In memory of Doug Ralph

Doug Ralph passed away suddenly at his home in Castlemaine, central Victoria, yesterday. I had heard about Doug's good work as an environmentalist and mentor for a while but only known him for about a year. What struck me most was his kindness and profound connection with the bush. I was privileged to interview him for the Spring 2014 issue of Earthsong Journal, the interview republished below.

A warrior for the earth and gentle soul is welcomed back. Rest in peace, Doug.

Box-ironbark country, in the foothills north of the Great Dividing Range, stretches in a belt across central Victoria and into the north-east of the state. Doug Ralph was born in this country at Castlemaine and has lived there nearly all of his 66 years. His descendants came to the area in 1851 during the gold rush. He stood for the Greens in the seat of Bendigo in the 1996 federal election and was a founding member of the Friends of the Box Ironbark Forests in 1997. Passionate about the environment and local history, he leads bushwalks and is something of an elder and mentor to young artists and environmentalists. He spoke with Sasha Shtargot.

Doug, there seems to be a flowering of environmental awareness and alternative lifestyles at the moment in the Castlemaine area. How do you explain it?

Well, there’s been a huge change in attitude towards the forests around here, mainly in the last 20 years. People used to be far more interested in the (gold mining) heritage of the area than the natural environment. We started the Friends of Box Ironbark Forests to gain recognition for the forests – we thought they needed a political voice. One of our victories was in the early 2000s when a section of the Calder Freeway was planned through a beautiful forest at Malmsbury. We campaigned against that and the authorities ended up changing the route of the freeway. They put a bend in the freeway away from the forest, put wildlife underpasses for animals, made changes to the designs of the freeway. I’m proud to say that I helped save a forest.

Something special is happening in central Victoria. There are now 2000 people in environment and Landcare groups in the Mount Alexander Shire, which is probably more than any other comparable area anywhere in Australia. There’s a spiritual element to it in that people are feeling a strong connection to place, a sense of belonging, and like-minded people are being attracted here. Really great people are coming all the time and I love being around them.

What do you think is special about the land here?

There’s something about the light here. I don’t know how to describe it – you just have to experience it. Once people learn to see it, the light has a big influence on them. You notice it especially when it’s wet, in the morning until about 10 or 11, and before it gets dark. In winter there’s a kind of horizontal light as the sun is going down and you get amazing light shows – the whole landscape sparkles with light.

I was deeply moved by a book about the Yarra River written by Maya Ward (The Comfort of Water, Transit Lounge 2012). In that she mentioned a story of some monks at a monastery who drew their water from one river all the time. They experienced the river, in a way they became the river. If you are drinking water from a particular area you are that water, you are the food of the area. Aboriginal people understand that – you just become part of the land.

I go for walks in the bush. It’s my way of meditating and sometimes afterwards I don’t know where I’ve been, I just blend with the landscape. One day I was walking in this way in a trance and all of a sudden I stopped – three wallabies were sitting nearby, eating calmly. Normally wallabies run away when a human is near, but these just sat there. I stopped and looked at them and they looked at me. It was a special moment.

Doug, the land in central Victoria was deeply scarred by mining and logging. Then cattle and sheep farms had their impacts. How has the land regenerated after all that?

In the last few decades, farming became unviable around here. Once the farming stopped, the trees started to come back. It’s been like a resurrection – something that was dead coming back to life. Historically, the early white settlers described the land as “park-like” – the forests had big trees with space in between. That’s what (British explorer) Major Mitchell described when he came through this area. But they cut down the big trees and when you do that you get a denser, coppiced, multi-stemmed growth. After all those years the forest is opening out again.

There’s a lot of regeneration going on and you are getting trees coming up in some places that haven’t been seen since the days of the gold rush. Once grazing stops, life comes back from nowhere. Where I live there were cattle for over 100 years, but the land is repairing itself. Even where you’ve had the worst impacts of mining, like where the land has been sluiced, it’s regenerating. You can strip the land bare but a seed will still germinate, a blade of grass will still come up.

People talk about active “revegetation” of the land, for instance planting trees to mitigate climate change, but you’re not really a supporter of that, are you?

The Government has this idea of a “green army” of people planting trees, but they need to get their head around changing the way the land is managed. We don’t have to plant 20 million trees – if we leave the land alone and let it regenerate we’ll get 100 million trees coming back. Bob Brown said that if you want to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, take all the cattle out of central Australia. If you did that, all the regrowth would be a huge carbon sink.

