We packed the kids into the car at 4am, terribly nervous at driving into the face of unknown fire fronts, blocked roads, possibly a tortuous death, but prepared to risk it to make it to somewhere on the other side of this inferno. On New Year’s Eve we prepared to defend our home from ember attacks, with garden hoses and buckets of water. We had no power, no phone or internet service, and no idea of what was coming our way … we were in between Moruya and Batemans Bay:
This is what was coming towards Broulee, where i live. We were already in that thick smoke, so we couldn’t know there was much worse coming. Looking towards my home from the other direction.
We’ve been living with very heavy smoke for weeks, so low visibility had become the norm. I had digested the previous loss of some favoured forests and places, although i hadn’t properly grieved them yet. I still haven’t. When i return from my evacuation, i’m going to have to.
But in the meantime, i need to hear the voice of the muses, as they sing the song of the earth, as it cries. Hear something ecomythic, which matches the fear our kids are going to experience, as they awaken to the Australia – and the world – we have made for them. Something that gets beyond the sexiness of the flames:
… and integrates the death they leave behind them:
How my beloved local beach looks now: ashen.
But really, nothing can prepare them. I try to weave a fine line between informing my kids about the world they will inherit and making sure i don’t scare the living daylights out of them. I turned my ‘prepper/survivalist’ tendencies towards helping to build community resilience rather than retreating to a bush bunker/treehouse combo. In the same way, i turned my Zen monkishness away from dreams of a mountain hideaway to an active life in my community, leading meditation circles and integrating evolutionary adaptations into everyday life. I sing about the apocalyptic times we are hurtling towards as well as about the joy of being in the body, as a self-aware primate on a beautiful planet. I try to integrate what i know from my specific area of expertise – the symbolic life of human consciousness in the context of our relationship with nature – into modern life for anyone who will listen. It’s not very lucrative, but … here we go again.
The Apocalypse, in mythic terms, is both an end time and an experience of revelation; an awakening. For Christians, it involved a rapture in their God’s company. I’ve written before that the term apocalypse now should be seen as something more rational, an actual degradation of our earth in physical terms, an unfolding of the logic of capitalism; while the truly ‘mythic’ leap of faith today is taken by those who still believe in the profiteering dream of unending growth. For the ecological apocalypse we are now witnessing to carry its truest meaning, it must lead to an awakening of the human spirit to the true meaning and value of our beautiful, rare planetary jewel of a home.
And for this to occur, it’s the song of the Muses that has to come through now: those transcendent ladies of the night, whose voices embody earth spirit, whose intelligence is celestial in nature, who flow with the fractal dance of the cosmos even while they stand with those who fight injustice. What do they sing now?
I’ve been praying to hear their words ever since i moved to the coast. I felt their influence directly in every song i’ve composed since, starting with my ode to the salty spirits of the ocean. The Muses love with abandon, they embrace everything, and in their embrace the petty greeds, hatreds and ignorance of the human ego are melted away. The way of the future, they sing, is falling back in love with the earth.
Seek your way through the clutter of human confusion, they advise, to that place where the spirit of life courses through your veins, rises up your spine, emanates from your DNA and passes along the sacred path from generation to generation, from the ancestors to the children: be a part of the transmission as it is embodied in human consciousness.
The Muses sing: fight for the earth, nourish your home, tackle injustice, be the warrior who stands for what is right on the playing field of life. Demand better of those who are responsible for making decisions about how the purse of your nation is spent; make sure they care for the frail, the elderly, the children and our home. Hold them accountable if they don’t. And they don’t.
Calm the mind and focus your anger.
Love your kindred spirits, your families, your home, your breath. Hold onto whatever you hold sacred and dear but be prepared to let it all go. Face death with poise. Prepare your soul to transform into another dimension of loving embrace for life as you enter another plane. Appreciate the little drops of water as dew bedecks the grasses and rain runs along the leaves. Be in awe of the power of nature, the fury of fire, the stellar force of our sun behind and within it, the explosions of volcanoes, the surge of the tides, the subtle draw of lunar magnetism, your sense of your body rising and falling with every breath, the twitching of nerves, the relaxation following a good stretch, the way mist rises from tea in the morning.
