Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet from Shirley's house, 1993

Here’s a photo of the Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet from Shirley’s place (lot 6) in late 1993. An exhausted dairy farm being transformed into a Permaculture Hamlet.

Shirley has been explaining to me how the process worked. That heady mix of dreaming and practical realities.

She’s been explaining what her intentions were, coming here alone as a widow in her early sixties. She was dreaming of community. And support. A place to put down roots and live into her older years. Her own, ecological, architect-designed house.

A place where she (a distinguished fine artist with works already in the National Gallery) could paint and create in peace — embraced and supported by Nature’s beauty and bounty.

Embraced and supported by a community of like-minded people caring for Nature and for each other.

What exciting days those were!

The dream was so inviting; the vision so bright; the intentions so clear.

Promotional material for Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet

Here’s the Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet insert in the Northern Star for late March 1994:

Star Focus on Jarlanbah March 1994

This is the vision we need to revisit.

How can we update the vision and re-align with our current version?

How can we move forward in harmony, cooperation and peace?

I look forward to your comments.

All ideas are welcomed. Contrary views are welcomed and and invited.

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter…. Obliged to you for hearin’ me….

It’s Easter weekend: a time for reflection on renewal, blessings and hope.

I am awash with fresh insights following a fascinating community mediation about the dual occupancy (accessory dwelling unit) issue on this community.

On this page — and soon in a dedicated website, I will chronicle my thoughts about community engagement and community development.

Bullying at Jarlanbah

I tried to become involved in this community four years ago. I offered some advice on how community meetings might be conducted. A few simple meeting protocol points based on research and years of experience. I was told it was “draconian”; that it was not necessary. Exhausted from the move to the bush from the city, I could not handle a concerted bullying attack from a long-term resident who ridiculed my simple offering. I cried for three days and resolved never to try that again. I can be paid to give my advice, I reasoned, in late 2005.

I’m an unlikely target for a bully but this one was an experienced professional. She’d had success with scores of others.

For advice, see:

Notes on Bullying

Bullying at Jarlanbah

For the full article on “Leaving Utopia”, click here:  Leaving Utopia – MARY GARDEN

There’s great new research on bullying which is encouraging. The Shared Concern Method holds great promise. But this requires people not to be passive bystanders but to stand up against bullies. I’d love to see more of this in this community.

Bullying comes in many forms on our community. One elderly neighbour moved away because she was simply terrified of abuse and felt that she could not speak out without being shouted down. One particular incident forced her to move: just plain bullying.

Others (wise, experienced community activists with great community development credentials) left because their views were always ignored. “Expertise” (I have learned)  is rarely appreciated here.

Sometimes more vulnerable or hesitant Jarlanbah residents are accosted in the street of the Nimbin village and berated about the activities of other residents. My tardiness in building our composting toilet has repeatedly been a topic of abuse from one resident to another without my even being present!

The Jarlanbah blackboard

And then there is the infamous Jarlanbah blackboard.  A sweet idea, you’d think. For neighbours to advertise the Easter Egg Hunt or share good news.  But for those of us who would like a small income stream from our property or who work at or from home (quite a few, actually, consultants, artists, chefs, gardeners, equipment repair people, authors, musicians…), a comment which appeared yesterday on the blackboard is a challenge (see below).

Many of the guiding principles of sustainability focus on working from home, the work-life balance, reducing automobile dependence… It was part of the founding charter of this community, for Pete’s sake…

A neighbour photographed it with a mobile phone and promptly erased it.

The Jarlanbah blackboard, yesterday…

Anyway, bullying will not be a problem for me any more.

Things are different now. We’re settled in, the toilet is built, the deck is a daily marvel and my three books have been birthed and are now for sale.

Even though there’s still lots of bullying around, I realise that I can no longer turn my back on the goings-on in my own immediate community and focus only on other communities.

There is much to learn from this small eco-village and much that needs to change.

The Jarlanbah archives

With the help of my elderly artist neighbour, Shirley, a founding resident, I have been exploring the Jarlanbah archives from the early 1990s.

What a tale they have to tell us!