In America where they have stopped farming, they’ve seen the land go back to forest, and in Europe people are talking about “re-wilding”. Regeneration is happening in a big way all over Australia, especially in the southern states. After all the rain that we had (in 2010-2011) there’s been massive growth and that has been huge for storing carbon. Changing the way you manage the land is about changing your attitude to it. It comes down to respecting the land – the earth is capable of repairing itself.

The Meaning of Nothing

I eavesdropped on a fascinating conversation the other day. Four people – an older couple and a younger one – sat down not far from my table while I was having lunch at a cafe and began discussing the meaning of non-being. It went like this:

“It’s amazing to think where you were before you were born,” the older man said. “Where was I? I was nothing.

“All these things were happening – all these events, world events – and where was I?”

“I find that really disturbing,” the older woman said. “I don’t know why. It just makes me shiver that I was nothing and that there’s nothing out there – that we go back to nothing.”

“I don’t think we go to nothing when we die,” the younger man chimed in. “I think there’s something there.”

“What do you mean?” the younger woman asked. “Are you saying that we go somewhere, to heaven?”

“I’m not religious. I just think that when we die we go to a place of love, of deep love and light.”

I enjoyed their discussion, a parley on subjects so immediate yet so deep. It gladdened me to hear people talk about such things and my own mind was stimulated to contemplate that “nothing” about which they spoke and the existence, or otherwise, of life after death.

There’s a classic Zen koan, or instructive riddle, that asks: “What was your original face before you were born?” The student of Zen meditates on the koan until its essence seeps into their soul. Its aim is to guide a person past the material layers of existence, past the rational everyday mind, and into a whole experience where being and non-being (my face when I was born, my face before I was born) are one. That experience of “just is”, beyond human delineations and conceptions, is said to be the heart of reality.

Accepting that, I wonder if non-being deserves more credit than it gets. As the cafe discussion progressed I began thinking that nothingness was more than some great cosmic pit out of which we emerged and into which we vanished at death. Paradoxically, it is an active presence or principle. Non-being and being are inseparable – to be, something has to come into existence, and if it does it must eventually die. These are the very basic rules of temporal reality. So in essence non-being is highly productive and deeply interwoven with being. It is the rich compost that gives birth to form and that receives form back to be remade, continuously to the end of time.

The idea that death is necessary for life has been understood since the early millennia of human thought. Hunter-gatherers and later crop and animal farmers lived close to nature, the cycles of life and death experienced intimately and everywhere to be seen. Various communities around the world made ritual sacrifices of crops, animals, and even sometimes people to ensure the proper cycles continued. Death was to be propitiated, non-being given appropriate reverence so that the fertile compost would keep producing new forms. Only recently in history, with the advent of modern Western culture, has a disconnection appeared in the human mind between being and non-being. Urbanised, industrialised humanity has lost the balance of the two, focusing almost exclusively on material existence, and denying the vital, essential role of non-being.

More than an empty abyss that bookends our life, non-being is a fundamental and constant part of everyday living. If we look closely, we can see its three variants or phases. Firstly, it is potential; it is the darkness that holds the ground from which everything is born and in which all is latent. When forms appear, potential is with them as they grow and change, continuously carrying possibilities for what they may be. Secondly, it is the decay that works upon all forms and their eventual death. And finally it is regeneration, the transformation of all in the great turning of the cycles of life. Here’s one simple example of the working of the three phases of non-being: A single fly emerges from potential into life. It lives and breeds, carrying its potential forward in its offspring and decaying as it nears the end of its life. One day it is caught in the web of a spider. Choking in the web, it is eaten by the spider. The fly in death is transformed into food and regeneration for the spider, into energy that becomes a part of the spider itself which in turn propels its life and eventual death.

The interplay of being and non-being is the basis of temporal reality and its product is change, constant change. When we meditate on this process, it can be immensely healing and comforting. There is a wild beauty in the processes of life and no part is out of place, nothing that is isolated or alone but everything has a reason and purpose. Seen in this way we cease to be angst-ridden by existence, but are active participants in a dynamic and creative Whole. The only danger is in thinking and acting as if somehow disconnected from this, as if the reality of life, its intimacy and integrity, doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, there is much of that presently in our world.

I think the young man in the cafe was right – we do go to a place of love and light when we die. But then we are in this place when we are alive too, even under the heaviest weight of suffering. We just have to open our eyes and look.

The Underclass

I’m thankful for much in my former career as a journalist, especially the exposure to people and events I would never have encountered otherwise. It all helped to build life experience and a certain degree of knowledge about the world, easing me out of my relatively protected existence and challenging preconceived ideas and prejudices.

