If i were to wish for one thing from a new year, a fresh start, it would be to become more grounded in reality, more capable of remaining aware of my breath as i move through life, more awake to the life of the world as it flows. To do that, i want to start by focusing on waking up from the dream of modern society, the consensus trance we are convinced is everyday reality.
This raises one core issue affecting us today: we are cut off at the root from nature. We are disconnected, as we wander the cities and the shopping malls, filling up on fossil fuels and alive to the 24/7 energy of the global village – but we have been doing so as if we were sleep walking. Now, it is great to see so many people waking up to the ruse – the capitalist shell game, where you never quite know where anything comes from unless you work hard to uncover the truth or make it to your local farmers market. Guiding people back to the place where everything comes from, the source – the earth and the stars, the elements and the ecosystem – is my path and my privilege.
I recently delivered the first ever Holistic Ecotherapy course and this was what we concentrated on. Reconnection. (By no coincidence this was the name of the album my post-punk art rock band Severins released last year). Sounds great, but exactly how do we reconnect, when we are trained so poorly by modern socialising forces?
We train our attention back. Back to the breath, back to the body, back to awakening to consciousness in the here and now. The mind wanders; bring it back. We practice mindfulness. But once we have that awareness back in place, we drop further down into the bodymind of this one precious life; we drop down into deep listening. This is immersive self-awareness. This is no separation between mind and body, self and nature, purpose and reality.
Now, we are nature listening to nature. We are awake to our place as a human self in a broad and living ecosystem. We are its human mind waking up to itself. There are plenty of other forms of intelligence in this ecosystem. At dawn on the morning of our final session together, a chorus of birds accompanied me down to my current favourite spot at Shark Bay and a yellow serpent coiled up in my belly, calling for some action. I felt the intelligence, the conscious awareness, of a living world breathing all around me, calling out to be heard. I felt the nervousness and responsibility of being the person who was ready to take note of this call and pass it on.
Ironically, in an online course, we were ‘together’ on separate laptops, in quiet bedrooms and lounges, all of us encased in four walls while we learnt to connect more deeply with nature. Such was life in 2021. We could still practice and everyone was given exercises to take out on their next sojourn to the great outdoors – even if this was a city park at lunch time, or a patch of grass in the backyard, or under a nearby neighbourhood tree. We vowed to take notice. Not always looking for something to attain, to receive, to be given – but to take notice, as if we were in love with our home and everything it has already given us.
To greet the place we live, to honour those who came before us, to give thanks to the earth and the elements and our kin, the other plants and animals who play their parts in maintaining a biosphere of life. If we feel called or ready to do so, to speak or sing our praise out loud, to offer gifts and service to nature, to treat it as if it was loved and to open ourselves to how that feels.
We also honoured the people and experiences that have brought deep listening into the public conversation, offered respect to the ancestors of the Country we are on, as well as our own ancestors, recalling our ancient and contemporary birthright to be here now, to feel we really belong in our bodies and our places. When we experience this level of love for our home, we don’t need to look anywhere else for a sense of accomplishment, transcendence or ecstasy.
Deep Listening, Deep Connection.
Join me for the next online Holistic Ecotherapy course here.
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Sometimes we write or think things that we don’t want to believe; we dream of impossible or unthinkable things, we imagine utopian futures and grand possibilities, we fall for wish fulfilment or fall into paranoid delusions. Often such flights of fancy are just that, with no more meaning outside of our own personal psyche. But other times, we may slip into the world of intuition, of prescience, of a kind of knowing that could only emanate from the otherworld, from the dimensions where time is folded with other realms so that the future somehow pops up in front of us and we know what is coming. Writers of faery tale or myth have always explored these realms, while prophets and other wise ones access this space with skill.
