Shoreline

The tender moments between sleeping and waking … a shoreline of sorts … when sleep has been deep and untroubled and waking is equally quiet and calm. A slippage between states. A visceral satisfaction with the heart at rest and the mind quietly attentive to first waking impressions – air on skin, bird sound, light permeating consciousness. Then the unfurling awareness of the accumulating sounds of the natural world creating a more complex ambient environment. It is Sunday and the last day of the year. No traffic sounds permeate my waking ears. If I listen closely sometimes I am sure I hear the ocean lapping. Birds, I realise, are my companions. My chosen companions. Their wildness beguiles and inspires me. I have two water dishes, front and back to entice them. The dish facing the park is visited all day by crows, magpies, magpie-larks, honey eaters, wattle birds, doves, and seasonally pink & grey galahs. Kookaburras hold their distinguished distance! A plethora of birds, some of whom I am sure know my voice and presence. Especially the crows, who eye me intently as they perch on the fence or pergola before descending to drink. A very special moment was seeing a crow have a bath in a large shallow black bowl filled with water, very close to my living room window. Intended as an aesthetic addition to my garden not a bird bath! What does the crow care? One day I witnessed an astonishing playful vision … a crow was plunging in and then perching on the edge over and over for a full immersion bath! Clearly enjoying the experience which they repeated many times to my delight. The dish facing into the central space is not visited by birds, but bees enjoy the water and the respite. I had no idea that bees need water also – why not? However yesterday an astonishing clarion sound pierced my home from the direction of the front courtyard. When I ventured to look there was a willy wagtail perched on the edge of the water dish and singing in full voice the most gorgeous song. I always remember my sister Phillipa telling me that Daisy Utemorrah (indigenous author, poet and community leader from Mowanjum), told her the wagtail is the messenger bird. So little bird what message do you have for me or for us at this time in our turbulent world?

Making Room for the Poetic

I am lying on my back on the liquid transparency of the Indian Ocean and above me is the sliver of a new moon. A smile breaks my face open. I breathe in this gift of moon and ocean, blue sky and fluffy white clouds. It is somewhere between 7-7.30am and I have driven to the ocean to cleanse the debris of living from my body. Awash with sadness, frustration, weariness and tenderness I drop everything and step into the great mother. For a brief time I have this small lagoon to myself. But it is also a shared pleasure as others arrive and enter the water in silent exchange.

 With peripheral vision I see parts of my body above the waterline – I feel like I am in a Magritte painting. It is utterly surreal – this proximity and vast horizon. Both exist in my body. Even the coldness of the water is reassuring, knowing the day is likely to be hot. I soak the cold into my cells. The sky feels opaque compared to the transparency of the ocean. It is all an illusion. Both are liquids of one form or another. Like my body. Air and water surrounding me. The thin sliver of white sand defines the edge of the land. Even this is an illusory solidness. Its form changes with the tides, the winds, the movement of the elements.

 All of this contributes to the poiesis of my life. Making room for the poetic is not a luxury it is critical to my life and to my being able to breathe and go on living. Making (art) is an everyday activity.  We all do it. We make meals, we make friends, we make love, we make conversation, we make do. I want to contest that making room for poetry is critical to live a life of meaning. An obsession with the sensate details of materiality impoverishes us and it is my intuition that we are then ready prey for the devouring, insatiable mouth of consumer capitalism. 

 So there is the moon and there is me floating on the great liquid ocean. When I open to a peripheral gaze I see my knees and toes, belly and hands … and I see the curve of the earth meeting the sky above. It is all horizon … curved horizon … shades of blues and greens. The traces are still in me as I sit here writing. My imagination has been stirred. This is the essential poetic ingredient for my soul.

