Ark Building
Sustaining our lives in sombre times
Since the last issue of byronchild , two globally significant elections have taken place — in Australia and the US. Collectively our so-called civilised society has sent out a signal loud and clear — that we are happy with the way things are and would like them to continue. The consequences for us all will be dire, unless by some stroke of luck, by voting them in, we have enabled these administrations to fall on their own swords during the coming years. World-renowned anti-nuclear activist, environmentalist, paediatrician and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott puts it much more bluntly:
‘This (the US election) is the most serious election that has ever occurred in the history of the human race, without a scrag of doubt,’ she told the Sydney Morning Herald recently. ‘I don’t know if we’ll survive the next four years … I don’t think the Americans have, on the whole, the faintest idea — and I have to say also I don’t think most Australians do either. But it’s not just the threat from nuclear war. It’s the threat of what’s happening to the environment, the global warming which is occurring rapidly now, to ozone depletion, to species extinction, to deforestation — it’s the whole thing.’
Since the elections, I’ve been struggling for days to come up with something to say in this editorial. The words weren’t finding their way through a pervasive low-grade funk of despondency that has resulted since the re-election of Bush and Howard. My mind wants to tell me that we’ve gone too far now and there is only hopelessness. Yet at the same time, a new determination to make my life more sustainable arises out of the post election rubble.
Sustainability is a word tossed around a lot these days. Until recently, I tended to associate the word with bigger picture concepts like sustainable fuels and sustainable economies, or things like making our own veggie gardens and installing rainwater tanks, but now I find the idea filtering into all ordinary aspects of my life — from birthday parties, to parenting, to friendships. It feels like now, more than ever, making our lives more sustainable on every level is paramount. The oceans are rising, both literally and figuratively. It is time, as Joseph Chilton Pearce (author of The Biology of Transcendence ) said, to build our little lifeboats.
So that is what I find myself doing, even if at first I didn’t realise it. The planks, masts and sails, nailed and mounted by a curious new desire to survive a storm that looms silently on the horizon. There is a strange new smell in the air and my senses are heightened.
For me, there are a few areas in daily life that reveal themselves as aspects to building a secure lifeboat. They are:
- Community
- Love of humanity
- Education
- Spirituality
- Conscious consuming
- Detoxification
- Integration
Community
I once wanted to live in the country, on an intentional community where everyone would supposedly hold similar beliefs and ideologies. This to me was community. In this way I thought I might live amongst like-minded people, who raised their kids in the same way and who liked to live ‘consciously’. This was supposed to guarantee me a safe and harmonious existence I guess — a sort of psychically gated community! I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is nothing worse than homogenisation amongst human beings — our hearts were never designed to fly in such conditions. When we live around people who are vastly different to ourselves, our capacity to grow and evolve increases — it is a rigor of human spirit.
We recently moved to a small town — its neighbourhoods typically suburban with houses close together, people of all ages, cultures, philosophies and religious beliefs clustered together with only a small patch of grass and some flowers to divide otherwise crowded streets. We have got all the trappings of suburban life: a fence around the yard, a dog, a mortgage, the sounds of traffic going down the road, teenagers next door with loud music. But we also have something else, we have one set of adopted grandparents for the kids, two sets of adopted aunties and uncles, another adopted uncle down the way and lots of elderly neighbours who seem to know every coming and going from our house. Our kids are in heaven, the neighbourhood their kingdom with all sorts of people with whom to interact and learn creating their own world outside of the parental domain.
When we first moved here I decided to do something old fashioned. I sent written invitations to all of the neighbours up and down the street asking them to join us for a get-to-know-us BBQ. Many people came, and friendships were made. Neighbours spoke to each other who had lived next door to each other for years and not yet met.
As a result, for Christmas, our neighbourhood is planning a street party, rolling our grills out onto our front lawns and sharing food. This is community getting to know each other again – going back to some of those old fashioned ways of reaching out across the fence and establishing contact and especially with those who stand outside of our day-to-day existence.
Love of humanity
These days it is easy to lose faith in who we are. Australia and America are more divided than ever and the tendency is to look at one another in the ‘You’re either with us or against us’ mentality. It becomes especially important therefore to expose ourselves to glimpses of who we are as human beings outside of that paradigm. Otherwise we lose perspective. To build a lifeboat, we need clear perspective. Music, film and art tend to describe the indescribable and, unlike so many aspects of society today, remain unfettered by cultural or corporate agenda.
There are a few favourite places I go to seek nourishment when I need to get a hit of faith in humanity. One of them is a CD called 1 Giant Leap . I play it loud when I am driving in the car alone or at night when the kids are asleep. The CD is from the Grammy award nominated DVD produced by Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman. They went around the world equipped with a video camera and a laptop merging sound, image and spoken word from some of the world’s most happening musicians, authors, scientists and thinkers and emerged with a production that expresses the unity of diversity like nothing else I have ever seen or heard (www.1giantleap.tv).
Another place is Circ du Soleil. One of their shows, Quidam , is available on DVD at the local video store, and of course, seeing the real thing is transformative. Along those lines I have to mention our local Steiner school’s Wearable Arts performance www.shearwater.nsw.edu.au, our local Spaghetti Circus, a fabulous, theatrical youth performance troupe government funded (www.spaghetticircus.com) and the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, events where hope for humankind is restored. All these things have one thing in common — a synthesis of music, art and word, as well as representation of cultural diversity. This seems to be the recipe for ecstatic experience.