I was thinking recently about my first experience of court as a reporter. It was in 2001 and I was still a novice on a local newspaper covering a patch in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. I don’t remember the story, probably something minor, but I found myself at Preston Magistrates Court on a warm summer’s day.

I remember walking into the old courthouse and being met by a whirl of activity. There was a narrow waiting lobby with a long row of seating down the middle and courtrooms on either side. I had arrived quite early for the hearing in which I was interested, so squeezed myself into a seat among the waiting throng.

It would be fair to say I was instantly out of my comfort zone. Many of the people around me seemed well-acquainted with the wrong side of the law, some rough in appearance, others quite edgy and volatile, many probably with experiences of drugs of various kinds. There weren’t just single men there, but whole families with children waiting for one thing or another, forming a miserable and disjointed picture of humanity.

It was the first time I seriously considered the idea of an underclass. It’s not a new concept – Karl Marx had discussed what he called the lumpenproletariat in the 19th century – but that day in Preston the existence of a dysfunctional underbelly of society seemed very real to me. I imagined it to be a class of people on the margins marked by poverty, addictions, abuse and crime, as well as social neglect, exclusion and shame.

I wonder if the notion of an underbelly or shadow would be helpful in understanding and addressing what is seen as the threat of Islamism to the West. Such an explanation would see the extremism not as an external menace or enemy to society, but as inherently belonging to it. Just as an underclass belongs to and is a product of the society as a whole – created by legal, social, historical and political dynamics as well as all the consequences of the choices of individuals – so the danger of Islamism could be seen as one of the outcomes of a globalised community and its tensions. Realising that we are part of a world community could allow us to tackle problems more holistically, drawing every person and every thing within our concern. With appropriate consciousness, no-one need be an “other” to whom we would have no responsibility or care.

What troubles me about the response to the Islamist violence in Paris and other places is the tendency to partiality: to see “us” and “our cause” as just and right, while decrying “their” evil and barbarism. We see ourselves as committed to values, while the “terrorists” are hell-bent on destruction. The reality is, of course, far more complex: even as we praise ourselves for tolerance and freedom, our security forces are operating in a shadowy world of state-sanctioned violence. Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, there has been significant curtailment of civil liberties and enormous growth in a largely secret security apparatus. Could the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with thousands of people dead and ongoing chaos, be attributed to our decency and good values? Or what about our continuing alignment with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most repressive regimes that has funded and armed the very Islamist groups we are now afraid of?

Behind the tragedy of lives lost is the spectre of power: who has it, who is challenging it, who wants more of it. “We” want to maintain and extend our power while denying it to those outside our circle. Islamism is but one response to global power dynamics, feeding on patterns of injustice. It is not a movement for liberation, for the enrichment of the human community, but a life-denying mirror-image to the worst aspects of Western power.

In the new globalised world our challenge is to move to a consciousness of unity and welfare for all because all of us are citizens of this planet. Liberty, fraternity, equality are not just ideals for me and my group but for everybody and every thing that lives under the great blue canopy of the Earth. We will only produce more wars, more suffering and strife if we continue along the old road of self-interest, grabbing what resources we can for ourselves, dominating because we have the money and power to do so. The underclass, the underbelly will always be in our midst, calling us to face the whole truth and to accept the whole of humanity as one.

Personality and Spirit

I’ve been enjoying the wonderful work of Bede Griffiths, particularly his autobiography The Golden String. Griffiths was an English Benedictine monk with a great interest in Eastern spirituality who travelled to India and was the central figure of the Shantivanam ashram from the 1960s until his death in 1993. The ashram follows a universalist faith where Hindu, Buddhist and Christian scriptures are read and where the rituals and iconography have an intriguing east-west blend.

Griffiths believed in the “perennial philosophy”, the idea that at their heart all religions point to the one Truth, the mystery of Love and its manifestation in the world. As an interpreter of Western and Eastern religious traditions, I have found none better than him; he writes earnestly and directly in the style of a wholehearted spiritual seeker and has a loving concern for the welfare of the world.

I joyfully discovered a few days ago that a documentary had been made about him – by an Australian film crew only a few months before he died. I picked up some ear phones and walked to my library to watch it on a computer.

