2024 – Stars – Attraction

What makes something or someone a star attraction?  I have been thinking about this after listening to Billie-Jean King being interviewed by Julia Louis Dreyfus – which is an interview I highly recommend.  Billie-Jean has lots of insights from her career in tennis, philanthropy, advocate and as a feminist icon.  She says in the interview leaders don’t choose followers, followers choose leaders. People are attracted to stars like her. They want to be in the orbit of such a star, and there is a gravitational pull that draws them in. There is responsibility in leadership to use that heaviness, perhaps it is the gravity or gravity itself that leaders need to hold steady so as not to cause a riot … unless of course that is their intention! 

Producers, directors, marketing, promotional peeps all derive their meaning from the stars they can hurl into the universe and then it is their job to keep them there. And the stars job to keep putting out their magnetism and the “look at me” factor.  I am watching this in popular culture unfold with the release of a new album, new book, new movie, new series. Those who have stood the test of time are very comfortable in their own skin, enjoying the limelight, and playfully exploit the moments offered up to enhance their backers. Sometimes newbies over stretch their new star status and slip up a bit before they find the orbit or lane they need to stick too.

It’s true in politics as well where star power attracts more followers and there is responsibility attached to that part of leadership and used unwisely, own goals inevitably come next. These baby stars demonstrate their immaturity and crash and burn dazzling disintegration in the skies can be a sight to behold. Gravitational collapse is the phenomena of contraction which draws matter towards its centre, and in leadership those who are more about me, me, me and lack generosity, find their lack of humility leads to implosion. It is a good reminder of the shadow side of star attraction.

The dual capacity of gravity to attract and collapse under your own weight is an invitation to humility and reflection. To consider how your actions as a leader expand and include others.

I was listening to Jack Carty sing a song about his love for his child last night at Loren Kate‘s Cooee Fest (surely an expression of an expanding universe!) I’ve heard him sing it before, and I think once again love is at the centre of all star attraction. I’ve popped the lyrics below. He explains that he now knows how the universe expands.  If we act out of love there is expansion. Love of ourselves, of others, the place where we live, the planet and universe itself.

Love has an intimacy all of its own, to deepen an understanding, by getting to know what’s under the surface, some of the invisible features, to look closely at the finer points. When I hear Sir David Attenborough describe a creature, his passion and knowledge transmits love. When I see a First Nations person greet the land with familial attachment I recognise love. When I see a mother notice a shift in breathing in her sick infant, her love instantly calls her to action.  Billie-Jean in her interview showed so much respect to her followers as a tennis giant, she turned into being a performer and wanting to give people a great show in return. I was struck by this same phenomena when I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert years ago. He felt everyone in the stadium had worked hard all year to save up to see him and the E Street band and so they had an obligation to be their best, to give value for money, to be worthy of the applause, to be grateful to throng of fans for enabling him and his band to do what they love to do. 

That is not just why the universe expands, I think it is how it expands. With love, respect and desire for intimacy in the gravitational dance that comes with star attraction.  May we all experience and know we are stars in someone’s galaxy.

I think I found the reason why the universe expands

I was standing in the kitchen when it fell into my lap

I outdid all those physicists with their particles and maths

And I think I found the reason why the universe expands

See the galaxies are spreading out

We know that much is true

‘Cause their light it shifts from blue to red

‘Cause it is spreading too

But no one knew just why they move

As quickly as they do

Though the galaxies are spreading out

And we know that much is true

Your mum and I have waited

For you to join us here

We’re gonna care for you and do the best we can

And I think I found the reason why the universe expands

I’ve loved you since I found out

You were there inside that womb

And you’ve been busy growing

And my love’s been growing too

It covers every particle on every distant land

And in order to contain it all the universe expands

Your mum and I have waited

For you to join us here

I’m gonna love you and I’ll do the best I can

And I figured out the reason why the universe expands

Yeah I think I found the reason why the universe expands

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: John Patrick Carty

Why The Universe Expands lyrics © Embassy Music Publishing Pty Ltd

Grateful to the expanding universe of love at the Willunga Farmers Market being gifted these beautiful flowers by Jake from Sunny Bunch Co

2024 – Stars – Pelicans

As I came down the highway where the river starts to be visible, above a flock of pelicans went into a star formation. They look so elegant in flight. Yaltu is their Kaurna name. Pelicans feature in plenty of dreamtime stories. 