Midjaliny (Noongar for rain, tears or weeping)

It’s raining as the moon drifts in and out of the clouds surrounding it in the early morning sky. The sound on my roof is comforting, familiar in ways that I could not have imagined before moving back to my birth place. I am in my country – Whadjuk-Noongar country. As I sit writing here in the dark listening to the rain, I hear rhythm in the fluid constancy of the falling rain. When I step outside to feel the rain on my skin I see the nearly full moon coming in and out of focus, never more feminine than this I think - elusive, beautiful, secretive, intimate. Rain creates an intimacy I have always loved from childhood, tucked in a warm bed it is one of life’s pleasures. I like the cool air coming through the windows and doors that I leave ajar, to allow this elemental  flow. A candle burning beside me, darkness enveloping and cracks of light entering the house. Birds begin to sound adding to the great pleasure of being alive and awake at this early hour. I sense adventure in waking early as though the potential of the day beckons, inviting me to taste, smell, listen and touch the world. Ahh a kookaburra in the distance. I feel so fortunate to have a patch of bush just there outside my door. I am living in what my neighbour calls the ghetto! I love this, the not wealthy part of this suburb that is bounded by ocean and river. The wealthy live beside the river in mansions I do not envy – Australian aspirational ugliness abounds. My local walks take me on the back streets past all kinds of treasures – narrow laneways, gorgeous gardens and intriguing hidden houses of imaginative flair, both old and new. It is all oddly familiar, school friends lived here when I lived nearby as a girl. I rarely came here – I would go the most direct way to the river through the wealthier adjacent suburb. This suburb was working-class, with factories and workers cottages and lots of small corner parks. These are now cared for and delightful to find and rest in on my walks. But the landmark I did go to was the Memorial Hall – an Art Deco façade over a late C19 building with all the attributes of the era – beautiful jarrah wooden floors and large spaces. What was the cinema in my youth is now a theatre and the cinema is outdoor summer viewing only. Daylight has arrived but the skies are still weeping – a day for internal reflection, dreaming and soup making. How to keep the angels happy and the wolf of reality fed – soup! This is the season of Djeran in the six Noongar Seasons, and also the season of Adulthood.

Moving Home

I have been moving … home to my birthplace Perth.

I found a little house under a great tree and I am making a new home in a familiar place. The tree brings immense solace with its changing colours, bird life and shedding bark. When I wake at night it feels like a companion and comforts me with its presence and magnanimous beauty. Early morning brings the sun rising from the east, glistening brightly through its leaves and branches. After midday the shadow is welcome relief from the heat of the day. Evening brings the return of birds for their meal and a last chorus of sound, heralding the evening. I have never noticed the colour of the bark before, it is pink but unlike any other pink I can name or know. It changes with the light – for now I am calling it ‘bush pink’. Strips of it fall into my courtyard along with the leaves. I don’t rush to sweep them away – I enjoy their unruly yet patterned presence that creates its own beauty. An unruly wildness lingers in Perth. I came home for this. Without knowing exactly, I knew I had to come home to this natural world. It’s the sky, the wind, the birds, the air itself. Something untameable I identify with lurks around. As I sit here I hear the wind in the tree outside and the raw dry sound of crows and parrots. Nothing quite like it anywhere else. It’s in my bloodstream, as familiar as anything I have known. My skin soaks it up.

In the process of moving I found some writing I did over 10 years ago on my return from residencies in Europe. I was surprised by the find and what it reveals to me now, in my seventh decade. How do we listen to the body and to feeling our way into how to live each decade anew?
“I board the plane home without nostalgia. I don’t want to live in Europe and I no longer want Europe to live in me.”  
It startled me to find this entry and what it revealed – I knew somewhere the future was beckoning me home to my country.

In honour of my tree here is Bill Neidjie, Kakadu elder and great story-teller speaking about feeling:

Tree …
He watching you
You look at tree
he listen to you.
He got no finger, he can’t speak.
But that leaf …
he pumping, growing,
growing in the night.
you dream something.
Tree and grass same thing.
They grow with your body.
With your feeling.
Bill Neidjie (1989)