Robyn Francis

The birth of this community in 1993 was accompanied by deep reflection and much dreaming, bearing in mind the state of the Earth and a deep desire to care for Nature in all her wondrous beauty. The developer was completely aligned with these ambitious social and environmental objectives. The designer, eminent Permaculture educator and designer, Robyn Francis, keeps in regular contact with many of us and recently has been helping us understand the deeper intent of our founding principles with respect to intergenerational equity, density, community infrastructure, inclusion and sustainability.

She’s reminded us of the strong focus on inclusion in the founding documents. Given that today there’s a lot of exclusionary thinking about in the world, it’s a salutary reminder!

Those of us who live on Jarlanbah are blessed to have Robyn as a neighbour. Awarded NSW Rural Woman of the Year a few years ago, she’s a Permaculture designer and educator of international eminence.

For Robyn’s award-winning teaching, education, training and design work, see:

www.permaculture.com.au

and

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/utopias/dream_machine/docos/jarlanbah.htm

How I wish I could have been part of that early planning process!

The far-thinking developer, John Hunter, his planners and designers (and then the first residents) spent long hours exploring alternatives for the social and physical design of this place. It was a dream that was both far-looking and practical; resilient and able to be modified.

We’ve lost our way…

For reasons that I will explore in this blog and in the new website, I believe that we’ve seriously lost our way here in the Jarlanbah Permaculture Hamlet.

But I am confident that it’s not too late to bring the original vision up-to-date, realign with it and and move forward in cooperation, self-reliance and harmony.

I’ve pasted in below the poster that used to be on our sign at the front gate:  the original dream. The sign went missing but the dream is still alive in the hearts and minds of many early Jarlanbah Hamleteers. And the newbies are now learning what our founding mothers and fathers had in mind.

The details of the dream are spelled out in a detailed Management Statement and fascinating early newsletters, which I will also post for people to read.

We need to understand our history here.

I need to understand it!

Blessings on you all this Easter weekend! May we all live in peace, cooperation and harmony.

The promise, if not (yet) the reality…

Trouble in Paradise

Tomorrow evening my neighbours are meeting to decide whether or not to try to ban dual occupancy (commonly called accessory dwelling units:  http://www.mass.gov/envir/smart_growth_toolkit/pages/mod-adu.html ) in this eco-village of 43 dwellings on 22 hectares.

The whole process has me mightily confused.

Imagine the contradictions

Imagine the contradictions. Here we are living on half an acre in a Permaculture community committed to self-sufficiency and sustainability principles.

We live in a low-income community (Nimbin, population 350) with a desperate shortage of housing, especially for lower income residents. And most of us do not grow much food – if any – on our properties. I think every lot has at least one car. We’re highly automobile-dependent and we’re certainly not secure in terms of food production.

Designed by Robyn Francis

But we’re trying. The Jarlanbah community, designed by formidable Permaculture designer, Robyn Francis, who lives down the road at the Djanbung Gardens Permaculture Education Centre (see: http://www.earthwise.org.au/), was established in 1993 and the first residents moved in in 1994. We’ve been here since 2001, actually living here since early 2006.

Now many of us are ageing and looking for opportunities to age in place and to have the possibility of a caregiver living on our house block.

Or to have an income stream from renting a small dwelling on our land.

Recently, the Jarlanbah Review Sub-committee rejected a proposal by one of our neighbours for a dual occupancy arrangement on his block. In North America, this is generally called an “accessory dwelling unit”.

His house is very stylish and modern in its design and I wondered what role “aesthetics” played in the decision.

Arguments in favour of dual occupancy

In any case, this case, which is likely to go to a formal mediation session, has caused a huge amount of discussion in our community. Some of us, citing global sustainability principles, Peak Oil, automobile dependence and the needs of an ageing, rural population, want to be able to have two dwellings on a lot. We can’t see how this would differ – in planning terms — from, say, a house with four or more bedrooms for a large family or shared household. We don’t see that the impacts on our road infrastructure would be that dramatic.

Not everyone would want to have another dwelling on their lot (perhaps half might – eventually) and those who did could pay extra to reflect the wear and tear that another vehicle might cause (assuming that vehicles would not be shared).