One of the most beloved South Australian stories by author Colin Thiele, Storm Boy starred a pelican called Mr Percival. Often I think of that story, the Coorong and Colin Thiele when I see pelicans. I love seeing them following the river banks in flight, coming into land on the water with olympian precision, or scooping up a bill full of fish at the end of a dive from a great height. There seems to be a fair bit of teamwork going on as they enjoy the thermals and then share a meal together. With an abundance of wetlands, coast, a river and seasonal lagoons near me, I see pelicans often and I never tire of seeing them. I think of them as part of my community, connecting water and sky. 

Being able to soar, ride the thermals and see from on high is extraordinary. What a legacy from the dinosaurs that us bi-ped mammals did not inherit.  As a child, and I expect like most children, I wondered what it would be like to fly. Borrowing the wings of a machine to get a simulated version of the experience is still a thrill, even after thousands of hours in the air. Pelicans get to do a lot more than take off and land and despite their ungainly design seem to have no trouble deftly getting what they need and want from air and water. 

Water takes on the shape of its container and air is much the same, a wind sock can tell us which way the wind is blowing, or indeed the pelicans in flight by how they glide.  The movement of the wind caused by air pressure, moisture and temperature changes far above or even close to the ground, reflections of a great conversation between the poles and our spinning planet.  The pelicans are like ballerinas in this cosmic atmospheric dance in the sky. 

Resting on the muddy embankments of the river, the big billed creatures find a moment to sojourn. Chatting amongst themselves about the conditions above seems like an instruction for my species, to be paying attention to one another’s noticings about what is in the atmosphere and how we might best navigate it together.  This kind of biomimicry wouldn’t go astray in some of the turbulence in the skies over Ukraine or Gaza or Iran or where-ever the strong man narrative dominance destroys the futures of generations. I want teachings from Storm Boy and Mr Percival to be available to everyone. Surely that is what wisdom cultures have to offer and how we tap into that rich vein for guidance is an invitation yet to be accepted by so many. 

While visiting a health professional this week, he said: well the way things are going we could all be up in smoke in three months. While I found this hard to hear, it was said without despair, more a statement of being a realist than stoicism. Turning to face the light, to look at the stars, to feel the gentle warmth of the early autumn wind in the late afternoon, before it turns to a chill when the sun goes down, to notice the pelicans flying in star formation, these are acts of defiance and resistance to the drums of war. The pelicans offer us a way forward, a way of being, instruction for flight and diving, community and how to journey for food and friendship.

On top of all this, it would be remiss not to include the well known pelican inspired limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt written in 1910: 

A wonderful bird is the pelican. 

His bill will hold more than his belican. 

He can take in his beak, 

Food enough for a week, 

I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!”

“to the stars” is the mantra of this extraordinary woman – Flavia Tata Nardini Photo taken at American River, Kangaroo Island – June 2021 where we were together on a Entrepreneurship Advisory Board meeting tour. Flavia is a rocket scientist and entrepreneur, co-founder of Fleet Space

2024 – Stars – Waiting

One by one, and then in little clusters, the stars arrived last night as friends new and old gathered around a fire. The oceanic views of Gulf St Vincent from the cliff tops at Marino Rocks on this early autumn evening are lit by the moon casting her shadow as light onto the stillness of the water. For eons others would have done the same from this vantage point, my breath, my body being added to the litany of others who have looked to the horizon for inspiration and to the skies for guidance. 

We are a long way from frontlines in Gaza or Ukraine, a long way from the inner demons or whatever drove the frenetic deadly behaviour of the man in Bondi, a long way from the place that aches from the depths of trauma hidden in the epigenetics of DNA responses.  Somehow these situations all align in my head, under these stars as we talk about disinformation.  Each of us has a trajectory into this conversation, vectors that now collide over tacos and strudel. I feel the wild love of stars twinkling above witnessing and burning to eavesdrop and I even wonder at one point whether one of them will fall closer to earth to hear a little bit more.

Perhaps this is a human version of the big bang – floods of matter, generations in the making, now arriving at a single point slowing down enough to be heard and seen and then mysteriously and magically spinning out again expanding and expansive.  My mind is blown and I am bestowing on the hostess the role of goddess who invited us to the table.  Maybe this is the relationship of the cosmos after all, the big bang being an invitation to come and play, to listen and learn from all the atoms?