Dawn Intimacy

There is something quietly thrilling about waking early and rising to make tea. I venture outside – it’s quiet and the stars and moon are stark in the dark sky. I hear the world breathe. As I wait for the kettle to boil I stand and listen – in the distance a train, some birds calling the day into being, and the sky changing colour quicker than I realise. With tea I venture back to bed and the vestiges of the film I saw last night, the meal and conversation with a friend linger in me. I have slept lightly. It is not as cold as it has been but cold enough to delight in the warmth of my doona and hot tea. It is the caress of the enveloping stillness that I find sensuous and intimate. A space opens inside me allowing nascent feeling to become imaginative exploration and sometimes like this, writing. It is comforting to feel the busy world resting around me. No traffic, no sounds, no hurried harried humans – I like the depth of the silence, which will break soon. The air is crisp, clean. Is it hope I feel? I don’t think so. I think it is pleasure in being alive. The immense almost desperate intensity of living. This is where my loving goes these days – into the world. The sadness I feel at what we have done to the earth sits in my body refusing to be numbed. The sheer beauty of the world is present everyday for me in these times of quiet reflective awareness. The seduction of our capitalist world distresses me. The movies tempting me with their advertisements to travel elsewhere. But where is elsewhere? I am elsewhere now as I attune to the molecular divinity I sense all around me with the transition of night into day. The adventure of living sensuously presents itself at any moment. Night air settles around me. Day is waiting in the wings. Sitting here writing – seeking the words that convey and craft what I am experiencing is part of the exacting task of creativity. I am composing and making and nothing gives me more pleasure than this. This is living intimately.

Breaking the Spell

So much feels broken. But when I am dancing and moving with others I feel we can defy the laws written and unwritten that bind and break us. I take a breath plunge headlong into the dance and come up gasping for air and the sheer audacity of my mobile limbs. Nick Cave suggests all our lives are dangerous we just live for a-while thinking we are in control.  He knows now with certainty that we don’t. Living is dangerous and the dance we are in takes us off balance all the time. I am falling and flailing. My knee might give way at any moment. Crash and I fall to earth. In the early morning darkness I practice patience. I can’t move quickly – it is a delicate moment when my feet first reach for the ground and I transfer my weight onto them. A hovering moment of uncertainty. My knee is giving me grief – a shredded menisci and other stray broken bits. I look forward to the pain being alleviated. I am also certain that it requires a shift in my awareness of what I can and want to do now. I am moving towards an older age where mobility is not taken for granted. The loss of walking is acute for me. I have kept myself going through walking – one foot after the other. I am housebound with this. I want to walk freely again. My son who knows this is not a given, reminds me of who I share the world with – those for whom walking is not an assumption. This reminds me of loving and living without assumption; without privilege; without entitlement. Last week Australia sent a clear message to an out-of-date patriarchal stance based on entitlement and privilege. I am breathing easier.  The spell has been broken.

Outpouring

It’s raining. I woke in the early hours of the morning to the steady sound of rain. Normally I would find this a deep comfort and sensual pleasure. The sound of rain and the smell of the wet earth along with the knowledge of the benefits for our gardens and vegetal life. But this time it is tinged with a little fear. This is the rain that has been falling steadily down the east coast of Australia causing enormous havoc in Brisbane, Sydney and towns along the coast. I know at least one family who have had to evacuate. I cannot imagine what it feels like to have your home surrounded by floodwaters. The rain was predicted and I have wondered what it would feel like to have the Yarra rise to unknown levels and whether my home would remain safe. I sit here writing to its steady insistent sound, letting it fill my imaginary to see how its unbroken rhythm might affect my writing. It is water – fluid, wet, falling heavily but with no violent force. It is in its insistence that the latent fear lies. Water is deceptively powerful, its constancy wears surfaces down, rounding the edges of the sharpest rocks, smoothing the banks of rivers, whilst cutting through and between to forge rivers in mountain terrain.

 I am listening to the weight and fall of the rain. It is steady. The day will be soggy, damp and close. The slight concern I have is balanced by my pleasure. As a West Australian rain was always something to celebrate. Its capacity to cool the earth and invite an interiority was a welcome shift from the extraversion that the sun and beach culture offer. My first experience of snow brought this also. The silence of snow was extraordinary. The world went silent. The depth of white all around a source of wonder. I was enchanted even with the deep cold that accompanied it.

Water becomes snow, ice, rain, mist, steam. Water is dynamic – it can be stagnant, still, flowing, swirling, raging. Its many forms and manifestations bring us different elemental experiences of the natural world. Water is transformative – we see the result of this in our gardens and in the surrounding country. We perceive growth spurts to delight the senses. After rain the air smells cleaner, when it starts we have the *petrichor, that magical smell that rises from hot earth. It is the sheer magnitude of water in these recent deluges that has been frightening and awe inspiring. The Brisbane River sweeping everything before it – boats, cars, jetties, breaking things apart as it rages.

