The importance of place

There’s nothing like a sense of place. I’ve never had a stable place of residence for more than a few years in my life, but for almost two decades my surrogate emotional home has been the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.

I’ve been going to the Vic Market most Saturdays since 1994, sitting with friends at one of the metal tables in the lane beside the delicatessen section. Fruit and vegetable shopping is the stated aim of a visit to the market but the real interest is in meeting old friends, conversation, coffee and immersion in the vibe.

There are lots of families with children, tourists passing through, couples sitting quietly together, buskers with guitars and solo singers, dogs of every size and kind, and fat overweened pigeons. I love the way you can watch people change over the years – children who grow into fine adults, stallholders taking their breaks sitting on milk crates and smoking in the lane; the friendships that come and go, and those that last. The market’s not just a backdrop to life – I imagine it having a transformative effect, a catalyst for the best in all of us. At the very least, it’s an affirmation and celebration that we are, after all, social beings.

And then there are the Vic Market legends: the time a certain reviled politician and his wife out for a casual stroll were sent fleeing after word of their presence got out in the lane; The Band Who Knew Too Much, whose joyful swinging sound attracted impossibly large crowds; and Jim, the craggy-faced seller of the Big Issue and his familiar cry, “Getcher copy of the Big Issue ‘ere, only five dollars.”

I think place is very important to human happiness. These days there’s an emphasis and tendency towards mobility – rootlessness is seen as OK because technology allows us to hook into communication networks from anywhere. But being a “person of the world” can be harmful if there are no places that are meaningful to us and with which we have a deep relationship. Places hold memory and so are part of our development, make us who we are. They are part of the weave of our lives, resonating psychologically and spiritually. Places evoke particular responses and moods that can be positive or negative – some are uplifting, others make us uneasy, dull or stupefied. At the Vic Market, I’m always reflective and deeply appreciative. For me, it’s a place to just be. I’m thankful for its presence in my life.

For thousands of years people have gone on pilgrimage to holy places. The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi, Muslims are asked to go to Mecca at least once in their life, Jews and Christians have Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Catholics the shrines and cathedrals of various saints, and Buddhists and Hindus significant geographical places and temples. Salvation is in the journey to the holy place and in the prayer or ritual conducted there; the journey is a pilgrim’s preparation for meeting with the divine, arrival the point of connection with God. Ritual renews and strengthens the bond a pilgrim has with their particular deity or expression of the divine, as well as providing a sense of union, meaning and depth in life. Power is created when the ritual happens in a group, the individual merging both with the religious community and the divine mystery/presence.

Mircea Eliade says in his brilliant book, The Sacred and the Profane, that sacred places channel a human need for connection, transcendence and meaning. They act as spiritual centre points from which meaning emanates and to which people need to return to reinvigorate their lives. Eliade points out that there are still echoes of symbol and ritual in the contemporary secular West, and people have a continuing need for transcendence. My experience at the Vic Market has something of this quality for me. It is a psychological centre point to which I return, a place of reflection and comfort. And I don’t believe that it’s solely a projection of my needs and desires onto a particular place, though an element of that is certainly there. There is a relationship between me and the Vic Market, which is re-established and remade every time I visit. This fine, unseen level of reality exits despite our materialist age and is not diminished; whether we acknowledge it is another matter.

Maybe somebody someday will set up a little shrine at the Market as an expression of thanks. It would be a concrete spiritual gesture and something perhaps for which we are not yet ready. The truth is that people show gratitude in myriad ways there anyway – buying food, chatting with the stallholders, appreciating the colour and variety of the wares, eating with friends, enjoying the ambience. Our actions have deep and lasting reverberations.

Discernment

It’s a small scene that captures the absurdity of life in the modern world: Chinese tourists pile out of a bus near Melbourne’s Parliament House and take photos of each other, faces beaming, in front of a statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

I see this on many mornings walking to work. It’s safe to say the tourists have no idea who Gordon was, because most Melburnians don’t know. He was a kind of tragic hero of 19^th century colonial Australia – a famed horse rider and poet who, having suffered a bad fall in a race and burdened by self-doubt and financial problems, shot himself at the age of 37.

Gordon was one of the early writers of Australian bush ballads, most notably The Sick Stockrider, a melancholy but folksy tribute to the European pioneering spirit. The Chinese tourists with their happy holiday snaps in front of his statue may not care, even if they knew. 

It’s a bizarre scene, but one that’s repeated countless times in different ways around the world and quite instructive. Disconnection is fundamental to the modern condition. Ironically at a time when people are more connected than ever across the world thanks to technology, when information is readily available on anything, deep levels of ignorance abound. 