Love aimlessly but fight with determination. Meditate upon what gifts have been bestowed upon you, take nothing for granted, but don’t let your thankfulness make you complacent with what can be transformed into something better. Glow from within. Remember your dreams. Stay in touch with friends and remain generous with colleagues. Inspire those around you. Connect with the spirit of life within and without. Walk in peace while you can. Be prepared for anything. Love.
*NB: Please consider Subscribing at the top right of this page, and follow Nature Calling – Deepening Connection to Nature on FB, as i’ll be posting updates on how to deal with the trauma, the depth psychology and ecomythic aspects of what is happening to Australia and the world right now; ie, how we recover, within and without.
Here is a letter that is less than 1 page long and is designed to gather support for the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th of September. Please feel free to adapt, sign as your own, share widely and use to initiate a conversation in your workplace or with anyone.
On Friday the 20th of September, we have an opportunity to show our support for a movement that is focussed on building a new way of life for humanity: one that does not take our planetary home for granted and works to protect it for future generations and for other species. Without this transformation, we will continue to do irreparable damage to the environment, to our soils and rivers, seas and fellow creatures.
This is just one day of the year, dedicated to the biggest issue facing the entire human race. No matter how important our work is, we can find a way to strike in support. If we work in a caring field, or anywhere that safety is an issue, we can suggest that those who don’t want to strike are rostered on to work. Management may be open to this, if they recognise the unparalleled danger that we face. If not, we can apply for leave. But however we do it, we have to strike. We have to show that business as usual is a death sentence for life as we know it.
The devastating impacts of human-induced climate chaos are increasing daily. Animals and plants are becoming extinct in frightening numbers. We are involved today in a struggle that is no longer ideological (about beliefs or ideas), or historical, but scientifically validated as an existential threat to living species on this planet right now. This is the most important moment to be alive in the history of humanity. No longer do our actions only matter to our local communities – although they still do. We must now give in to the call to “Think Globally and Act Locally”, for this emerging crisis affects us all.
On Friday the 20th of September, we are being asked – by leaders in the environmental movement, by school students who can see their very future crumbling before them, by climate scientists and communicators the world over – to strike for climate action. I call upon you now to
commit to this action and to make your commitment public;
talk with your colleagues about how to keep everybody safe (rostering staff who are prepared to stay on at work to ensure public safety while others strike);
make a statement of support for the general strike’s aims, which are to call upon world leaders in politics and industry to support serious and immediate climate action such as complete transformation of energy to a carbon neutral world; and to
enable your organisation, department or corporation to professionally and compassionately manage this day in support of climate action, as meaningful participants in the most important movement of our times, in ways that promote the transformation of our own work practices in alignment with a carbon neutral global society.
Yours in civil disobedience, Geoff Berry [*NB: adapt and sign your own name here freely!]
In Anima, Thom Yorke follows a trail that was set out for his soul when his European ancestors crossed paths in the great forest.
For this new audiovisual feast from Paul Thomas Anderson is fairy tale, folks, mark my words. And as a writer who has long explored the deep trails made across our psyches by the play of light and darkness since time immemorial, the idea of ancient tales with modern significance is something dear to my heart. This isn’t myth as falsehood, but myth as powerful storytelling, opening doors to our secret longings, our hidden hopes, our romantic selves.
So how does this modern mythmaking work? Well, where once wise old crones shared secrets beneath the wild spreading branches of an oak or elm, or curious children allowed themselves to become enchanted by the thrilling call of a songbird until they were lost in the forest, Yorke is drawn along this heartfelt tale by similar instincts. His character in this romance is on the scent of the chase, following a girl of his dreams, yearning to return her lunch case, which is as precious to him as any other form of lost treasure could be. By the time he has woken up on his crowded train, dodged countless commuters on crammed escalators, and faced other barriers to his distant love interest, Yorke is following the golden imperative of the mythic journey: the hero is inspired to set things right, by returning the case and maybe meeting someone to care about in the deal. The foes and barriers, the challenges to his path, the obstacles that threaten to derail the fruition of his dream … these are all inevitable in the hunt, or life is not being lived. The thorns cross the path, the villain stands in the way, the mountain must be climbed. Our goal may seem just out of reach, but it is in such a quest that we are reminded of our power, as Joseph Campbell so often reminded us.
