Lyndy
SUMMERHAZE
"WHAT are you BRINGING to the WORLD?"
She lives the reality of everyday magic: a woman of many talents, not only an accomplished musician/songwriter, lecturer in English literature but also what might have once been termed a true ‘sensitive’ and a gifted healer who reads energy, meaning that she is able to read what is behind the appearance of things. She has an absolutely heightened sense of feeling which allows her access to realms that most of us have long since shut down from or sceptically think don’t exist. This is something that has always been with her but she first re-discovered her healing capacity in Sydney in the seventies. Just from this brief story you can tell that Lyndy has had an interesting and somewhat bohemian life. She was a muse of sorts to musicians, poets and writers in her younger years and as mentioned above is a writer and musician in her own right – a universal woman.
A
At seventy-five Lyndy is a vibrant and spicy mix of immense joy and humour coupled with the acute wisdom you can see in the depths of her greeny-blue sparkling eyes. To be in her company is to be enriched and lifted out of any semblance of the mundane.
At sixty she took the unusual step of leaving a marriage of thirty-five years – something that takes courage and I have always admired her for that – but she is not someone who will compromise with what she feels is not true. Leaving Sydney, and coming north to the Northern Rivers area of NSW to make a new life she found she could not get a university job and ended up cleaning houses for a number of years to pay her bills and I never heard her complain about that even an iota. Incidentally she once helped me out by cleaning my house and she is the only woman I have ever seen rock up to a cleaning job in an Armani jacket. I love that about her, never one to drop her standards.
I wanted to interview her for this site because as well as all the above, Lyndy has a wonderful dress sense and a timeless, classic style with a touch of edge. Speaking with her about clothing you are reminded that once women were in fact educated in how to dress and knew all about fabrics, cuts and how to wear clothes that suited them – not dictated to by current trends and yet at the same time unabashedly up-to-date modern.
ON
never dressing down
"WHAT WOMAN would
ever want to BE SEEN DEAD in a TRACK SUIT?"
I loved the story about how you turned up to a cleaning job. You were wearing a beautiful Laura Ashley linen dress. - JB
Yes. LS
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And it was duck egg blue with a mixture of aqua. - JB
Yes. – LS
And you wore it to clean somewhere because you had to do cleaning. - JB
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Yes. For a while. – LS
The next-door neighbour came in. They couldn't believe why you were wearing, this beautiful outfit for cleaning. And you just said, - JB
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‘Well, why not? ‘ LS
You never saw why you shouldn't. Why should you ever dress yourself down to clean a house? - JB
And why should I ever wear tracksuits? – LS
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Yes. Tracksuits. Tell me about what you feel about track suits. - JB
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I will never, ever appear anywhere in a tracksuit. – LS
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​What is it about a track suit? Tell me. - JB
I really feel that if I would wear a track suit, then I'm in the sludge. I don't feel I have any traction with bringing light, beauty, joy. It would just completely demobilise me to be wearing a track suit.
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It's like what woman would ever want be seen dead in a track suit? – LS
ON
Clothes and Fashion
"Those clothes would have actually ... CURTAILED women’s MOVEMENTS
and she FREED ALL THAT UP
with her DESIGNS."
But you see, I think that's part of why I wanted to interview you because you said to me the other day, ‘I love beautiful clothes’. And how you said it was just like you could have come out of any era, not the era of the Chinese domination that we're in now. . . - JB
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That's an interesting thing to say. – LS
Well, look at the way that our clothing has been controlled. It's pretty much all made in China now, we’ve lost most of our local factories and seamstresses and no disrespect to the Chinese but a lot of what you can now buy in Australia is pretty boring really. – JB
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Yes, I know. Utterly boring. – LS
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A lot of it’s got no style, no grace, no quality, no shape, no form. – JB
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And you have to end up paying a lot of money for true shape, which is ridiculous. . . Why should you have to pay a lot of money for a decent cut? – LS
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Exactly. – JB
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I mean, I do pay it and when the money leaves my hands, I'm in great joy because of what I'm receiving and then sharing. I'm not going to resent it, but it's such a set up.
