Resilience in Transition
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My Personal Transition: Through the Covid Looking Glass

17/4/2022

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As a nerdy high school student, I was tickled pink to be selected to attend physics Professor Harry Messel’s International Science School at Sydney University. It was a huge adventure. My family billeted an international scholar called Lesley, who was a bit older than me, from Salt Lake City, Utah, and together we took the train daily for two weeks to listen to lectures from famous scientists. Every year the Science School had a different theme. I had religiously listened to the one the year before on TV, on the subject of subatomic particles. But in my year, the subject was “Brain Mechanisms and the Control of Behaviour”. The theme music which began every day and featured in the ABC broadcasts was the soundtrack from Stanley Kubric’s “A Clockwork Orange”. (I didn’t appreciate how weird that was until much later, when I saw the movie.)

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This experience helped me decide between multiple paths I could have taken in transitioning from high school to university. I sought out a double major in Biology and Psychology, focusing heavily on physiological psychology, animal behavior and genetics. Like a true reductionist, I wanted to understand human behavior by studying the nuts and bolts of the human brain, neurotransmitters, pathways and the genes that underpinned neurodevelopment. Interestingly, my US friend Lesley became a medical psychiatrist.

In my early twenties, I discovered BF Skinner’s book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”. As I was trying to teach myself to type on my new typewriter (yes, they had them in those days), I decided to type out excerpts from Skinner’s book for practice. I still have them somewhere in my memorabilia after forty five years. Skinner’s behaviourism and his Skinner boxes (used to demonstrate operant conditioning in rats) had featured in Messel’s Science School, so this book furthered my interest in becoming a brain scientist. For my Honours degree, I studied neurons in cell culture and their membrane glycoproteins. My PhD journeyed even deeper into the reductionistic tunnels, studying the epigenetic regulatory proteins which turn genes on and off.



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However, something was happening in parallel to subtly subvert all of that: while working in the biology lab, I met a lab technician called John who meditated. My curiosity was aroused to study the brain correlates of this practice, but the wise meditation teacher told me “if you want to study meditation, you will have to DO it”. So I did, it blew my little mind, and one thing led to another and I found myself doing “self transformation” workshops and courses, and then trainings in neo-Reichian body-oriented psychotherapy.

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Thus, while my day job was tutoring genetics and doing my PhD in a biological sciences lab, my weekends were spent doing group psychotherapy, breath and body work, “releasing” my childhood traumas, coming out of my schizoid defence of living in my head to avoid feelings, and beginning to see human dysfunctionality from a whole new perspective - the experiential, “subjective” inside, rather than the “objective” outside.

A double life indeed. I began to realize that the reductionistic tunnels from behavior to brain to neurons to neurotransmitters to genes, were leading me further and further from the questions about human behaviour that I started with. I was also starting to feel a bit like a lab rat myself, anticipating the academic bar-pressing aka publishing, applying for grants and endless boring committees; I also could no longer bear killing or otherwise torturing animals to get my answers, or breathing in toxic lab fumes and using radioactive chemical tracers. Down the microscope I intuited a vague warning: Go Back, You Are Going The Wrong Way.

The tension between my two lives finally led me, at the end of my PhD rite of passage, to abort my lab scientist trajectory altogether; I won a Fellowship and flew off to the USA on an adventure into somatics and expressive arts therapy, then ecopsychology, deep ecology and music therapy. I found in these “holistic” disciplines, the artistic and academic freedom to explore my embodied human mind, creatively and even spiritually. While in the US, I visited my childhood friend Lesley, but sadly by that time my “fringe” fields were not compatible with her still pharmaceutically-based model of psychiatry.

I subsequently found, in my collection of left and right-brain resources, plenty to keep me and my students amused and self-actualising during my various forms of teaching over the next twenty years. Eventually, when I found myself “retired” from my academic position, I became a climate activist, as you do, when you realize that there’s a big problem.



And then came Covid-19.

At first, I was frightened and obedient. I became a footsoldier for the government Narrative, my biological reductionistic finger pointing to the “Science” if I happened across friends on Facebook who were questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and masks.

And then, in 2021, with the deaths of women my age after the injections, the censorship, the lies about “horse pills” and the coercion to get “the jabs”, I found myself defined by a new DSM-like-diagnosis: “vaccine hesitancy”. I stopped trusting the mainstream media. I went looking for explanations of what on earth was going on…

My world inverted.

I had stepped through the looking glass into an Orwellian dystopia. Some of my climate change friends tried to “rescue” me from “disinformation” or “PTSD”. But I saw that they were simply backing the BigPharma Science Dogma, not the actual data or observations of coal-face doctors whom I found to be congruent and trustworthy.

I wrote to the media, to my trusted politicians in the Greens, to other NGOs that I thought would defend bodily autonomy and reject mandated injections. Silence. I began to find that the only politicians speaking out against medical aggression and injustice were from the “wrong” side of the culture war I had religiously observed. I implored my Greens to transcend the culture war and stand by these politicians to save lives that were being lost to lack of early treatment. Silence. Betrayal.

I began to observe that my friends also became silent. Some were firmly entrenched in the Narrative, some smelled a rat but just didn’t want to know, or couldn’t cope; others seemed able to listen to my alternative viewpoint but were not really that interested, or agnostic; yet others sometimes would “like” my FB posts, but never comment (were they humoring me or were they genuinely afraid of Big Brother-Tech?); thankfully, a few friends were “on the same page”, searching and sense-making, and we would comment and discuss theories about what was going down. I began to make new likeminded FB friends, and gradually found a complex rabbit warren filled with the interviews, discussions, writings, and debates of people around the world who were searching for the big picture behind this new dystopia.

The word “freedom” was prominent among those resisting the Narrative. I followed with joyful spirit the Canadian truckers, the New Zealand and Australian convoys, the US Freedom Convoy; and I was dismayed by the awful way these anti-mandate protestors were vilified and ignored by governments, media, and the compliant citizenry. The rabbit warren, at first medical-centred, branched out into abuse and trauma psychology, alternative media, writers, politicians, and lawyers.

At some point I stumbled across Yuval Noah Harare’s talk for the WEF, and the transhumanist plan to use biometric sensors to hack the human body and take over evolutionary biology.

And I realised I have come full circle. Back to Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Brain Mechanisms and the Control of Behaviour, A Clockwork Orange, in a new, transhumanist technocratic incarnation. The view of the human as nothing more than the nuts and bolts of biochemistry and scientific reductionism. Humans as Nudge-able animals to government-approved behaviours, digitally controlled and surveilled, and even genetically modifiable. But what sort of monsters would perpetrate a global medical coup?

