December 17, 2013 by Kiri

Belonging (workshop debrief)

I’ve had the most amazing weekend. On Friday I performed at Mother Tongue, a women’s spoken word evening. On Saturday mrA had his last circus class of the year and we hung out with some new friends. Then on Sunday I ran Our Earth Our Self.

It was a weekend of belonging, of being in community with other people, being held and holding space for meaningful conversation. Listening and being heard. The poem I performed at Mother Tongue was about the feeling of being called, of having a spiritual epiphany and then being overtaken by ‘ordinary’ life. It was also a fairly grand statement of my purpose in life. I was nervous beforehand not in fear of the audience response (it is an incredibly supportive crowd) but of making such a strong statement about myself. It paid off, the audience responded warmly and I had this incredible feeling of liberation.

It felt like that was perfect preparation for Sunday’s workshop, it left me feeling whole and strong and replete. I was able to bring that sense of myself as part of something greater to the workshop and it helped me hold the space. The workshop was small but lovely. It, too, left me feeling connected and alive. Most humbling was the fact that my parents chose to come. I never would have thought they would be interested but they were excellent contributors, whole hearted and authentic.

This time the numbers were touch and go right to the end, it was only my determination (and my parent’s decision to come) that meant it went ahead. A number of people dropped out at the last minute all for very valid reasons but I’m left wondering what more I can do. I’ve asked some questions in the evaluation about how people would describe the workshop and its benefits to see if I can improve the way I’m marketing it. Although the work that reconnects is designed to inspire and sustain action for social change, I can’t help but feel that it could have a much broader appeal. Don’t we all need safe spaces to feel our pain?

November 30, 2013 by Kiri

Grandmother gum

A friend recently drew my attention to the Radio National Project – Trees I’ve Loved. They asked listeners for stories about their relationships with trees and then selected 40 for production and broadcast. I highly recommend you go and listen, they are mostly only 2-5 minutes long and very moving.

It has inspired me to reflect on my own relationship to trees and particularly Grandmother Gum, the great old gum tree in the grounds of the local primary school. I’ve spoken before about how trees function as a mindfulness bell for me but I find my relationship with this particular tree is deeper than that.

I went to primary school here and the grounds are steeped in memories of humiliation. That’s the bench where I was picked last for rounders, there’s where my ‘friends’ used to enjoy running off on me at random moments (taking advantage of my inability to keep up), and over the back was the library where I took refuge. The buildings are all different now (thankfully) but the ground and my heart hold the memories.

I don’t remember taking refuge in the tree back then but now I feel she was a silent witness to that time in my life. Her boughs sheltered me from the sun as I stood in the outfield lost in my own thoughts, oblivious to the game I was excluded from. It comforts me to know that if my son goes to school here, she will watch over him as she has watched over me.

I have introduced Mr A to the tree and encouraged him to speak with her. The idea has taken root, he refers to her as the Grandmother Tree, and also “your friend, Mama.” Yesterday we went to visit her but the gates were locked. Mr A said “she misses us” and then “I wish there were more Grandmother Trees, out here.” I sighed “Yeah, me too.”

I weep now as I write that, for the kind of world where Grandmother Trees are everywhere and duly respected. The kind of world where trees are actually allowed to grow that old. I am stunned by three and a half year old Mr A’s easy respect for this great being. It comes so naturally to him and yet so many people seem to miss the point, what happened?

I fear for the future of this precious tree. A family friend in the next street once said it’s a Corroboree Tree (a tree that predates colonisation where people would have gathered). I’ve looked for scars and found none so it can’t be verified. I find myself wanting to contact the Koorie Heritage Trust, to ask someone to come out and assess it. I want her to be protected. I also want other people to recognise that she’s special, perhaps to validate the depth of my own feeling. I feel lonely in my love for her, a weird hippie.

On the other side of the school there’s a mosaic that features local landmarks like the train-line and the creek. Along the top, holding it all in its generous embrace are the boughs of the Grandmother Gum. So perhaps I am not alone, other people honour her too. The school grounds are radically different than the days of my childhood but she is untouched.

The Radio National tree project is further evidence of the fact that people care about trees, find solace and joy in them, feel deeply for and about them, and grieve their loss. I wish this were more a part of our culture, that there were more places and spaces to speak of our connections, that trees were more deeply appreciated.

November 21, 2013 by Kiri

Sherbrooke Yatra

Sunday was a big day of protests against our government’s woeful response to climate change. They are actually planning to dismantle measures put in place by the previous government. The loss of the carbon price seems inevitable and yet 60,000 people across the country turned out to protest their intention to repeal it.