“It will open the floodgates”

But not all residents feel this way. Others are afraid that having a few more dwellings will open the floodgates. “It’ll turn Jarlanbah into a slum and a ghetto,” remarked one of the long-term residents, while another claimed that she did not move to Nimbin “to live in cluster housing.”  “This is not inner city Redfern,” claimed another.

NIMBY and BANANA

As a Jarlanbah resident who has spent a whole career (since 1967) working in housing and planning, I am curious to understand what this really means.

Where would these road-wrecking new slum-dwellers come from?

How could a ghetto emerge as a result of density increase?

I can’t help but think of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or better still, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (or Anyone).

Nevertheless, this small village community on 43 lots is about to embark on an open, democratic, community discussion on this matter. In the Jarlanbah community centre, subject of an equally acrimonious debate that featured bullying and recrimination, broke hearts, shattered trust, offended aesthetic sensibilities and still rankles…

The Jarlanbah Community Centre

Watch this space!

Wednesay morning update:

Shocking meeting with no facilitation process to help us.

People jumping up and threatening, screaming and swearing at each other, unable to be controlled by the Chair.

I’m now branded as a consultant who’s the same as a dot-com operator — in the pay of the developers, plotting the extinction of all the wallabies, echnidnas and antechinus.

Pretty soon we will have blocks of flats at the bottom of the gully!

More soon!

Wednesday, after the mediation session

This matter has been taken to a formal mediation session through the State Department of Fair Trading. As a trained mediator myself, I know that what goes on inside the room stays inside the room.

I will post my later thoughts on dual occupancy policy in this blog but for now, I cannot report on the latest events at Jarlanbah.

Except to say that we had a lovely pancake breakfast this morning (responding to advice from American planning theorist, John Forester, that we spend more time together socially and eating together). So this morning before the mediation, I served pancakes for breakfast in the community centre (after Shirley and I scrubbed it within an inch of its life last night).

And tonight it’s pizza on our deck.

It’s raining softly in Paradise this afternoon. It’s very peaceful.

After a four-hour+ mediation, the local residents have gone home to their families and their gardens.

I hear Gaia, the living Earth, breathe a sigh of relief.

Is she thinking: Hopefully, those pesky humans will relax and simply love what they love.

After four years living on our half-acre block and over eight years in total including time visiting on weekends, we have a toilet. We christened it a few weeks ago with great delight and considerable relief (pun not intended).

Neighbours and friends wonder why this basic amenity has taken so long.

I sometimes wonder, too.

But with the wettest two years since European settlement delaying construction of our large roof, we had to work quickly on other projects when we finally did get the roof on.

That required several alterations (dismantling, cutting and re-welding) to the massive box gutter which was splashing all over the interior house timbers.

Now it’s all working.

We have a roof and insulated exterior walls and a box gutter that handles great floods of water.

So we could finally turn out minds – and our resources – to the toilet.

A Farallones Institute Composting Privy
I was surprised to find out what the design for a composting toilet which the local Council approves was first published by the world-famous Farallones Insitute in Berkeley, California in 1976. I was living in Berkeley in the late seventies and much admired the Farallones Institute and the Integral Urban House (see: www.newsociety.com/bookid/4032).

The Farallones Institute was an independent association of scientists, designers, horticulturists and technicians which served for several decades as a pioneering centre for teaching and research in appropriate technology and sustainable design. Integrating architecture, agriculture, waste recycling, water conservation, and renewable energy, the Institute has been widely recognized as a model for ecological design. The Farallones’ resource conserving systems, solar dwellings, and organic gardens have been used extensively as a teaching tool.

That famous place. And now I was about to have one of their two-chamber composting toilets.

The toilet turned out to be much more work that I expected (though I did not build it.) Because it does not get direct sunlight, it has two chambers. After six or nine months, one is decommissioned and the other one is used for a similar period of time. The compost is put on the fruit trees.

Seems fine to me, though having two separate toilets in the bathroom is a rather quaint touch. We did not have toilets like that in North Vancouver.