It was then that I performed a little thought experiment…


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What if…

I was born into upper class privileged elite in which lower classes were thought of as lesser beings, even referred to by my school friends as “cattle”. I found myself in a position of immense power and financial control and saw that the planetary ecosystem was headed for disaster. I attributed that problem to the growth in world population and the genetic disease burden that had been allowed to accumulate in the human gene pool. I had become a philanthropist and already put in place a vast network of global vaccination and birth control to reduce population growth. I was well aware that the financial system of the world had only years before complete collapse. There were also viruses being genetically engineered in bioweapons programs all over the world that could specifically target certain ethnic groups. My network of elites had long been attempting and refining plans involving eugenics to save the world from foreseen chaos and install a global government. New types of vaccine-gene therapies were being developed that could target the elderly, those with co-morbidities, and those with genetic defects, ostensibly for medical therapies, but these were the people who in my eyes were placing a huge burden on the human population. Such gene-based vaccines housed in lipid nanoparticles could also specifically target reproductive organs to reduce fertility in younger people. A global pandemic preparedness plan operating through WHO control of sovereign governments had been put into place in case of such emergencies.

What if…

One of the bioweapons laboratories “accidentally?” leaked a coronavirus containing a bioweapon peptide. My elite network “seized the opportunity” to roll out their plan for a “great reset” of the global healthcare and financial systems. A “diagnostic test”, never before used for such purposes, that could be ramped up to generate millions of false positives, was immediately rolled out globally to generate panic and lockdowns. Any nuisance doctors or scientists who spoke out or developed treatments for this bioweapon-virus would need to be silenced and discredited by the media, which was already easy to get onboard due to global ownership. The gene-based vaccines were rolled out globally amidst psy-op campaigns, well-practiced by governments, through the legacy media to ensure compliance in the name of “the greater good”. Doctors were targeted by their authorities to stay in line with WHO and health authority protocols. Any people who died or were injured by vaccines were quickly mopped up by changing safety monitoring definitions, statistics and gas-lighting the survivors as hypochondriacs or anti-vaxxers. Those who displayed reluctance to be injected were labeled as “vaccine hesitant” (a new diagnosable illness), “selfish” “narcissists”, and if they protested being coerced through mandated job loss, were vilified as “right-wing-anti-vaxxers”. The public was inoculated against those who were figuring out the eugenic plan by using the term “conspiracy theorist”, a historically proven technique to “other” any opposition to totalitarianism. I had some faint glimmers of guilt when the bioweapons “accidentally” killed children, but there is always collateral damage in any war. The ends justify the means…





A thought experiment, or horrible dawning realization, having entered a looking-glass view of the world I thought I knew?

Powerful forces are now vying for control of this new world of biomedical data; they believe the masses will give up their bodily autonomy in exchange for promises of health, and amazingly, with plenty of psychological terror campaigns and messages of “for the greater good” from nudge units and their media, they have succeeded in double or triple jabbing a majority of us, and are continuing for the fourth, then the flu shot and so on…and of course, the digital ID passports.

Strangely, I’m aware that the new order media have not only made “freedom” a dirty word, associated with “right-wing-anti-vaxxers”, but the authoritarian governments are now also hijacking the word “resilience”, which, rumour goes, will be associated with “good cop” assistance to those made homeless by weird weather (are they “nudging” along climate change, with geo-engineered local weather, as well as people? Given the last two years, it would not surprise me). And what of the resistance? “Come and stay in our resilience camps…”  No, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, could they?


How ironic that I named my website “Resilience in Transition”! Little did I know what could unfold…

Time will tell whether this evolves into a benevolent dictatorship-cloaked-as-democracy or a nightmarish surveillance and culling of those inconvenient folks who still believe the “misinformation” that there is such a thing as human “freedom”.

I certainly hope my little thought experiment is a dystopian fiction. But if it’s not, don’t worry, the thought police will soon take it down.

May the Force be with you.



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A Spontaneous Story that Lightened my Covid Darkness

2/11/2021

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“In their tent under the jacaranda, they hatched a plan…”


I heard this phrase, or something like it, a few times on Radio National advertising, and somehow it stuck. It came to revisit me in the wee hours of last night, and the following story came “from out of the Blue”…

“In their tent under the jacaranda, they hatched a plan…”

The next day, Lucas and his little sister Maisie waved goodbye as usual to their mum after she dropped them off at the school gate. They waited until she had driven off before surreptitiously making their way back through the neighbourhood and home again. There was no time to waste: the plan had to be carried out today, while their parents were both at work, allowing enough time to get back to the school gate that afternoon.

Soon, satisfied with the actor’s makeup job they had done, Lucas left the house again and waved to his sister standing at the front window and mouthing “good luck!” and a thumbs up. It wasn’t far to their family doctor’s surgery, and although he didn’t have an appointment, Lucas’ acting skills ensured he was squeezed in to see Dr Campbell by the sympathetic receptionist.

“Whew!” thought Lucas, “that’s the first stage of the plan got through”. He scratched and writhed in the waiting room, so realistically that other patients made sure they gave him a wide berth.

Finally, he was called in by Dr Campbell and ushered to sit on the chair across from the doctor’s desk.

“What can I do for you, young Lucas? It’s unusual for you to come without your mum today, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes, Mum was going to come too but something urgent came up at work and so she dropped me off here and will pick me up when I call her,” said Lucas, convincingly.

“So, I can see you’re in a lot of discomfort with that rash of yours. Let me take a good look at it,” said Dr Campbell in his friendly parental tone of voice. Lucas crossed his fingers that the research he’d done on the internet had been sufficient.

“Hmmm, I’ve not seen anything quite like THIS before,” said Dr Campbell. “You’re a bit of a mystery today, Lucas. What do YOU think you have here?”

“Well,” said Lucas in a thoughtful voice, “I did do some looking up on the internet this morning to see if I could figure that out myself, and I THINK I might have “scabbies”?” Lucas deliberately mispronounced the word in a childish way.

“Oh, you mean “scabies”, yes, the marks on your head and neck do seem a bit LIKE scabies…” Dr Campbell intoned wisely. “Now tell me, Lucas, how are the rest of your family at the moment?”

“Well,” answered Lucas cautiously, “my sister Maisie seems to be scratching more than usual, but so far my parents seem OK. Maybe I got it at school?”

“Perhaps, perhaps…and tell me, how’s your grand-dad?”

