I wake to the sound of wind moving through the trees around my home, followed by emergent bird calls – small chirps and in the background the deeper dissonant crow caws. Shall I go for a swim now or later? What an indulgence – summer is here but so far cool mornings, warm days and golden afternoon early evening light. I know the heat is coming but this is idyllic, and I savour every moment. The great eucalyptus that shades my home is shedding great swathes of bark revealing pink trunk beneath – this ‘skin’ curls into long slivers all over my garden and courtyard. I feel reverence as I pick them up - sculptural fragments of the most beautiful colour which I now call bark pink. The light on this tree in the afternoon at this time of year is gorgeous. Now in my third summer, I am observing the seasonal changes of birds, insects and plant life around me. The change into summer clothes, bringing colour and lightness to my body as I feel air moving over skin. My first swim of the season was an effusion of pleasure soaking into my body. I meet familiar beach goers, and we exchange greetings. The sand is white and fine under foot, the horizon wide, stretching endlessly in front of me, broken only by Rottnest Island and sometimes large container ships carrying their goods between here and the rest of the world. I wasn’t particularly a beach girl growing up here, but I always loved the wildness of the ocean. I spent many winter days walking along these beaches – often in solitude. My own young wild self imagining another life lived elsewhere – dancing! And now I have returned with a different perspective on the eternal presence of ocean and wind and sky surrounding me here on this thin strip of limestone coastline. Travelling from Rome to Tuscania a decade ago, the train went along the coast, and I was reminded of this coastline – the same wind-swept shorelines, scrubby growth and slightly desolate railway stations. And as the train sped past a station, the flash of an older man exquisitely dressed, bright pink socks revealed by his elegantly crossed legs. I gasped at the sheer audacity of style I would never see in Australia on a man. Or so I thought! What hubris! On another train ride from Fremantle to Perth I sit opposite an incredibly elegant, well-dressed older man. I silently admire his whole couture ensemble right down to his soft leather handbag slung over his shoulder. This is no everyday pedestrian Aussie, this is someone who loves clothes, textiles and fashion. Someone who dares to be different. I breathe it all in with pleasure. The train stops and as we alight, I tell him I appreciate his entire ensemble, and he surprises me by returning the compliment. Of course he noticed! I no longer remember what I was wearing but I do remember what he was wearing. In our brief exchange he said he was 80 and he always liked to dress well. I admire this. It requires rigour believe me to do this in our casual culture. And once I discovered that Virginia Woolf loved fashion, I no longer felt any shame about my love of clothes, fabrics and beauty. They are to be celebrated in a world that seems to insist on huge quantities of disposable synthetic clothing. As the late, great marvellous Vivienne Westwood said: “Buy less, choose well and make it last.” And then she said: “Whatever you fall in love with … you know … that’s how you’ll do something”. I fell in love with dance, and I am still dancing and making. And every day I ‘fall in love’ with something or someone. Yesterday I alighted from the bus – note all these adventures of the everyday occur on public transport – with a beautiful young man and in one complex road crossing we effortlessly exchange names, story and touch. Frederico and I made human contact – brief exacting perfect!
Pilgrimage
When I left for my ‘road trip’ I didn’t realise I was making a pilgrimage. This occurred later in the journey as I got on and off trains and buses arriving somewhere both new and yet familiar from my years of living in Sydney, Melbourne and regional Victoria.
Setting off in early July I arrived in Melbourne on a very cold evening. I slipped into my Melbourne skin and ventured onto Sydney Road for Japanese ramen with warm sake. Sitting almost on the street I immersed myself in the passing parade of coat-wrapped bodies and snippets of conversation. I had arrived in Melbourne! A grand thing.
Following my workshop at Green Monday Studios and several delightful meals with friends and family I set off to stay with friends in regional Victoria. Brilliant freezing days and nights filled with conversation, shared tears and laughter alongside familiar places imprinted in memory after my years of living in the area. Back to Melbourne to share a beloved niece’s birthday at Cam’s then walking along Merri Creek which was lapping the edges of the path. A memorable movie on Charmian Clift – genius writer, woman and artist. What a life – well lived and tragically ended. But ‘did you know’ said Alice to her friend ‘She is the grandmother of Gina Chick the woman extraordinaire who thrived in the “Alone” series with such joy and brilliant knowledge.’ What a lineage! Yesterday I bought my first Charmian Clift to get to know this writer who was a rule breaker, a wild woman of searing intelligence, and a passionate human.
Venturing back into regional Victoria to visit friends. Evenings by the fire with excellent wine, a fire and good company. All that I had imagined. Waking to the slow seepage of morning light permeating the darkness, frost over the ground and hot tea in hand. Long walks through familiar yet always unknown bush. Stories exchanged with our footfalls. Good food and coffee in the bonhomie of local cafés. I drink in beloved friend’s faces and stories. We accompany each other in a creative exchange of living and aging.