– LS
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It is and it's got worse – but then if you think about it, in the past the only people that wore beautiful clothes were people who were loaded. Most of the ateliers were in Paris and the clientele that a designer like Chanel served were all very wealthy. And Audrey Hepburn is a universal style icon to this day, but she was the muse of Givenchy and that was a highly privileged position to be in. The clothes she got to wear! – JB
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Yes, I adore Audrey Hepburn and her sense of style. – LS
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And we all love her style but she was dressed in things that cost thousands and thousands of dollars. – JB
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Totally. The amazing thing for me about the clothing industry in America was Brooks Brothers establishing themselves as the first ready to wear in 1818. They're like a later development of the Industrial Revolution which made possible a middle class that could be mobile, energetically communicative, and well attired without having to pay a fortune for it. The Industrial Revolution liberated a middle class who could earn a living, earn
good money and spend and circulate that money and it was to do with movement, flexibility and flow.
​Brooks Brothers were a much later flowering of this new movement of having clothes that the middle class could wear – quite beautiful and stylish, they had access to things that they wouldn't have had access to before. – LS
You are amazing that you know this. . – JB
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Well, it's just stuff I put together but I don't know much about it really. – LS
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No, no, but I love what you're saying, that's why I love talking to you, because it's always so rich in these things that you see and you put together like that. Like when we were talking about Chanel on our walk a few days ago and you were saying that she took women out of the constriction of corsets and all those reductions and restrictions. – JB
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She liberated them from frills, not that there is anything wrong with frills as Seinfeld would say [laughs]. If people want to wear them then wear them. – LS
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A lot of what we wear today was from her inspiration. – JB
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Absolutely, and how we dress – because it was totally one of the most revolutionary or evolutionary things for women to be released from all that silliness that went around all the ribbons and frills. Not that that has to mean anything but at that time it did. Chanel was evolutionary in her design for women providing beautiful couture in which they didn’t have to be tied down, you know, laced into corsets with long this and long that. Those clothes would have actually curtailed women’s movements and she freed all that up with her designs.
There’s a scene in the Chanel movie (‘Before Chanel’) where the camera is looking down from above on a ball and all the women are going around in their frills and ribbons and pastels and there in the middle of it all, you see Chanel in the original little black dress. A long elegant body-hugging gown, with no frills, just absolute elegance on wheels.
And she's waltzing around there and watching that my heart just expanded. – LS
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What I love about that is she must have been so confident in herself to dress like that at that time. Can you imagine? – JB
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Absolutely. And she was a woman who in, in a male dominated society – not that I am one of those people who has a thing against men, not at all – but in that society and at that time she actually was able to stand as a woman and run a business, be a successful designer and not be married and not tick all the boxes.
I mean, she said things like, ‘a woman only really starts to get interesting when she gets older’.
– LS
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She was unique and very outside the box. – JB
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ON
finding your true style
"The WHOLE THING is you've got to FIND
what is YOUR STYLE."
But now I want to go on to talk some more about you because I think you've got a very strong sense of your own style. What you choose to wear is classic in its way, and always with an understated luxury with a bit of edge too. But for many of us a lot of the time we're very influenced by what others think, what others are wearing, and you know, are we really wearing what's true for us? - JB
We each have a particular God-given ‘design’ and the clothes we wear can be a a rich outer representation of. That's what could impulse our clothing choices. I would love to wear some of the sparkly stuff that others wear for example but it just doesn’t work on me. I'm a classic dresser and it sometimes can be quite preppy.
So, it's what you, the individual is there to represent – that angle – and therefore what you're true to without any comparison to any other woman. And that's the crucial thing with women. We can't compare. Everyone is equally stunning. So, to compare ourselves to anyone else, it is madness. – LS
Mm-hmm – but we do it. We were taught to do it. – JB
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We were taught to do it. And I've felt it when younger but now I just go deeply, even more deeply into what I'm here to bring.
So, the whole thing is you've got to find what is your style. What, what are you bringing to the world? In my instance, you're not bringing frills. You might be bringing Chanel or you might be bringing, you know, Brook Brothers or Ralph Polo Lauren.