At this point, Lucas didn’t quite know how to field this unexpected question. His words gushed out before he could think too much because he was holding in so much emotion. “Unfortunately, Grand-dad has just received the news that his Covid test came back positive. He has been told there is no treatment and to stay home and isolate and a community nurse will check on him and see if he will need to be hospitalized. It’s awful, we’re really scared for him. Mum and Dad are putting on a brave face, but Maisie and I have been reading a lot on the internet and we are really, really scared to lose him.”

“I see…” said Dr Campbell. Well, that’s enough stress to make you HIGHLY SUSCEPTIBLE to scabies, I should think. I’d better write a script for you immediately so you can go to Mrs Laurie and get some medicine for your…for yourself. Now try not to scratch that RASH too much, Lucas, will you?”

And with that, Lucas was given his precious prescription, ushered out, waived on by the receptionist after a signal from Dr Campbell at his door, as he called the next patient in to his office.

“Wow!” thought Lucas, “my acting and makeup must have been better than I thought, that was SO easy!”

Mrs Laurie the pharmacist’s shop was only a block away. When Lucas got there, Mrs Laurie was just finishing a conversation on the phone. She looked up and waived him in. Fortunately it was not a busy time and she took Dr Campbell’s prescription from Lucas’ hand, while looking at his rash, smiled and said “Won’t be long, Lucas, I’ll have that filled in five minutes. You can sit on that chair or browse if you like.”

“Last phase of the plan…going well…” thought Lucas nervously. Five minutes went slowly, but then there was Mrs Laurie in front of him, handing him a packet and saying “Don’t worry about payment, I’ll fix it up with your mum next time she comes in.”

Lucas was ecstatic as he ran home to Maisie, who squealed with delight when she saw the plan had been successful. No time to lose, they raced off to Grand-dad’s flat a block away and left the package at his front door. Then they went home and rang him. He didn’t sound too bad, it having been only two days since he got the first symptoms, just sounded like a bit of a cold.

Lucas said, excitedly, “Grand-dad, we found you a medicine to take for your Covid. It’s called i-v-e-r-m-e-c-t-i-n, and Dr Campbell prescribed it and Mrs Laurie said to take two tablets now, and then again every second day for two weeks.”

Their grandfather was gobsmacked. He’d been trying in vain to get hold of some of this drug, but the Australian TGA had forbidden GP’s to prescribe it off-label for Covid, and pharmacists had been forbidden to dispense it anyway even with such a script. He held on to the phone while he opened the front door, brought in the package and opened it. “You beauty, kids! Don’t know how you pulled that off, but you’re life savers! I didn’t like my chances, but now I’m going to lick this thing.”

The children were so elated they almost floated back to the school gate in time for their mum’s pickup. “And what did you do at school today?” she asked. “Oh, not much,” they chimed, “it was a boring day.”

And that was how the plan that they hatched in the tent under the jacaranda came to bear fruit. And the surprising thing is that word got around, and so did an unusual amount of contagious scabies which tore through the schools, enabling a whole swathe of GP’s, who had been beside themselves with frustration, to prescribe treatments for these itching, scratching children so that they too could save their grandparents from the TGA.

When the rates of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid suddenly turned the corner, it was attributed to the successful vaccination campaign. The politicians patted themselves on the back, the media applauded them, and the TGA smirked in satisfaction. The Big Pharma companies made a mozza and everyone was happy. It was only the epidemiologists who looked at each other, did the calculations, and shook their heads. Something didn’t match up with the predictions, something else was going on…but what? In the end they gave up wondering and just smiled sheepishly.

And it was only much later that Lucas realized that Dr Campbell and Mrs Laurie were a lot smarter and wiser than he had realized at the time, which was lucky, don’t you think?



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Coming Out as a Cynical Activist

19/8/2021

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(an article originally published in 1/6/15 on the Climate Wellbeing Network website: http://climatewellbeingnetwork.weebly.com)


I have a "Planet Rescue" notebook made from recycled paper, which I bought to record my notes from a training course with activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy at Tyalgum Tops in the 90s. As part of the training we were asked to make a mask representing the parts of ourselves that we were ready to let go of, for the sake of the Earth. After I had made it, I drew a small picture of my mask in my notebook. I named it "My Cynical Despondency"



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We burned our masks in a ritual fire that night. But, (perhaps because I still have my drawing?), I have not yet given up my cynical despondency.

Every time I see, on the nightly news, or in my Facebook feed, some new example of the horrors perpetrated by my own species on other humans, animals, ecosystems...my cynical despondency rises again, or rather sinks to a new low. Considering how dysfunctional we are, might it not be better that we do carry on with business as usual until climate change wipes us off the planet so she can start again?

During one of these bouts, brought on by some awful example of animal cruelty for the sake of making money, I drew this cartoon:


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I didn't show anyone my cartoon, however, because, well, it's too negative! How could I be a climate change activist and secretly feel that the planet would be better off once it sneezes us off? I closed up my cartoon folder and got on with my attempts to "save the Earth"...But I did Google "does homo sapiens deserve to live?" And amazingly I found a lot of people who say "No!"

Recently, listening to a series of seminars called " The Future is Calling Us To Greatness", I was perturbed to discover a lady who is doing "palliative care for the Earth". There are a lot of people now who believe that it's already too late, that we are about to see the end of life on this planet due to runaway climate change. Perhaps we should all just be trying to enjoy each moment we, and life on Earth, have left, in the manner of someone with terminal cancer?

I am repelled by this idea. I don't want to give up the fight and do palliative care! I want those f***ers to put a price on carbon, stop subsidizing fossil fuels, transition to a green economy; I want global justice for all humans and non-humans. Yet the cynically despondent part of me wishes for the end of my species. It lies submerged under lots of do-do-doing, until the next wave of despair hits and I wonder why I'm even bothering.

But do I have to stomp my cynical despondency back into its box? What if I were to let it see the light of day, tell my closest friends, even share it in a blog? What if I could "come out" to my cynical despondency, hold it in one hand, and in the other hand hold my love for this blue jewel planet and all its wonderful, precious inhabitants, even its dysfunctional pathetic humans, us, me? So that I can keep going, keep moving towards the world I want to live in, no matter how dysfunctional we are at this moment in our history, and no matter how unlikely it seems that we're going to pull out of this nose-dive?

Is that, perhaps, what Joanna means by "Active Hope"*? I think my goosebumps are saying "yes!"


* Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone.



