WHAT ARE YOU BLOWING UP 💥 THIS 5th NOVEMBER?

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason, and plot.

I see no reason

Why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Written by John Milton in 1627 at the age of 17, this poem (abbreviated) relates to November 5th, 1605, when Guy Fawkes and his Catholic mates tried to blow up the English Parliament in the “gunpowder plot.”

Which we celebrated for centuries afterward, and still do in some places.

Remember cracker night ?  Bonfire night ?  Fireworks night?

That one night of the year when we used to be able to buy explosives, legally, and blow stuff up!!

It was wonderful.

Explosions lit up the city as people gathered for barbecues, with rockets 🚀 bursting in the sky, Catherine wheels scorching wooden fences, & Roman candles with exotic names like Shooting Comet, Dragon’s Breath, and Golden Shower.  Dogs would go crazy with fright, & the next morning, the sky over the city would be thick with haze.

For days before and after, kids (mostly boys, including me back then) launched rockets out of iron pipes, booby-trapped letterboxes, and dropped bungers into the holes in bricks, trying to make them disintegrate.

I even tried making my own gunpowder.  It never worked.  One of my most cherished memories is going with my mother to a butcher’s shop to ask for saltpetre, which was used to preserve meat but is also an essential gunpowder ingredient.  And for Christmas, she gave me a big bag of sulfur – another essential ingredient !!! I couldn’t have loved her more!

Still, my gunpowder experiments failed, so I resorted to pulling firecrackers apart, extracting the gunpowder, and … blowing stuff up!

Who else remembers those good’ol days?

Cracker night was abolished across most of Australia by the early ‘80s because, as I recall, little boys kept blowing off bits of themselves.

But I’m still blowing stuff up.  I’m still launching rockets.

Not out of pipes or into bricks anymore.  Now, I use my energy to ignite something far more impactful and meaningful in the world (& much less polluting).

Today, I’m blowing up the false narratives that keep us confined, shattering the limitations we impose on ourselves, & dismantling the beliefs that stifle our true potential, to make space for bold, authentic ways of living.  I’m challenging the relentless internal chatter that whispers we’re not enough in our ears, replacing it with the awesome truth of who we can be.

Because some things are just begging to be blown up! 🧨.

When we clear the debris and shatter those constraints, we create space for something new: a world built on acceptance, inclusion, and empowerment.

What are you blowing up this November 5th, 2024?

Love Bobbi ❤️

Wisdom speaker | Transformation Coach | Trans Woman | Model