Especially about protecting our earth.
And that gets to me. Cos I don't believe that.
So, like my healthy mother/daughter relationship that drives me to prove her wrong, so develops a healthy husband /wife relationship where we inspire each other through our beautiful differences....until one or the other of us sees the need to change our mind.
I love my husband Nick and understand where he's coming from..he's seen a lot and knows about the world...reads the news and understands the 'issues' a lot more than I can be bothered with!
But when I do my spiel and say:
"But, dear husband, at the end of the day we are all just little human beings living on a planet, and underneath all the economic systems and structures that work to brainwash us otherwise....the truth remains that we all have naked bodies under our clothes and bare feet that can touch the ground and we all have the capacity to feel the textures under our feet and see the skies up above and hear a bird if we're reminded to listen. We all have senses and through our senses we can feel. We just have to be shown how again, cos some of us have forgotten...".
When I do this speech, he still shakes his head. When I talk about our leaders needing to come for a walk....along a beach, slow and gentle, or through some strands of untouched forest...when I say that's what they need to do in order to feel something again, he says it's too late, it's impossible.
They have no capacity to feel anything
And wow! That really goes inside my soul....
They have to feel, I scream inside!
Don't they make love to their wives?...Don't their children make them smile? Don't they cry when their loved ones die?
They have to feel these things!
Don't they feel relaxed at the end of the day when they've signed off all their papers and can watch the telly with feet up and a cup of tea in hand?
Isn't that feeling?
If I don't believe that all human beings have the capacity to feel, same as if I don't believe I can save the world a bit, I'm likely to go crazy and curl up in a ball and die....
Yesterday I nearly did that.
Cos I read the paper....pages 1 and 9 of The Australian....about Tasmania's South West 'maybe soon to not be' Wilderness.
The plans are to scrap the region's 'wilderness zone' and rezone it as 'remote recreation' ...and create 'new experiences, particularly for middle class Chinese visitors who may be unwilling to wade through muddy tracks for days to reach a wilderness destination" (ibid)
No! No! No!
Wilderness has no destination!
Wilderness has no paths to follow unless you know the paths of the land.
Wilderness is at its best when you stand at the edge of it and go:
'Wow! There are no pathways here...I'd be lost if I was to enter. I am small and that is great....I am vulnerable in that land... '
That's what wilderness is. Unknown and not needing to be known...
I've stood on the edge of that bit of land in Tasmania having no desire to enter it.
I'm a white western woman...I have no knowledge of land without pathways. I don't see it as a place to explore or re-create in....that land's created beautifully as it is.
So I leave it alone.
But I'll stand on its edge and I'll feel it....
Allowing all the possibilities of that place to free up my white western soul.
I'll allow my white western brain a moment of blissed out understanding that there exists a place on earth that is still pristine, unknown, untouched....by our colonialist need to control everything.
That thought calms me.....as well as inspires and exhilarates me.....
And that's enough.
No more.
But they always want more.
'We need more attractions:we need more places to put tourists.' (The Australian Jan 16th 2015 p9)
Put the tourists in the places that have already been built for them!
Take them on the amazing treks that have already been marked out for them. Show them the parks, the mountains, the lakes, the islands, the boat tours, the treetop walks, the wild ocean shores.
And if they still want more, then we take them to the edge of the Tasmanian wilderness and we say:
This here land is not for you. This here land is untouched by you. This here land is to be left alone and understanding this and obeying this will be your next adventure.
Learning to not re-create.
Learning to love what's created.
Learning to feel the mystery and greatness of a place by not doing anything in it or to it!
(continued next post...)