I showed my support by participating in a Yatra in Sherbrooke forest above Belgrave. We walked about 7km (the Grants picnic ground loop if you know the area) in silence interspersed with readings and deep ecology exercises from Joanna Macy.

It was a lovely way to do deep ecology, dwarfed by the mountain ash forest and held by it as we walked in silent solidarity. I was so quickly embraced by the little group although I’d only just met most of them. I guess you don’t show up for something like that unless you have a particular spiritual bent and it’s a pretty deep place to start from.

It’s reassuring to see the diversity of people who are engaged with deep ecology. I look forward to the day when Yatras become like 5rhythms and you can be sure there’s one happening somewhere every weekend. We’re building what we need to sustain ourselves not just in environmental activism but in life.

November 13, 2013 by Kiri

December workshop: Our Earth, Our Self

Reigniting hope and sustaining action in the face of crisis, an experiential workshop.

Take a day out from the grind of making social change to connect with like minded people and reignite your passion. The work that reconnects gives us space to feel difficult emotions in a supportive environment and allow hope to arise.

Continue reading →

October 26, 2013 by Kiri

The trouble with Australian seasons

The following excerpt is taken from my Master’s thesis on seasonal celebrations:

In Australia seasonal variability has been the norm for many thousands of years. From a European point of view it is “a continent characterised by extremes of variation and unpredictability.” (Rose, 2005: 38) The cultural practices of Indigenous Australians, however, have evolved alongside Australia’s changeable weather so that “conditions labelled by whitefellas as ‘very changeable’ [are] in fact ‘entirely natural’” (Rose, 2005: 37). Debbie Bird Rose describes an Indigenous system of understanding and interpreting the seasons according to a range of interrelated events.

Rather than being based on a projection of an annual cycle, seasonal changes are forecast through awareness of changes in flora and fauna and responded to as they occur. “The system is widespread, the content is local. All of it – system and content – is built from extremely longterm observations that have accommodated variability and patchiness and identified precise concurrences.” (2005: 40) Such a system, Rose argues, is impossible to correlate with the European calendar without losing the dynamism that makes it so suited to Australian seasonal conditions. It holds the seeds of a world-view that challenges the European seasonal mind-set and represents a way forward for spiritual ecologists. Rose holds the Indigenous system up as an example to us all of how we can live “in this vulnerable continent.” We can seek to build a relationship with what is happening in the natural world around us by allowing observation to be the basis of ritual.

So as I alluded in my response to some questions on my previous post the notion of ‘indigenous seasons’ is problematic. The familiar 4 season calendar introduced from the north was shaped by an agrarian relationship to the land. There’s a sense in which the whole concept of seasons don’t apply to Australia because of nonannual cycles like El Nino/ La Nina. However the idea of basing rituals on observation presents a great opportunity, particularly as climate change begins to show its teeth.

How this might work in practice I don’t know, I’d love to explore. I imagine a semi-structured ritual that provides space for call and response, litanies of experiences or free flowing physical expression, there’s no limit to the ways you could gather observations. A system of continuously adapting and responding to changes in seasonal patterns is really the only way to maintain a genuine relationship with the land. It also has to be more than human somehow though, we have to allow space for the Earth to speak to us, to feel our small selves within that larger self.

October 20, 2013 by Kiri

Earth, spirit, community

Five years ago I completed a Master’s thesis called Seasonal Celebrations in the Melbourne Bioregion. It was an exploration of various groups who were attempting to create or adapt seasonal celebrations that are attentive to our local experience of the seasons.

This is particularly pertinent in Australia. As a former British colony a large portion of society here practice cultural traditions that were developed in harmony with a completely different landscape. In case that’s not enough we are in the southern hemisphere so our seasons are opposite to those of the dominant global cultures of US and Europe. The epitome of this is the hot sweaty santa claus in the red fur lined suit on a scorching 35 degree (celcius) day, sitting on a throne surrounded by fake snow and fir trees.

It makes no kind of sense and yet, what I found when I was discussing my thesis with people was that the pagan elements, the ones that typify an ancient relationship with the Earth (the fir tree, the roast lunch, the stockings by the chimney), are the ones that are closest to people’s hearts. One year, for our extended family Christmas, I subsituted a wattle branch from an overburdened tree that was about to fall over, for the traditional fir tree. All the kids asked where the Christmas tree was and insisted that the wattle was the wrong colour.

I wrote my thesis hoping to discover a spiritual practice that would honour my connection to this country. Not in a patriotic sense, but with a deeply grounded respect for the land that has brought me up, that has been a source of spiritual solace. I found great people doing great work but I did not find my spiritual home.