That which intrigued me most and sparked my imagination occurred towards the end of the film. For most of it I followed the narrator’s description of Griffiths’ life story and interviews with him and members of his Indian community with a mixture of interest and delight. One person described him as a “prophet”, and his spiritual wisdom was, indeed, very deep. Then we saw him before a stream about to perform a ceremony with attendants by his side and a group of devotees behind him. One of the assistants said something to him and Griffiths, suddenly confused and cross, grumbled audibly “Tell me what I should do!” His face soured for a few seconds and the attendant smiled in embarrassment, then Griffiths’ demeanour changed as he bent over and splashed water in the different directions and towards the crowd.

In the context of the whole documentary, little should be made of this scene. However, it did send a shock through me. The prophet was also a man with a man’s foibles and limitations. For most of the film my mind had cruised in the wake of the spiritual beauty that it revealed, but now I was reminded of the concrete personality and the everyday material dimension of life.

I can’t comment on Bede Griffiths the man because I didn’t know him, and he was quite frail at the time the documentary was made, but I would like to make some general observations about personality and the spiritual journey and the way they inter-relate. By personality I mean ego, the constellation of forces and influences that make up an individual and the variety of ways an individual presents to the world and to him/herself.

The first observation is that a personality has to be reasonably robust to be able to meet spirit in a functional way. Usually that means some level of discipline has to be attained that allows a person to act as a container or conduit for spirit. Discipline comes over time through various ways like meditation, prayer or yoga, which strengthen the personality’s ability to meet spirit and create pathways for their relationship. The process is helped by life experience – the rough and tumble of the everyday world that doesn’t overly scar a personality but leaves it generally healthy. Spirit is inherently powerful and potentially dangerous and needs a sufficiently tempered ego for its vehicle. Sometimes, particularly in childhood, a spiritual experience can simply slip past us because we lack the development to properly assimilate it, while at other times it can be outright harmful – I think of the ways that intense types of meditation or drugs like LSD can bring on visions that psychologically damage people who are unprepared. The rule is that, exceptional people aside, personality and spirit need time to grow together.

The second observation, obvious thought important, is that a person has to will a connection with spirit. That is, they must actively seek it out. Random soulful experiences – like a holiday by the ocean, listening to music that is deeply moving or reading a powerful book – are good things but on their own don’t lead to the spiritual path. What does is the desire of the personality towards spirit and the exercise of will in that direction. The twist is that will can be exercised unconsciously, particularly in the early stages of personality-spirit development, so that for years we may be moving towards spirit without our rational, everyday self being able to name it as such. When there is a conscious link between personality and spirit, when the ego realises it is moving towards the divine, the spiritual path is strengthened and quickened as an individual organises their life in relation to spirit. The process is never smooth and at different times and in different ways the personality is usually still resistant to the demands of spirit, nevertheless the way is laid out. Once the conscious connection is made, the holiday by the ocean or the soulful music or book are no longer discreet experiences but build on one another in a chain of development that is the personality’s choosing.

Thirdly, the development of the personality can run separately to its meeting with spirit, and it does not necessarily follow that a spiritually developed person is also someone whose personality is highly mature. Once the ego is capable of holding a certain amount of divine energy, it is faced with a choice of progressively surrendering itself to spirit or maintaining a status quo. If the latter, spiritual power can distort the ego over time and create all kinds of shadow and chaotic effects; or the ego may try to harness spirit for its own ends, again producing shadow and chaos. Some Indian gurus are examples of this, milking spiritually hungry and naive Westerners for money and their own ends.

Personality-spirit relationship requires the ego to gradually surrender its autonomy to the divine, but in the process the ego is transformed (or purified) through many stages of development. All religious traditions emphasise morality and right conduct not just for good inter-personal or communal relations, but to shape the ego in relation to the divine; temporal human form has to be perfected enough to ascend to the level of divine union. However, even for those who are well-advanced on the path, faults and limitations that are subject to being human remain. I see the scene of Griffiths’ petulance by the river in this light – the eternal is perfect and we are perfect, but we are also human. The perfect can only be recognised as such when there is also imperfection, which is the condition of everything that exists in time and space.

Lastly, the personality has to embrace mystery. This is perhaps its greatest challenge as it progresses down the path of union with spirit. Mystery is the great nothingness that cloaks and thoroughly penetrates the material universe. From this nothingness we and everything else emerge and to it at death return. It is inescapable and ultimately ineffable – there is no way to describe or comprehend it. A relationship with it, however, can be built if we approach with an open heart and fashion an awareness attuned to the subtle behind the appearance of things, the language of symbols and the power of ritual.

Mystery surrounds the very choice that is made for a life of wholeness – why some people take the path and others don’t – and what becomes clear is that it is not us who choose spirit, but spirit who chooses us.

