Sparks will fly #21 #music

The poet sings like a lark surrounded by virtuosos who know how to get the best out of each and every inch of their instruments, in a space designed for the singular purpose for sound to reach our ears and soak into our bodies – this was a musical nourishment to savour. One indeed to take to the grave, as I instructed my youngest to include You’ve underestimated me dude in the set to be played at my funeral. Energetically, the pulse of life, with all it highs and lows, swirled around us in raptures. I bow down to your talent and your willingness to share them with us all:

Kate Miller-Heidke | vocals / piano
Keir Nuttall | guitar
Iain Grandage | cello / piano
Jessica Hitchcock | backing vocal

You know sparks will fly when the shock of greying luxurious hair on the cellist arrives just before the first words of introduction are spoken. The ancestors were already in place and the next generation eagerly was taking up their invitation to join the appreciation society. David Whyte says: Poetry is language against which you have no defenses. The quartet raged a triumphant victory march and reached into the cracks and chasms of my heart and soul, my sword and my shield were rendered helpless, I was left defenceless.

I am being instructed through a set of exercises which is calling me to examine some of those cracks and chasms. It is not all comfortable. As this day dawns I am wondering how perhaps there is another way in to be opened, music and poetry has served me well in the practice to keep being broken open, they can creep into me with the open-heart surgery and exam of life seems to require!

In a recent speech I made, I shared a couple of snippets of time when I was literally under threat of death – a knife being pulled on me and a gun pointed at me. There have been a few other times death has come knocking. As a child suffering from asthma where breath in the body was scarce, in traffic there have been a few near misses, running behind a bus as a ten year old on the streets of London. And, I have had a death threat too during anti-racist campaigning. Coming close to death is an invitation to live more fully. It is also to unpack how these near-death experiences can continue to work their way into the future and not be relegated to the past, as if somehow they already processed, packed up and neatly put away. Music calls these experiences out into the open for review.

The emotional labour is never really over and comes repackaged and repurposed … and often for me this is through music or poetry. When a song moves you it has tapped into memory, or maybe into possibility or fantasy. There were many such moments last night. The cello becomes your spiritual director, the shaker becomes the metronome of your heart beat and the highest notes crescendo to match your higher self as the heavy darker tones of chords thumping on strings and keys takes you down as far as the notes will go … and then some. Rumi says: If all the harps in the world were burned down, still inside the heart there will be hidden music playing. It is this hidden music which is being examined but I can’t get to it without the live music on the outside. And it is in between sets that the reflection takes place, in the quiet, when instruments are lying in state, when the cup of tea is getting cold, when the chairs are empty, when the leads are relaxed. I am in between sets when I reflect, everything is still on stage, there is gratitude and expectation of more.

Remaining open is the way sparks will fly and the door is always ajar when I can hear the music.

Between sets, Ukaria 25 May 2019

Sparks will Fly #20 #yellow

A letter to my grandson in 2035

Dear Archie,

Just before your 4th birthday, Australia had a big election. A lot of us thought it was going to be around climate change and for a lot of us it was.  But not everyone can see into the future easily, and lots of people are scared of change. Being able to adapt to change is so important. I am so proud of you when you notice you are struggling and can’t always get your own way, so you take yourself off and cool down and then come back and join in again with the conversation and the play.  Being able to self-regulate and learn you can’t always get your own way was a fabulous skill and gift your Mum and Dad taught you. You are not scared of your own feelings when they bubble up and you get to know what they mean for you.

I am sorry my generation have left you with so much to deal with Archie.  I ran out of puff more than once. I am so grateful for all those young students who took the streets long before they were old enough to vote, and by the time they got to vote, they were able to turn things around …. I just don’t know if they were able to do enough in time for you.

As your 16th birthday approaches, I am so grateful for all those lovely paintings you made for me when you were little, they help me keep seeing the world through your eyes. You did one for me once when you were three you called Black and Yellow Australia. You could see the sun rising and the night falling.  It really helped me through some tough days after the 2019 election and a few more between then and now in 2035.