I love my sense of belonging to Earth. I love feeling awed and humbled and held by something greater than myself. I love feeling that I am part of the richness of the whole Earth community. Thus far my spiritual journey with the Earth has been a solitary pursuit. Some would say that this is a necessity, that it’s not possible to share such a thing in community. I don’t know if that’s true or not but my heart longs to try.

I can’t help but feel that a spiritual community, like the Buddhist jewel of sangha, would help to keep that sense of connection alive and central to my life. Particularly when family, work and home responsibilities prevent me from immersing myself in wilderness.

October 3, 2013 by Kiri

Wominjeka

Six years ago I did the Aboriginal Heritage Walk through the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. The moment of participating in the welcome ceremony and receiving a gumleaf – symbol of permission to pass through Wurudjeri country – was profoundly moving. I wasn’t aware of the guilt I carried around until that humbling moment. The following extract is taken from my journal at the time:

My head is still spinning. The information is one thing – all the uses of plants, the stories, the words for things, the tools, the place of animals and the interaction between people of different language groups. How do you make sense of such a complex culture in only two hours? … Their whole way of life is different to mine. Their stories overlay the city, I look around and imagine people … interacting here, imagine a whole other landscape with waterfalls and different names.

There’s a song by Tiddas that captures it perfectly “A living history beneath the concrete of the city streets which we walk upon.” When it comes to ecological identity I have so much to learn from Aboriginal Australians. I feel so hesitant though, I desperately want their knowledge but I am so ashamed of the way my people have decimated their culture (and continue to do so). I feel unworthy of the teaching. Then again restoring my own relationship to country and learning to care for it may provide a path to reconciliation.

A friend once told me that he volunteered to support urban Aboriginal people living in poverty. When I shared my feeling that my relationship to the land was dependent on reconciliation he told me he didn’t think reconciliation would lead us back to the Earth. Instead turning to the Earth and caring for country is the only way nonindigenous Australians could come close to understanding our first peoples.

September 27, 2013 by Kiri

The art of meaningful conversation

Recently I’ve been making connections between a variety of different ideas but haven’t known how to articulate them. There is something about the human need for meaning, belonging and importance that connects to our environmental crisis.

On the one hand I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle and Brene Brown. I’ve found enormous personal insight in their work and it has helped me to push myself toward being a better and happier person. In the face of environmental crisis it might seem like this personal journey is self-indulgent but it’s not.

Consumption is driven by numbing behaviour, when we take the time to say “I am enough, I have enough, I am grateful” and do the work to believe it and feel it. Then we are freed from the need to consume mindlessly. That’s not even the half of it though, we have gifts to offer the world that we squander in our mindlessness. We are not fulfilling our potential as a species because our greatest creative gifts are burried beneath a flood of stuff.

The pursuit of money over meaning is killing us.

This week I attended three days of training on the Art of Hosting. On one level what we learned was a collection of tools and group processes for engaging people in generating creative solutions to social problems. What the hosts modeled though were ways to keep people present and engage in meaningful conversation. They drew the group to recognise our common humanity, to step out from behind our professional identities, engage with what matters to us and apply it to our work.

Meaningful conversation is fundamental to society’s transition from destruction to sustainability. When we make peace with the present moment we stop trying to impose our will on the world and come to appreciate what is given and what we have to give. As we realise our fundamental worth we stop needing to prove it with bigger, better, faster, more and we naturally make space for others to be present and call forth their better/higher/buddha nature. This creates the grounds for genuine dialogue, it’s the only way that change can happen and the only way we can come up with the kind of creative and innovative solutions we need.

September 23, 2013 by Kiri

David Suzuki has a go at talking sense downunder

And then we’re spiritual animals. We emerged out of nature and when we die we return to nature. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that we will never understand or control. We need to have sacred places where we go with respect, not just looking for resources or opportunity.

I am deeply ashamed that our government has attracted the attention of the global community for being on the cusp of a massively retrograde step (repealling the carbon tax). I am grateful that David Suzuki is having a go at talking some sense into them and the general populace. The Conversation has published an excerpt of his speech at the University of NSW, he writes very plainly about the paradigm shift that is necessary to address our current environmental crisis.

September 9, 2013 by Kiri

UPDATE Workshop: Our Earth, Our Self

NEWSFLASH: We’ve had very low interest in this workshop (probably because of the clash with Buddha Touched the Earth) but we’re not cancelling, oh no, we are going with the flow. My cofacilitator, Linette, is going to bring the flow game and we are going to use the time to ask some big questions and do some deep reflecting, feel free to join us, upstairs at Friends of the Earth in Collingwood.