At the Soul Food Cafe, within the sanctuary that Lemuria affords, Heather Blakey has quite literally built a target specific, interactive community for people who want to practice the Soul Food Way and make writing and art a daily practice. Soul Food now has artists, writers, journalists, photographers, scientists, archaelogists, storytellers, illustrators, musicians living in residence. The Soul Food Cafe has long ceased to be a static webside and provides very real mechanisms for working collaboratively in a creative, online environment.
In the late 1880’s Heather Blakey’s great Grandfather, George Chale Watson, wrote a book entitled the Mountain Tops of Lemuria to record his journey on a Black-birding ship through the Polynesian Islands. It was believed that these islands were the old mountain tops of Lemuria, the lost southern continent.
The Lemurian writing sanctuary was born after Heather Blakey located, at the Queensland University, the only copy of her great grandfather’s book. The University Librarian permitted her to make a copy of it and you will find Watson’s fascinating account of his journey, together with other ancestral material, on the site.
Original adventurers found Heather’s Lemuria by passing through a very special portal and all the stimuli was housed here. At this time Bravenet Forums were used as a means for people to participate and publish their work and Heather Blakey transferred some of that material on to the Soul Food Cafe site.
When the Blogger Revolution came Heather created a virtual monastery at Soul Food using this exciting new self publishing tool. In an interview with Chris Dunmire she talked about how she envisioned the Lemurian Abbey as a place full of fine art and craft, a monastery that would be filled with tiny, Spartan cells where votaries of the muse could come, retreat behind walls and observe time differently. She believed that in this Monastery, time would not be measured with clocks and believed that monastic writers would be free to wander through the cloisters and walled gardens in a meditative state, capturing metaphors in their writing nets.
The Lemurian Abbey became a wonderful sanctuary for people eager to practice the Soul Food Way. A metamorphosis began to take place and Heather realised that there was something magical happening on the site. A creative transformation was taking place and she could see that interaction and collaboration were working in an online setting.
Today people come through many portals, arriving in parts of Lemuria that have been established as a result of various journeys. Today travellers can head out in many different directions to explore Lemuria, find the elixir of creativity and discover self. As with the old Silk Road Soul Food’s Silk Roads are filled with travellers who bring new ideas, make exchanges and barter.