Then a flight to Hobart to stay with friends recently relocated from Darwin. A leap from north to south across this huge continent. They live perched on a high hill just under the mountain. They take me for an extraordinary meal at a local restaurant – the food is incredibly original and beautifully presented. Food is a priority in Hobart! I spend a day at MONA – moaning in ecstasy at the surroundings, current exhibition and fabulous lunch. The ferry ride there and back is a further treat. I have waited years to come, and it doesn’t disappoint. At the end of the day a pianist gathers a small ensemble to play the composition he has created that day. He has been doing this for several months. A great gig! On my last morning, we walk directly into the bush behind the house to see snow on Kunanyi/Mt Wellington. I am told this is unusual.
Back to Melbourne for a brief stopover at my niece’s new home and the following freezing morning a train to Bairnsdale, a brief pause then onto a bus that makes the curve around the south-east bend of this continent. I alight at Quaama a place I had never heard of in the Bega Valley. Once more I am welcomed by dogs clambering for attention, a fire and a glass of wine. I like this. I am the old woman who now has time to listen, observe and respond to the many stories that surround each home and family. Everyone is so generous and kind and this touches me deeply. I am resting in my eldership. Stories of great suffering here as the fires swept through and no one was left unscathed. People lost everything or much that was critical to living and making a living. This couple have been at the coalface of the recovery and are deep in the ecological crisis we are all in. We have spirited conversations full of knowledge and rigour.
The last part of my journey awaits, and I feel the fullness of my journey. This I realise has been a pilgrimage. My last bus journey takes me north to meet a dear friend and colleague. We made terra together, the most important work of my life. She sweeps me up in Milton and immediately I am aware of a different kind of comfort that money brings. Sydney lurks close. We buy good food and venture to her beautifully crafted home close to the beach in Bendalong. More conversations around the fire with wine and food. I sleep deeply and wake to dawn and the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean. Nothing reminds me more than this, that I live on the opposite side of the country with the stunning Indian Ocean sunsets. Home begins to pull. My body is full of story, friendship and connection to place.
One last journey by car through the town of Berri, once a small place of charm now a bustling town with too many tourist distractions. We arrive in Sydney in the late afternoon. My last days are filled with the pleasure of the familiar. A visit to the Gallery of NSW, walks around Bondi, a vintage shopping spree and a fine evening of performance in Marrickville with the marvellous Chris Abrahams (pianist with The Necks) and others. I’m done and ready to fly home.
But not quite. Another treat is in store for me. A full flight and not a big plane. I am sitting by the window with two men next to me. At some point I must use the toilet. When I get out and turn there is a cue the length of the plane in front of me. I turn around and there is no one waiting the business end (of course!). I consider and am prompted by a young woman who comments on this cue. I say, ‘watch me’ and walk assuredly to the business end of the plane. I speak to the flight attendant and point out the long cue and ask if I can use the business lounge toilet. She cannot refuse me and doesn’t. When I walk back the two men next to me say congratulations. I say it helps to be a white-haired woman sometimes. The man next to me startles me with ‘I bet you have done harder things?’. ‘Oh yes’, I respond. I sit down and his words land in me and precipitate a conversation. His accent reminds me of London. He tells me he is from Kenya. The rest is history as they say. He is a theatre maker and writer on his way home. I ask if he knows a fellow performer. He is delighted by this connection, and we begin a conversation that is still going. We met yesterday to continue our inter-generational stories. Mararo and I have many stories and lives to share.
Shoreline
The tender moments between sleeping and waking … a shoreline of sorts … when sleep has been deep and untroubled and waking is equally quiet and calm. A slippage between states. A visceral satisfaction with the heart at rest and the mind quietly attentive to first waking impressions – air on skin, bird sound, light permeating consciousness. Then the unfurling awareness of the accumulating sounds of the natural world creating a more complex ambient environment. It is Sunday and the last day of the year. No traffic sounds permeate my waking ears. If I listen closely sometimes I am sure I hear the ocean lapping. Birds, I realise, are my companions. My chosen companions. Their wildness beguiles and inspires me. I have two water dishes, front and back to entice them. The dish facing the park is visited all day by crows, magpies, magpie-larks, honey eaters, wattle birds, doves, and seasonally pink & grey galahs. Kookaburras hold their distinguished distance! A plethora of birds, some of whom I am sure know my voice and presence. Especially the crows, who eye me intently as they perch on the fence or pergola before descending to drink. A very special moment was seeing a crow have a bath in a large shallow black bowl filled with water, very close to my living room window. Intended as an aesthetic addition to my garden not a bird bath! What does the crow care? One day I witnessed an astonishing playful vision … a crow was plunging in and then perching on the edge over and over for a full immersion bath! Clearly enjoying the experience which they repeated many times to my delight. The dish facing into the central space is not visited by birds, but bees enjoy the water and the respite. I had no idea that bees need water also – why not? However yesterday an astonishing clarion sound pierced my home from the direction of the front courtyard. When I ventured to look there was a willy wagtail perched on the edge of the water dish and singing in full voice the most gorgeous song. I always remember my sister Phillipa telling me that Daisy Utemorrah (indigenous author, poet and community leader from Mowanjum), told her the wagtail is the messenger bird. So little bird what message do you have for me or for us at this time in our turbulent world?