Another place, fortunately for all of us, is found in time spent with children. Like a flower pushing up through the pavement, one moment can split apart any pessimism we may hold. Attending a birth at home or spending time with someone terminally ill cracks our heart open too. We need to taste our divinity again in situations that bring first hand experience.
Education
My partner and I recently purchased a copy of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (www.outfoxed.org), the documentary about Murdoch’s corporate hold on the millions of Fox News’ watching minds across the globe. It cost us only $9 from amazon.com and we have since been showing it to all of our friends, considering also to have a public showing at our community centre since our local movie theatre so far shows no interest in running it. It is time to take educating ourselves into our own hands and no longer depend on our nightly news to spoon-feed us anymore. And more than that, it is time to share what we know with others. My partner and I are in the process of creating a library of books, magazines, videos and DVDs and spreading the word by sharing it.
While it may be a waste of our efforts to try and change institutions and politics, it is never a waste of effort to educate oneself and others thus enabling others more material to build their own lifeboats.
Spirituality
Religion has failed us and always will fail us. Religion of any kind can only ever be the commentary of a footprint left behind by someone who knew the truth, it can never be about truth itself. These times are asking more of us collectively — that we cease looking at the footprint and begin to walk the walk ourselves. We have to radicalise ourselves to another way of seeing the world and our universe so that collectively we open the door for another way forward, something totally uncharted. I cannot say I know what that would look like but I do know there are huge collective forces at work in the world the results of which we are seeing before us now.
There is a divine undercurrent that courses through all of existence, some call it God or consciousness , others Christ or Allah . Some call it nonsense. The point is, we all call it something. To set our compass to that undercurrent in the times ahead will surely bring correct understanding. Be wary of those who tell you that there is a particular way or a particular formula, or that there is a process to go through before something is attained, all of which only serve to postpone a very direct, immediate and essential understanding. And we have no time to postpone anymore. That indescribable glimpse that happens when we are deeply touched — that is the clear direction for compass setting and we don’t need a priest or a teacher or a method or a book to tell us about it. Get rid of the middle-man, those days are over.
Conscious consuming
I felt so helpless during the elections. It seemed that no matter the effort, no matter how many people were galvanised into action, the outcome was the same. No wonder so many Americans end up not voting. One has to question if any vote really counts at all? But there is one vote that does count and it counts immediately. The vote with our dollar. Where I spend my money is the kind of system I am voting for. Do I vote for Woolworth’s and Cole’s or for the local farmer and green grocer? Do I vote local or globalised? Do I vote for products tested on animals? Do I vote for cars that guzzle oil? It’s my vote; a voter machine can’t miscount it, I can’t be hassled in the voter line. And my whole family can vote too, even if they are under 18. Cool. So, we’ve been mindful of our votes lately — where each cent is going and whom it is going to benefit.
Detoxing
Lately I have been paying attention to all those really long words in my shampoo and soap, as well as all those numbers listed in the ingredients of my rice crackers, not to mention the poisons in house cleaning products. Words like sodium laurel sulfate and propylene glycol. I then began taking the chemicals out of our home. It is a big job and the more I look the more I find but it is a very rewarding process. It serves two purposes — I can contribute to the lowering demand for such dangerous substances and I can contribute to the health of my family and myself. Along these lines, keeping fit is essential. Check out Is Your Bathroom Toxic? by Susan Lockhart on www.byronchild.com/arts36.htm or the March – May 2004 issue of byronchild .
Integration
Today we segregate everything. Young children go to day-care, older children to school, the elderly go to aged-care, teens go to the skate park stuck someplace in the forgotten corners of the neighbourhood and the rest of us get on with our lives, free from interruption from all of the above. We also segregate aspects of our life: work time, play time, social time, family time, quality time, alone time. And we segregate the kinds of people in our lives: switched-on, conservative, conscious, spiritual, unconscious…
I notice that it takes enormous effort to keep those segregations in place. For example: I work from home. Until recently, I only worked when the kids were at school. If they phoned home sick, then I would drop everything and bring them home, the whole work day gone. I would say to myself (and to them) this is kid time, that is work time, now it is family time etc., not realising that I was creating an unsustainable system as well as subtly making the children the centre of attention when I was with them, rather than allowing them to integrate into ALL aspects of daily life with me all the time. When they were used to being the centre of attention (lots of one-on-one time!), then they came to have a distorted view of the times when it was not one-on-one. It is often seen at parties, where kids are shoved in front of the video so the grown-ups can have an uninterrupted conversation. Release this segregation, integrate children into work life, social life, all life and greater enjoyment, relaxation and intimacy is enjoyed by all. I had to learn that Attachment Parenting does not mean ‘centre of attention all the time’, the latter being unsustainable. Release all the other segregations and we all begin to develop multiple attachments, belonging to each other and the community and they belonging to us.
How we live, not who we vote for, is what is going to make a difference in these times. Building our little lifeboats empowers others to do the same and soon the oceans will be filled with them. Then, who knows what might happen.