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Expressing urgency without alienating: sharing our climate stories

18/8/2021

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(originally published on Climate Wellbeing Network website on 20/11/15, now http://climatewellbeingnetwork.weebly.com)

“I’m an activist first and a therapist second”, I heard myself saying to Sally with surprising clarity and quite a charge. We had been discussing how to structure a short “self-sustainability” session for staff in a government environmental department as part of “mental health month”. The theme I had proposed for this session was: How do we take care of ourselves as we face the global challenge of climate change? Sally was suggesting that perhaps beginning with workplace issues and then broadening the discussion to more global issues would be wise? Some of them might not even have thought about climate change?

I found myself reacting quite strongly to this suggestion. I had spent most of my career teaching and supporting people, with body-oriented and arts-based approaches, to take care of themselves in difficult life and work situations; but now the spectre of climate change and its implications for life on earth loomed large for me, overshadowing other self-care issues. “If they haven’t yet thought about climate change, maybe it’s about time they did!” I blurted.

Reflecting on these statements of mine later, I am reminded of Jungian psychotherapist James Hillman’s work, with which I resonate. For Hillman, modern psychotherapy needs to be situated in a larger context, the context of our currently dysfunctional relationship with the ecological world. In the 90’s I had enjoyed the conversational book he and Ventura had written, We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy - and the world’s getting worse, which explored the idea of the therapy room as a place to support people’s expression of their discomfort with the status quo and the arising impulses toward social change activism - “awakening civil courage” - rather than pathologizing and ameliorating these as unhealed personal past trauma.

I’ve never been able to stomach the idea of being paid to do corporate “personal growth/team building” sessions whose purpose is to make workers more efficient and happy while their corporations are busy adding to the global capitalist growth enterprise that is rapidly extracting, exploiting and decimating the planet. So I guess that’s what I meant by being an activist first, therapist second.

My urgency voice is stroppily saying: At this late stage of my working life, I don’t want to “pussy-foot” around putting people’s comfortableness before the life-death challenge of climate change. It’s clear to me that socially sanctioned climate change ignorance/denial is not bliss, but a ticket to oblivion for human civilization as we know it and most of our fellow species.

However, then I am faced with the “yes, but…” that George Marshall has so eloquently described in his book Don’t even thing about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. I realise that Sally was right in being cautious, not only for considering client wellbeing, but even in terms of supporting mobilization: confronting people with the facts has been tried by scientists and activists for many years, and instead of mobilization it has resulted in a backlash response. Clive Hamilton refers to as “sinister” the recent labelling of non-violent and legal activists, by Australian Senator Brandis and others in our climate-recalcitrant government, as “eco-terrorists”, “sociopaths”, “climate catastrophists” and “bullies” who practice “vigilante litigation / lawfare” in order to prevent new massive coal mine developments or coal-seam-gas expansion. Hamilton says these words reveal a deep loathing for environmentalists. Such a loathing presumably springs from the defence of a world-view, and a beloved business-as-usual scenario that is now on increasingly shaky ground.

So how do I honour my feeling of urgency without alienating those who might not yet have dared to come face to face with climate change? How do I find a middle ground: facilitating a movement forward toward engaged citizenship rather than either fostering “comfortable numbness” or feeding a reactionary loathing for “greenies”?

Does one answer lie in sharing stories? When I think about the most memorable aspects of recent talks I’ve attended by inspiring social change agents, what stays with me are their stories. Christopher Wright, co-author of Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: processes of creative self-destruction, has collected and analyzed many climate change narratives from corporate environmentalists; at a recent Living in the Anthropocene meetup in Sydney, he described how his own “climate aha” epiphany actually came after meeting an Al Gore Climate Reality presenter. Scott Ludlam, WA Greens Senator took what he described as “a risk” at a Festival of Democracy session to tell us a personal story: his mind-expanding experience when he, as a young white city-raised environmentalist, was first exposed to the indigenous perspective on uranium mining on their country. At the same session, Julian Assange spoke to us, via Skype from his prolonged confinement, with some humour about how he draws some optimism from the bungling incompetency of the bureaucratic surveillance machine.

The questions so often asked during Q&A sessions after such presentations are: How did you first become involved…? and How do you keep going in the face of…? We want to know the human story behind the scientific facts and the moral imperative.

Because it is the human stories that contain the seeds of empathy, resonance, that can awaken in us, and make it safe to feel, the enormity of this challenge – because others have trodden that path and survived. Thus perhaps it is by sharing our own climate change stories that we can find that delicate middle way toward a movement that can transition us into a liveable world…



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Climate Change: Going deeper than ecology

18/8/2021

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(first published in 3/2/15 on the Climate Wellbeing Network website, now:
http://climatewellbeingnetwork.weebly.com)


Picture this scene: a small group of people wearing decorative masks are seated on the ground in a circle in silence. A closer look reveals some masks that resemble animals such as possums and bears, some birds, insects, some that look like trees which are adorned with twigs and leaves, and still others that appear to be landscapes, mountains, rivers and clouds.

The "bear" begins to speak. "Welcome, Beings, to our Council. We are here to discuss the gravest of challenges facing us. We are here to listen to one another. Each of us will have the opportunity to speak and be heard. I ask you not to interrupt one another with advice or suggestions, but if so moved, to utter "I hear you" or other words of support. When all have spoken we will open ourselves to receiving and sharing any wisdom that may come to us about how to deal with our challenges...."

Wind back the clock...

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A day before, these people had come to a Council of All Beings workshop. They were people with one thing in common: they were concerned about the changes that human beings are making to the Earth's ecosystems and climate. They had come together from all over Sydney. Some were already friends, others were strangers.

As the first day proceeded, they had engaged in playful experiential processes to get to know one another, settle into their breathing and their bodily sensing. They had used their imaginations to connect with the movements of their ancestors, the primates, mammals, even lizards and fish. This was called "Evolutionary Remembering".

They had shared with one another the feelings that they had brought with them, now safe to emerge, of sadness, anger, fear or emptiness. They had been gently guided into experiencing the gift which may be found under such feelings. Gifts that empower.

Then they had spent some time in the bush, finding a natural "ally" there, a Being that might have something to say...And they came back to the group with ideas and decorations with which to create their ally's mask. The mask that they would ritually put on the next day...


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Climate Change Facts - Climate Change Feelings

How does a Deep Ecology workshop such as a Council of All Beings contribute to our engagement with climate change?

The more facts we learn about climate change and its potential consequences, the more likely we are to go into defensive, self-protective responses such as denial, or paralysing responses of despair and giving up. If we avoid these extremes we might find ourselves getting REALLY ACTIVE to the extent that we eventually burn ourselves out!

