You’d be forgiven for thinking there were more important things to do, more pressing actions to be taken, than sitting quietly on a meditation cushion. And you’d be right. Sitting meditation is practice. For being in flow with the moment, moving with grace, embodying consciousness in the best way possible, as a primate capable of self-awareness. While doing important stuff, like fighting fires. Grab the hose, aim the water, protect the assets, move back, come around the side, get out, get in and do your job. All under extreme pressure. Professional or volunteers; now that’s action.
HILLVILLE, AUSTRALIA – NOVEMBER 13: RFS Firefighters battle a spot fire on November 13, 2019 in Hillville, Australia. Catastrophic fire conditions.
Most of us who faced fires in Australia over recent weeks aren’t heroes. We’re just trying to save our lives, families and homes, and helping others when we can. But no matter whether you had to fight ember attacks or full blown fire fronts, or if you were watching the previously unimaginable horror unfold, as monster fires joined up to create a mega-catastrophe on a world changing scale, we’ve all been scarred by this experience. How we deal with it can be a matter of personal choice, but from a therapeutic perspective, if you get time, you could do worse than to sit. Contemplate.
Hone your mind. It helps. Getting to know yourself better, you can come to realise your habits and choose what works for you according to the balance of your desires and values. Or just relax, let the mind melt down the spine like a melting egg of golden butter. Breathe into the centre and up along that spine, lifting each part as if it were carried by a silver rope hanging down from the heavens. Let that breath go through the top of your head, lifting it also and tilting it slightly forwards, so that your chin is tucked a little. Look 45 degrees to the floor. Let thoughts float away like clouds in the sky. Don’t judge them, it’s a waste of time and undermines the self you want to be. Breathe in, up the spine, and let go as you exhale. Repeat.
Sit in nature if you can. It’s precious. As we’ve seen.
Sitting in meditation affords you time to check in with yourself and give you time to recognise if you are carrying some self-defeating patterns. Also to melt them away a little each time, or to support better ones. We practise in every sit, as well as throughout the day. This is a clarifying of the mind that is also self-care, because sitting in meditation can help you ensure that you’re not getting too wound up in cycles of action and reaction, by putting your daily experiences into a more expansive framework. Just like the monk who learns that the same amount of salt in the wound feels very different when you identify with the expanse of the lake and not just the limited confines of the personal mind, we can become more than an action/reaction machine.
Sitting with how expansive our minds can be can transform them from their former limits.
Sore? Let that pain dissolve into the entire energetic matrix within which we incarnate: the earth. Rest in that exact place where you are for a while. This will remind you of how much you can be as well as help you do stuff better. This includes fire fighters and frustrated parents, baristas and climate scientists. It could also help activists entering upon the shores of burnout, or just plain exhausted by the fight against a corporate and political class that is supposed to be serving us but is serving its own interests instead. The forces of climate denial are varied and very well funded. This makes the current mainstream story unpalatable, at best, and criminal, in terms of the environmental damage being wreaked upon the planet right now. We must feel this, if we are to identify with our larger being, the one that dissolved into the lake, and be true citizens of the earth, along with all our kin, without whom we cannot survive, let alone flourish. Air comes from forests and seas (remember this sometimes with your breath). To be fully alive, we must be fully alive with the earth. That’s expanded consciousness. That means something.
The dead wombat has been there for a couple of days now. The stench tells the story, as do the flies. The painted stripe down its back is another thing – a sign to those who care, that this one has been checked. Its pouch is empty; no babies need to be rescued from its dead body. Drive on, like everybody else does. We’re in a rush, or going too fast, or we’ve just seen it so often it doesn’t register anymore.
Roadkill – it’s an everyday reality for those who drive, especially long distances on country roads. It’s the collateral damage of the road trip. And it’s a sign of the times, a symbol of how we live, the things we can’t change, the fast pace of modern life and the way we treat the rest of the world (aka nature). We cut straight lines across the land, just as we do across the seas and skies, in order to get from one place to the next as fast as humanly possible.* Because we have business to do, people to meet, more immediate concerns than caring for the land and the planet that is our home. More important stuff.
