Land and story

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. William Blake

Heavy cloud draped the top of the hill; or perhaps it was mist masquerading as cloud, or cloud transformed by the pull of earth to mist – whatever it was, it gave the hill a grave mystique on a dark and cold autumn morning.

The hill was one of a chain undulating for several kilometres in this part of north-east Victoria, a volcanic regurgitation millions of years ago with scattered grey rocks to tell the tale. I looked out at it from the kitchen of a friend’s house on a sheep farm.

Staring at it for a while, the urge came to explore and climb: I pulled on my boots and the hill beckoned me forward. My friend had planted trees to stop erosion and there they stood, at intervals, with brown-orange bark peeling. Not much else was around except a tough-looking sedge that grew in clumps. A track that had been ploughed in red-clay mud by the farm’s quad bikes was fringed by the droppings of sheep.

A clammy cold touched my skin as I climbed to the mid-point of the hill. Here the rocks began, covered in dry and seemingly dead lichen. Occasionally an old white or red box tree appeared crookedly on the slope, incongruous amid the barrenness. Occasionally the rocks congregated to a natural seat or vantage point from which you could see for miles the changes of farmland, forests, ridges, gullies and flats; the land at times creased, then smoothed itself out, then as unexpectedly became jagged.

At the top of the hill more rocks and some dead trees dragged to form a spot for shelter and fire – a place for coming together, maybe celebration, on warmer days. The quad bike trail continued along a dip at the other side of the hill and on to the next one. This was solemn, out-of-the-way country; a mob of kangaroos scattered somewhere far below, some twigs crunched underfoot, little else rippled the profound silence.

Well after my experience of climbing I wondered about the story of that land. Indigenous people, no doubt, would have weaved creation stories for these quiet, rocky hills, binding human consciousness deeply with the country. Would the land not have stories still? How could a person recover and retell them?  

Our modern Western consciousness is focused on the concrete and the separate. Reality is largely comprised of physical objects that exist in themselves and that can be seen, felt and touched. But that’s not all that reality is: there are subtle, intuitive dimensions that don’t fit a strict materialist view, and the more these are explored the more it becomes apparent that much of life is non-rational, non-linear, non-separate, and that it is healthy to acknowledge and affirm this.

How do we approach these “spiritual” dimensions of life? I think mystery is the clue here. It’s about paying attention to the silence, the unseen that exists with everything we look at. It requires a broad but measured opening of the senses with focus on the energy or quality of objects. It is cultivated in disciplines of meditation and yoga and contemplative prayer. Its doorway is the relationship of things, and its language that of metaphor and symbol. What comes forth from mystery undergoes a certain filter as we translate it into the concrete world; it registers in the body and mind and passes through the particularities of personality, life experience and training. A certain painter will feel its presence and paint, a certain teacher will hear its call and teach, a certain carpenter will be touched by it and produce inspired work. And so it goes.

I think the land that I was privileged to visit in north-East Victoria does have a story and that it is accessible through intuition and patient listening. It would not be arrived at rationally and objectively and would not stand up to secular, rationalist scrutiny. It may have changed over time as the land has changed over time. It may, in all likelihood, be slightly different with each individual who cares to tell it. But the point, really, is the purpose of the story, the moral of the tale. It is to connect to the land, to see ourselves in it, our life its life. When we tell its story, we are walking with it in its evolutionary journey just as it feeds into ours. We cannot help but care for it, mythologise it, celebrate it, just as we celebrate our own life and those of other humans.

In a way, my simple description of the walk up the hill is a beginning of that process. In fact, any response of openness and wonder is a beginning – it is then up to us to carry it further, to act in whatever ways we can to bring the sacred back to a meaningful presence in our world.    

Joy

Flying a kite is the loveliest of things: this I discovered by chance when some friends invited me to their place one day.

It was windy and the park near their house was an invitation to play. We brought out their new kite; while my friend held the controls I stood with it at a distance, took a short run and it was in the air, climbing high through the gusty layers of wind. 

I was entranced as a kid, laughing as I watched it fluttering and bobbing. It was so high in the air that it seemed absurd to think someone was controlling it, yet my friend kept nonchalantly tugging at the strings and smiling. The kite was a free spirit and its freedom was infectious – I briefly took hold of the steering, still laughing with sheer delight at the audacity and beauty of its flight. It was the first time I had flown a kite and the memory has been etched deep since.