Deep Ecology goes behind, underneath, the facts, into the psychological and spiritual dimensions of our relationship with other life on this planet-home of ours. It helps us to refind, and really experience, our ecological self: how we are actually part of an evolutionary process, how we are embedded in our ecosystems. We get a glimpse of what it could be like for our fellow Beings on the planet.

Such a workshop also facilitates our coming together to share the 'inconvenient' feelings that are not safe or appropriate to express in everyday conversations with family or friends. And through that shared bravery, we find colleagues with which we can 'go forth' as a movement.

Beyond the scientific facts of climate change are our human choices on how to respond. Participating in a Deep Ecology community gives us the resources to turn our deep caring into sustainable action.



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The Thievery

15/12/2019

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A week or two before we came up to Wamberal to reconnect with our newly inherited cottage by the sea, we participated in a workshop run by the North Sydney council on Australian Brush Turkeys. These birds have, over the last decades, reinhabited the areas of NSW they had disappeared from due to foxes and other feral predators. Although many people in Sydney and the Central Coast are now frustrated by their neighbourhood brush turkeys because of their instinctive raking and mound building behaviours, the workshop focused on their interesting biology and life cycle. We even borrowed a little book by the workshop leader, Ann Göth, to follow up.

We had not an inkling that we were about to discover our “own” resident brush turkey with its large mound underneath the huge hibiscus in our new back yard. We “named” him BT, or Bertie, and I was pleasantly reminded of my dad, Albert, who enjoying playing with the baby magpies in this same back yard when I was a child.

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Over the last year we have been both fascinated to watch BT from our back porch, and frustrated by his destructive raking bare of the grass in the yard. There seems to be an extended brush turkey family roosting in the trees in the neighbouring property behind ours. When our landscaper dismantled BTs mound, (and heavily pruned the overarching hibiscus (!!) - the subject of my last blog), I felt the loss but appreciated the inevitability of reclaiming our back yard jungle. My partner Alex was pleased with this increased spaciousness because it offered us potential for our new garden, but I noticed pangs of guilt when observing BT continue to try to rake leaves despite nowhere to put them. Lately, it seems that he managed to build up a mound just over our back fence.

Then, a few days ago, I learned from Alex that our next door neighbours, whose back garden BT had apparently destroyed with his raking, had trapped him and “relocated” him two hours drive away. I was horrified! I am still grieving. I cannot imagine how people can be so unempathetic that they could take BT out of his family group, far away from his landscape and abandon him in a place he has no familiarity with, no knowledge of local resources of water, food, or predators and other dangers like traffic. I am so, so sad that “my” BT, who was almost a “pet”, has been kidnapped without any word to me, his fate just communicated to my partner as an aside during an across-the-fence conversation.

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Over the days, my grief has deepened and broadened, causing me to contemplate all the animals which have similarly been stolen from their family groups, by poachers, for zoos, or as a result of the destruction and theft of their habitat.

And of course in the human world, the barbaric practice of stealing indigenous children from their parents “for their own good” still continues, as well as the theft of land and cultural appropriation.

I wonder about the big picture. The failure to empathise with beings other than one’s immediate group seems to be common across social animals such as chimps and humans. “Us” and “them” is perhaps a natural response to resource scarcity and selfish genes. Evolutionary advantages in sharing and caring are inversely proportional to genetic relatedness. So why am I so surprised at my neighbours’ treatment of brush turkeys, which are after all a species more closely related to poultry, (considered “food”), than to us “intelligent” humans?

Are we just obeying the imperatives of the evolutionary process when we steal, plunder, take whatever we want from the environment? After all, predators would not ask us before munching on our limbs for their lunch. “Theft” is built in to the cycles of eating and decaying – everything takes what it needs without compunction. The emergence of empathy for other species seems to be a developmental and cultural latecomer – we have not even been able to be kind to all other humans yet, so maybe I am asking too much of our species to expect universal ecological identity? The mess we have created of our world speaks volumes. We are currently still hell-bent on stealing the future from our children and the entire biosphere. Unless we learn empathy rapidly our fate looks bleak.

Poor BT has been taken to a fate I will never know. Maybe he has already died of thirst or hunger, or been run over by a car as he tried to come back to his birthplace – a thousand imagined horrors are possible. Or maybe this is his new adventure – maybe he, as a “foreigner” will attract lots more females, maybe he will continue to father baby BTs in his strange new land for some time…

I do miss him. But one of his relatives seems to have already filled the vacuum in our back yard that his kidnapping left. Or maybe…just maybe...they got the wrong BT?



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A Pruning Lesson

23/8/2019

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Although at times in my life I have actively sought a “tree-change”, mostly I find myself extremely reluctant to let go of things-the-way-they-are. This tendency manifests in many forms: my long hair, my collections of memorabilia, even never being the one to break off relationships or leave jobs.

As a gardener, I am a very reluctant pruner. I recall getting very upset over my Dad’s proclivity to prune-with-gusto in our family garden. A landlord that pruned “my” garden severely without notice also sent me into a rage.

Although we have rarely had a garden of our own, my partner Alex has had to curb his pruning too. During the years of managing my mum’s rental cottage (formerly our family-and-friends holiday cottage) on the central coast, we planted a lot of little native Australian bushes. But due to both distance and my reluctance to prune, these grew over twenty years into much larger bushes than indicated on the tag. And despite our bias toward Australian natives, some non-native hibiscuses that date from the 1960s were allowed to remain on the property due to my attachment to “the old days” of my childhood holidays up there. One of these hibiscuses, in the neglected back yard, had sent branches far and wide, oft covered in morning glory creeper, and more recently forming a haven for a brush turkey’s mound.

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Then with my mum’s passing, we found ourselves the new owners of this wild backyard, and Alex began a project to wrestle it back from the weeds and the brush turkey. The latter had so scratched off the ground cover that storms were washing our topsoil into our neighbour’s yard!

Alex engaged his horticulture course friend Rowan to landscape one of the back corners of the garden, and work had been underway for a couple of days when we arrived at the property. We were surprised to find the brush turkey mound material already relocated completely to the back corner behind some new gabions forming a low wall. I was relieved that Alex wouldn’t have to do this mound relocation after all, since we had been told that the mounds often harbour wildlife such as deadly funnelweb spiders and snakes!


The hibiscus was still overhanging the site with its long arching branches. Over lunch Alex mentioned that Rowan was asking about pruning the hibiscus. I replied that Alex should make sure that I was consulted about any pruning. We went shopping.

On our return Rowan was just leaving for the day. Alex went into the back yard to see how the work was progressing with the gabion wall. He came back and suggested I come and see, and I got my camera to continue my documentation of the progress. As I approached I noticed a lot more space in the back yard. Suddenly it hit me – the hibiscus was GONE!!! It had been pruned back to several stumps. Devastated is too weak a word. It was too horrible to bear. I turned and went back into the house. I lay on the couch in shock.