So now we do not have to trudge 50 metres in the rain down to the community toilet. That was sometimes challenging when we were sick, it was raining heavily or the grass on the slope to the community building had not been cut. More than once I’ve slid down the hill to the community toilet on my bottom.

Gratitude to the Jarlanbah community and goodbye community toilet

Karl’s so happy not to have (in his words) to “push s**t uphill” any longer, as it was his job to clean out the community toilet while we (and many others) were using it. He had to haul the compost in a wheelbarrow up the hill 50 metres to bury it on our lot. That was a hard job, which he did uncomplainingly. But as he says, it’s good to know that it’s your stuff if you’re carting it. He has great tales about what he found buried in the Jarlanbah community composting toilet! And it certainly wasn’t “our stuff”!

Farewell to the Jarlanbah community toilet

Toilet Heaven
But now, rain or shine, we are in “toilet heaven”.

The kitchen is next.

Then we can benefit from Karl’s bountiful kitchen garden, currently fallow, but ready for reviving once he has a break from the seemingly endless task of house building. (I know he’d gladly give up the ladder and welder for a spade and trowel!)

We’ve been at this house-building job for three years now. And now that my three books are published, I have more time to help.

We’re hoping to christen our new home before the end of this year. In the meantime, when we think of people who are so much less fortunate than we are, we’re reminded that we’re blessed with two huge tanks full of water, a cozy, dry place to sleep and a spacious deck for entertaining.

The world ice hockey champions
On which deck, to the great delight of our dear Canadian friend, Marnee and her Irish (but pro-Canadian) husband Ollie, we watched the Olympic television coverage last month for sixteen exhausting nights. A passionate, newly demonstrative nationalistic Canada reminded us that Canadians are (and must always be) the world ice hockey champions!

Right on!

Eh?

The Guest Bedroom

We’ve been living in our shed for three and a half years. House under construction for two and a half…

And on Friday the windows arrived for the guest bedroom in our house-under-construction project. It has walls, doors, a roof, a floor and almost windows.

Tomorrow morning at 9 am Ken is coming to help Karl install them.

I’ve been reflecting about how much this means to me. It’s so marvellous here these sparking winter days. It’s absolutely freezing at night as we huddle around a fire on the deck in our Mexican chiminea. Then it’s up to 30 during the day.

Many blessings

I’m blessed to be  living in a rural paradise, awakened by the raucous laughter of a dozen kookaburras in a nearby tree. Spending late winter afternoons watching a family of five wallabies relaxing and eating the new grass shoots on the lawn.

I WANT TO SHARE THIS. But it’s not much of an offering to urban people who have baths and toilets and kitchens when I say I can offer a tent or a rat-infested shed. A wash under the hose.

A lovely prospect

But the prospect of putting a bouquet of  fresh flowers in a vase in the guest bedroom,  hanging ironed curtains on the new screened louvered windows, setting out a few good books on the bedside table, a candle, incense… that is such a delightful imagining.  It brings a great yearning to my heart. Many dear friends have visited us in our chaotic circumstances. We’ve trudged them around the muddy building site, stumbling over piles of timber and peering into unfinished rooms, gesturing where rooms could be, how the roof could go…

“I couldn’t live like this.”

One, appalled, could only say, “I couldn’t live like this.”  Others have hugged us and offered all means of encouragement. Very great encouragement. Everyone marvels at the beauty of the place.

Tonight I was sharing my enthusiasm for the guest bedroom by phone with Leonie, twelve thousand miles away. Maybe she’ll come to visit after Christmas. We might have the box gutter sorted out by then. I reassured her that her room is rat- and python-proof, fully mossie-proof. It has a great view of the escarpment. Great ventilation. A private verandah. It’s very quiet. We even plan to have key locks on the guest bedroom doors so that guests can leave valuables and not be worried by our relaxed rural attitude to security.

So, one more sleep to an almost-ready guest bedroom. One more step toward the hospitality I dream of.

Feels like Christmas Eve.

Sad postscript the next day: The windows were too big for the spaces. It was the Builders Picinc Day in NSW (a holiday I had not heard of!) so could not sort it out.