Joy is the unfettered exuberance of life. It is life with a clear path to express itself, direct and powerful, healing and productive. It is an elemental shout of “yes!” to all creation.

Most often and most clearly we see joy in children: a toddler has just walked for the first time and beams with achievement, or a child jumps onto a playground swing and is immediately overtaken by joyful energy. Joy and play are connected, both requiring an uncluttered and unpolluted innocence to flourish. And both joy and play thrive on discovery, the arrival at a moment that is entirely unique and fresh in time.

Joy is boundless energy: we can face almost anything, no challenge is insurmountable. It also engenders a certain lightness of being that’s crucial in facing life’s ups and downs, and which is a necessary balance to the gravity of life.    

Adult lives with adult cares often seem sapped of joy, confounded by cynicism, complicated by doubt, inhibited by unhelpful psychological patterns. When the path to joy is blocked we can seek it in the wrong places, displacing its life affirmation in drugs, alcohol or other addictions. Joy is also necessary for social stability; some amount of it needs to be stimulated or maintained for a harmonious society – witness the popularity of television, comedy and comedians, and spectator sport, all of which can elicit feelings akin to joy. 

There is also a kind of joy that is less transitory, less dependent on what is happening in each moment. In this regard I recall the work of the late Western Zen master Charlotte Joko Beck, but it’s also described in the wisdom traditions of many different cultures. For Beck, joy is a permanent condition of life that can be experienced in happy times and in hardship: it infuses life’s phenomena, but its origin is in mystery beyond. “Joy is being willing for things to be as they are,” she says in her book, Nothing Special: Living Zen. When we experience life fully but without attachment we connect with joy, a boundless energy that is the ground of being, the source from which ever-changing material forms spring. It is eternal and indestructible, a continuously renewing well of replenishment, affirmation and inspiration.  

Perhaps ultimately, joy is simply life contemplating itself. It is the act of awareness, great or small, that propels the evolutionary process, and without which nothing can exist. It is the fox that catches and devours a rabbit, and the man flying a kite in a field; it is the green algae multiplying in a creek and the pod of dolphins swimming in the ocean; it is the old woman waiting at a bus stop and the Prime Minister speaking in parliament. All are encompassed by joy, and the more awareness we bring to each act, each moment of our lives, the more we increase joy in the world. As joy increases, so all life is boosted and made more robust. Joy is simple, with a simplicity that is at the same time incredibly profound. 

The metaphysical impulse

I came across the work of English philosopher A.C. Grayling while browsing in the wonderfully named Hill of Content Bookshop in central Melbourne.

Grayling’s book, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life caught my attention. In it he devotes short chapters to various aspects of life, some classed as “virtues and attributes”, others as “foes and fallacies” and “amenities and goods”. He ruminates on such things as death, fear, courage, Christianity, faith, health and leadership with admirable simplicity and clarity. His aim is to encourage people to think more about their lives and the world. 

From my perspective and interests, one paragraph in the book’s introduction particularly caught my eye. Grayling is a secular humanist, a follower of the Enlightenment line of Western liberal thought. He’s an atheist with little tolerance for any aspect of religion, yet he says that he believes passionately in “the value of all things spiritual”. By that he means “things of the human spirit, with its capacity for love and enjoyment, creativity and kindness, hope and courage.”

“The value of all things spiritual”: this phrase struck me. No matter how anti-religious or materialist a person is in their views, it seems impossible to find anybody who doesn’t at least entertain some measure of the metaphysical. By metaphysical I mean not of material, objective functioning. “Things of the human spirit” cannot be measured, analysed empirically or talked about in any conventional scientific way. Notwithstanding belief in a material objective universe, it seems all of us ultimately cling to something else as well. Grayling, like other humanists, turns the metaphysical impulse away from organised religion to humanity. Whereas in other times God was the source of all meaning and value, now it is Man. 

The metaphysical or transcendent impulse need not be synonymous with otherworldliness or the supernatural. It simply recognises that there is a level of reality beyond the senses and human reason. Indeed, the transcendent and the material are inextricably linked in a mutual dance. Take sexuality – making love is a physical act of two bodies coming together, yet it’s also an occasion for metaphysical union that can touch us deeply and rejuvenate our spirit. Or as another example we can think of how being in a particular place triggers certain emotions or thoughts – the material conditions of that place relate to non-material levels of experience. 