When Alex came into the house he knew how upset I was. He said he didn’t know Rowan was thinking about pruning that day, so he hadn’t made a point of communicating my wishes before we left to shop. It was all a terrible misunderstanding. I told him he could have the back yard, that I no longer wanted any part of it. He retreated into a self protective shell.

Tormented by grief, I returned to the back yard with my camera to take a photo of what was left of my hibiscus. Hardly anything. It was then that I made the macabre discovery of the stack of hibiscus branches on the other side of the back yard. It was an enormous pile of beautiful green leafy hibiscus branches, and the sight of it made me weep out loud.


In my tormented state I started dragging each branch onto the grass around the washing line. Branch after huge branch. My beautiful, wild, overgrown, messy hibiscus! It had known my father’s hands, and had become so old and unpruned that it had found an architecture like a magic cave, which the brush turkey had occupied. It was a piece of history of this place; it KNEW that backyard like no one else; had watched years of brush turkey chicks hatch, sheltering the mound so it could be maintained at just the right temperature. I felt that I had lost a friend. I felt I had to say goodbye, how SORRY I was that I failed to protect it. I didn’t KNOW. I blamed Alex; I blamed myself. If I had known it was in danger, I would have stopped the pruning. I could have decided which of the branches to prune and which to leave as magical green archways.

My neighbor Max must have heard my unbridled sobs as I dragged the branches around, and, looking over the fence, he asked me what was wrong. I told him, and in trying to comfort me by saying that “it will grow back”, he unleashed my rage all the more. “Yes, it may grow back into a tidy little hibiscus bush! I hate tidy little hibiscus bushes! I loved THAT untamed hibiscus!” Max left me to my grieving.

I assembled what was left of my friend into a bushlike circle on the lawn and took photos. I sat in the middle of the cut branches – so much cut off – unbelievable! I got the secateurs and cut off small branch tips with little new leaves and buds. I didn’t know whether they would grow roots, but I just had to save the life in them for a while at least, even if it was only to put them in a vase. Before dark I dragged the branches back to the pile, perhaps to hide my episode of madness in case the workers would be coming back in the morning.


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That evening, I tried to find some comfort in journaling. “My hibiscus has been butchered.” I began. … “mistress of the back yard…it had been there for 50 years or longer… flowering every year, big beautiful pink flowers…I am SO, SO, SO, SO SAD.” I was numb. The garden was empty without it. My oft-quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins lines came to me: “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

As I lay on the couch afterwards immersed in my grief, it dawned on me that I myself am part of a branch that may soon be pruned. I felt the grief I had been pushing away, the grief and the guilt for all my fellow species that are already being pruned off the tree of life by the climate disruption, and those that are to follow. No one knows how severe this Great Pruning will be.

All night I tossed and turned and felt physically ill. I am living inside a slow motion horror story. Am I a character in someone’s nightmare? I realized that there was no turning back the clock; that what had been done was done. Shit happens. Horrible.

In the morning, anticipating that Rowan and his assistants would be returning, I suddenly knew I wanted to protect the “bones” of my hibiscus from being cut up and fed to the mulcher. So I once again dragged the branches off the pile and made it clear in a friendly way to the workers when they came that I didn’t want any more pruning without consultation. They understood and apologized for the misunderstanding. I told them not to worry about the branches, that I wanted to use them for a “project”. I had no idea what I meant! Alex seemed to know more than I did – he explained that I am an “artist”, which seemed to justify this mad idea.


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Over the next few days the “project” emerged, piece by piece. It unfurled into a documenting and honouring of the beauty of each individual branch, carefully pruning it so that its architectural features were clearly visible, and then photographing and drawing the structure. I also measured all the saw points on branches and the stumps that were left, gradually forming a map like a giant jigsaw puzzle of the original bush. For some reason this meticulous mapping and artistic appreciation of the wild hibiscus gave me huge comfort.



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Eventually the branches found new sites in the garden where they can be lovingly admired from kitchen window and back porch by me and Alex for a while longer.

The tips were also “propagated” into little pots, which now sit on my city balcony. Perhaps by beginner’s luck some will grow roots, and then I will wonder what on earth to do with them! But for now, this is how I am coming to terms with my loss.



For some people, this story will be incomprehensible, I suppose. All this fuss over a hibiscus bush! Yes, it was about my treasured hibiscus. And The Great Pruning. It all blurs into one, and perhaps I learned something: that it can be a huge comfort to give meticulous attention to the beauty in my life, even while carrying a broken heart.

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Finding Resilience in Afterspaces

27/6/2018

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“Have you seen what they’ve done to our street?” asked our downstairs neighbour Mac as I welcomed him in. He’d come to speak to my partner, Alex, about organizing a body corporate job on the property, but seemed quite perturbed about this question.

“You mean the tree on the corner?” I asked, exchanging a mutual sad nod. That morning a huge old camphor laurel tree had been cut down. A week before, Alex had talked to a workman there who told him the tree was destined for the chop, and we had sentimentally taken some photos of the tree yesterday, not knowing exactly when it would be gone. Then, this morning I’d noticed the loud sounds of a mulcher, and driving past the corner later I was struck by the strange gap in my usual landscape – a huge space had replaced what was a beautiful spreading tree with ivy growing up trunk and branches. (Last autumn, Alex had been so delighted by the reds, oranges and yellows of the ivy that he’d taken a whole series of photos of the tree in the late afternoon light.)

It was a poignant surprise to realize that our neighbour, too, was feeling the loss of the old mother-of-a-tree. I wondered how many others in the neighborhood were similarly dismayed, without warning or a chance to say “goodbye” to this landmark.

The next morning I found the beautiful autumn photos and as promised, emailed them to Mac with the words “Comfort in remembered beauty”. I also rang the council to ask why permission had been granted to cut the tree down. After a search of her records, the explanation was: “dieback in canopy" and "extensive decay in trunk and branches". I just needed to know why. It was somehow a comfort to know why.

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By now, having been a climate change activist, I am beyond shedding too many tears over the loss of a single tree. Still, I was sad for the birds and the other creatures who would be far more dismayed – or am I projecting? Anyway, the absent tree sank down into the depths of my psyche while I went on with my life. It sank down and found resonant places, memories, feelings…

In the wee hours of the next morning a phrase bubbled up from the depths, and I wrote these words on a piece of paper I keep at my bedside for such sleep inspirations: “heartfelt afterspaces”.