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So, it’s all about what are we bringing. – LS
Tell me more about that. – JB
Our bodies are our vehicle of expression and our clothes are to put on the body and that is part of our expression. My representation in clothing is quite often stylish in a slightly preppy way – I don't really know the fashion terms but it has a streamlined, clear cut, tailored, no nonsense thing about it. And l essentially, bring a quality of ‘divine austerity’ (which means precision, integrity, simplicity and awesomeness) to earth and that shows in my style. So, finding your style is to do with what you’re here to represent, to reflect a quality of heaven. Other women will reflect their own unique design so there is actually never any cause for comparison to another. As One, we can together bring Sacred Sexy Beauty of every angle.
When a friend was living in my house, every morning she'd come out for work looking so regal and I’d go, ‘Wow. How beautiful to walk into work looking like that. It's going to uplift everyone.’ Women are going to get, ‘Oh my God I can be like that’.
You don't have to dress down, you don't have to hide because of jealousy coming at you. It exposes all the jealousy, competition, and terribleness that is fed to women to do to each other instead of finding their own expression of their universal beauty. In the face of jealousy all we have to do is lovingly and powerfully turn up the volume. Withdrawing, hiding, and dressing down is the last thing to do.
And there's not one woman in the world who isn't stunningly beautiful when they're connected to themselves. When they're living the Soul. Each one is divinely beautiful. – LS
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ON
NOTHING IS ORIGINAL
"Breaking the
CONSCIOUSNESS
That things have TO BE BETTER, have to BE DIFFERENT."
Yes that’s true… but sometimes I feel that I'm not as clear on my own style as maybe some people are. - JB
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What makes you think that? I don’t at all get that impression.
– LS
Because I'm often quite changeable about things I like. I can be in something like this today (a soft pastel top with frilled cap sleeves) and then tomorrow I might be in a pin striped shirt and trousers. – JB
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You don't have to stick to anything. In fact I am very inspired by your incredibly stunning style. I've got a long skirt with flowers on but I often wear pants like you and have really men's-like clothes on. And that's gorgeous. – LS
Well, maybe it's because I'm often very influenced by other people that I see, like for example, I see someone has these nice shoes, I think, ‘Oh, I'd like a pair of those’. – JB
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Oh, believe me, I'm exactly the same. I never originate a thing. I see something that someone's got on and go, ‘That's it, I'm going to get that, or something like that’. And then your taste can change, because I used to go to these parties where women would wear a silk shirt and black pants and I never did that. I was always looking for linen and linen and linen and linen.
And then, you know, recently I bought a silk shirt and now I'm going to try the silk shirt and the black pants and the leopard-skin shoes. It's almost Gold Coast (Queensland) but I go, ‘Well, I'm going to try that’. – LS
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So it's a richness, isn't it? – JB
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Absolutely. You don't have to stick to anything. It's only what you are impulsed to wear in that circumstance. – LS
But when we actually get that right, when you get that moment and you do it, then you feel very settled. You feel amazing in yourself. . – JB
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Absolutely, you feel incredibly settled which is the only way to be – very sexy. And I had something else on this morning, my first thing, which is a very preppy skirt from Brooks Brothers and it's got a belt and it's a good length, down to mid-calf, and it's camel, a sort of drill material. It's amazing. And you can use it in winter with a riding jacket and long boots. – LS
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I love the way you describe it, it’s so visual. – JB
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That is how Brooks Brothers presented it. I am just relaying it. So, anyway, I put that on this morning, but there was no oomph. And usually, when I put that on
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I feel amazing. Today it didn't work. It was just flat. So, I thought, well, I'm not going to wear it. So, I just went and looked in the cupboard and saw what stood out. I find I don't always have to wear something different every day. There are things which have a moment and you keep going back to and go, that's what I want to wear. I want to wear that. – LS
Yes, I do that. Yes, I do that all the time. But there used to be this idea, you had to be seen in something different every day.– JB
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I was brought up that way. Not just my parents, but the milieu – it's a consciousness. The innovative consciousness, that things have to be better, have to be different. Because everyone is so jaded by life as a result of the vibrancy of energy being ignored.
And that extends to the idea that we can’t wear the same thing – which is not true. And we were discussing this the other day when you were talking about maybe buying one of these skirts
I have.
And I said, I absolutely don't care if every woman in the room has the same dress on as me, because we all represent something different.
