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.    

Seeds of Change

Herein is the subtle wisdom of life:

The soft and weak overcomes the hard and strong.

                                                - Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu

There has been a wonderful program on Sunday nights on ABC Television in Australia called How to Grow a Planet, by BBC Scotland. Superficially it’s about plants and their evolution over millions of years, but embedded in it is a subversive theme about the relationship of humans to the rest of the world.

It goes something like this: “Plants deserve just recognition for their enormous impact on life on Earth. They have been at the centre of great evolutionary changes, including the evolution of mammals and our own species.”

One of the program’s amazing insights is that plants developed a way to tell animals when their fruit was ready to be consumed – fruit turned red when the seeds inside it were mature for dispersal. Scientists believe that primates evolved an ability to see colour as a result, giving them an advantage as ripe fruit also had more sugar and so more energy.

The insight is that humans have co-evolved with plants, and where we seem to control them the reality is more complex. People have spread certain plants across the globe – cereals like wheat and rye, fruit like bananas and tomatoes, flowers like roses – and this can be seen as an evolutionary triumph of those species. They have particular qualities we like and so we propagate and develop them.

It’s quite humbling to think that not only are we reliant on plants for the oxygen they breathe into the atmosphere and the nutrition and energy we get from eating them, but our bodies and minds and indeed whole civilisations have been shaped by them. The development of agriculture, namely the cultivation of wheat in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, was the crucial developmental step towards Western civilisation and what we have now.

Plants are intelligent. How to Grow a Planet has shown that they sense and communicate among themselves. I think this has radical implications. The 18^th century Enlightenment enthroned Man as the centre and pinnacle of value, but recently there has been a growing realisation of the interconnectedness of all life. This entails a shift towards a moral system that does not privilege humans, but honours all species as part of a great web of life. Such an ecological approach has been embedded for thousands of years in the culture and spirituality of Indigenous people.

I believe that this shift can only come to full fruition experientially in people’s lives, not purely at an intellectual level. In Melbourne in the past decade there has been a flourishing of farmers’ markets, community gardens and organic food box schemes. People want a greater connection to their food and how and where it is grown, as well as to those who grow it. This is a reconnection, a re-establishment of meaning that was taken away by supermarkets and suburbia. In more mature phases, perhaps decades away, conscious ritual and a symbolic life emerge to express a new way of being.

In a way, cultural changes are another triumph for plants. Compared to the prevailing human spirit, with its emphasis on power and control, theirs is a soft and quiet energy. Some writers, aware of changes in the human psyche, have noted a movement towards a more nuanced, “feminine” view of life.  David Tacey, in Edge of the Sacred (Daimon Verlag, 2009), describes the emerging paradigm as being “closer to nature and the elemental world, closer to the soul and the feminine, to intuition and feeling, to the values of the earth and the body”. 

In the process of co-evolution, survival is at stake: that of plants and humans. As human population grows and we take ever more for our needs, as we pave over the soil for our ever-expanding cities, we are threatening the survival of other species as well as undermining our own long-term future. I believe that plants, and the earth in general, recognise this. If we can accept there is an intelligence at work in nature that is fundamentally kin to our own, then we need to listen to it and learn from it. If we share a common soul, then an injury to one is an injury to all.

I think people who garden are in a privileged position. Gardening is a ritual with profound meaning, whether a person recognises it or not. On one level a garden is there for beauty, for neatness and tidiness, for the vegetables or fruit trees we grow, for the relaxation it gives us. At a deeper level we are reproducing cycles of life in a dance with the plant world; plants and the earth are making us as much as we are making them.    

   

Leave it in the ground

An almighty rush to dig up the ground is sweeping through Australia and other parts of the world.

Fed by the global hunger for energy, the rapid development of countries like China and India and steadily growing world population, we are in the grip of a frantic mining boom.

Mining is a daily discussion topic in Australia, which is rich in many of the world’s most needed minerals. New iron ore mines are being opened in remote parts of the country, while prospecting for coal, coals seam gas, gold and other minerals seems to be happening everywhere, often with concern and opposition from local communities.

Once, decades ago, Australia was said to be “riding on the sheep’s back” for our economic dependence on wool and other farming products. Now the talk is about the enormous wealth created by the minerals boom and the rise of mega-rich mining tycoons like Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer.

With this focus has come discussion about the distribution of this wealth, with the government introducing a resource rent tax to recoup some of the royalties for the benefit of the general population. The reality is that much of the wealth goes overseas and the states furthest from the most lucrative mines, where most of the population lives, struggle economically regardless of the boom. What is often left out of the discussion on mining is its most immediate cost – to the environment.

In advertisements run by the industry to shore up public support, you don’t see the scale of the gigantic holes gouged out of the earth by open-cut mines. You are not told that the earth is never the same after a mining operation, that there is no true “rehabilitation”. You are not informed about the millions of litres taken out of groundwater aquifers, or the toxic slurries that are pumped back into the ground from some mines. The digging is generally well away from population centres and so most people have no direct experience of what is going on. Driving through the coal-rich Latrobe Valley east of Melbourne you would not know that just a few kilometres from the road are massive open-cut mining holes.

Mining is underpinned by the idea that humans are separate from nature. The earth and its minerals are inert, dead, have no living connection to us, and so we take what we please. The aim is to provide raw materials to feed the engine of modern society and, if possible, make lots of money along the way. Indigenous people hold a different notion, that the land is alive and sacred and that we belong to the earth, not it to us. Nevertheless some Indigenous communities are co-opted by large corporations into accepting mining on their land with promises of jobs, schools and better roads.