But while the chase is timeless, the imagery of Anima reflects our new ‘natural environment’: the city. The opening, submerged in the subway, enfolds us within a train shooting along a tunnel, like a probe into our everyday underworld. We don’t want to over-analyze the film – as Martin Shaw wrote, the best stories remain dark around the edges, they leave us in mystery, grappling with our own inner truths and conflicts, unsure rather than overly confident in our self-knowledge. But the nodding of the commuters, Yorke included, seems to stand as the inevitable process of socialization, a dance we all join in order to get by, a way of being that lets us be in the world. Turning it into dance is the magic that art, in this case film, allows us – to settle into the truths of our lives while also making them part of a greater whole. We play the game, we know we play the game, but we know we are also more than this, that we come from a place of unlimited potential and ultimately we belong in that place, as much as we do here, in our world of limit and dissolution.
In this world, Yorke and Anderson play with the familiar while feeling out its edges. As soon as Yorke glimpses his Anima – a Jungian term for the feminine within – his otherwise tired character is opened out into new worlds of excitement, with the possibility that everyday life might not leave us flattened but invigorated; that something might change for the better, after all. The chase includes a classic flying dream sequence, as well as epic scenery, and Yorke’s character responds with passing episodes of passive acceptance, fleeting anger, playful exploration and hopeless resignation in turns. All of these human responses are bound within another mythic signalling: towards the wonder of awe. Can it be true? Is it real? The dream of Anima speaks of these gentle inner experiences, which we all know and hold dear but too often let slide along the rigmarole of modern life.
The eventual meeting, the reuniting of two lost souls who complement each other in the endless dance of being around being, rolling along a laneway wall, is a testament to the hope of our unquenchable longing. Anima draws us down and reminds us where we come from and where we belong. This is Home, a place we have sometimes forgotten is also a planet with limits, forests and lakes, seas and other creatures that need protecting.
Whatever parts of us face the world – our Persona to society, family and each other – find relief in the depths of Anima. Psyche, or mind; self, the individual, you person, the mind/body, your vehicle for getting by … that person seeks their dance partner beneath the surface, where she lives and breathes and waits for us to remember. Take the trip, again …
Geoff Berry wrote his PhD on the symbol of light, his MA on dreams and myths, and sings along similar themes with Melbourne post-punk band SEVERINS.
Initiation makes us into something we weren’t before. Successful ritual transforms our consciousness, expanding our minds beyond a little circle of desire and gratification, connecting us to the more-than-human world of nature all around us, the ecosystem we depend upon, the creatures who are our earthly kin, as well as connecting us to the spirit of life in the cosmos itself. This is what we used to get consistently in premodern society and what some people in more traditional societies, which are more resistant to the modern disease of disconnection, still get.
For those of us born into large-scale modernising cultures, religion tries to fill the gap, which is left as we turn away from this world of animistic life, but it gets so cold in those dusty halls and generally misses the meaty, gristly, blood-pumping point of the matter. That is, the living matter …
The best book I ever read on this subject was “Nature and Madness” by Paul Shepard. He pointed out what we had lost, how the turn towards technological domination of the planet came at such a great cost, as we allowed our initiation rituals to become severed from the word around us, and led by new types of elders, whose loyalties were to king and army rather than our fellow animals, our ancient homes in the forests and the mountains, the deserts and the seas. It’s a great book, but like my PhD on the meaning of light, it spends most of its time diagnosing the problem, leaving us to find solutions.
So I wrote this song, as a hint towards some things we could be doing to take our power back, as a signpost, a call to arms, an ecopoetic symbolic evocation of that world, as it calls us back to ourselves and to its living significance, within and without …
I feel a little tug on my heart, as i find this creek running into the sea in Tathra today. It is the first time it has made it this far since i started staying here regularly a few years ago. Today is exactly one year since the devastating bushfires in this seaside community, so there was a lot of resilience and reconnection to celebrate, as well as a lot to remember in mourning. Recently it was also the 10 year anniversary of the Kinglake bushfires, which at the time shocked the world with their unassailable ferocity and loss of life, both human and non-human. My brother lost his property that day, but he narrowly escaped with his life, along with his wife and 1-year old son. Life is creation and destruction, birth and death, shut down and break through all the time.