I recalled that when I was younger and less aware of the whole human-ecology catastrophe, I felt the loss of “my” trees in such a physical way that it was as if my own limbs had been severed.

While living on the central coast in my thirties, my next-door neighbour decided to cut down some cheese trees on our boundary. The noise of the chain-saws traumatised me through paper-thin fibro walls, so I tried to soothe myself by going to the other side of the house, and sat meditating. I felt the tree, and spontaneously invited it to come over and live for a while in my body if it wanted to. It took me up on my generous invitation and we meditated together until after the chain saw had stopped. The tree-spirit seemed to be curious and found similarities in our physiologies: my lungs were like leaves, my gut villi were like roots…

I will never forget the sudden and very amusing surprise the tree-spirit seemed to gasp when, having finished my meditation, I got up and walked to the kitchen. Tree-thought translated: oh my goodness, you can MOVE! Wow! That’s cool!

This tree-fusion experience also helped me to find tree metaphors for the flow of “chi” during my t’ai chi practice, based on the upward and downward movements of nutrients within trees. That tree lived on in me for many years, I think.

Then, in my forties, I befriended an elegant young angophora that grew up outside my second-floor flat’s balcony. I used to sit and meditate there and the tree was a lovely part of my life, bringing me lots of bird visitors, and waving its delicate long leaves in the harbourside breeze.

One awful morning, without any warning, there were workmen climbing the tree and sawing off one of its branches. They obviously intended to cut the whole tree down. Apparently this decision had been made by the “body corporate” and mere tenants were not considered relevant or even worth telling. I ran downstairs to confront the workmen. I can’t remember exactly what I said-screamed but they stopped the job and went away for a while. Meanwhile I took away their ladder and put it at the back of the property next to the washing line. I was SO upset! They had already cut the branch that came to my balcony and there was only a slender trunk left, which looked quite odd. I stood by the doomed tree and wept for a while and then went back to my flat.

Not long afterwards came a knock at my door. This description comes from the lyrics of a song called One Tree, which I wrote later about what had happened:

    Two policemen stood in my stairwell
    And asked me to explain myself.
    Why was I so worked up?
    Couldn’t be just a tree – it must be something else.

    They had a piece of paper from the council    
    That said it was OK to cut down the tree.
    Because it says so on a f***ing piece of paper
    Do you think that matters to me?

    Now I stare out my window,
    At bricks and concrete and stone.
    I don’t want to live here anymore –
    This is no longer my home.

    And I read in the paper
    ‘bout the freeway going through
    And I hear that the Penan forests
    Are still being clear-felled.
    And I wonder how THAT must feel.
    All I lost is One Tree – and that’s enough pain for me.


Heartfelt afterspaces. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about his felled Binsey Poplars: “Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty been”. As I grow older I see so many afterspaces in my world.

The week of the felling of my corner camphor laurel happened to be one year after my mother’s final week of life on planet Earth. The afterspaces of a person are somewhat different from that of a tree which spent its entire life in one place, leaving a very strong afterspace: a negative afterimage of itself etched in the mind’s eye.

But my mother’s afterspaces are scattered around my present and past world like autumn leaves, blowing in the winds of my daily rounds, reminiscences, dreams, night-waking thoughts; her music, still too painful to watch on videos, finds ways to undo me whenever a heart-opening song comes on TV or radio.

Like the tree, whose loss is softened by remembered beauty, I am immersing myself in gratitude for having been indulged by 62 years of mothering. I rest back in my mother’s afterspaces and she is still there.


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When resilience fails... F*CK IT!...and listen...

1/12/2015

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(The asterisk has been used in this article to assuage internet conservatism.)

"I think I've reached my F*CK IT! moment" I said to Joanna.
"How would you like to explore that through art?" she replied, unperturbed by my uncharacteristic language.

For several years we had been swapping arts-based supervision sessions with each other, at first to help us navigate the challenges of our working life. These monthly sessions had subsequently supported our buoyancy through the tides of Joanna's PhD and its aftermath, my unplanned "retirement", and my subsequent journey into climate change activism.

After a year of failed attempts to interest anyone in my "Active Hope" groups, and recently felled by several months of chronic pain during which I had stopped my Gratitude Journalling, I had come to this session sleep deprived and exhausted. The night before, one of my Facebook friends had posted a video in which the term "near-term human extinction" featured, with people exploring the meaning for them of the "F*CK IT!" moment. That video had found a deep resonance.(1)

Yes, I was definitely at a F*CK IT! moment.

"I don't know, Joanna," I replied to her question about how to proceed. "I don't feel like I've got any creativity left in me." After a long pause... "Perhaps drawing".

Joanna got out some paper and art materials. She apologised for the small A4 paper, but it was just right for the size of my creative impulse. I positioned the paper and its cardboard support on a stool in front of my comfy chair, and chose her crayon pencils, which were bundled with an elastic band. Joanna went to get something for a moment and I sat holding the bundled pencils vertically with both hands, tips against the page, and began a back-and-forth twisting movement, (screw it?), eventually covering the page with multicoloured zig-zags.




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It looked like a forest. A F*CK IT forest! My sense of humour began to peep through my exhaustion. I wrote underneath the forest: The F*CK IT moment has come! And then around the edges, turning the paper: Have fun with it! Turn it around! Let it BEEEEEEEEEEEEE...

A path into the centre of the F*CK IT forest lead me to a place where I sat and just BEED, like a buddha.

"What do you see from the centre of the F*CK IT forest?" asked Joanna.

I looked around. "Too much for a heart to bear." I answered. My tears revealed that I had spoken my truth at that moment.

After a pregnant silence, Joanna read me two poems which she had gone to fetch while I had been drawing.

Poems that Joanna read to me

I became a strange person,
No one comprehends my state,
I chant and I alone listen to myself,
No one understands my language.

My language is the language of the birds,
My homeland is the country of the beloved,
I am a nightingale, my beloved is my rose,
To be sure, the colour of my rose never fades.

Yunus

and

Have you not seen the sunset? Watch the sun rise, too.
Can the sunset inflict any harm on the sun or on the moon?
Which seed did not grow after it was sown in the soil?
Do not worry that the human seed will not grow.

Rumi

"Do not worry that the human seed will not grow". These words reminded me of "near-term human extinction", a phrase used in the video, a phrase that I'd heard before but shut out of my mind.

I began to describe my sense that it is only a matter of time before people start forms of ecoterrorism to defend what's left, because they see other avenues for a peaceful transition failing.

"Would you like to have a dialogue about this?" suggested Joanna.