Making Room for the Poetic
I am lying on my back on the liquid transparency of the Indian Ocean and above me is the sliver of a new moon. A smile breaks my face open. I breathe in this gift of moon and ocean, blue sky and fluffy white clouds. It is somewhere between 7-7.30am and I have driven to the ocean to cleanse the debris of living from my body. Awash with sadness, frustration, weariness and tenderness I drop everything and step into the great mother. For a brief time I have this small lagoon to myself. But it is also a shared pleasure as others arrive and enter the water in silent exchange.
With peripheral vision I see parts of my body above the waterline – I feel like I am in a Magritte painting. It is utterly surreal – this proximity and vast horizon. Both exist in my body. Even the coldness of the water is reassuring, knowing the day is likely to be hot. I soak the cold into my cells. The sky feels opaque compared to the transparency of the ocean. It is all an illusion. Both are liquids of one form or another. Like my body. Air and water surrounding me. The thin sliver of white sand defines the edge of the land. Even this is an illusory solidness. Its form changes with the tides, the winds, the movement of the elements.
All of this contributes to the poiesis of my life. Making room for the poetic is not a luxury it is critical to my life and to my being able to breathe and go on living. Making (art) is an everyday activity. We all do it. We make meals, we make friends, we make love, we make conversation, we make do. I want to contest that making room for poetry is critical to live a life of meaning. An obsession with the sensate details of materiality impoverishes us and it is my intuition that we are then ready prey for the devouring, insatiable mouth of consumer capitalism.
So there is the moon and there is me floating on the great liquid ocean. When I open to a peripheral gaze I see my knees and toes, belly and hands … and I see the curve of the earth meeting the sky above. It is all horizon … curved horizon … shades of blues and greens. The traces are still in me as I sit here writing. My imagination has been stirred. This is the essential poetic ingredient for my soul.
Midjaliny (Noongar for rain, tears or weeping)
It’s raining as the moon drifts in and out of the clouds surrounding it in the early morning sky. The sound on my roof is comforting, familiar in ways that I could not have imagined before moving back to my birth place. I am in my country – Whadjuk-Noongar country. As I sit writing here in the dark listening to the rain, I hear rhythm in the fluid constancy of the falling rain. When I step outside to feel the rain on my skin I see the nearly full moon coming in and out of focus, never more feminine than this I think - elusive, beautiful, secretive, intimate. Rain creates an intimacy I have always loved from childhood, tucked in a warm bed it is one of life’s pleasures. I like the cool air coming through the windows and doors that I leave ajar, to allow this elemental flow. A candle burning beside me, darkness enveloping and cracks of light entering the house. Birds begin to sound adding to the great pleasure of being alive and awake at this early hour. I sense adventure in waking early as though the potential of the day beckons, inviting me to taste, smell, listen and touch the world. Ahh a kookaburra in the distance. I feel so fortunate to have a patch of bush just there outside my door. I am living in what my neighbour calls the ghetto! I love this, the not wealthy part of this suburb that is bounded by ocean and river. The wealthy live beside the river in mansions I do not envy – Australian aspirational ugliness abounds. My local walks take me on the back streets past all kinds of treasures – narrow laneways, gorgeous gardens and intriguing hidden houses of imaginative flair, both old and new. It is all oddly familiar, school friends lived here when I lived nearby as a girl. I rarely came here – I would go the most direct way to the river through the wealthier adjacent suburb. This suburb was working-class, with factories and workers cottages and lots of small corner parks. These are now cared for and delightful to find and rest in on my walks. But the landmark I did go to was the Memorial Hall – an Art Deco façade over a late C19 building with all the attributes of the era – beautiful jarrah wooden floors and large spaces. What was the cinema in my youth is now a theatre and the cinema is outdoor summer viewing only. Daylight has arrived but the skies are still weeping – a day for internal reflection, dreaming and soup making. How to keep the angels happy and the wolf of reality fed – soup! This is the season of Djeran in the six Noongar Seasons, and also the season of Adulthood.
Moving Home
I have been moving … home to my birthplace Perth.