 The earth is suffering. I am sure of this. What is transpiring is apocalyptic  – fires, disease, floods and famine in its wake as food sources are impacted. There is an impatience to return to ‘normal’ after Covid but what is normal now? This is what we have been told will happen. It is not an anomaly. There is the interweaving of a longer story from an indigenous point of view and there is the effect of what humans have done to the powerful but fragile ecosystems over centuries of colonisation, capitalism and its associated greed.

 The earth gives us so much pleasure and nourishment and perhaps like our bodies we don’t pay attention until we are suffering. The earth is suffering. And she will do what she needs to heal herself, expelling what is needed to survive.

 *Petrichor is the term coined by Australian scientists in 1964 to describe the unique, earthy smell associated with rain falling on dry soil. It is caused by the water from the rain, along with certain compounds like ozone, geosmin, and plant oils. The word is constructed from Ancient Greek πέτρα 'rock', or πέτρος 'stone', and ἰχώρ, the ethereal fluid that is the blood of the gods in Greek mythology. Wikipedia

dancing again

How do we begin again – to meet, dance and touch one another? In the aftermath of the past two years how do we gather into our selves and cultivate the practice of being with one another to move, create and find our belonging? I propose that this practice can support us redefining ourselves and how we navigate our way through. The vulnerability we have all experienced is at the heart of our return and renewal, remaining present as we renogotiate our lives. My teaching is infused with the philosophy of self-organisation and relational life. As we find our deepest connection to ourself, others and the lived world we re-pattern our belief systems and invite questions about our role and place in the lived world. The offerings are infused with ethics|aesthetics and the capacity for transformation is cultivated between us all.

Practice

I lie in the quiet darkness and what emerges is:

Beginning my practice is very like tending the fire first thing in the morning when only the embers are there.

I need to blow gently, and place small kindling over the embers. I lie on the floor, breathe and wait. I tune in sometimes eyes closed. Slowly flames begin to lick around the dry wood and my body eases out - softening, extending, opening. It is an intimate process.

On the best days the moving is easy, on the difficult days there is a heavy dull resonance. As the flames catch the heat builds. Slowly my body responds. Layers of resistance shift. I follow the emerging narrative.

My moving generates thinking. It is fluid – a making sense of – a knowing – a being with – enduring.

From the intimacy of the beginning I move into engagement with the space. Gathering momentum and complexity, I move from internal focus to engage with the whole relational field.  I am making and being made. Recognition and knowing converge. I am dancing.

I have cultivated this awareness through attunement. It brings tone to my fleshed body and sharpens my perceptions. As I continue to move, pause, listen - the continuous inter-personal narrative opens out into philosophical discourse with the world. Things that are troubling me emerge and direct my focus. Dancing wrestles with these emergent states – problematizing, provoking and sharpening my responses.

Dancing is my engagement, sometimes my answer to the world. It is my politics. Dancing is how I resist dominant narratives. My practice is continuous research – demanding all that I know in every moment so that I might perceive what I don’t yet know in the emergent dance.

Form is created through moving; ideas are realized through moving; questions are raised through moving.

I am enthralled by this process that gets richer every year. The intimacy with myself gives me the courage to be in relationship with the world and others. It sustains me.

I don’t expect answers …

The fire crackles away licking limbs and igniting new imaginings.

September 2016

A Long Walk

Today I walked along Gap Road to the top of the hill. I had no particular intention when I set out, only that it was a glorious day and the blue sky beckoned. It is the first day of Melbourne coming out of lockdown and I feel emotional. It has been such a long hard few months. I have not been in the city but through my friends and students I have gauged the scars of the long hibernating months. Walking felt like the practice I needed today. In walking you see many things that you miss driving past. I am noticing more this year due to the constraints we have all been living with. The rain has also delivered a year of abundant fungi and now wildflowers. The yam daisy is out and the orchids are emerging. The introduced and now wild species are in flower. One I have not noted before is the hawthorn. Along the road I see surprising and beautiful compositions of the flowering hawthorn intermingled with kangaroo apple. Near a neighbour’s there are white and pink hawthorn overlapping and they look glorious. I haven’t noticed them before, but I have not spent an entire year here either – with the seasons flowing one into the next and revealing their delicate secrets. The birds are also abundant as I walk – the grey shriek is particularly noted – a medium sized bird with a song that wakes the heart and the ear. I have walked to the top of the hill where I can see the plains leading to the city of Melbourne in the distance. I realize I wanted to acknowledge and feel part of this first day of Melbourne’s release from lockdown. Along the way I have had conversations … smelt the earth … heard birdsong … seen the black angus cows flicking their tails … despaired at the ugly house recently built at the top of the hill … seen the dump of household rubbish that people think no one will notice …  and considered the months that friends, colleagues and students have endured under lockdown during this pandemic. I feel keenly we are living in historic times.