All I could see when I was sad for my country was two worlds – old over young, coal over climate, Presidential over team, known over unknown, comfort over risk, little over big, negative over positive, no policies over policies, men over women. I thought about your painting and realised black and yellow is not black and white – things are more complex than that. Yellow is the colour of hope, the colour of joy and happiness. It is also the colour associated with being a coward and often the colour for not being well, a bit jaundice giving you information that there might be something wrong with your liver, gall bladder or pancreas. Yellow is a paradox.

I did get more active on climate and helped out some of the students in the strikes for climate change, I cheered madly with the lovely Greta got a Nobel Prize and was so inspired when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest US President ever. So I know it wasn’t all lost, but I felt pretty sad and a bit hopeless the day after the 2019 election.

I knew then, as a I know now, hope is not a substitute for action. And if you do want something to happen about what matters to you, you have to put your shoulder to the wheel, join with others and mobilise.  And the lesson I learnt and hope you learnt too is: Don’t give up, get organised.  Let sparks fly and glow with the yellow light shining on and through you.

 

Sparks will fly #19 #Mother Earth

I was shocked to learn last night that there are possums in our country facing extinction, I will have more respect for the one who tramps up and down the fence and onto my roof most nights. One in three of Australian mammals face extinction and this is chilling – habitat removal and the effects of climate changing – are the big predators they face.

Turning back the tide, through movements like drawdown and Extinction Rebellion who are determined to create the conditions for environmental, climate, economic and social justice to imagine a way forward.  As I wandered home from the Extinction Rebellion night, my memory tumbled back to my teens and the 1970s into apocalyptic forecasts in songs by people like Larry Norman, Barry Maguire’s Eve of Destruction, and books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and teachings of Joanna Macy. And from my own tradition I kept hearing the words immortalised in the music of my teens in Godspell number, Alas for you with the enduring line, I send you prophets, I send you preachers.  The song ends with a defining shout worthy of an early punk moment: Blind fools screamed by Jesus. There have been so many prophets and preachers, scientists and environmentalists, and yet we find ourselves on the edge of extinction – what would it take to turn this all around?  I am comforted to some extent by the rebels and those taking action around the world. I am encouraged by those educating us like Mary Robinson and Maeve Higgins with their podcast Mothers of Invention. Their catch cry is climate change is a man-made problem with feminist solutions. Can’t argue with that!

I have been revisiting old papers I wrote in the 1980s as part of my masters degree after listening to Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. She has re-ignited and reminded me what I was doing thirty plus years ago and how it was totally under-written and came out of my faith perspective, my musical choices and my desire to try and understand how come economics got the biggest slice of the story, when the real issues as I saw them started with us humans and the environment. I was overjoyed to reconnect with Hazel Henderson’s layer cake model, which was my constant companion to understand economics and was pasted up above my working space at home and from time to time made it to places like the fridge. Raworth tells her own love of Henderson’s work in a post last year. I was so over-joyed I went digging through my archives in the shed to find the paper I wrote and later re-worked and published by Catholics in Coalition for Justice and Peace, Keeping House: An alternative future of ethics and economics.  It was a little piece of my masters thesis. The year is 1993! I am shocked and disappointed it has stood the test of time. At a personal level, I am perplexed that I moved away from this work and not really sure why I did, I have my theories about that, but that might be for another post another day when I can let the sparks fly about injustice, women’s work, and what supporting another’s journey.

I am clawing back my history here and discovering just how fortunate I was to be exposed to these ideas back then, and the rich theological thinking that helped me arrive at the thinking at the time. While there is no mention of climate change as a concept, there is plenty in my writings about environmental justice, especially around development and third world issues as we referred to them in those days. There is eco-feminism and the relationship between feminism, a patriarchal view of God and economics that counts what is invisible and not counted … like women’s labour and other species.  I even made an argument for a theology big enough to factor in the invisible and discounted having the best chance of saving the planet.  The paper was published just after the March 1993 Federal election. I included commentary about the narrowness of the political parties using childcare as their only effort to have a  women’s issue in their pitch to voters. I wrote: “Women’s issues are much broader than this one issue and political parties of all persuasions are going to need to come to a better understanding of this for the rest of the decade and for generations to come.”