I think in future our time will be seen as the high water mark of material consumption. Unparalleled wealth is being created with a seemingly endless variety of material goods and choices. If you have the money you can get virtually anything you want, do anything you want, be anything you want. Money has few barriers across the globe.  

Yet as passionately as we have sailed in recent times into the adventure of the material world, the inner world of Spirit has been left far behind. We lack connection with ourselves and our environment, living as tourists in our own lives. Though contemporary technology, including IT and the internet, is helpful in many ways, ingenious and creative, it has negative personal and social effects. Distraction and hyperactivity are two of the most notable. In the absence of a spiritually infused culture with healthy values, addiction to gadgets and the products of the internet is widespread as people fill the inner void. 

Despite this, I can see change. At some point perhaps not so far in the future, as a result of immense human population, scarce resources and climate change, our society will become radically different. There will no longer be endless material abundance and sheer survival will become more important as we are forced to live within environmental limits. By then as a society we may also have moved towards the inner world of meaning, connection and community.

The move towards the Spirit starts with discernment. It’s about engaging quality. Discernment lifts an individual out of the common denominator of the mass and presents him/her with deeper choices about life. What is life about? What really makes me happy? Endless and addictive “conversation” on Facebook, Twitter or other social media does not address these questions; neither does endless consumption of goods, ideas, travel or anything else. When we engage with quality in our lives, we are on the road to creating meaningful connections. Then we can begin to relate to technology or any other aspect of our world with open interest but not with the slavery of the mass. 

The constant barrage of new technology affects social interaction and creates problems that take years to understand, let alone address. There is, for instance, the anxiety and social exclusion of people who don’t participate in or can’t keep up with technology – because of poverty, age, disability or other reasons. There are also the effects that new technology has on the body, either directly through stimulation of the nervous system – contributing to lack of sleep, distraction and anxiety – or indirectly through lack of exercise and obesity. 

Discernment needs to be a central pillar of our culture. Many individuals are already walking its path in various ways, connecting with their deeper selves and their community, but discernment has to become a template for society as a whole. For the tourists who congregate in central Melbourne by the likeness of Adam Lindsay Gordon, it might be something as simple as taking a minute to read the words on the statue; or a moment in the early morning sunshine to imagine who this person might have been, before taking a photo.  

The death of print

We live in a time of endings, but also in a time of beginnings. Recently a friend told me she felt a great loss at the “death of print”, the decline and likely disappearance of many newspapers. It felt to her momentous and the times were uncertain.

I agree. There is enormous transition going on. To me it seems like the entire Western project, the civilisation whose political, economic and social ways have come to dominate the planet, is undergoing fundamental change. Institutions that emerged during the Age of Reason like the press and parliamentary democracy seem particularly moribund at the present time.  

But with endings, there are always beginnings. This is something we often fail to see. When a person dies, for instance, the family and friends grieve for a time and then go on with their lives. The death is felt as a loss, which it is. But it also opens the door to new relationships. Those who are left behind have a new experience of life, a difference in the makeup of things, a re-ordering of reality. Often that which has been neglected or unseen comes to the surface and opportunities for growth and enlightenment inevitably arise.

Every death heralds a birth. This is not something easily grasped by the rational mind. Most of the time we see material existence as a moving jumble of discrete and isolated phenomena. But the connections are everywhere, on all levels, and interdependence is the overriding reality. A deep and fundamental understanding of relationship is, I think, something that humans are evolving towards, but it requires a shift in the psychic dominance of rationality and a greater opening to mystical experience.

The ecology movement is one of the primary catalysts in turning our minds towards relationship. Scientists are increasingly aware of the biological interdependence of life on Earth, and how life-supporting ecosystems exist in delicate balance. Take one part out of an ecosystem and the whole, dynamic web is changed. When we revere nature, when we are awestruck by a mountain or moved by the lushness of a forest or the grandeur of the sea, we turn inwards to a profound place of oneness, which is mystical experience. 

What birth arrives with the death of print? I don’t find this easy to answer, and it’s probably still too early to tell. The breakdown of the traditional press as mass opinion-forming agents creates an opening for multiplicity and diversity of views – we have seen this in the internet – but those views are not necessarily mature or enlightened. The shift towards the internet is also a means by which culture is fragmented as people seek out their own niche interests and news, abandoning the broad-based and generalist news services. The fragmentation, in my opinion, furthers the decline of the political-economic-social system we live under. It makes society more unpredictable and volatile.

Before new forms are created there is a period of gestation, usually involving conflict and crisis. We don’t know how long the present period of transition will last, but it’s safe to say that the seeds of the new order are already in existence. The seeds of love and unity are daily watered by the actions of millions of people across the world.