Memory & Spring

Over the past week as I descend the stairs outside to my study or to hang out the washing a distinct aroma greets me. It is the stuff of dreams – a smell that reminds me of my father and spring in Perth. In particular old men with buckets in Hay St Mall, selling it in delicate bunches come September. As the month of my birth, boronia heralds spring in my imagination. Its pungent smell a mix of sharpness and earthiness. Quite distinct – I know no other smell like it. My father loved it and sent me to buy it when the men were selling from their buckets in the city. I knew it grew in the cold wet south, so they must have made the journey with this sole purpose in mind. I am nostalgic remembering this. And now it is growing at the bottom of the stairs under the lemon tree in Riddells Creek. Planted last year and kept alive all summer long, it is flowering abundantly and offering up its unique fragrance. Its botanical name is Boronia megastigma, indigenous to the south-west corner of WA, I associate it with Denmark on the south coast as I know it grows there and is where I lived as a little girl. It has delicate fronds of narrow leaves and its flowers are small pendulous balls - brown with lime-yellow centres, bursting out abundantly along the branches. But its perfume makes it distinctive and unique. If we had a perfumery legacy in Australia this would be the queen of perfumes surely! I am smitten and enthralled to be able to linger, filling my nostrils with its heady fragrance and igniting memory.

the plagued body

Why has a virus brought the planet to a stop? This is the question I have been sitting with. Nothing prior to Coronavirus has been able to do this. Neither mass ecological destruction, with its resultant famine and disease, nor the high number of deaths in wealthy countries from opiates, obesity and alcoholism. Why is this? Is it because it is invisible? Is it because once more we have an ‘enemy’ we can conquer, within the body itself? The body has been so maligned in Western Culture. I would say hated actually – beginning with the Christian Church and continued in western traditional scholarship. Always designated to a lesser place, reduced and minimized in significance. Until we get sick! Until we are afflicted with an illness or a virus! Then the body is sacrosanct. We recognise we cannot live without it. I’m very serious – I think many people would prefer to be a walking head or a talking head. (Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days reflects this wonderful absurdity). People even speak of being betrayed by their bodies, as though their body is a slave in service to the far superior head/brain. This top-down concept of priorities is being truly dislodged in this present moment. We are all in this together. There is something comforting in this that many people feel, including myself. The virus does not differentiate between rich and poor, white or black, man or woman, it attaches where it can, invitation or not. How the disease might play out is however, profoundly effected by wealth distribution.

The Coronavirus confirms we are a social body not an individual mechanical body. We exist in an inter-subjective field – we transmit knowledge this way as well as viruses.  We have not extended hospitality to this virus on our terms; it has leapt across all the boundaries, mechanized structures of control and ideas about ourselves as a separate individual body. We are in isolation to minimise the spread from body to body. We cannot make the virus hostage to our will. Currently it is holding us hostage! Our response to the Coronavirus has a history back to the medieval plagues. Isolation is known to curb the curve of infection but what will curb the curve of our insatiable appetite for addictive consumption? In these days and weeks of being at home with much less work and demands it is possible to begin to perceive other ways of living. I hope many people get to like it and recognise they have been conned – by a system that treats them as dispensable objects rather than feeling subjects. That we all need less material goods and far more spatial/temporal realms to explore our originality. We could begin by being inspired by the complexity of the living world that surrounds us in our cities, towns and rural countryside. We might discover a gentleness and love for living that requires so much less than we have been led to believe we need.

Host

When I read that 2019 was the worst year in a century for the environment in Australia  I felt stilled. How can this be when so much is known, understood and disseminated? It is horrifying to know that we are committing a form of ecological suicide, that will affect the whole living world – rivers, oceans, plants and animals. As human animals living in our wealthy countries our assumption and consumption has had an unprecedented impact on the life of the planet. We thought we could ‘have it all’. That it was ‘all good’. It is not all good, it is terrifying and we should be terrified. Not just of the Coronavirus but the conditions under which this virus has thrived in finding us as the next host.