If we accept that humans are separate from nature, then essentially there is no cost to our actions. But what happens when we dig out radioactive uranium? Or take iron ore from deposits left by living organisms in ancient seas? Or drill deep holes and remove the coal formed by ancient forests? I suspect it upsets balance in ways we know nothing about.

Our planet has created immense treasures in its 3 billion years in existence – treasures formed in the relationship between the atmosphere, wind, water, rocks, volcanic eruptions, shifting tectonic plates and myriad life forms. The planet’s unfolding transformations can be seen below and above the surface. In a way, we are stealing its history (which is our own history) by mining it; and we do this with no better reason in places like Australia than to support unsustainable lifestyles.

I don’t say there should be no mining, but it needs to be limited and strictly controlled. Above all, it should be informed by reality, not illusions of human dominance and separation from nature. The reality is that we are made of the very same elements we are digging out of the ground; we are formed by the earth and out of the earth, so we have to act with the utmost respect and in concert with life. In essence what we do to the planet, we do to ourselves.      

What is required is a radical shift of values, which I think is slowly occurring across the globe. Commentators like American theologian Matthew Fox talk about a creation-centred approach rather than a human-centred one. This is where we don’t negate human needs, but they are seen in the context of the needs of all beings and the planet as a whole. The old biblical maxim, “Do unto your neighbour as you would have done unto you” becomes “Do unto all life as you would have done unto you.”

The spread of environmental thinking and action across the world is a sign of this shift, but there is a very long way to go. I think the current mining mania shows a system in steady decline; often the worst aspects of a civilisation rise to the surface before there is great change. And there is hope – Gaia has undergone incredible upheavals over the aeons and its creative life essence, which is also our life essence, will go on regardless.

On Sacrifice

Since Anzac Day last month, the remembrance of the war dead of Australia and New Zealand, I’ve been thinking about the notion of sacrifice.

In the context of war, sacrifice is seen as a laudable goal. Men, and now some women, risk their lives to “protect” their country from an external foe. The sacrifice is linked to high ideals like freedom and democracy. The welfare of the community is set upon the actions and service of those who go to war, and to die in that service is “the ultimate sacrifice”.

There is something about that idea of sacrifice that, in the 21^st century, seems lifeless and worn out. For instance, each war has underlying issues that are usually missing in public consciousness. World War I was essentially a clash of empires over territory and resources. World War II, despite the high note of stopping fascism, was about self-interest and control – as seen in the vast American and Soviet post-war spheres of influence. In recent years the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought largely to maintain Western geopolitical and economic domination.    

The idea of sacrifice has been a tool of propaganda to obscure the real causes of war and to fudge the complexity and complicity of all sides in conflict. We project our inner demons onto an external enemy, seeing ourselves as blameless, selfless heroes while the other is cast as menacing and evil. It must be said that some enemies, like the Nazis and al-Qaeda, were and are evil. But what of the millions killed by “our” side in the various wars? The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo; the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the obliterated villages of Vietnam; the thousands dead from the US invasion of Iraq, the drone strikes on Pakistani and Afghan civilians. At the heart of warfare is the desire for power and an inability to see yourself in a fellow human being.

Sacrifice, in its best sense, is not a tool for someone else’s gain or for our own in any literal, material way. It is about giving something up so that the bigger, fuller Life can be advanced; to support the creative work of soul in the world. When parents sacrifice their time and interests for their children, helping them to grow and learn, it is not just the individual child who benefits but the evolving Life essence they embody. Humanity and Life more broadly are furthered. Sacrifice is about letting go of the narrow, restrictive bounds of ego to fulfil greater purpose, in the knowledge that we are more than disconnected, isolated selves.

In David Tacey’s book Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth the author mounts a powerful argument for sacrifice as a tool of advancement in the specific Australian context. The attachment to rationality and masculinity that have been the bedrock of Australia’s history and culture have to be let go, he says, so that we can develop a genuine relationship with the land. Listening and dialogue with nature requires an opening to our own depths, to archetypal forces resonant in us and in the land. Aboriginal people relate to these forces through subtle appreciation and Dreaming myths.

Sacrifice, it needs to be said, is not about destroying the ego. It is not about selfless action where the personality is repressed. There is a balance that is struck between gain and loss that only the individual can truly judge. For instance, “If I take this challenging job, will the overall benefit to my life and the lives of others be worth it?” The test is whether soul or greater purpose is advanced. As an example, looking back on my own life, I think of my six years as a part-time journalist at The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Though for a long time I struggled with the work and the work environment, the stability of a job and good pay provided a platform to focus on inner development. I can also say that I gave up a career as a journalist to pursue my life’s calling as a writer; the sacrifice being the loss of a lucrative, socially sanctioned path for a precarious but spiritually meaningful one.

It seems the idea of sacrifice will continue to be misunderstood and misapplied until there is sufficient social development, enough soul penetration of the mass psyche, for a turn away from ego and towards true meaning. Then there will be an understanding that sacrifice entails no loss at all, its fruits infinite and joyful.      

Sun Dance at Mario's Cafe

Mario's Cafe is a landmark in Melbourne's alternative, coffee-drenched Brunswick Street strip. It's been there an eternity, a warm and stable presence amid the busy street life. This poem, Sundance at Mario's, is a contrast to its generally amiable and nonchalant air.

Some dance at Mario’s

Some squat in a corner

Some poke at their linguini

or stab at their scotch fillet

Some pray at Mario’s

Some drink from its bowl of evanescence

Some mutter through clenched pink fingers

while others wait for a better god

Some laugh at Mario’s

Some bellies jiggle

Some lipstick moves

as a prelude to lesser things

Some hold court at Mario’s

Some boast or bluster

Some sink in their seat

with vague and watery eyes

while outside the earth flies

                                the earth flies

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.