It doesn't matter, you know, you can buy anything. And I have bought things that you have. – LS
I love that though. Yes, because there's a sort of taboo in it, isn't there? – JB
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There's a taboo in it, and yes, we just break all such taboos because they are restrictions and reductions and all based on competition and identification. – LS
And part of that is that you have to be original, but then nobody's original. - JB
Nobody's original – as King Solomon said in his wisdom, ‘There is nothing new under the Sun’. – LS
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Because it's all derivative. Even Chanel copied some of the things her lovers wore. - JB
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Yes, totally. She got inspired by the beautiful loose stripey fisherman's sweaters when she was down at Deauville (France). And she made them into a gorgeous fashion item. – LS
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Everything is derivative. Everything. The whole lot. So, we bust that. - JB
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Yes, absolutely agree that we bust that. – LS
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So, I want to go back to finding your own way of dressing that reflects what are you bringing to the world, which we've talked around already – but how would you help a woman to find her style?
I mean, you have an incredible sense of your style. You just do it. You probably never even think about it because it's so innate to you – you know what to what to wear for your body, for your shape, for your emanation, for everything. You just don't get sidetracked. You don't waste time on things that you know don't work. - JB
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And one of the tricky things about that is when you are younger for some – and it wasn't me – having a shop assistant who wasn't actually there for your best interest. Who just wanted to sell something and no judgment about that, people have got to make a living but it's not about them. It's about us claiming the authority of what we know works on us and what we represent. We are deeply precious beings. – LS
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ON
FINDING
THE MAGIC
"YOU just have to KNOW what is the MAGIC
And then bring that."
But suppose you don't quite know that, whereas you've got this very developed sense of style and fabrics and all of that. Did you always have that? - JB
Yes, I always had it. And I think everybody always has everything but various things have been trampled on so that we've been made to move into something that's uncertain and unsure which is actually not who we are. So, it's a matter of constantly knowing what you are and that you have something unique and yet totally harmonious to bring to the whole, to everyone.
And that's what you go for. And you can find what that is if you just fall a little bit still and don't let the busyness of the world completely overtake take you – the buzz. You know, the buzz factor. Just say, ‘okay, that's the buzz factor’ – but to get to true beauty, you have to go deeper because true beauty lies in the deeps of Stillness and belongs to everyone without exception. It's not a face style. It's not a body style. It’s not a ‘look’. Which are all contrivances. It's a living emanation inside every woman. And every woman is beautiful and that's what we go for. My mother said that I always knew exactly what I wanted to wear. She nevertheless, overrode me on several occasions: ‘No, I had to buy that sensible dress. No, I couldn't have the one with the sailor collar. You'd only be able to wear that to a couple of ocasions’. You know, all of that. – LS
That's so deadening, isn't it? - JB
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Oh, absolutely. You just have to know what is the magic. And then bring that. – LS
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So, is that a feeling in your body, the magic? What is it for you? – because we would never make mistakes, if we could just feel it. - JB
You definitely don't make mistakes if you stay in your body because your body communicates. – LS
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Whether it just works for now or not. – JB
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Yes, and you can overlay that purity with a contamination of a fantasy of what you want to look like. You know when I was a teenager, I wanted to look like Sandra Dee, blue eyes and blonde hair, she was like a baby doll. Very cute. Oh, why did I have to I look like a gypsy, the only person in Lismore (a small provincial town in rural NSW) who's not blonde and blue eyed? Out of fantasy, I'd like to look like that, but I very soon realised, well, you just have to wear what suits. So, I used to get ‘Seventeen’ magazine sent from America. That was inspired by a friend of mine, Glenys Hepburn. She used to get Seventeen magazine.
– LS
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Was this when you were about fifteen and sixteen? – JB
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Yes, about fifteen or sixteen, and we would pore through the magazine and find the clothes we liked, and then we'd get the closest materials we could get and we'd go to the dressmaker and they'd charge us about twelve pounds for a dress and they'd make us something like we’d seen in Seventeen magazine. So, we would look absolutely amazing for practically nothing. – LS
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But isn't it incredible that you girls would do that because you were in Lismore, which must have been a sartorial desert in those days. – JB
Totally. We only had Fosseys which is like Kmart or something. I used to wonder why I was born here. Yes, it was a total desert and you can imagine when I first went to the movies and saw the clothes, you know, like in Gigi, or Audrey Hepburn movies and Grace Kelly movies, I went, where do they get these clothes?