 If you are to host someone that usually means there has been an invitation extended to a guest or guests. This virus has not been invited but we have given consent, through an insatiable demand for cheap goods, to so much destruction of its normal contained habitat that it has simply leapt across a species gap and found that we humans are a suitable host for it to live and thrive. Is this opportunism or creativity? We might be experiencing it as a destructive force but it is what all life does – finds ways to survive and reproduce. How do we find creative ways to respond to what we perceive is a threat to our existence? What response-ability are we taking? I feel keenly that unless we grasp a more wholistic understanding of what is happening with the manifestation of this virus, then we are not going to be able to imagine a future that is liveable for all life on the planet. If we continue to use and abuse natural resources, peoples, and animals for our own purpose, we will have to live with the painful demise of so much of the living world. We are part of that living world. So our demise as a species is probable. Perhaps it is inevitable.

References for you to understand the complexity of what this virus means for the living world.
Ensia a nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet:
… a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19
https://ensia.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-biodiversity-planetary-health-zoonoses/
 and
United Nations Environment Programme:
Regardless of its cause or origin, the emergence of COVID-19 has underscored the mutually-affective relationship between people and nature.  Now, we must try to understand and appreciate the limits to which humans can push nature, before the impact is negative.  Those limits must be embraced by our consumption and production aspiration.
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/covid-19-and-nature-trade-paradigm

Quiet

I walk down the road – this is such a privilege I recognise in these difficult constrained times. It is an unsealed road with bush one side and a few houses every so often on the other. I am alone and the air is fresh and clean. What is striking is the quiet – very few cars and no aircraft. But it is a deeper silence I sense. The world as we have known it is quiet like on Christmas day or Easter. I speak with a friend in NYC who is holed up in her apartment, grateful for running water, electricity and the internet. I concur with this knowing others do not have these basic necessities that at this time are so critical for our health. As I walk I absorb the quiet into myself. It is a comfort. The noise of consumerism has been relentless. We have not been able to hear the suffering of others or of the living world. The fires are a fading scream. The great engine of consumption roars drowning out any cry or plea to listen. Endless distractions pull and tear at us, the marketing forces grab any opportunity to make you feel your life will be less if you don’t comply with this or that demand. The endless marketing of ourselves through social media is a relentless burden but framed as an imperative. The ‘being positive’ heroic stance so wearying when in fact we need to feel what is going on under all the hubris and fantastical fabrication of our lives.

So I breathe in the quiet and listen to the layers of the world around me. The natural world waits patiently for us to attend. Let’s attend now before it is too late.

Our Suffering Country - Part Four

Environmental Labour & A New Dance 

What is uncomfortable and confronting about life is not the solitary experience of one person but frequently the suffering of many. Through the arc of dancing, thinking, writing and conversation I interrogate how I/we need to live differently to survive the time we live in. I want to leave a legacy, which is not separate from how we care for each other, our local environment and the planet. They are intertwined and entangled realities of thought, feeling and lived experience. Is it a new dance? I am asking this through the lens of my practice. This is where my skill lies and my accumulated ‘body of knowledge’. It is not an imperious lofty gesture from the canon of western dance; it is the everyday gesture of my hands reaching to touch you. The potential of which is transformed in the moment of your touch reaching my extended hands. I feel your desire for life in this meeting. Our story is in our hands and our reach from ourselves towards another. There is always demand there in the desire for connection, and perhaps even understanding. Without this we are a blank and no one wants to be met by nothingness. Is this absence then?

Are we absent from our own lives? Is this the clarion call of this historical crisis we are in? In the routine of busy lives filled with what we think is important we rarely make time to feel. My work is an invitation for people to feel their lives. In all their dimensions and complexity. It is courageous work – archaeological, anthropological, philosophical and creative. Beauty is critical to this process. Eros too. Reclaiming the territory of our souls is tilling the ground of our existence and this involves recognition of earth itself. It is an ecological process inseparable from the life of the planet. This is where I begin my environmental labour.