The F*CK IT dialogue

Two chairs. I chose a red scarf and a blue scarf, draped over them.
"Where do you want to start?"

I sat on the blue chair and began to speak to my other self on the red chair. "History shows us that change comes in two ways, through violence or peacefully. The trouble with violence is that it leads to backlash and then it becomes a To & Fro, Eye-for-an-Eye..."
"Make it personal" interrupted Joanna.
"Be patient." I said to my red self.

From the red chair: "Patient! They've been blah-blahing for 20-30 years and now it's too late for more blah-blah! This elephant needs a firecracker for it to budge."

Blue: "I'm exhausted. Maybe you're right. F*ck it! Maybe it is time - but I haven't the energy to start a bushfire. If you've got the energy, go ahead. But be prepared for the reaction. Your bushfire will get out of control."

Red: "Maybe that's what has to happen. The situation is explosive. Something's got to give way. Every time I learn of another species going extinct, how we're killing the oceans, birds feeding their chicks plastic and dying in agony... Don't tell me to stomach it all and be nice to politicians and try to talk them into DOING SOMETHING! F*CK IT!"

Blue: "If you start a "bushfire", be aware that the "backburn" force far outweighs your might. They will clamp down with martial laws, drones, missiles, walls... (An image comes)... It's like the difference between a bushfire and a solar panel - the former brings nothing but chaos; the latter can channel all that energy into productive outcomes. (gently) I'm not suggesting you relinquish your rage, just try to put it to work in the most productive ways, using our knowledge of human psychology, politics, economics, the way the beast works - you've got to be smart with your rage."

Red: (after a long pause) "I hear you."

Joanna indicated it was time to wind up the conversation and thank each other.

Blue: "Thank you for your energy and passion."
Red: "Thank you for your wisdom."

I felt an inner coming together of these two part of myself, and it felt good to have them reconciled to working together. I wondered if the chronic pain and sleep deprivation was the only way I could have been brought to the F*CK IT moment, since normally I'm such a doer and control freak. Had my unexpressed rage been so seething that it had been eating me up from the inside?

Whatever...the F*CK IT forest had yielded its message. Thank you Joanna.


(1) Link to the Fu*k It! @ The Fuki! video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNAIyNLQPWM&feature=share


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Supporting resilient and effective activists: the layers of Citizens' Climate Lobby

21/5/2015

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The Urgent need for ACTION!
To those of us who are familiar with, and convinced by, the scientific evidence on human-caused climate change, the need for urgency of global action couldn't be clearer. And climate change being a "wicked" problem, there are many complementary forms of action to be taken. Once we've made the (often difficult) decision of what kind of action best suits our skills and resources, the temptation is to become very task-outcomes oriented, spending every available moment thinking, planning and acting on our agenda.

Unfortunately, this approach, though perhaps effective at first, is the recipe for activist burnout. This is appreciated by activist groups that encourage some recreational "down-time" for individual activists and local groups. I'd like to describe my take on one climate change focused organization in which time spent on self-care and building of relationships is endemic to the structure of their model of activism.

Citizens' Climate Lobby
Citizens' Climate Lobby has come on the climate change activism scene in the last decade, mostly  in the USA, but now spreading internationally. Its focus is to empower citizens, through group lobbying of local representatives, to create the political will for governments to support climate change mitigation by enacting a carbon pricing system called a "fee and dividend". (More about the details of this can be found at citizensclimatelobby.org)

Having stumbled upon CCL while enrolled in a Climate Change MOOC, and with a background in deep ecology-based activist support, I was impressed by its human-centred flavour, and I now find myself involved in a fledgling local Sydney group. Aware of the urgent impulse to "go do it NOW!", I am seeking to ground myself and our group in the difference between CCL and other action-centred approaches.

What's Different about CCL?
My partner Alex and I recently participated in the CCL online training course in how to facilitate a Group-Start workshop, the initial start-up experience for new volunteers. Our teachers, Elli and Mark, were impressive in their heart-centred openness and the value they place on sharing of feelings as part of the Group-Start experience. On reflection, I am drawn to use a series of concentric circles to describe the CCL model:

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Listening Conversations
In the outer layer, we build relationships with key people who influence the political process: we  lobby our local politicians and talk to media editors, forming ongoing relationships which find common ground between their (often conservative) values and the opportunities presented by climate change; we also have non-confrontational climate change conversations with family, friends and strangers; our communication is based on inquiry, listening, being-with, and relationship development rather than presenting convincing information or applying pressure (summed up by our Group-Start teaching points: "be interested, not interesting" and "for, not against" using "power rather than force"). George Marshall's work on climate change communication, see climateoutreach.org.uk, is compatible with CCL's methods.

Community
Underpinning this is practising non-confrontational communication and relationship building within our local groups; this contributes to our ability to work as a team in lobbying contexts, and is built upon time spent getting to know and appreciate one another and what we care about, sharing our activism journeys, and having fun together (What? Activism is Serious!); we are given the space to find our emerging contributions as volunteers and our team lobbying roles in the group, so that activism can be personally satisfying, on our growing edge, rather than taking us into scary territory; through CCL's emphasis on nurturing breakthroughs in personal power, we may find that, given time, we grow into more challenging roles.

Inner Resilience
And at the core of these relationships is our ongoing time devoted to self-awareness, savouring what we love about life, and engaging in feelings-based reflection in order to build our inner resilience and sustainability as citizen activists; the "despair and empowerment" and "work that reconnects" processes from Joanna Macy, brought into a climate change focus in her recent book (with Chris Johnstone) called Active Hope, can serve to guide your inner activist journey.

Giving it a Go
It is easy to neglect the inner two layers because they may seem, especially to "hard core" activists, like a waste of valuable time that could be spent "out there doing stuff". However, the volunteer turnover and personality issues within activist groups, and the slowness of the global response to climate change over the last twenty-five years, suggests to me that a more heart-centred, measured and inclusive stance may be worth a try.

The three-layer approach can be adapted to any climate change, environmental or social change organization, and I encourage you to consider possible adaptations you might incorporate into your world. And if your form of climate change activism could involve personal empowerment in citizen lobbying, I urge you to seek out and join, or start, your local CCL group! The more the merrier!



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    Rosemary Faire

    I am an expressive arts therapist and adult educator desiring to support climate change engagement and resilience in transition. My work-life journey has taken me through biological sciences (epigenetics), embodied education, music and movement therapies and deep ecology, and I'm keen to facilitate the formation of creativity-based support groups and peer supervision among those who are concerned about our planetary sustainability.

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