Having an emergent practice is a hopeful act, it is a practice of expectation of being able to sit in the not-yet, in the maybe, in the what-if, in the where else, in different perspectives. I notice to myself for the first time around this table, under these stars that emergent and emergency come from the same place. To bring into the light, to arise, unforeseen, and so from what might gently appear under the stars and the moon as more light arrives, inside, I am stirred once again to act urgently. Maybe this is exactly how disinformation works too ? Starting slowly and then before we know we are in serious danger.

At one point in the evening I offer a poetry prescription to the person sitting to my right.  I suggest she reads Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte as a response to some thinking she is doing in relation to her workplace’s curious reconfiguring.  When I offer this up, I am recalling to myself a few of the lines that evoke the ordinary opening to something yet to emerge.  When I get home I read the whole poem and feel the choice, prescient. 

So here is that poem because the stars are always waiting for you, alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity, the good in you is seen, and everything, everything, everything is always, always, waiting, for you, for you, you, you you.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone.

As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice.

You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation.

The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last.

All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is Waiting for You

2024 – Stars – Punch in the head

This year’s theme is stars and there were a few moments this week when my inner frustrated self wanted to throw a punch and cause a sensation of seeing stars!  This outburst that didn’t come to fruition, except in my imaginings, was the result of a cascade of mansplaining and inability to answer what I considered simple and straightforward questions.

The experience of seeing stars from a blow to the head is described by those who have had this happen to them, describing it as brief flashes of lights or spots in front of their eyes. Apparently this is caused by a disruption to the visual system causing a perception change. Finding that out, made me wonder if a shake would do the same trick, or even clearing out their ears would help!  

My tension started when I asked a question that was responded to in a rambling way that told me what had been done, and not what the future held, which was the essence of my question.  Now I know as well as anyone who has been in leadership and recruitment selection that past performance predicts future performance, but I was asking how the past would inform the future, not to get a history lesson.  The next person who spoke (a male) added to my question and got the answer straight away … although he too did take up a fair bit of air time to make sure he was seen to be the one asking an intelligent and vital question. My grumpiness doubled in response.

Next came an off hand remark that could be brushed away as ignorance or at worst bad manners. Racism though is racism so I walked out of the room instead of giving the teller an audience. 

Then within a few minutes I was once again being talked at, not alone, in a group and when an answer to my question took up another five minutes and the answer bore no resemblance to the question I had asked I could feel my patience draining further and further from me. To top it all off later in the same event, the senior person (a woman) of a presenter, asked the presenter to move on and he (yes, a he) declined the invitation and just kept on trucking until he was done.  By the end of what, in total, had only been a few hours, in four different settings, I was wondering why the desire to punch the patriarchy so it would see stars, was so high on my agenda.

Oh Patriarchy. Let me count the ways. 

Why do I put up with this kind of behaviour? I think I am tired and so much of my time these days is not spent dismantling a system that doesn’t work for women and in fact for most men either. I also prefer to be a metaphoric midwife than a palliative care nurse – bringing in new life, potential, possibilities, instead of smoothing the pillow and administering pain relief.

My patriarchal tolerance threshold feels like it has slipped down a few notches since being in local government. As Mayor I find myself tolerating behaviours I would not if I was a CEO, Chair of a Board or a senior executive. I think my frustration this week was a wake up call from my better self that I am in imminent danger of being a drowning frog in hot water. 

I am giving myself a good talking to and looking to those Seven Sisters in the sky who take to the skies every night to run from their pursuer. Those stars are a better inspiration for me, than a punch I might want to land! 

“ Hi I’m Tom and I’m a recovering patriarch”  has a lovely ring to it. Imagine then working on the 12 steps in a peer group with support and kindness through the healing.

1. I admit I am powerless over patriarchy— my life has become unmanageable.
2. I am coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care and practice of greater good
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to the universe, to myself and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to work on myself with others to remove all these defects of character.
7. I am humbly working on my shortcomings.
8. I am making a list of all persons I harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. I am making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. I will continue to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admit it.
11. Through prayer and meditation I will improve my conscious contact with goodness in the world
12. Have a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I will try to carry this message to others with an addiction to patriarchy, and to practice these principles as I make my way in the world.

Maybe now I am seeing stars?

I’ve had enough punches from patriarchy to last me till my dying day. Taking a deep breath to get back into the ring.