Our Suffering Country: Part Three

Keeping the Peace 

I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’, either in my work or in my everyday living. I have lived long enough to know there is always a price for remaining silent.  I want to explore the dark even terrifying territory of our lives with imagination, candour and feeling. In plummeting the depths of feeling, we may find ourselves. I cannot begin my relationship with the living planet if I don’t have a relationship to myself. It is an oxymoron. Once we find trust in our bodily knowing there is a realm of knowledge that reveals itself to us. In learning to perceive we learn to perceive others and the living world.

I tried to ‘keep the peace’ for many years. First, as a girl child, then as a young wife. One day I woke up. Prince Charming did not kiss my lips. Prince Charming kept me sleeping, tiptoeing around me, to hold me ‘in place’, to maintain his hold, his position ‘in place’. No, it was a woman who woke me. Germaine’s words crept into my imagination and would not go away. They were uncomfortable. Waking up was painful. Dreaming is much nicer. It was as if the words etched into my brain began to fragment. New meanings were being revealed. I began to feel conned. I had been conned. And I didn’t like it. I felt the world of my construction turn on its axis and reveal another narrative, one that resonated with my experience. And I was complicit in this construction through an enculturated process of denial. I had not read Virginia Woolf. From this time I have not ‘kept the peace’. It is my role to provoke and question the roles we assign ourselves. Are they ours or have they been insidiously impressed upon us by repressive histories of thought, fear of difference and complexity?

I repeat I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’. I want to speak, write and dance what is disquietening, disturbing and unpalatable. My work provokes self-reflection and engagement with one’s life. I don’t set out to provoke. It is in my nature as they say. It is in the fibre of my body, which is filled with my lived life.

Keeping the peace is compliancy and compromise.

Our Suffering Country: Part Two

Our Libidinous Life Force

I am very worried at our being distracted from what is painfully imminent. We distract ourselves with the urgent immediacy of jobs, Xmas, endless coffee, Facebook and Instagram, and shopping to the sound of muzak. This latter is no small thing. It’s a numbing of our senses, a repressing of our libidinous life force. We do not think, we do not have to think about what we need, we are compelled to buy with no satisfaction guaranteed. We always need more - of every thing. We succumb to entertainment through all forms of media. We imbibe prejudice, hatred and ignorance at every utterance laced through the community via all forms of media. We succumb to the seduction of a ‘simple life’, when no life is simple.

Have we allowed our libido to be stolen? In the long cultural process of domesticating us have we sacrificed desire for life? We are, paradoxically, living more safely, yet more dangerously teetering on the edge of existence? In relinquishing desire have we accepted safety and certainty? When in fact there is no certainty and in embracing this dynamic realisation we invite complexity and the retrieval of a passionately lived life. With this more tenuous reality we may just begin to feel alive. Complexity is what made us and complexity offers us daily, the opportunity to transform, reconfigure and renew our ways of living and loving.

There is communion between the breath of the day and the space of the body.

Our Suffering Country: Part One

I am sitting in bed writing; it is both a place of comfort and rest – a retreat from the world for a while. For the last 5 days we have been on high alert as this part of Australia burns. We have spoken of almost nothing else. We check our emergency App frequently and respond to every beep alerting us to nearby fires. Everything that has been created here in the valley at Riddells Creek could be lost if one of these fires comes this way. Or it may come later this summer or next year. It is in some ways inevitable. We live with bush across the road. The birds, animals and insects will suffer. We will all suffer. Australia is suffering.  I cannot write of anything else and when I receive emails that let me know of events happening in the city I feel irritated. How banal, I want to ask them: ‘Who is your audience at these times’? We are in critical need of conversation and transformation. I know that the practice I offer supports this.

I wrote this on Sunday 8 December 2019 before the fires began in Victoria and NSW:

Living on the edge of a city in a place filled with bird life it is extraordinarily difficult and simultaneously painful to imagine what lurks surely close by as summer approaches and the world around us becomes drier and more flammable. It is a knives edge where the reality of the present sits in uneasy expectation of the future. The becalm is illusory and all those around me talk incessantly of the looming disaster and impending tragedy. Yet, I am tenderly touched by the beauty of everyday life here in the valley. The birds wake me, the sun comes up faithfully illuminating the colour of the leaves in their extravagant diverse greenery and I make tea in the sublime hope that today will be a ‘good day’ filled with human endeavour, kindness and satisfying conversation. I am hopeful for the day, for the planet, for our humanity. But I am very worried at our being distracted from what is painfully imminent. To overlook the state of the earth is suicide. It is so difficult to feel this crisis when the day by day evidence of life is strong. But it lurks all around us. In a city close to us there is fire and a sky full of smoke. How long until it reaches my world?