But today, seeing this little creek making its way out to sea made my heart glad. So often it’s the subtle touches of nature connection that can make a difference to the way we feel; and, more importantly, to the way we act. Continuing to work with this foundation of ecopsychology (or ecospirituality) enables us to tune in to our part in the more-than-human life that we are part of. We’ve changed the world and damaged its fabric in this new era of the Anthropocene and, as a race, we haven’t yet proven able to pull out of the slippery slope of materialistic capitalism and take better care of our planetary home.
So why celebrate such a small matter today? Because the stream made it, the flow created breakthrough, and some days our hearts hurt and we need to be reminded that this is the ancient way of life. We take what we think we need and sometimes this is too much and we do damage. Then, we need to let the waters flow, to give away and to give back. Sure, it is natural for us to want to draw fresh water from a sparkling stream; to be refreshed by its soothing qualities and to give thanks for its gifts. But this is not what the military/industrial complex is doing. It offers engineering infrastructure to suck the rivers dry, to create mega-dams and turn the taps onto crops of cotton and rice and whatever else are doused in the chemicals designed and pushed by Big Pharma, to be sold and controlled according to the machinations of predatory capitalism. We all know this, but it is proving to be a ‘wicked problem’, to dislodge the machine and allow the earth to regrow from beneath such withering machinations and their shadow.
I grew up in Port Adelaide, which meant that my school holidays were spent on local beaches, in the desert fringes of the Flinders Ranges, down the Fleurieu Peninsula and along the Might Murray River. I always felt deep kinship with the salty sands and gentle dunes along my friendly beachfronts, and was never quite so much at home along the river, with its spooky dead trees in places, and its steady one-way flow. But then i visited the Coorong for the first time, and my heart sang for the river and the sea at the same time.
The Coorong in South Australia, where the Murray River meets the sea – sometimes.
Here, when i was a kid, a mighty river flowed into the sea, with much of its overflow captured in salty lakes and lagoons surrounded by my favourite landscape feature of all, the sand dune. There were mysteriously quiet coves, dead flat crystalline beds of salt, endless blue skies and crashing oceanic waves on the other side of a fragile dune system. It was many years before i would learn why the Murray stopped flowing into the sea, how the river mouth was closed up and the inland lake system dying. The story of criminal irrigators stealing vast quantities of fresh water upstream, in other states of Australia, is now coming further into the light, as the tragedy of millions of dead native fish hits the headlines and the public become outraged at the stupidity and recklessness of the ‘system’ again. It’s no coincidence that the remote communities mostly affected are largely Aboriginal, while it is wealthy industrial farmers (not the caring smaller scale ones) that profit. Again.
Local fish death tragedy, Wallagoot Lake, caused by low water levels, drought and heat.
The fish death phenomenon is largely out of the 24/7 spectacle of news media already, although it has just hit home (albeit on a smaller scale, thank goodness) in our local area. Since then, we have enjoyed a dense bank of rain such as we haven’t seen around here in ages. It’s been sweet to fall asleep to the sound of raindrops on the roof – and maybe even to wake up to it too. And so, this little creek flows into the sea. Something seems right about this; something we have missed. Like so many of the symptoms of the runaway climate destruction we are now witnessing, it’s as if part of our souls have been splintered away, as the earth groans under the weight of modern industrial capital and its inevitable commodification and degradation of every ‘resource’ it can get its greedy hands on.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the place where the two waters – fresh and salty – mingled was renowned as a place of fertility. Many Aboriginal Australians know the same truth; that such places are rich and should be protected. Rivers are meant to run and we should take their fresh water for use and not for greed. If they don’t make it to the sea for too long a period, death follows. It’s just another ancient law we ignore at our peril. Long live the spirit of flow and letting go and allowing for breakthrough, both in our fragile environment and in our souls – which end up being the same place, when we open our minds and bodies to our place in nature.