Much disappointment. (Watch this space…)

A day later: Ordered new windows. We’d apparently violated some window-measuring protocol. Supposed to call it “make size” to include the window reveals (whatever that means…) Our fault. But they fit in the living room. Still, it’s not the same.

Ken did a great job of brushcutting instead…

Sept. 7th, 2009: The windows are in. At last! It’s gorgeous. It’s ready for guests. Cosy and homey. Not exactly “finished” but filled with love.

March 2010: The exterior walls are insulated and clad, two new windows added above the original ones, an internal screen door to allow for more cross-ventilation and we’ve had our first proper guest. Now that we can offer the convenience of a beautiful composting toilet next door, it’s even more inviting.

Come to visit!

The Guest Bedroom March 2010

Up a ladder and too tired to pay the account

So imagine me on the day that a credit card account was due for payment trying to convince Karl – up a ladder for hours mending the roof – to pay it online as only he knows how. Understandably, he chose bed after an exhausting day and the account was late.

In the morning – at 9 am – he paid it. I then rang the bank to ask for a remission of the late fee. I proudly answered all the identification questions: my childhood pet, great aunt’s maiden name, Karl’s favourite brand of German sauerkraut… Anne, from Tasmania, seemed sensible enough.

Then came the question I could not answer: what recent charges have you made on this card? The earlier statements were with my bookkeeper, who lives in a local community whose road access was flooded out by what the locals came to call “the chasm”.

Airlifted tofu

(As a side note, it was humorous to hear that all the tofu in Lismore was bought up by the emergency services and airlifted by helicopter to the cut-off alternative community members!)

Anyway, I could not remember my purchases. It never occurred to me that they would be, of course, on the statement I was ringing about. Anne didn’t think of that either.

The upshot was that I was deemed not to be me and therefore had my credit card access cancelled.

“I AM me! Truly, I am. Ask me anything else? Ring me back on any of the numbers you have on file,” I cried, then remembering that the floods had cut the home line.

“Ring me back. Email me! Anything! I’m in a tiny village. Don’t make me go into that terrible bank again with those appalling people who send me away, telling me I have to make an appointment to collect my credit card. I have sworn never to go into that bank. Never.”

On my desk is the morning paper with their latest advertisement: “We’re for…  [all good, sensible, community and local things].” I’m encouraged to believe that they are the bank I can bank on. They are for me. Hah!

Deep carpet sobbing

I am crying now. Deep carpet sobbing.

I ask to speak to her supervisor.

The supervisor, also from Tasmania, takes the same hard line. She does not say my name because, of course, I am not me.

I am not me

I am not me. I have to drive 75 kms. round trip to Lismore. I have been cut off.

I explained again, sobbing, that I was me, that the account was paid, that all I wanted was a little compassion (the neighbouring community got helicopter loads of tofu, for God’s sake!).

I closed the account and moved things to another bank .

Which bank?

(Which bank? That bank!)

There a compassionate and generous officer sorted out my affairs and made me and Karl cups of tea.

Complaint addressed

In the end, someone from “complaints” rang from the first bank and apologised.

But when I asked here whether State Government policies on natural disasters had any impact on how banks operate, the woman said she did not know. She thought probably yes.

Disasters come in many forms. For us, blessedly spared, this one just brought us a lot of mess and the loss of some treasured mementoes.

And a new bank. With real people.

This story was prepared in response to the Durham University Colloquium/Workshop, FAITH & SPIRITUALITY IN THE CITY: Towards a Post-Secular Urbanism?, in March, 2007. The event was convened by Philip Sheldrake. As far as I know, no report has been made of that event.

It forms chapter 14 of my forthcoming book (with Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman), Creative Community Planning: Transformative Engagement Practices for Working at the Edge (London, Earthscan, 2010).

So . . . here we are and there we were . . . once upon a time . . . or below a time, or under a time or beside a time. It doesn’t really matter — in a place far and not so far from here . . . in a time long ago . . . and not so long ago . . . our grandmother was calling us —to hear a story. 