Cultivating our Imaginations

Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing that people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps that is what dreaming, and art, are for. Helen Garner: “The darkness in everyone of us” https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/july/1435672800/helen-garner/darkness-every-one-us

When I teach I often speak of cultivating our imaginations through somatic engagement. We are an intelligent body and it is with imagination that we find creative ways to live. We move in and through the world. Our footfalls leave an impression. Our touch leaves a memory. Our heartbeats sync with those we love. A somatic moving practice engages our imagination as we listen, respond and become ‘at home’ in our bodies and in the world. Developing embodied consciousness expands our sensitivity and resilience.

How might we bring the intelligent body into our concern for the living world? What kinds of conversations can we cultivate that don’t lead to despair or create false hope but offer us means to take action? World events escalate our need to attend to how we are living and ways in which we can renew rather than consume. What narratives drive us and keep us paralyzed or opens our hearts to change? How do we live embodied and embedded lives? I feel that expanding our imagination is critical to this venture. Living in our complex dynamic bodymind is a practice and requires deep attention and reverence for the gift of life. Perhaps it is a form of prayer that extends beyond religion to the fragility of life itself? Shall we begin together?

Learning about fire

“We teach our children how to swim don’t we?” Uncle Dave Wandin asks us. “We need to teach our children about fire in the same way. Running away from it isn’t the answer.”

I am riveted by this simple yet powerful reality he is presenting to me. It is the thing that stays with me after a day of stories and learning at the Sunbury Rings, organised and attended by local Landcare groups.

Uncle Dave Wandin is a Wurundjeri Elder and part of the Narrap team that manages the properties owned by the Wurundjeri Council. He is giving us a stories folded within stories of his people’s history. Questions always invite further stories and we listen attentively and respectfully. We are all interested and pretty informed folk who want to know more. We care for country too and it is in this shared intention that we come together to learn about this significant site for Indigenous peoples from this region.

The day before we did the annual burn-off at Riddells Studio, something I look forward to with a bit of devilish glee. I like the energy of the fire and the beauty and power of it. This year due to my own vulnerability I am more cautious. There are two big piles from a big manna gum, ripped apart in the high winds experienced this winter. With its fall it took other smaller trees, littering the creek with timber. I am learning all the time that this is the way of the bush and how these life cycles influence the shape of the creek line, the flow of the water and the delicate stability of the banks.

The fire takes off with a satisfying crackle. I wait till the bigger red flames sink before feeding it with the extra limbs. The eucalyptus leaves ignite in a mini explosion. If I put too much I note the smoke goes dark brown. I don’t like the look of it and wait, constantly aware of the proximity of trees nearby, the neighbours’ property, and the falling ash. Too close for just a minute and I smell my hair burn – then a small piece of ash brushes my ear and it burns. Just seconds but I respect the intensity and get a woollen hat to cover my head and ears. It feels much safer.

We always wait till the weather is right – no wind or very little, damp ground after recent rains but you can never be certain and fire creates it’s own winds. Whilst I am burning it changes direction multiple times. When Uncle Dave poses this question about fire he also says you have to learn to read a fire, the smoke … that dark brown smoke is not good. I realize I have been learning and am excited. I am getting an idea from watching closely, listening and being humble in the face of the power of fire. Just like I am with water. My mother lost her first child through drowning – he was my oldest brother. I never knew him. He existed as a ghost throughout my life. The grief a constant in my mother’s life. We all learnt to swim and my mother learnt to swim at 40. My brother taught her. My sister and brother were champion swimmers. My brother, elegant and lithe, as he still is in the water. My sister, powerful and determined, as she was in life.

The morning unfolds in as Uncle Dave insists “Aboriginal time not whitefella time”.When lunch arrives we are all peckish and satisfied with time spent together consolidating connections through learning about country. Uncle Dave is a continuously generous and consummate teacher. I want him to help us learn how to burn Barrm Birrm – opposite the studio and property. Learn to cool burn in the old way so that we might have a chance if or when fire does come through. I look at him and see how thin and fragile he is. He has made it his life to learn from his elders and he only began recently. We could lose him too soon. I feel this keenly.