Of course, modern science is limited to purely rational, material explanations: all human responses, it would say, are ultimately the result of the triggering of certain chemicals in the body, neurones in the brain etc. within a genetic structure. One of the main problems with scientific explanations as the sole, objective descriptions for reality is that they are never ultimately objective, but constantly changing and evolving. The other problem is their tendency to reduce everything to a mechanistic soullessness that denies life rather than enhances it. As a result of this tendency other forces, social and psychological, act as counterbalance. The arts – music, film, dance, painting, poetry – are one important outlet for the metaphysical impulse. The other major component of counterbalance is the unconscious: when we deny or suppress apprehension of the transcendent, we shift its potency elsewhere. Addictions, depression and many forms of anti-social behaviour arise from an inability to comprehend and experience life at meaningful depths. 

For most people in the West there is an uneasy and somewhat schizoid relationship between science and the metaphysical. On the one hand science provides the basis for all knowledge, while at the same time it is tacitly assumed that it does not play a definitive role in many areas of life – such as the emotions and relationships. Creativity, intuition and spontaneity are some of the human attributes science finds difficult to grasp and understand. Because it is too big a leap for us to define ourselves wholly in scientific materialist terms – effectively as complex machines – we are more comfortable for science to have complete sway in the natural world. Any experience of transcendence in nature is said to come from human feelings and imagination, not from the life of nature itself. Rocks themselves don’t speak, nor trees or mountains, and any suggestion that they do is mere anthropomorphism – projecting the human onto the non-human. The modern excision of “soul” from nature means we have lost the direct, close relationship we had with it in earlier times and the resulting distance has made it easier for us to exploit and destroy it.   

The challenge, as I see it, is to bring the metaphysical up from the margins and back into the heart of Western culture: it needs to be openly acknowledged, and its importance recognised. Science would have to cede some of its power to a spiritual way of seeing and being in the world. Material and spiritual explanations would coalesce in service of the fullness and renewal of life. And the wheel does not have to be reinvented too much as we move forward – we can look for inspiration to the myriad wisdom teachings over the thousands of years of Western culture as well as learning from the traditions of others.  

I suspect secular humanists like A.C. Grayling wouldn’t agree with these thoughts. But then humanism itself has been around for hundreds of years, and, like much in our culture, is in sore need of reinvigoration, new ideas and new ways of applying them in the world.  

Human change, climate change

Another day, another political crisis in Australia. What is becoming clear is that the uncertainty that has been playing out for months in Canberra, the farcical machinations and media frenzy, are fuelling a growing sense of despair in the community.

As someone who pays attention to the news, I could be swept up in the media wash of events as they happen blow-by-blow, but I’m interested in going deeper to see what patterns or truths lie underneath.

To me the current volatility in Australian politics, perhaps unprecedented at federal and state levels, mirrors the volatility and shakiness of other societal systems and institutions. If the strength of an institution is measured by popular faith in it, few in Australia are not in trouble. Disillusionment, cynicism and outright hostility are commonly expressed not just at the state of politics, but the economic system, the media, large corporations like banks and mining companies, the legal and health systems.

More broadly, there is a global volatility that is unsettling the foundations of much that has held certain for a long time. Take the ongoing crises of capitalism and the dire economic circumstances of countries in Europe; or the Catholic Church with its urgent need for reform and reinvention.

And then there’s the rapidly changing and uncertain state of the Earth’s climate. In the currently dominant Western worldview, which emerged out of the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century, humanity sees itself as separate from, and masters over, nature. Yet the development of science has led to conclusions that, in fact, the planet is an interconnected web of systems and relations and no single strand of life is truly separate from any other. What happens in one part of the globe is related to, and in turn affects, what is going on somewhere far away. What one species does has ramifications for many others.

The volatility in human societies and global climate change are not coincidental forces. They are related by the simple fact that humans are a species on planet Earth and as such reflect and affect the whole. It’s a measure of our present culture’s narrow vision that we only see the largest impacts of climate change like extreme weather, droughts, bushfires and the like – the mundane reality is that as the planet changes, so do we. Our societies change, our institutions change, our psychology changes, our way of life and our way of seeing ourselves and the world changes. It’s merely a commonsense observation that if humans are not separate, we are subject to change on many levels.

One of the great potentials of change for us, I believe, is that very recognition of belonging to and being part of the Earth, its life and cycles. The old Western worldview which crowned humanity as independent and superior to all other creation has to give way to something much more humble and nuanced. And, indeed, change is already afoot: there is a growing view of humans as stewards or guardians of life and its diversity. This perspective appears in the most recent documentaries of David Attenborough and seems to be increasingly informing conservation work across the globe. While I welcome it, I think it’s an intermediate step to something else, that being a holistic, earth-centred paradigm in which we experience ourselves as one with nature. This can only come about with a spiritual awakening.

The recent summer in Australia was the hottest since records began. In some towns in the interior the temperature stayed above 40 degrees Celsius for weeks, while Sydney and Hobart had their hottest days ever. Heat produces flux and movement, and is the catalyst for transformation. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw “fire” as the primal element behind all change, an instrument serving the divine Logos.

Perhaps this country, becoming hotter year by year, allows us a privileged position to see and take part in transformation. Maybe this will be the cauldron in which the ingredients for the new paradigm properly cohere. Whatever happens in coming years and decades, we are in for a period of heightened volatility and change.

Sine qua non

Poetry, like other art forms, gives expression to the intangible, that which moves below the surface of individual and collective consciousness. Here is my latest contribution: 

Sine qua non

(an essential condition or requirement)

Still life with pomegranates, bay leaves and durian

Still life with couscous and quince

Still life with rambutan and raspberries

Still life with buttered crumpet and bees wax

Still life with pheasant and firefly

Still life with cumquats and corpse

Still life with tattooed arm and torso

Still life with castanets and cattle prod

Still life with ant and ant eater

Still life with scorpion and march fly

Still life with bouquet and zeitgeist

Gentrification and hip culture

I once preferred to pass through Preston rather than stop there for any reason.

A working-class suburb in Melbourne’s north that matured after World War II, by the 1990s its High Street had a tired and beaten feel, its life sucked out by the growth of shopping centres and the movement of many of the original families to newer areas.

As a reporter on a local newspaper north of Preston, I would use High Street as a through-way, driving to wherever I was going to cover a story. Garages, brick churches, milk bars and shoe shops flashed past; fruit shops and bakeries that seemed perpetually empty, migrant community clubs with heavy locked doors.

Last week I had lunch with a friend in Preston, the first time I had been there in years. I’d heard about the spread of gentrification to this patch about 8 kilometres north of the city, but the change nevertheless surprised me. Cafes are not just the sign of all that is hip and trendy, but also all that is real and dynamic. In the 21st entury, without a cafe a neighbourhood seemingly has no right to exist. The people who matter don’t produce anything material any more – when not in an office or at home they are in a cafe. And there the coffee springs were: scattered among the old working-class shops in High Street like bright, young heads in a cabbage field. 

I’m ambivalent about the development. There is no question that the area has new life, and new people have moved in thanks to the rapid construction of apartment buildings. I’m also drawn to the hip culture of cafes, funky boutiques, micro-breweries, pop-up design markets and the like, certainly in preference to blandness or chain-store commercialisation. But, in the admirable quest for quality and creativity that seems embedded in this gentrified culture, there are some issues.

The first, as I see it, is that of conformity. Quality needs diversity if it is not to atrophy and die over time – there is a certain look, certain group habits and trends that solidify once a culture is established. The people in that culture start to look the same, think the same, eat the same ... and indeed High St, Preston, is beginning to resemble a number of other places in inner Melbourne, its residents eating organic food, sporting tattoos on their arms, riding certain types of bicycle with certain styles of helmet etc.  It’s true that groups are groups and develop habits – humans are at one level herd animals – but quality and creativity demand the spark of individuality be kept alive, not extinguished by a sinking into the mass. I think there is still much to be understood in the differences and common ground between individual and mass consciousness (and unconsciousness) and what influences both. The test will be if we can create communities where people of diverse ages, nationalities, interests and occupations thrive under a unifying umbrella of acceptance and oneness.

The second issue relates to money. Whatever the claims to cutting-edge style, creativity or environmental sustainability, gentrification is driven by wealth and exclusivity. When the cafe culture comes to town, the existing (poorer) tenants move out – this has largely been the pattern so far. It is capitalism at work, colonising where it can to “add value” to what is there. This process is entirely arbitrary and not intrinsically linked to any moral values; it appears wherever money can be created. It is then no surprise that class politics is absent in the gentrified culture – those who benefit from it are unlikely to question its foundations. Yet capitalism is a hard taskmaster, and even the relatively privileged are increasingly forced to work harder and longer hours to maintain standards of living. The challenge, in my opinion, is to create spaces and forms where the emphasis is on real, living values like community, ecology and solidarity and where monetary wealth, business and profits are not central.

Indeed there is a pureness to the spirit of quality and creativity, as it inspires individuals and groups, which is aligned with generosity and mutuality, as opposed to grasping and serving private ends. Over time this spirit can soften and transform a culture dominated by acquisitiveness and the market. While recognising the demands upon us of society as it is, we need to turn to this spirit, be moved by it, and reach out and remake the world.

The Brown Lady returns

“The most powerful rituals happen when we simply create an opening and an atmosphere of receptivity ...”

Starhawk, The Earth Path

Hundreds of people are on a slow, deliberate pilgrimage along the Yarra River. From its silty confluence with Port Phillip Bay, they wind their way to the river’s source in the ranges east of Melbourne.

It occurs once every two years in autumn, when the rains begin to soak the land parched after summer. In groups, each of a particular locality along its length or ordered according to profession or other kind of interest, they uproot weeds and plant native trees along the Yarra’s banks.

Wandering creeper, hawthorn and blackberry bushes that choke the side of the river make way for tussock grass, tree violet, banksia and red gums. Fences are put up or mended to keep people and feral animals out of some areas; fox and rabbit holes are filled in.

Towards the end of each day the Brown Lady appears. She is carried by a couple of willing souls on a platform, an effigy of a woman regally clothed in brown. She is a symbol of the river, its distinctive colour made by the movement of clay soil. When she appears, a person from each group approaches and attaches an item to her that represents the group’s work that day: a blackwood twig, the shell of a cicada, a chain of chicken wire or a piece of paper with words of some kind. There is joy and delight with the appearance of the Brown Lady and welcome at the end of a day’s work. In a little while she will join with others that have appeared in other places along the river, all of them coming together at a central place before the main and largest Lady. Here all the people gather to share food, sing and dance, rejoicing in the life of the river and the great bounty she brings to all who depend on her.

I had a vision of this planting/weeding pilgrimage and the Brown Lady while walking along a part of the Yarra in suburban Melbourne. In this area there is a lot of wandering creeper that seems to be strangling the life out of the floodplain. Starhawk says in The Earth Path that the seasonal rituals she and her neighbours perform in northern California are what “the land told us to do”. Perhaps something of the openness and sensitivity required to listen to the land was with me when the pilgrimage idea arrived – a human dreaming meeting the dreaming of the land.

Paganism may sound like something bizarre out of the past, but I believe it holds important lessons for our culture. A look at the history of Western civilisation shows that periods of cultural renewal and flowering occur when there is a revitalisation of the past in the service of new ideas and vision. Classical civilisation grew on the fertile soil of the Greek mythological heritage. The Renaissance was inspired by a rediscovery of Plato and classical ideals. More recently, the social movements that catalysed dynamic change in the 1960s were influenced by the romanticism and utopian socialism/anarchism of the 18th and 19th centuries. The past is drawn upon to propel new life.

Reverence for all life is the heritage that paganism brings. It places humans within a web of connections and in appropriate relationship to all other species on Earth; not as the masters of everything but as a humble and important link in the chain of life. And it is one way to give sacrament to this relationship, to provide a spiritual container for it.

I think we are in sore need of sacrament, of life-giving and nurturing ritual that affirms our communion with all life. The importance of ritual lies in its translation of spiritual energy – the bubbling cauldron of the psyche – into form. The channelled, purposeful release of such energy to further life can be immensely powerful and liberating: the Brown Lady pilgrimage could be of this order if it actually occurred.  

In the meantime our secular culture denies and suppresses the voices of spirit. It’s possible that some day this pent-up energy will burst forth in a general way into the world – uncontrolled, undisciplined, unmediated by wisdom or tradition, spiritual energy is a grave danger. That’s why there is a pressing need now for life-affirming ritual, for appropriate channels and forms, for learning from older religious traditions, for the imagination tuned to the vibrant humming of the earth.