But I knew I'd get to them one day. – LS
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I love that. So, you didn't have any kind of ‘Oh, that's just what movie stars wear. I can't wear that’. – JB
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No, no, no, no. You know, every woman knows what looks good on her because as soon as you get the right combination, phoom! It falls into place, it lights up and you can try wearing something else but this is how it works. Very, very simple. And there's no woman who doesn't know how to do that.– LS
So, what you're saying is we all know it. But if you go and sit in the streets anywhere, London, Paris, New York, Lismore, wherever you are, Sydney, Brisbane and watch people, a lot of what people are wearing is just not that. So, if every woman knows that inside her, what makes her look good, but she doesn't wear that, then that has to be deliberate somehow – a deliberate sabotage. – JB
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Yes, it has to be. Women often take on deliberate protection or a playing down of themselves so that they won’t be attacked for their sublime Sacredness. And it's a protection from being all the beauty of yourself because the world is very threatened by the beauty of a woman and her innate Sacredness. And so, everything is done to stop that.
The forces that prevail in society try to shut down every woman from being that, which is a crime. And then what happens to the men? They are lost, without the leading light of a woman’s true Sacredness to hold the true standards.
– LS
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Yes. And what's put up instead, in Vogue Magazine for example, is an image of a woman. And those images are saying it's not cool to smile. – JB
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So true. Models in our current fashion magazines never smile now.
You're not allowed to smile. No, no, no. You can't be inviting. You can't be warm. You’ve got to look like a kind of heroin addict or something. You’ve got to look miserable. – LS
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Or you are not cool. – JB
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Yes, absolutely ridiculous. But nothing is an accident. It is all part of a strategy by the forces that prevail that does not want humanity to evolve back to what they truly are, to make beautiful young women think that they have to be miserable, bad tempered and pouty to be seen to be attractive, when that is the last thing in the world that is truly sexy. What about their innate magnificence, exquisiteness, and true authority?
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So, my hairdresser who's just 29, 30 and she just bought her own salon, always gets Vogue for me because from the early days I used to go there and I would read Vogue. And we were just looking at it together the other day and she was saying, ‘Oh my God, nobody smiles. Everybody looks like they're in anguish’.
And we just had this incredible conversation about why don't women want to emanate beauty. Why is it so wounded? And, you know, is it something in the way that women have been treated and what is now supposed to be attractive in a very anguished porn-ridden world. Do we ever ask what dictates this fashion, who is demanding it and why? How we have given our power away!
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And it was an amazing conversation and opening the pages of Vogue literally I felt like I was being assaulted from the faces of the women, (beautiful women) in how they have to present
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themselves, in whatever they think is needed or whatever's running Vogue wants the agenda to be. I can't actually really look at that those images any more.
I’ve always loved being in a woman’s body and I used to think when I was a teenager, this is amazing. I used to feel amazing when I got my period. I used to feel like such a gorgeous womanly woman. I felt this was the foundation of everything else I ‘did’.
And I absolutely adored that time of my life and my mother didn't teach me that. In general at that time periods were a curse, you know?
But I do remember feeling so sacred. Such beauty. It was just incredible. I love being a woman. – LS
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So, can we go back to the influences of your youth…
You had a friend Beverley at the Conservatorium of Music, didn’t you. – JB
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Yes, Beverley Laurie, she was very stylish and she used to make clothes from Vogue patterns, vogue dresses and stuff, and I learned a lot of my clothes sense from her at that point. Beverly was the first person I knew who wore tweed. You know, with a little black jumper with short sleeves. Stunning. And I really went into that. – LS
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Where did you learn about fabrics? Because you’ve got an incredible sense of fabrics. – JB
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This sort of happened. – LS
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You learned about what you loved. – JB
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Yes. – LS
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Did you always love linen and cottons? – JB
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Yes. – LS
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Yes. Yes. I never liked synthetics – when nylon came out and all that started happening. I was going, ‘No, I'm not going there’.
I still don't really like synthetic that much, but sometimes synthetic stuff is actually good. Sometimes it really does work, but it often it doesn't turn me on.