In the course of spiritual development, when the ego eventually stands at the precipice of its own extinguishment in union with the divine, the great terror of mystery, the fear of the abyss, must be faced. Wisdom traditions tell us that what lies beyond is Love, pure and simply Love. It is not a sentimental love, such as we are used to in popular Western culture, but something that is the bedrock of all existence, the spark and fulfilment of all creation. It is what Buddhists call Nirvana, the ultimate reality, and what in the Judeo-Christian tradition may be described as the experience of God or the Godhead, when a personality is simultaneously null and void and completely full, at its absolute centre in the universe. Griffiths concludes The Golden String with a reflection on Love, quoting from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, the words of the prior of a monastery in which the brothers met:

“Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of divine love, and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf and every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

The prickly Moses

The prickly Moses is a most beautiful specimen. It’s a type of bushy wattle that lives in the temperate parts of Australia. For leaves it has a profusion of little spikes, likely to give your skin a gentle massage than cause any pain if you brush past the tree.

Just now at the creek near where I live the prickly Moses (Acacia verticillata) trees are in unusual array, looking decidedly out of character. Where only a few weeks ago they were covered in yellow brushy blooms, now delicate thin seed pods hang off each tree like Christmas decorations, sometimes in single dribs and in other places in bunches. It’s hard to imagine how these pods could have emerged among the dense green spikes; old prickly Moses has a softer, fairy-like appearance.

Nature is a miracle everywhere you look. From the plants that team along the local waterway to the shapes of clouds, the body of an insect to the body and mind of a human being, it’s a profound glory if you reflect but a moment. The appropriate attitude to the world ought to be wonder, ceaseless wonder, as a function of the affirmation of life. When we approach anything with a state of open curiosity it reveals itself to us, often slowly, showing the beauty of its being and the spirit that is one in all.

It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m not sure that our civilisation knows what life is. Science has the most detailed understanding of the fundamentals of the universe – genomes and DNA, sub-atomic particles and the rest – yet we are progressively killing life on our planet. We shoot probes into space to look for life “out there” but we have not solved the most basic problems of how we relate to it down here. That’s evident in the way we continue to extend human reach even as ecosystems fall apart, and in the way our societies are haunted by inequality and exploitation, soullessness and despair. So much human energy goes into life-negating activity.

To learn from nature is to rediscover and revalue the instincts in service of life. The prickly Moses tree thrives within a web of connections of light, water, bacteria-rich soil and various insects which pollinate its flowers and live and feed on it. It also thrives within a particular plant and animal community, which in turn is part of a larger ecosystem within a specific bioregion existing on a continent subject to weather patterns, geothermal activity, ocean currents and the rest; from there it is the life of planet Earth, the solar system, the galaxy and finally the universe. The instincts serve life when the mind that controls them, the creative intelligence that propels activity, is contained within the bounds of purpose and affirmation. When we ask, “What is the purpose or life-affirmation in this action?” whether it be small or large, individual or collective, we set ourselves within the frame of nature.

To return to nature is to inhabit the circle of grace that is our birthright. Everything exists within the grace of the universe, yet human actions are sometimes within and sometimes outside the dimensions of this state. Love brings us strongly to grace, with feelings of connection, oneness, solidarity, soulfulness and ease. When grace is present, the world is a lighter and more beautiful place, the burdens of life are experienced in their proper context, and everything seems possible. Grace corrects the human tendency to be lost in the minutiae of living, the weight of dense matter, by lifting a person into a fuller vision of life. Without an awareness of grace, we are vulnerable to destructive tendencies like greed and self-interest, to separation from our true self, and feelings of abandonment and alienation.

The prickly Moses lives in a state of grace, but we must have the vision to see that. When we experience beauty in nature it is not simply an enchantment that takes us away from “the world”, but is a reflection of our own self, of what we are and what we can be. That’s not to say that non-human nature always presents a pure ideal, rather that it can act as a spur and inspiration for more enlightened human living. When I see the prickly Moses in its glory, I too want a life of glory; I too want to live its simple beauty. The lesson that is learnt is intrinsically about us.

Old and new, affirming life

Walking through a peaceful park or bushland I often get the urge to say something to the land, to intone some words of acknowledgement. Speaking directly to the presence in that place, I usually say “Thank you, spirit of this land, for having me here and showing me your beauty and wisdom.” I bring my hands together and bow slightly to add small gravity to the moment.

I never intentionally decided that I had to acknowledge place, but the desire just arrived one day when walking along a creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. The words floated in on some mysterious vessel, felt right. Paying some due to the trees by the path, the flitting birds, the burbling water, the occasional skinks and blue-tongued lizards seemed the natural and proper thing to do, an expression of gratitude and joy.

My gesture of thanks accords with Indigenous ways of seeing and relating to the land. In Australian Aboriginal cultures, arrival at a place is an occasion for paying homage to its spirits or ancestors. Words are reverentially spoken and ceremonies held; smoke is sometimes involved, as is water, faces are painted so the spirits can properly recognise the newcomer.

The older human mind represented by Indigenous cultures, with its magical way of seeing the world and direct kinship with nature, is still present, though largely unconscious, in the psyche of modern Western people. We choose to project our magical stories into movies and the arts in general and experience their ancient, raw power in dreams. In these stories, the boundaries between objects soften and blur, the rules we understand to govern rational reality are undone and we move between worlds unseen in our “normal” everyday existence.

It’s important, from an individual and collective point of view, to be in touch with the many layers of the psyche. A person cannot be fully whole if there is not a connection and acceptance of the different dimensions of being within them. Some of these may shock or surprise the rational mind, while others may be easier to embrace. The challenge is not to accept a flat, one-dimensional picture of reality because that limits the scope of one’s humanity and, as depth psychology has shown, the mind is incredibly complex.

Collectively, we are in the early stages of what has been categorised as “post-modernity”, in which pluralism is an important idea. This holds that there is not one truth but many truths, many different ways of expressing what is right and valuable, and each expression is one small tile in the mosaic of what it means to be human. As we move through this new era, our challenge is to reconcile all the different voices – some echoing from the distant past while others of recent genesis – into a picture of humanity as a whole, a truly beautiful and varied creation. All the voices have something to contribute as long as we keep in mind the ultimate goal of life-affirmation. Where there are tendencies towards destruction and life-denial, and there are plenty in our world, we not only call them out and resist their spread but at some core level these too must be accepted and embraced as an aspect of the reality of being human. Nobody and nothing is beyond the pale, all is of the one Life.

If we examine extreme Islamism, for instance, as one difficult tendency currently in existence, we can see a version of a corrupted pre-modern view in which there is only one notion of what is right and true. But taken in context, it can be viewed as a reaction to Western global cultural hegemony and US military domination; it is in part fed by the resources of Saudi Arabia and other conservative Persian Gulf states for the extension of their power; it feeds on elements of racism and alienation experienced in certain communities and on the particular cultural/religious dynamics of those communities.

Taken as a whole, this ought to provide us with a path towards healing and addressing the threat that Islamism poses. The solution requires everybody to be a part of it, in the sense that we are not separate and that humanity is one living body. Global power dynamics affect everybody, as does the spread of Western values in relation to other cultures; security issues are global due to the global nature of transport, the internet, economic systems and telecommunications; racism and various forms of alienation affect just about every country in the world.

We are one, and if we don’t learn to act as one we may eventually die as one on this fragile, blue planet. The idea that some people are treated as separate, that young Muslims are a potential problem to be “re-educated” to our values, misses the mark by a long way. You only have to look at the fundamentalist currents in Western culture – religious, scientific, economic – to see that no group has a monopoly on partial, self-righteous viewpoints.

Coming back to my action of speaking to nature, I can see the life-affirming aspects involved. It draws me into greater conscious connection with the web of life, the myriad interactions of beings which support me in everything that I am and do. It reminds me of the value of the non-human when for so much of the day my mind is upon human things. It rekindles my imagination and simple gratitude. And though it may sit uncomfortably in the hard-edged world of modern rationality, I’m sure that it leads to other acts of compassion and kindness, which has got to be a good thing.

Space Oddity

The capacity of capitalism to continually mine human life for self-interest and profits is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. I penned a poem recently on that theme:

Space Oddity

A man is standing on a train platform, whistling.
It's a Bowie tune, Space Oddity.

He breaks to stretch his body,
bending left and right,
squatting, twisting, shrugging his shoulders,
pressing the cyclone wire fence
to lengthen his calves.
He picks up a few bars of melody between movements.

Someone will look at that and see dollars.
And suddenly on every platform at every station
people will be performing Whistle-a-cise TM:
men in grey suits using their umbrellas
to contort muscles,
women bouncing children on their knees
to drop calories.
The tunes will cost $5 each downloadable now.

It's an individual's free choice.
It's liberty and enterprise.
It's the oddity of being human.