleep in their hectares of refuge in Thailand, complete with campfire and guitar to serenade these beautiful and intelligent creatures.
Help heal our planet, ban the torture of baby elephants, expand and encourage consciousness, use distance energy healing, demand corporate accountability, expose the truth, Help animals any way I can, Help the Environment, end suffering of any kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment