Abbey History

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 we used Bravenet Forums as a means for people to participate and publish their work and Heather Blakey transferred some of that material on to the site.

When she first talked about the Lemurian Abbey, Heather talked about how she had envisioned it as a place full of fine art and craft, a virtual 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 quickly became a wonderful sanctuary for people from all over the world, people eager to practice the Soul Food Way and make writing and art a daily practice.

Today The Lemurian Abbey is a divine sanctuary across the lake from the City of Ladies. This lake is not unlike Lake Como in Northern Italy and is home to votaries of the Soul Food Way.

The Abbess (Heather Blakey's alter ego) welcomes all comers and encourages residents to give bricks to ensure the growth of this virtual sanctuary by shopping here.