I found a little house under a great tree and I am making a new home in a familiar place. The tree brings immense solace with its changing colours, bird life and shedding bark. When I wake at night it feels like a companion and comforts me with its presence and magnanimous beauty. Early morning brings the sun rising from the east, glistening brightly through its leaves and branches. After midday the shadow is welcome relief from the heat of the day. Evening brings the return of birds for their meal and a last chorus of sound, heralding the evening. I have never noticed the colour of the bark before, it is pink but unlike any other pink I can name or know. It changes with the light – for now I am calling it ‘bush pink’. Strips of it fall into my courtyard along with the leaves. I don’t rush to sweep them away – I enjoy their unruly yet patterned presence that creates its own beauty. An unruly wildness lingers in Perth. I came home for this. Without knowing exactly, I knew I had to come home to this natural world. It’s the sky, the wind, the birds, the air itself. Something untameable I identify with lurks around. As I sit here I hear the wind in the tree outside and the raw dry sound of crows and parrots. Nothing quite like it anywhere else. It’s in my bloodstream, as familiar as anything I have known. My skin soaks it up.
In the process of moving I found some writing I did over 10 years ago on my return from residencies in Europe. I was surprised by the find and what it reveals to me now, in my seventh decade. How do we listen to the body and to feeling our way into how to live each decade anew?
“I board the plane home without nostalgia. I don’t want to live in Europe and I no longer want Europe to live in me.”
It startled me to find this entry and what it revealed – I knew somewhere the future was beckoning me home to my country.
In honour of my tree here is Bill Neidjie, Kakadu elder and great story-teller speaking about feeling:
Tree …
He watching you
You look at tree
he listen to you.
He got no finger, he can’t speak.
But that leaf …
he pumping, growing,
growing in the night.
you dream something.
Tree and grass same thing.
They grow with your body.
With your feeling.
Bill Neidjie (1989)
Dawn Intimacy
There is something quietly thrilling about waking early and rising to make tea. I venture outside – it’s quiet and the stars and moon are stark in the dark sky. I hear the world breathe. As I wait for the kettle to boil I stand and listen – in the distance a train, some birds calling the day into being, and the sky changing colour quicker than I realise. With tea I venture back to bed and the vestiges of the film I saw last night, the meal and conversation with a friend linger in me. I have slept lightly. It is not as cold as it has been but cold enough to delight in the warmth of my doona and hot tea. It is the caress of the enveloping stillness that I find sensuous and intimate. A space opens inside me allowing nascent feeling to become imaginative exploration and sometimes like this, writing. It is comforting to feel the busy world resting around me. No traffic, no sounds, no hurried harried humans – I like the depth of the silence, which will break soon. The air is crisp, clean. Is it hope I feel? I don’t think so. I think it is pleasure in being alive. The immense almost desperate intensity of living. This is where my loving goes these days – into the world. The sadness I feel at what we have done to the earth sits in my body refusing to be numbed. The sheer beauty of the world is present everyday for me in these times of quiet reflective awareness. The seduction of our capitalist world distresses me. The movies tempting me with their advertisements to travel elsewhere. But where is elsewhere? I am elsewhere now as I attune to the molecular divinity I sense all around me with the transition of night into day. The adventure of living sensuously presents itself at any moment. Night air settles around me. Day is waiting in the wings. Sitting here writing – seeking the words that convey and craft what I am experiencing is part of the exacting task of creativity. I am composing and making and nothing gives me more pleasure than this. This is living intimately.
Breaking the Spell
So much feels broken. But when I am dancing and moving with others I feel we can defy the laws written and unwritten that bind and break us. I take a breath plunge headlong into the dance and come up gasping for air and the sheer audacity of my mobile limbs. Nick Cave suggests all our lives are dangerous we just live for a-while thinking we are in control. He knows now with certainty that we don’t. Living is dangerous and the dance we are in takes us off balance all the time. I am falling and flailing. My knee might give way at any moment. Crash and I fall to earth. In the early morning darkness I practice patience. I can’t move quickly – it is a delicate moment when my feet first reach for the ground and I transfer my weight onto them. A hovering moment of uncertainty. My knee is giving me grief – a shredded menisci and other stray broken bits. I look forward to the pain being alleviated. I am also certain that it requires a shift in my awareness of what I can and want to do now. I am moving towards an older age where mobility is not taken for granted. The loss of walking is acute for me. I have kept myself going through walking – one foot after the other. I am housebound with this. I want to walk freely again. My son who knows this is not a given, reminds me of who I share the world with – those for whom walking is not an assumption. This reminds me of loving and living without assumption; without privilege; without entitlement. Last week Australia sent a clear message to an out-of-date patriarchal stance based on entitlement and privilege. I am breathing easier. The spell has been broken.