That’s how we got here – to the precipice of the ecological emergency, which afflicts the entire earth now, the cliff over which we are hurtling since the feedback loops started to kick in. We burn greenhouse gases and turn the plants and animals into agribusiness and treat them all like grist to the mill. Any cereal grain or docile beast unfortunate enough to be domesticated has been ‘farmed’ – or more accurately, industrially exploited – to the point of complete depersonalisation.
You couldn’t do to battery hens, pigs, or feedlot cattle what is routinely done on behalf of obscene profits if you actually had to face what these animals feel. We couldn’t decimate the insect population and pour countless trillions of litres of chemical run off, of pesticides and fertilisers, into the sea, creating desolate coastlines and Great Barren Reefs, if we cared about the rest of the earth’s population.
It’s all about the wheat, the rice, the cotton; not the birds, the bees, the native grasses or traditional remedies that used to grow here. Where? Anywhere.
This dead wombat is one of the dozens I see every week on my work commutes. Smashed to death by a metal bullet hurtling down the road at 100kmh, another human being at the wheel. Almost inevitably, we won’t stop to witness the passing of another life at the hands of modern society. It’s just what we do. Kill thoughtlessly, randomly, impersonally, as an inevitable side effect of our hustle and bustle. This is what we have done to our planet and home.
Roadkill is a symbol for our times.
For more on the mythology of straight lines, see the ecomythic doco “City Living, Nature Calling” here.
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!]
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 …
When we think about the lack of action on climate change, as well as the ongoing rush to strip the planet of ‘resources’ and thus continue the devastation of the environment regardless of our obvious need to take care of the earth, we can easily slip into despair. Seeing as world politics including Australian ‘leadership’ seems to be going in the wrong direction, blind hope is not going to help us. So what do we do?
Aside from turning to the good things that are happening in our communities – and there are plenty of them! – we can return to the breath. Leave the societal realm behind and breathe into the body. This gets us back to the experience of awareness, of the one state we can definitely change for the better – our own body and mind. Deep breath awareness not only relaxes the mind and thereby reduces stress, it can also lower our heart rate and create space so that we are not merely reacting to the world at the moment, but exploring a space of freedom and creativity as well. We can also give some air to feelings that have compounded around the issue that has wound us up; we may feel sadness and grief, frustration and anger … this is a good opportunity to can allow ourselves to be human, to have the feeling and then to let it go (don’t rush!).
In the body, when we have breathed through our tension or anxiety, we can find comfort; we can recognise whatever needs to be changed, what it takes to be in our power, to be ready for action, to stand for what’s right, to be poised as an animate being capable of self-awareness … and when we have reignited these potentials, we can go further, breathe into the depths of the mind/body beyond the personal self, to the core truth of being human, which is that we are also more than this; we are interdependent beings, open to the elements through breath and ingestion, made up of DNA shared by plants and other animals and mitochondria and clay and water and salts …
Through breath we can find psychological freedom and return to the intertwined mystery of human being: we are consciousness embodied in self-aware primate form, both completely dependent on nature for our lives and also capable of experiencing ourselves beyond the limits of time and space. This is the paradox of being human; we are only here and now and also always more than this. Just like light and consciousness, metaphors for each other … but that’s another story, for another time.
For right now, return to breath, rebalance the self and remember the more-than-self, and return to the world ready to fight the good fight for another day. Beyond all else …
You couldn’t do to battery hens, pigs, or feedlot cattle what is routinely done on behalf of obscene profits if you actually had to face what these animals feel. We couldn’t decimate the insect population and pour countless trillions of litres of chemical run off, of pesticides and fertilisers, into the sea, creating desolate coastlines and Great Barren Reefs, if we cared about the rest of the earth’s population.
This dead wombat is one of the dozens I see every week on my work commutes. Smashed to death by a metal bullet hurtling down the road at 100kmh, another human being at the wheel. Almost inevitably, we won’t stop to witness the passing of another life at the hands of modern society. It’s just what we do. Kill thoughtlessly, randomly, impersonally, as an inevitable side effect of our hustle and bustle. This is what we have done to our planet and home.