I like polished cotton. Cottons, linen. I love silk, but when I put it on, it does nothing for me. But I see you in silk and you look divine. So, it's a matter of working out what? When you put something on does it lift the room? You know, does it light you up?
A magic happens a constellation of influences come together, but you know, of course it's all to do with the vibration.
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"I must FEEL an
impulse to put SOMETHING
on."
ON
STAYING
CURRENT
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I have another question for you. Do you have anything in your wardrobe that you've had for a long time?​ – JB
That's an impossible question. I’ve probably got things that are four years old. Is that a long time? – LS
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Well, that's long enough. Do you wear them much? What I'm asking you is do you find that you buy things often? When you buy things, do you buy them for the moment or do you buy them with an eye to them lasting or do you think sometimes, ‘I'll love this for a long time’. – JB
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I don't ever think about that one way or the other. I don't consider it but I have got things that are four years old, like a couple of Gant jackets, that are great to wear with jeans, white t-shirt in winter and boots and they're classic. They're not tweed, but they're like the classic Tweed jackets. So, they're quite old and I still wear them. – LS
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And you still feel good in them. You still feel they light up the room when you put them on. – JB
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Yes, but then lately I've been feeling every year I don't want to wear what I had last year. .– LS
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I feel that too – JB
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I just keep wanting to discard clothes and get new ones. . – LS
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It's a very expensive habit. – JB
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Yes, I know, but I just can't go around in clothes that don't do it. I just can't do it. – LS
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So, it's like something loses the energy, doesn't it? – JB
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Yes. Well, it loses where you are at that moment. – LS
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That's right. So, you taught me that things have a life, you know? But there’s this sustainable movement now, which I understand because nowadays we buy all these cheap clothes and throw them away – JB
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It's horrendous. – LS
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It's awful, it's tat and it has no quality – JB
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No. Nothing in it. And it's been made without love and it's been made by people in sweat shops that have been paid dollar a day and the whole thing is disgusting. – LS
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Yeah, absolutely. So, I understand where the sustainable movement is coming from but they'll never stop women buying new clothes.
You'll never stop that because of what you're saying, we are drawn to the vibrational freshness of something that has to express a quality of you. But if you nail it with something particular that there seems to be like two things, the moment-to-moment thing like we're talking about, but also something that's more enduring because there's some things that you buy that you're just happy with for a long time. – JB
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Maybe not. A particular object, yes, but the same object made new – LS
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Right. Okay. So, you mean you might go for a certain style of jacket, which is classic… – JB
And that one might wear out because I wear it so much. If I see another one a bit like it, I might buy that. If it's something that's worked and it's something that I feel the impulse for. I must feel an impulse to put something on. – LS
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I think one of the things that's really beautiful about you, Lyndy, is you have an enormous richness around what you wear and you can describe things to me from your history, and the way you describe the clothes you had, or the dresses you had is so evocative. I wish there were photos of you.
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But I wan't to finish by asking why are clothes important? Why is appearance important to you? – JB
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It's just a sense or a feeling like, when you walk in to have dinner with me, Josephine, and you're always looking just spectacular. You know, like a combination of funky, but elegant, but you know, a bit Italian and I love it. And it just inspires me. So, if someone turns up in a track suit, I'm kind of, well, I'll still love them of course, but it just doesn’t spark anything. I don't think there's many places where you can actually wear a tracksuit.
But in the end, it’s all preference and it doesn't matter. It's what's in your heart.
But to answer your question, I don't know why I love clothes.
– LS
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But you've always loved them. – JB
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Yes. And in previous eras if you were a woman who came from a certain class and you had money, you had to learn about clothes. It was part of what a woman had to do. – LS
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Yes, absolutely.
So, the love of clothes comes from somewhere. – JB
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Well, yes it does, because I always had it. There can be no pictures about what you have to do to have a good and worthy life. You know people can think if you talk about clothes, you're being frivolous but everything is everything vibrationally speaking.
The only thing that matters ever, ever – is the vibration in which you're doing whatever you're doing. That deep sense of pure being when we know the divinity of what can come through us from our true Source. – LS
END
Photography by Iris Pohl: www.incocreation.de