Outpouring
It’s raining. I woke in the early hours of the morning to the steady sound of rain. Normally I would find this a deep comfort and sensual pleasure. The sound of rain and the smell of the wet earth along with the knowledge of the benefits for our gardens and vegetal life. But this time it is tinged with a little fear. This is the rain that has been falling steadily down the east coast of Australia causing enormous havoc in Brisbane, Sydney and towns along the coast. I know at least one family who have had to evacuate. I cannot imagine what it feels like to have your home surrounded by floodwaters. The rain was predicted and I have wondered what it would feel like to have the Yarra rise to unknown levels and whether my home would remain safe. I sit here writing to its steady insistent sound, letting it fill my imaginary to see how its unbroken rhythm might affect my writing. It is water – fluid, wet, falling heavily but with no violent force. It is in its insistence that the latent fear lies. Water is deceptively powerful, its constancy wears surfaces down, rounding the edges of the sharpest rocks, smoothing the banks of rivers, whilst cutting through and between to forge rivers in mountain terrain.
I am listening to the weight and fall of the rain. It is steady. The day will be soggy, damp and close. The slight concern I have is balanced by my pleasure. As a West Australian rain was always something to celebrate. Its capacity to cool the earth and invite an interiority was a welcome shift from the extraversion that the sun and beach culture offer. My first experience of snow brought this also. The silence of snow was extraordinary. The world went silent. The depth of white all around a source of wonder. I was enchanted even with the deep cold that accompanied it.
Water becomes snow, ice, rain, mist, steam. Water is dynamic – it can be stagnant, still, flowing, swirling, raging. Its many forms and manifestations bring us different elemental experiences of the natural world. Water is transformative – we see the result of this in our gardens and in the surrounding country. We perceive growth spurts to delight the senses. After rain the air smells cleaner, when it starts we have the *petrichor, that magical smell that rises from hot earth. It is the sheer magnitude of water in these recent deluges that has been frightening and awe inspiring. The Brisbane River sweeping everything before it – boats, cars, jetties, breaking things apart as it rages.
The earth is suffering. I am sure of this. What is transpiring is apocalyptic – fires, disease, floods and famine in its wake as food sources are impacted. There is an impatience to return to ‘normal’ after Covid but what is normal now? This is what we have been told will happen. It is not an anomaly. There is the interweaving of a longer story from an indigenous point of view and there is the effect of what humans have done to the powerful but fragile ecosystems over centuries of colonisation, capitalism and its associated greed.
The earth gives us so much pleasure and nourishment and perhaps like our bodies we don’t pay attention until we are suffering. The earth is suffering. And she will do what she needs to heal herself, expelling what is needed to survive.
*Petrichor is the term coined by Australian scientists in 1964 to describe the unique, earthy smell associated with rain falling on dry soil. It is caused by the water from the rain, along with certain compounds like ozone, geosmin, and plant oils. The word is constructed from Ancient Greek πέτρα 'rock', or πέτρος 'stone', and ἰχώρ, the ethereal fluid that is the blood of the gods in Greek mythology. Wikipedia
dancing again
How do we begin again – to meet, dance and touch one another? In the aftermath of the past two years how do we gather into our selves and cultivate the practice of being with one another to move, create and find our belonging? I propose that this practice can support us redefining ourselves and how we navigate our way through. The vulnerability we have all experienced is at the heart of our return and renewal, remaining present as we renogotiate our lives. My teaching is infused with the philosophy of self-organisation and relational life. As we find our deepest connection to ourself, others and the lived world we re-pattern our belief systems and invite questions about our role and place in the lived world. The offerings are infused with ethics|aesthetics and the capacity for transformation is cultivated between us all.
Practice
I lie in the quiet darkness and what emerges is:
Beginning my practice is very like tending the fire first thing in the morning when only the embers are there.
I need to blow gently, and place small kindling over the embers. I lie on the floor, breathe and wait. I tune in sometimes eyes closed. Slowly flames begin to lick around the dry wood and my body eases out - softening, extending, opening. It is an intimate process.
On the best days the moving is easy, on the difficult days there is a heavy dull resonance. As the flames catch the heat builds. Slowly my body responds. Layers of resistance shift. I follow the emerging narrative.
My moving generates thinking. It is fluid – a making sense of – a knowing – a being with – enduring.
From the intimacy of the beginning I move into engagement with the space. Gathering momentum and complexity, I move from internal focus to engage with the whole relational field. I am making and being made. Recognition and knowing converge. I am dancing.
I have cultivated this awareness through attunement. It brings tone to my fleshed body and sharpens my perceptions. As I continue to move, pause, listen - the continuous inter-personal narrative opens out into philosophical discourse with the world. Things that are troubling me emerge and direct my focus. Dancing wrestles with these emergent states – problematizing, provoking and sharpening my responses.
Dancing is my engagement, sometimes my answer to the world. It is my politics. Dancing is how I resist dominant narratives. My practice is continuous research – demanding all that I know in every moment so that I might perceive what I don’t yet know in the emergent dance.
Form is created through moving; ideas are realized through moving; questions are raised through moving.
I am enthralled by this process that gets richer every year. The intimacy with myself gives me the courage to be in relationship with the world and others. It sustains me.
I don’t expect answers …
The fire crackles away licking limbs and igniting new imaginings.
September 2016
A Long Walk
Today I walked along Gap Road to the top of the hill. I had no particular intention when I set out, only that it was a glorious day and the blue sky beckoned. It is the first day of Melbourne coming out of lockdown and I feel emotional. It has been such a long hard few months. I have not been in the city but through my friends and students I have gauged the scars of the long hibernating months. Walking felt like the practice I needed today. In walking you see many things that you miss driving past. I am noticing more this year due to the constraints we have all been living with. The rain has also delivered a year of abundant fungi and now wildflowers. The yam daisy is out and the orchids are emerging. The introduced and now wild species are in flower. One I have not noted before is the hawthorn. Along the road I see surprising and beautiful compositions of the flowering hawthorn intermingled with kangaroo apple. Near a neighbour’s there are white and pink hawthorn overlapping and they look glorious. I haven’t noticed them before, but I have not spent an entire year here either – with the seasons flowing one into the next and revealing their delicate secrets. The birds are also abundant as I walk – the grey shriek is particularly noted – a medium sized bird with a song that wakes the heart and the ear. I have walked to the top of the hill where I can see the plains leading to the city of Melbourne in the distance. I realize I wanted to acknowledge and feel part of this first day of Melbourne’s release from lockdown. Along the way I have had conversations … smelt the earth … heard birdsong … seen the black angus cows flicking their tails … despaired at the ugly house recently built at the top of the hill … seen the dump of household rubbish that people think no one will notice … and considered the months that friends, colleagues and students have endured under lockdown during this pandemic. I feel keenly we are living in historic times.
Memory & Spring
Over the past week as I descend the stairs outside to my study or to hang out the washing a distinct aroma greets me. It is the stuff of dreams – a smell that reminds me of my father and spring in Perth. In particular old men with buckets in Hay St Mall, selling it in delicate bunches come September. As the month of my birth, boronia heralds spring in my imagination. Its pungent smell a mix of sharpness and earthiness. Quite distinct – I know no other smell like it. My father loved it and sent me to buy it when the men were selling from their buckets in the city. I knew it grew in the cold wet south, so they must have made the journey with this sole purpose in mind. I am nostalgic remembering this. And now it is growing at the bottom of the stairs under the lemon tree in Riddells Creek. Planted last year and kept alive all summer long, it is flowering abundantly and offering up its unique fragrance. Its botanical name is Boronia megastigma, indigenous to the south-west corner of WA, I associate it with Denmark on the south coast as I know it grows there and is where I lived as a little girl. It has delicate fronds of narrow leaves and its flowers are small pendulous balls - brown with lime-yellow centres, bursting out abundantly along the branches. But its perfume makes it distinctive and unique. If we had a perfumery legacy in Australia this would be the queen of perfumes surely! I am smitten and enthralled to be able to linger, filling my nostrils with its heady fragrance and igniting memory.
the plagued body
Why has a virus brought the planet to a stop? This is the question I have been sitting with. Nothing prior to Coronavirus has been able to do this. Neither mass ecological destruction, with its resultant famine and disease, nor the high number of deaths in wealthy countries from opiates, obesity and alcoholism. Why is this? Is it because it is invisible? Is it because once more we have an ‘enemy’ we can conquer, within the body itself? The body has been so maligned in Western Culture. I would say hated actually – beginning with the Christian Church and continued in western traditional scholarship. Always designated to a lesser place, reduced and minimized in significance. Until we get sick! Until we are afflicted with an illness or a virus! Then the body is sacrosanct. We recognise we cannot live without it. I’m very serious – I think many people would prefer to be a walking head or a talking head. (Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days reflects this wonderful absurdity). People even speak of being betrayed by their bodies, as though their body is a slave in service to the far superior head/brain. This top-down concept of priorities is being truly dislodged in this present moment. We are all in this together. There is something comforting in this that many people feel, including myself. The virus does not differentiate between rich and poor, white or black, man or woman, it attaches where it can, invitation or not. How the disease might play out is however, profoundly effected by wealth distribution.
The Coronavirus confirms we are a social body not an individual mechanical body. We exist in an inter-subjective field – we transmit knowledge this way as well as viruses. We have not extended hospitality to this virus on our terms; it has leapt across all the boundaries, mechanized structures of control and ideas about ourselves as a separate individual body. We are in isolation to minimise the spread from body to body. We cannot make the virus hostage to our will. Currently it is holding us hostage! Our response to the Coronavirus has a history back to the medieval plagues. Isolation is known to curb the curve of infection but what will curb the curve of our insatiable appetite for addictive consumption? In these days and weeks of being at home with much less work and demands it is possible to begin to perceive other ways of living. I hope many people get to like it and recognise they have been conned – by a system that treats them as dispensable objects rather than feeling subjects. That we all need less material goods and far more spatial/temporal realms to explore our originality. We could begin by being inspired by the complexity of the living world that surrounds us in our cities, towns and rural countryside. We might discover a gentleness and love for living that requires so much less than we have been led to believe we need.
Host
When I read that 2019 was the worst year in a century for the environment in Australia I felt stilled. How can this be when so much is known, understood and disseminated? It is horrifying to know that we are committing a form of ecological suicide, that will affect the whole living world – rivers, oceans, plants and animals. As human animals living in our wealthy countries our assumption and consumption has had an unprecedented impact on the life of the planet. We thought we could ‘have it all’. That it was ‘all good’. It is not all good, it is terrifying and we should be terrified. Not just of the Coronavirus but the conditions under which this virus has thrived in finding us as the next host.
If you are to host someone that usually means there has been an invitation extended to a guest or guests. This virus has not been invited but we have given consent, through an insatiable demand for cheap goods, to so much destruction of its normal contained habitat that it has simply leapt across a species gap and found that we humans are a suitable host for it to live and thrive. Is this opportunism or creativity? We might be experiencing it as a destructive force but it is what all life does – finds ways to survive and reproduce. How do we find creative ways to respond to what we perceive is a threat to our existence? What response-ability are we taking? I feel keenly that unless we grasp a more wholistic understanding of what is happening with the manifestation of this virus, then we are not going to be able to imagine a future that is liveable for all life on the planet. If we continue to use and abuse natural resources, peoples, and animals for our own purpose, we will have to live with the painful demise of so much of the living world. We are part of that living world. So our demise as a species is probable. Perhaps it is inevitable.
References for you to understand the complexity of what this virus means for the living world.
Ensia a nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet:
… a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19
https://ensia.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-biodiversity-planetary-health-zoonoses/
and
United Nations Environment Programme:
Regardless of its cause or origin, the emergence of COVID-19 has underscored the mutually-affective relationship between people and nature. Now, we must try to understand and appreciate the limits to which humans can push nature, before the impact is negative. Those limits must be embraced by our consumption and production aspiration.
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/covid-19-and-nature-trade-paradigm
Quiet
I walk down the road – this is such a privilege I recognise in these difficult constrained times. It is an unsealed road with bush one side and a few houses every so often on the other. I am alone and the air is fresh and clean. What is striking is the quiet – very few cars and no aircraft. But it is a deeper silence I sense. The world as we have known it is quiet like on Christmas day or Easter. I speak with a friend in NYC who is holed up in her apartment, grateful for running water, electricity and the internet. I concur with this knowing others do not have these basic necessities that at this time are so critical for our health. As I walk I absorb the quiet into myself. It is a comfort. The noise of consumerism has been relentless. We have not been able to hear the suffering of others or of the living world. The fires are a fading scream. The great engine of consumption roars drowning out any cry or plea to listen. Endless distractions pull and tear at us, the marketing forces grab any opportunity to make you feel your life will be less if you don’t comply with this or that demand. The endless marketing of ourselves through social media is a relentless burden but framed as an imperative. The ‘being positive’ heroic stance so wearying when in fact we need to feel what is going on under all the hubris and fantastical fabrication of our lives.
So I breathe in the quiet and listen to the layers of the world around me. The natural world waits patiently for us to attend. Let’s attend now before it is too late.
Our Suffering Country - Part Four
Environmental Labour & A New Dance
What is uncomfortable and confronting about life is not the solitary experience of one person but frequently the suffering of many. Through the arc of dancing, thinking, writing and conversation I interrogate how I/we need to live differently to survive the time we live in. I want to leave a legacy, which is not separate from how we care for each other, our local environment and the planet. They are intertwined and entangled realities of thought, feeling and lived experience. Is it a new dance? I am asking this through the lens of my practice. This is where my skill lies and my accumulated ‘body of knowledge’. It is not an imperious lofty gesture from the canon of western dance; it is the everyday gesture of my hands reaching to touch you. The potential of which is transformed in the moment of your touch reaching my extended hands. I feel your desire for life in this meeting. Our story is in our hands and our reach from ourselves towards another. There is always demand there in the desire for connection, and perhaps even understanding. Without this we are a blank and no one wants to be met by nothingness. Is this absence then?
Are we absent from our own lives? Is this the clarion call of this historical crisis we are in? In the routine of busy lives filled with what we think is important we rarely make time to feel. My work is an invitation for people to feel their lives. In all their dimensions and complexity. It is courageous work – archaeological, anthropological, philosophical and creative. Beauty is critical to this process. Eros too. Reclaiming the territory of our souls is tilling the ground of our existence and this involves recognition of earth itself. It is an ecological process inseparable from the life of the planet. This is where I begin my environmental labour.
Our Suffering Country: Part Three
Keeping the Peace
I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’, either in my work or in my everyday living. I have lived long enough to know there is always a price for remaining silent. I want to explore the dark even terrifying territory of our lives with imagination, candour and feeling. In plummeting the depths of feeling, we may find ourselves. I cannot begin my relationship with the living planet if I don’t have a relationship to myself. It is an oxymoron. Once we find trust in our bodily knowing there is a realm of knowledge that reveals itself to us. In learning to perceive we learn to perceive others and the living world.
I tried to ‘keep the peace’ for many years. First, as a girl child, then as a young wife. One day I woke up. Prince Charming did not kiss my lips. Prince Charming kept me sleeping, tiptoeing around me, to hold me ‘in place’, to maintain his hold, his position ‘in place’. No, it was a woman who woke me. Germaine’s words crept into my imagination and would not go away. They were uncomfortable. Waking up was painful. Dreaming is much nicer. It was as if the words etched into my brain began to fragment. New meanings were being revealed. I began to feel conned. I had been conned. And I didn’t like it. I felt the world of my construction turn on its axis and reveal another narrative, one that resonated with my experience. And I was complicit in this construction through an enculturated process of denial. I had not read Virginia Woolf. From this time I have not ‘kept the peace’. It is my role to provoke and question the roles we assign ourselves. Are they ours or have they been insidiously impressed upon us by repressive histories of thought, fear of difference and complexity?
I repeat I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’. I want to speak, write and dance what is disquietening, disturbing and unpalatable. My work provokes self-reflection and engagement with one’s life. I don’t set out to provoke. It is in my nature as they say. It is in the fibre of my body, which is filled with my lived life.
Keeping the peace is compliancy and compromise.
Our Suffering Country: Part Two
Our Libidinous Life Force
I am very worried at our being distracted from what is painfully imminent. We distract ourselves with the urgent immediacy of jobs, Xmas, endless coffee, Facebook and Instagram, and shopping to the sound of muzak. This latter is no small thing. It’s a numbing of our senses, a repressing of our libidinous life force. We do not think, we do not have to think about what we need, we are compelled to buy with no satisfaction guaranteed. We always need more - of every thing. We succumb to entertainment through all forms of media. We imbibe prejudice, hatred and ignorance at every utterance laced through the community via all forms of media. We succumb to the seduction of a ‘simple life’, when no life is simple.
Have we allowed our libido to be stolen? In the long cultural process of domesticating us have we sacrificed desire for life? We are, paradoxically, living more safely, yet more dangerously teetering on the edge of existence? In relinquishing desire have we accepted safety and certainty? When in fact there is no certainty and in embracing this dynamic realisation we invite complexity and the retrieval of a passionately lived life. With this more tenuous reality we may just begin to feel alive. Complexity is what made us and complexity offers us daily, the opportunity to transform, reconfigure and renew our ways of living and loving.
There is communion between the breath of the day and the space of the body.
Our Suffering Country: Part One
I am sitting in bed writing; it is both a place of comfort and rest – a retreat from the world for a while. For the last 5 days we have been on high alert as this part of Australia burns. We have spoken of almost nothing else. We check our emergency App frequently and respond to every beep alerting us to nearby fires. Everything that has been created here in the valley at Riddells Creek could be lost if one of these fires comes this way. Or it may come later this summer or next year. It is in some ways inevitable. We live with bush across the road. The birds, animals and insects will suffer. We will all suffer. Australia is suffering. I cannot write of anything else and when I receive emails that let me know of events happening in the city I feel irritated. How banal, I want to ask them: ‘Who is your audience at these times’? We are in critical need of conversation and transformation. I know that the practice I offer supports this.
I wrote this on Sunday 8 December 2019 before the fires began in Victoria and NSW:
Living on the edge of a city in a place filled with bird life it is extraordinarily difficult and simultaneously painful to imagine what lurks surely close by as summer approaches and the world around us becomes drier and more flammable. It is a knives edge where the reality of the present sits in uneasy expectation of the future. The becalm is illusory and all those around me talk incessantly of the looming disaster and impending tragedy. Yet, I am tenderly touched by the beauty of everyday life here in the valley. The birds wake me, the sun comes up faithfully illuminating the colour of the leaves in their extravagant diverse greenery and I make tea in the sublime hope that today will be a ‘good day’ filled with human endeavour, kindness and satisfying conversation. I am hopeful for the day, for the planet, for our humanity. But I am very worried at our being distracted from what is painfully imminent. To overlook the state of the earth is suicide. It is so difficult to feel this crisis when the day by day evidence of life is strong. But it lurks all around us. In a city close to us there is fire and a sky full of smoke. How long until it reaches my world?