Don’t you want to go there? Or at least be entranced by those who have …
But we have to be clear about how our mind works before we can start to trust these kinds of intuitions. Once we know the style of our desires and fantasies, we can be alert to them arising in our minds, and dismiss them on the way to more objective information. To do deep listening to nature, we have to quieten our personal mind and open up to our greater mind; the one that is talked about in ecopsychology, animism and spiritual realms as being the human mind that is at one with the greater reality, with the world, even with the cosmos and its mysterious gift of consciousness. This is what i mean by the ecomythic; the dimension from which appears such otherworldly yet ecocentric wisdom.
On December the 9th of 2019, i wrote that “A great fire is coming and we are all in line.” Everybody knows now that the whole south east of Australia is burning, but a bushfire near my home on the south coast of NSW had already been burning for weeks. In previous years, this would have been known as a serious fire; it took out a beautiful stretch of forest over 30km long, countless trees and animals had been scorched, and we were breathing in smoke and swimming in ash as we got used to the new reality. Life goes on and we adapt. But now we are preparing for a future of unknown collapse, just as climate scientists have been warning for years. We’re going to have to collectivise rapidly, coherently, with deep reservoirs of patience and generosity.
Mossy Point, where i lived for two years, with the cataclysm approaching nearby Rosedale
I didn’t know the ‘great fire’ i wrote about was going to spread from the one already burning and threaten my home and destroy so many others, as well as kill so many people and the countless other beings; but i knew it could. What i meant was that a great fire is threatening all of humanity now … that greenhouse gases had created a world hotter than we could handle, that traditional ‘Care for Country’, as Australian Aboriginals practiced for tens of thousands of years, had been dismissed by the new machine of modern agriculture, that the business of clearing, sowing and poisoning the land for ever-increasing yields and profits was creating a tinderbox that is ready to ignite all over the place and not go out until it has taken us with it. The amount of firepower out there nowadays; coal mines and power stations, oil refineries and endless vehicles burning petrol, nuclear power plants and of course an unconscionable pile of weaponry, from street level guns to tribal warfare capable dirty nukes, handheld anti-aircraft missiles and more, creates endless opportunity for the damaging aspect of fire to be unleashed as fresh hells on earth. Anthropogenic climate change and ecosystem destruction creates the tipping points we know are adding up.
Alongside the fires, there will be more devastating floods and hurricanes, sea level will continue to rise and destroy low-lying cities; in short, other horrors await us just around the corner. All of it is coming sooner and harder than predicted, which means we should be taking the climate science more seriously than ever, seeing as it is clear it has been overly conservative, in an effort not to be too alarmist. Ancient traditions have predicted this since before colonisation stole the lands of so many earth-loving peoples. The pueblo-dwelling Hopi of Arizona, where i spent some time in conversation with a spiritual leader some years ago, saw the signs of End Times everywhere, but also put this in a bigger picture perspective of worlds that come into being and pass away in cycles. This also inspired the visually stunning art film Koyaanisqatsi, a forerunner to more recent explorations such as Baraka and Samsara.
The Abrahamic religions tend towards linear timescales, where current events lead to degeneration and saviour for the faithful. The dualism common in western society is a constant feature, as a force of ultimate good finally defeats an evil power, after much thrashing about and the devastation of much that was good in the first place. Some fundamentalist sects even believe that the destruction of the human world could hasten on this ‘rapture’. Unfortunately, Australia currently has a Pentecostal Prime Minister, which may be part of the reason he has shown such deplorably poor leadership in terms of tackling the climate emergency and the bush fires.
Subliminally powerful, but socially irresponsible imagery of the Rapture. It promises endless glory; but it also says, “Give up on earth and return to your true home in the light!”
Eastern philosophies tend to favour cyclical time frames, wherein the end of one world would result in the birth of another. This reflects the traditional, animistic position, which followed the laws of nature to see that out of death new life emerges. Examples include the caterpillar withdrawing into the cocoon only to emerge as the butterfly – an image i have always found solace in – and the way Australian Aboriginal firestick, or cultural, burning, promotes new growth. These kinds of ideas can be extrapolated to faith in the ongoing life of the human soul beyond death; just as the snake sheds a skin, so we ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ to arise new in another dimension. There is no reason to dismiss such beliefs, unless we are so trapped in what sociologist Max Weber called ‘the iron cage of reason’ that we can no longer accept any reality outside of the one we have been socialised into. Rather, an intelligent and open-minded person would understand that human culture evolved in close contact with nature and exercised refined senses to read subtle energies and ‘track’ psychic paths as we traversed the possibilities of consciousness outside of the physical realms.
