Knowing your world

It is said that many hunter-gatherer peoples offered thanks to the spirits of the animals and plants that they took for food, giving gratitude and respect for the gift of life.  And straight away, I must digress - I used that term "hunter-gatherer" because it is what I learned in school, over 50 years ago, and yet books like Dark Emu, by Dr. Bruce Pascoe, show just how intensively and intentionally those supposed "gatherers" intervened to increase the productivity of their territory.  Back to the story.

At some point in human history, before cities formed and empires grew, deities were named and thanked as being the directors or providers of weather, fertility, and food.  Stories of creation were told, genealogies handed down, and sagas and epics were chanted to remind us of the deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors and their enemies.  People could identify a story within which they lived, and picture their own place in it, as well as locating all the life and landscape around them.

The cities appeared, and kings, and emperors, who took to themselves the title of divine, and exercised control - they claimed - over all the resources the people needed.  As king fought king, and empires rose and fell, many people sheltered in the cities, while beyond the walls, the slaves and peasants continued to fish, farm, and hunt.

Is that when humans began to look less closely at, as well as appreciate less, the plants, animals, and things that we use for nourishment, medicine, comfort, and clothing?  When their gratitude shifted to the kings and emperors?

Those hunter-gatherers were living in, and respecting, the world that gave them being, nurtured them, and took them at their end - sometimes even brought about their end.  Their civilized cousins had walled themselves in, putting the natural world at a greater distance, though the enemy that had inspired the wall was actually other people.

We live in that same world - it is still the source of all, excepting sunlight, that we need for life and comfort.  In the case of sunlight, the atmosphere that filters that light, and protects us from its excesses, exists only because of life.

Yet every year it seems that more and more humans reach adulthood with no real knowledge or understanding of the world we rely on.  How can we have respect for our home if we do not understand it?

Baba Dioum wrote: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught"

The world we live in is complex beyond our ability to fully understand. Our brains, facing a flood of data, have developed mechanisms to filter and sort through all that information.  We seek patterns in the data, and try to develop a sense of cause and effect for every thing we see, hear, feel, taste, and sense. We seek a sense of certainty and safety, and tailor our stories accordingly.

Yet, when we have made for ourselves a story that is comforting in its certainties, we have placed ourselves at risk of real harm. We know our world only partially - it is rare that we can be absolutely certain of our future, even that which is only seconds away.  As for next week, month, or year, certainty is a dangerous illusion.

A story that takes into account such uncertainty, and helps us reach for the skills and resilience we might use when the unexpected arrives, is a better story - and, who knows, the unexpected might be more wonderful than we have imagined?

A comfortable story is a risky story because it can lead us into a sense of false security, so that we do not pay such careful attention to the world around us - its inhabitants and their behaviour.  It is when you stop paying attention that the nasty surprises can sneak up on you, and the serendipitous opportunities slip by unnoticed.  But attentiveness and alertness use energy, and we humans have another useful habit - we like to conserve energy.  Some might call it laziness, some might call it sensible, but our ancestors learned not to burn energy unnecessarily, especially when their next meal might not eventuate as soon as hoped for.  Like all human traits, it has its up sides and its down sides.

To survive and flourish, we need a story that makes sense of the world we live in, and gives us purpose, hope, and direction. With the aid of our ancestors, we learn and develop a story by which we live.  Each of us has our own unique story - though it may contain many elements in common with the stories of those around us, it also is built from moments of personal experience and thought that no one else can fully share.

Our story is also influenced by the stories we hear and see - and many of the stories we encounter in the media or online are not honest tales.  In many cases they are created, constructed, designed, and polished so as to distort our personal story in ways that benefit the makers of those stories.  Yes, you can think "advertisers" or "politicians" when you read those words, and you would be partly right, but there are others creating and foisting dodgy stories on the world, and doing so for reasons not always explicable or reputable.

Many of the stories that wash over us every day have very narrow interests at their heart, and if we are to create an honest and useful story for our own life we need to be able to discern which of those  stories should be discarded, and which ones kept. To do that, I think we need to spend time with other people that is not filtered or mediated by technology, and when we have had our fill of people, we need time in nature - real nature, not pictures and sounds on the screen or page. 