We are still talking childcare, and while the issues are getting broader it has taken decades. One Prime Ministerial contender offered up his Mum from a past generation as the narrative of how these inequities have to be dealt with in this century.  I met with a woman twenty years by junior who is a rising star in her field of international business and start ups this week, I knew her in early twenties and we were talking about ethics, imposter syndrome and gender …. I told her I thought these conversations would have been over by now … a glimpse of optimism in my 34 year old self.

Economics and household come from the same Greek word – oikumene – and households are considered the domain of women, although that was not the case in those ancient times. But now, like in those times the contribution of women (and slaves) was not counted and not valued, just as we don’t count the value of the land as our mother and indigenous relationships and knowledge of the land and waters.  Writing this in 1993 and while that this closing paragraph, would need a bit more work to be current and cover off deeper meanings of wealth, it bothers me this still resonates:

The outcome of economic rationalist policies ensure that there are two categories of people – the have’s and the have nots. It works on the principles of exclusivity in decision-making with few people able to participate in the processes for economic and human development. This contrasts with my Christian tradition, where Jesus is a model of inclusivity and where wealth is about human resources and the use of material wealth for the good of the community; where the earth was created from us to care for, not to plunder and rape; where our creative energy are gifts which are at the disposal of one another; and where the spiritual and physical worlds are not separate. We must, I believe, work together to ensure the development of an economics based on values of justice and one which rests firmly in the deep appreciation that we are a part of One household and that we are the housekeepers.

This Mother’s Day lets think of our Mum, our home, our planet and do our bit to clean up the House, because we are running out of time for our combined imagination and skills to be put to work. Sparks will fly.

 

Sparks will fly #18 #humiliation

The different between embarrassment and humiliation has been a topic of discussion this week.  Embarrassment being an inside job and humiliation being an experience of power and something that cuts a lot deeper than embarrassment. Humiliation is often covered up and put in the corner, but it can be complete with outing and public scrutiny. The never ending dance includes familiar friends of shame and guilt.  Shame is also an inside job, and you feel completely alone and guilt focusses on behaviour and can often be shared. There is no end to opportunities to experience these emotions and see them play out everyday!  On the weekend, I was at a friends birthday party and some of the in-real-life Dad jokes caused embarrassment to the children of the father in question, but there was no guilt or shame to be seen.

Exploring these themes with aplomb is Brene Brown and her work around shame is bringing a revolution to emotional growth. Empathy, resilience and self-compassion seem to be the holy trinity inoculation and anti-dote to these other emotions, and breaking them down to be clear about what is yours and what belongs to the other.

If your heart can be big enough to hold the hurt, it might also be that strengthened by generosity, be big enough to hold the healing.  Matching the healing to size of the hurt, seems to be one of those equations of life that isn’t easily addressed.  Lots of little hurts can amalgamate in all kinds of ways, being swept under the carpet, stored behind closed doors, hidden under a bed … look at all those metaphors which imply darkness, out of sight and mediated by a solid object.  I think that is what we do to ourselves as well as our hearts harden and become impenetrable when we don’t let the hurts ooze out and act like the vulnerable human beings we are when we are betrayed and lost.

Coming out into the light, being exposed to the elements, it is inevitable we will be weathered. The innocence, power, creativity and splendour of the elements best described by John O’Donohue are at our disposal constantly being revealed in the landscapes around us and as the earth and the rivers are worn down and the wind wildly blows about us, as it does in Western Ireland, or for us in Australia how the sun beats down on us, the elements are irresistible. We are caught in their flow and our attempts to manage them with air conditioners, sunblock, umbrellas or even dams, doesn’t stop them being there. There are lessons we can transfer from the elements to our human condition. We can put up barriers, use devices, create and use psychological gymnastics but those emotions are with us and we need to work with them, not against them, to find our way out into the light and good weather of good health.

We are elemental beings where the great forces of air, earth, wind of course fire find themselves a home in our emotional selves and in our bodies.  Humiliation is in the earth from which the very word derives and has us digging deep to get through it.  Perhaps it is by working with the other elements to blow it away, give it space to breathe and let the sparks fly? Maybe then that it can be relieved of its duty to call us closer to knowing our worth and understanding humiliation as a by-product of institutional injustices. When that realisation comes to the fore … sparks will fly.

 

Photo by Mahkeo on Unsplash