My Zen training, alongside recent years of deep listening in nature, has opened a world of possibility like this. Generally, in Zen, we attempt to be as true to the moment as possible, focussing on the now even while always taking into account – or at least, not dismissing – the extent to which we are always also partly caught up in our personal histories and possible futures. But i have found that while dissolving the traps of personal disposition, compassionately letting go of our escapist fantasies and slipping out of the iron cage of reason, it is not only the moment that becomes more clear, more sparkling and evocative. There is also the ever-present realm of the ‘otherworld’, wherein deeper patterns of meaning that include the world of nature and psyche beyond our personal self become apparent.
And thus appears … Burning in the Sky. I was scared of this song at first, as it paints such a terrifying picture of the reality we are now speeding towards. But i knew i had to sing it and thankfully i’m in a band with 3 of the most amazing musicians, who could compose and play the music to make it a symbolic anthem for this time, as well as a call to those who want to continue to evolve and adapt, together. I knew immediately, as i heard it in my head in Tathra one night last year, that it was mystic prophecy. I just didn’t expect it to become so prescient, so quickly. Rebel for Life. Because a great fire is coming for us all and there will be a burning in the sky. Better to be forewarned than ignorant, even – perhaps especially – if the message is bleak.
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Animists like me believe the world is alive. It goes beyond an intellectual idea, but it’s more than just a feeling, too; many traditions from around the world recognise the possibility that consciousness flows through the universe, that intelligence is a property of the physical world. It shows in the way animals are born to move, knowing what to look for in their environment and where to go from birth, even across the planet sometimes, then back to breeding grounds regardless of the ebbs and flows of their life and without maps or signs. At its most primal, the intelligence of life is expressed in the way that plant life lifts out of soil and trust its face towards the sun, even that way tides shift in accord with lunar movements.
Taken to its logical conclusion – even though some people, trapped in ‘the iron cage of reason,’ as German sociologist Max Weber, called it, think that logic has nothing to do with it – this means that the planet is alive. This is what most traditional societies understood, native Australian populations included. More scientists now claim that “The Earth is Just As Alive As You Are”, following the controversial Gaia Hypothesis made famous by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The sticking point was always sentience; does the Earth want to give birth to and sustain life, or does it just happen by coincidence? As Climate Scientist Professor Will Steffen explained to me during the filming of Nature Calling pilot episode, it’s not necessary to be so concerned about this that we either embrace or dismiss Gaia: we live on one earth system, where everything is connected and everything matters.
This is a neat piece of writing by Ferris Jabr, of the New York Times.
Here’s a song that accepts this perspective and dances its truth, out in the open, with intuition and the poetry of the earth built in. As Will has long said, we need the humanities and the social sciences, including psychologists and media analysts, to change human behaviour in accord with the requirements made of us by runaway, anthropogenic climate change. Songs of the Earth are part of this response; inspiring tunes that make us think in new ways or align with our wishes for a safe and flourishing planetary home. Planetary Rumpus, by my band Severins, brings animism alive in a modern sense; it is informed by scientific thinking sparked with Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysian frenzy, asking us to drop into that realm with all of our senses intact – and the recognition that we need a new compass for these wild and changing times.
Planetary Rumpus expresses the instinctual drive within, our genetic coding, which we feel surging through our bodies and veins like a double helix rising out of the primordial soup towards the heavens. It asks us to feel the sun on our skins at dawn as if we are being awoken to a brand new day, as if sunrise were a ritual of rebirth and another chance at realising the great fortune of our lives, as consciously self-aware primates on a living planet … this is the archetypal music of the cosmic serpent in our double helix DNA body/minds, right now. Turn it up and let rip.
