Mindfulness

People-watching is a fascinating pastime. Living and working in the city gives you plentiful opportunity to gaze, admire and be perplexed. 

It gives me delight to see the pretty faces of women – on a tram in the morning or coming out of the underground train station as I pass by, or in back lane cafes at lunchtime. 

One day recently it struck me there was a little more to this people watching than I had supposed. Over many years of admiring women, it occurred to me that I was really only looking at one face. It was the ideal of beauty underneath the multitude of variations, the form of the rose beyond the variety of colour, shape and smell. In the language of depth psychology, I was looking at the archetypal Goddess, or a reflection of my own anima. 

It reminded me of something Joseph Campbell wrote in his book, Myths to Live By. In describing the way humans see life, he uses the image of a ceiling with many light bulbs pouring forth light. One could choose, as is typical for most of us most of the time, to focus on the individual bulbs. Or, one could see and appreciate the animating light that all have in common, that makes all the vessels essentially one.

In modern Western society we tend to see ourselves, each other and the world as discreet and largely disconnected forms. Seeing the shared Life signifies spiritual awakening, a calling to deeper and more fulfilling experience, to what is truly important in life. Despite the way we think and act most of the time, sometimes people demonstrate the underlying non-dual reality. I think of those who risk their lives heroically to save others – there’s an implicit recognition that all life is one.

Such recognition could be called “mindfulness” or “looking with eyes that see”. It leads to a kind of pattern thinking. Tending a garden, we acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of plants, soil, water and micro-organisms, but we also connect with the pulsating Life that all the elements share, that is the core. We are drawn to the archetypal experience and meaning of Garden. Cooking dinner, we prepare various items of food through a number of methods, but we are also engaged in Creation and the food is a sacrament to the continuation of Life. It is an act of joy and love.

Religious ritual has through human history been the means by which consciousness is elevated. Yet in the West organised religion has been dying a slow death, its vitality lost behind dogma and the glorification of particular deities and saviours. Nowadays it is up to the individual, linking with fellow travellers, to find their own way along the spiritual path.

How do you cultivate mindfulness? I think the first step is validation of non-dual reality. Existence is not a random and meaningless set of acts – everything is alive with meaning, though the meaning might often escape us. Such things as dreams, coincidences and the imagination must be taken seriously and given their rightful and honoured place in our lives and in the world at large. The metaphoric and poetic has to be restored in value equal to the rational and scientific. I think meditation is also important here – the act and ability to be aware of ourselves fully in the present moment. Out of the silence we enter in meditation, those parts of our personality hidden behind our everyday persona emerge. We also become aware of the infinite that lies beyond the personality. The more conscious we become of the patterns underneath surface reality, the richer, ultimately, our lives become.  

What is Truly of Value

The following was published in Earth Song Journal this month. It’s a brief tale of an adventure 11 years ago.

One day in February 2001, a park in Melbourne’s north disappeared with a brief flourish of bureaucratic pens.

Nobody mourned it that day. The local council mentioned its demise in passing in a media release, and said it would ask the State Government for compensation. That was that. The Whittlesea Gardens, a windswept 19 hectares of public open space in Lalor, was finished.

At the time I was working as a reporter on the local newspaper, The Whittlesea Post. I was young and keen to make a difference in the community. The ensuing fight to save the gardens was my chief highlight in an 11-year career as a journalist on suburban newspapers and The Age, and an inspiring example of a community’s determination to rescue its treasured ground.

The Whittlesea Gardens will never feature on a list of Melbourne’s attractions, but to people in Lalor it’s a welcome break from roads, concrete and brick veneer; a place where the mind can wander, kids play and dogs roam. Ironbark and box trees are scattered across the landscape, there are rises with native shrubs and a lake where coots gently bob and cormorants preen on the water’s edge.  

Yet in February 2001 this suburban sanctuary was to make way for the Craigieburn bypass, a 17-kilometre section of freeway connecting the Hume Highway with the Western Ring Road. For years before the go-ahead announcement, the bypass was strongly opposed by people concerned about damage to the Merri Creek. The campaigners were mostly from the inner suburbs while locals living near the path of the freeway, many from non-English speaking backgrounds, were barely aware of it.

That is, until the Whittlesea Council mentioned, buried in its media release congratulating the government on the freeway (for its “economic benefits”), the death of the gardens. The Whittlesea Post stepped up to the plate. My editor, a man with a strong sense of compassion, was happy for me to take up the cudgel against authority in the typical way of the journalist. While the government and the council were patting each other on the back, we splashed “Gardens at Risk” on the front page of the paper, alerting people to the coming bulldozers. 

It worked. A fortnight later, shocked residents started an anti-freeway campaign. Led by Erkan, a young Turkish man, and his sister Tina, they organised a petition and began ringing local councillors and the State MP demanding to know what was going on. The Post ran a front-page story on the campaign with a separate profile on Erkan. “If they build the bypass here, I will be opening my back door and looking at a big wall – instead of the beautiful gardens,” Erkan was quoted as saying. “I don’t want to stop progress, but progress doesn’t have to roll over us.” 

By early April, People of Whittlesea Refusing Entry, as the anti-freeway group called itself, had chalked up several fiery community meetings and presented its petition with 1700 signatures to the government. Whittlesea Council now decided it would lobby to have the path of the freeway moved 300 metres to save the gardens. I well remember one abusive phone call from a government media staffer who berated me for writing negative stories, not balancing my coverage with the freeway’s economic benefits.

Ultimately the people won, sort of. In August the Federal Government, which was funding the bypass and had final say on it, decided to change the route as recommended by the council. The fact that a federal election was coming that year probably played a part. Erkan and the other residents were glad their precious gardens were saved, though still unhappy with the freeway. As environmentalists pointed out, Merri Creek grasslands would be destroyed whatever the freeway’s path. 

What does it take to save a park? Obviously, it requires organisation and leadership. It entails having a voice, speaking out and confronting authority; it means doggedness and determination. But perhaps the less tangible and often less articulated factors play the greatest part: a mix of fear and love. Fear of the modern economic, industrial machine – a kind of amoral monster that exists to expand and in whose path ultimately stand nature and communities. And love, which enlarges awareness beyond the immediate needs of the individual, allowing us to see what is truly of value.