Real people and real nature enter our story by way of all our senses, not just the visual and auditory - perhaps that is why the poetry and writing that most moves us contains cues for all our senses, too.

Finding Resolution

The days can blur together as they slide towards the end of the calendar year.  For many years, my work often kept me busy over the Christmas/New Year period, but nowadays I enjoy a work-free fortnight, or so, and thus there is less need for me to watch the calendar and the diary.  Somewhere between Christmas Eve and New Years Day I am pretty well guaranteed to forget what day it is, and feel like I am inhabiting a perpetual weekend.

Somehow, it feels wrong to be celebrating New Year at the height of summer.  There is growth abundant in gardens and among the wild life, and it has been this way for several months.  The climax of my gardening year is still three or four months away, for that is when the apples will ripen, and the pumpkin vines wither and expose their gifts to me for the winter ahead.  Now is the season to work early and late, when the shadows are long and the air is cooler, and spend the warm day reading or listening to the cricket or dipping in the pool or the lake - it does not feel like the end of a year, or the beginning of another.

But still we will watch the New Year fireworks fly and fall in dazzling cascades of colour above the great arch of The Harbour Bridge, lighting up the graceful curves of The Opera House, and filling The Cumberland Plain with swirling clouds of gunsmoke.

We will kiss loved ones, toast the incoming year, and grope for a response every time someone asks  us "What are your New Year's Resolutions?"  But, my year began months ago, close to the (Southern Hemisphere) Spring Equinox, when waves of pink or white blossoms lit up the bare branches of the fruit trees around my gardens, and the gardens of my neighbours - a sight more beautiful and better scented than those fireworks.

Or did it?  For a gardener, the making of resolutions is more likely to be an Autumn task, in response to recognition of the mistakes made and jobs not done as the seasons of warmth and growth are swept away with the falling leaves by the first gales from the south.  By Mid-Winter, Blue Mountains time, I will be trying to carry out the resolutions made in Autumn, in the hope of a better and more productive growing season to come.

The cold weather and long nights offer plenty of time inside at my desk to reflect, plan, and write.  It is perfect for the making of resolutions and the formulating of plans, blue-prints, and lists intended to carry those resolutions to fruition.

Perhaps we in Australia need to shift our New Year to July so that the official calendar aligns with our instincts and the pattern of our seasons.  After all, Yule-Tide in July has been a regular thing here in the Moutains for many years.

What did the First Peoples do, I wonder?  Did they have or mark in some way a 'beginning' to the year?  If so, when did they do it?  Or did they roll with the cycle of the seasons?  From all that I have read and heard, they seem to have had a complex set of indicators - the flowering of various plants, the arrival or departure of different birds and animals, as well as all sorts of astronomical signs - by which to understand the seasonal changes, and plan their next move.

It would be a more flexible and adaptive way of noting the passage of time than the rigid calendar the modern world is driven by - that calendar which does not quite fit with the actual movement of our world around its star, and needs regular trimming and fine tuning to keep it more or less in synch with natural reality.

The New Year's Resolutions made under that calendar often do not seem to fit, either.  For many, the Ritual of Resolutions seems to lead inevitably to a Day of Disappointment, as the last wishful promise fails or is discarded as too hard.  It's a bit like all those resolutions made as Political Promises every few years by our politicians as they face re-election.  They often sound terribly familiar (usually because they are), and that Day of Disappointment seems to be arriving so much sooner now than it used to.

Indeed, here and in many parts of the world, such disappointment is becoming almost perpetual - not a good omen for civil society.  Yet resolutions can be an expression of hope and intent and, perhaps like my winter-born gardening resolutions, failure might be averted by the application of planning and determination, and regular reminders of those good intentions.

For without hope, what is there?  When the nights are long, and the days are dim, hopeful resolutions offer a path back to blossoming springtimes and bountiful summers and autumns. When ever you make your resolutions, I hope they take you and your world down a good road, to a better future.