Happening
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| Lily: usual position: inversion on the verandah. |
Lily and I had a chat with Chim and Anne today. Both of us were a bit anxious. The note saying they wanted to catch up with us at 3.30 today had been left under the bottle of sunscreen on the outside table yesterday. We both wondered what we'd done wrong.
The meeting was just to check in. Are we going okay? How are we feeling about the possibility of being staff? Who wants to do what?
There's no money involved. But one thing we spoke about was the opportunity to innovate - to run classes, workshops, get in touch with groups and make connections with the local community so that the centre is used more often and becomes self-supporting. That's the vision from their point of view.
For us, then, it is an open invitation to start innovative programs and see what happens. Sure, the obstacles are distance (we're a few kilometres out of town) and population (Balingup only has an in-town population of about 380 people, and no high school). That's a small local audience to draw from, and drawing people from further away is obviously harder. But it is an amazing opportunity to do almost anything, with lots of encouragement, a range of good facilities, an established network and virtually no overheads. So what could I do - a day for day dreaming and getting excited:
- a community garden
- permaculture and sustainability workshops
- a weekend writing workshop
- a running group
and, for me the most exciting
- creating an after-school writing group/space to help kids with their homework.
Check out this talk by Dave Eggers for an idea of the template for the after-school program.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html
I find it moving and inspiring... and nice that he's humble and funny, too.
Of course, there's also a chance to write, which is brilliant.
For Lily it's yoga, yoga and yoga.
This is all in addition to the chance to learn from and with the people here about mindfulness, Buddhism, and everything that the people here bring as well: cooking, music, social and environmental justice, community and everyone's different passions... And getting my head around a really specific Landcare project, which is generally referred to as anything "Up On The Hill")... And of course other side jobs like writing and editing and proofreading...
So things are heading towards us staying here for a while.
But it's still early days: we'll see.
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| Lily running her first yoga class post-India, down at Living Waters. Claire, Fliss and Annie being model students. |
Observing
In the Friday morning workshop, which is called Sacred Art and Theatre, the group looked at the concept of Gaia - the principle of an interconnected and interdependent living world. We tried to make a list of people who are exemplars in this area.Any such list is debatable, but here was ours.
James Lovelock, David Suzuki, Jacques Cousteau, Robert Hunter, Paul Watson, Starhawk, Janna Macy, Chief Seattle, Rachel Carson, Al Gore, Prince Charles, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), Judith Wright, Henry David Thoreau, David Attenborough, Andy Goldsworthy, Ansel Adams, Peter Dombrovskis.
I find this a worthwhile activity, an inspiring list, but I think it misses something. For me a seed of the answer is discussed quite eloquently in Crow Planet: the idea is simply that prolonged and close observation of even a single dead fish or bird can lead to insights and understandings deeper than you might expect. I have to emphasise that it does have to be close. It has to be the kind of observation in which you sit in front of the object for a long time and ask it to reveal its secrets to you, and wait, and be open to answers (or secrets) that you didn't know before hand, that might not even fit into the way you thought you could possibly think beforehand. It's funny that it only strikes me just now, while writing this sitting at a Buddhist Retreat Centre where meditation happens quite regularly... but this kind of approach to an object is quite close to one way of meditating on something: that intertwined and double approach of being focused and yet open.
Focusing usually means blocking out distractions, seeing only the one thing. But remaining open is in a sense the opposite: being open to new ideas and insights. Doing both is tricky. But what Lyanna Lynn Haupt did in Crow Planet was meditate on the body of a crow. Focus on it, and see what it tells you.
The thing I miss in our list of exemplars is a leaf, or a tree, or any creature or patch of soil. I sound like a hippy, but I just want to acknowledge the real exemplars in holding the knowledge. Books are inevitably abstractions. Experience is where the learning is rooted.
We then made a little shrine to our list and our ideas - an artistic expression of the ideas we had discussed. I think it is an effective practice and it's one that Chim and Anne are playing with as a possible process to take into workshops and schools. But again, I felt like we had taken another step further along the path to abstraction. I thought of Duchamp's Urinal. The idea that things become art when they are put in an art gallery is reflected in the thought that things become sacred when they are put in a church. Chim suggested that the lack of shrines is one of the biggest issues in the world today challenged me. What is a shrine? If uyou look at a tree and the grass around it's base and the light shining down through its leaves and see a tree, then there is no shrine. But is this the problem of a way of seeing. Does the tree need to be in a church for it to seen as worthy? Bizarre. Is the need not for more shrines but for a more reverent way of seeing? Just make everything a shrine. Job done. Otherwise shrines are just weird abstractions, like Leunig's classic drawing of the father and son watching the sunset on Tv instead of the one happening outside their window.
(I feel pompous and silly writing that, knowing that I know so little, and that I seem to be writing the same thing over and over, rather than doing what I intend, which is actually to go out and observe something - a leaf, a tree, a person, a behaviour...)
Today's behaviour was the lineage bias in the teaching and learning style of this Buddhist tradition. Knowing the people - tracing the lineage of ideas - is important to Chim. For him knowing the ideas and knowing the people were indivisible parts of the learning. When we started speaking about the issue I struggled to think of writers, even though once we got going I was able to name quite a few. I thought about Clunes, and my aims there had nothing to do with introducing students to people. I was really keen above all else to make them aware of themselves and their connections and impacts on the people and world around them, now and in the future. These weren't so much ideas as information: how much water does a washing machine use? How much electricity do they use per day? How much water does it take to grow a kilo of beef? How far has the carrot you're eating travelled? What happens if you plant seeds and care for them? How do you feel when you plant a tree and, with your friends, create a future-forest?
The history of people and their ideas are important, and I wonder if I did the kids a disservice by not giving them a list of heroes - a lineage to hook into. I wonder if I would do so in the future, if there's time in a crowded program for it. Or whether I'd still just want to get them outside - hands dirty - in the garden.
That's one of the disconnects I see here and wonder how to tackle: we sat up there discussing Gaia for three hours, but down here there's only one edible plant in the veggie garden, and that's a patch of mint.
I have lots to learn!
Things I'm grateful for
Playing. Lily, Nick, Marcus and I did headstands, handstands and juggled after dinner tonight. Nice.I had a headache this afternoon. I slept and then had a tasty dinner and drank water. I'm grateful to whichever of those did the trick.
Once Upon a School - Dave Eggers.
Lovely dinner.
Lily seems very happy.
Bed.
Glad I did some writing today after all.
:)
Good night.
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