Gran’s story, as my story, was about the time of the Great Turning. My grandmother’s Nana was living in a large city like this one and she saw and heard all these things herself. And these changes were not just happening in the cities, though they started and spread from the cities to multitudes of communities all over the Earth.

The first time I heard this story, us children were sitting with my Gran around the campfire in a little community garden just like this one full of pea shoots and berry bushes. Old as the hills, my Gran leaned forward with that look I loved in her tanned, lined face. And she whispered the same words I say to you now. These things I am about to tell you…

My children. What a time it was!

In those days, people in the cities had lost touch with the living Earth and all the important things. Things like their place in the local and global community and even the inner scared parts of themselves. It sounds ridiculous, after all of us here and those before us have been through, but that’s how it was in those days. Cities were contradictory and confusing places, with really rich people and really poor people. Many people felt isolated, though they lived right next door to someone.

People were really separated from the land, too. They depended for their lives on the living Earth around them but gave nothing back. They had forgotten that the Earth was alive or where they came from or who and what they were connected to. They were frightened by the Earth Changes and many of them refused to believe they were happening. It took the Time of the Great Storms to convince some of them.

My Nan told me that part of the Great Turning was about bringing sacredness back to the city. Do you know what that word means? It’s a word they didn’t use enough in the Old Times but if you listen closely to my story, perhaps it will make more sense to you. To make that happen, the people did not have to learn anything new; they just had to learn how to remember. Like you remembering the story I am telling you right now — and passing it on to your children and grandchildren.

In the Old Times, cities were centres of advanced scientific, technical and intellectual development. They were also places where individuals, rather than the community, flourished. People who were concerned about that problem were writing books and articles about the ‘good city’. They wrote about the kinds of things: social justice, community identity, emancipation, the commons and the common good, justice and fairness, rules and responsibilities. Some put forward lists of the conditions that would support human flourishing, with ideas about housing, health care, creativity, work and social supports.

Sadly, they also got bogged down in their own words. They succumbed to despair and apathy. They told stories about cities riddled with anxiety and depression, full of people who were disconnected and excluded. It made some people feel fearful, guilty or hopeless about the problems in their own communities. Everyone was saying such bad things about the cities but my Nana felt that the cities could make a big difference — if people just looked at them in a different way.

People wanted their public spaces, their everyday public spaces, to be magical, beautiful, comfortable and creative places. Small, special places were essential to people’s everyday lives. They had special rituals attached to them. One of the new creative types described a process that he called ‘eco-revelatory design’: ways of making the life of a place manifest in the city. People could really understand what he said.

There was no time for delay at the time of the Great Turning, which was what they called that time when the Great Storms came and the people had finally lost their faith in the ways things were ‘supposed to be’ in the Old Times. In those days, there was a great yearning among people to be whole and to reconnect with everything that had been lost. This story is about how people went from being isolated from each other and the Earth, to reconnecting.

At that time, people grew to relearn skills they had forgotten: listening with the ears of others, even listening with their hearts. The chattering mind grew quieter so that the heart and spirit could flourish. Balance was really what was required. More and more people began questioning what was real and looking more carefully at what was already in their cities. They held lively and boisterous public meetings that overflowed local halls, school gymnasiums and all the online social networks. People were speaking their hearts.

Although it took a longer time for the universities to welcome the new ideas, planning students started learning about concepts like ‘right livelihood’ and ‘skilful means’ and about ‘working from the heart’ on practical and intelligent solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the cities and the Earth. New courses, some even on subjects like ‘heart politics’ were proposed. Local people started coming into university classrooms to help teach these important topics. Some of the more influential contributors challenged the students and their teachers to be part of the changes, not to resist them. They implored city planners to become actively engaged social change workers and told them that ‘teachers’ and ‘lessons’ were everywhere in the world. They argued that their planning work should express their interconnectedness.

And you can imagine … before long, the cities began to look different. And to feel different. More like what we have today. People came out of their houses and met in cafés and parks and held meetings and social events and gatherings to organise themselves to work together. As people spent more time with people they saw as different from their ‘own kind’, some of the tensions between different groups released.

The Indigenous people and the poets assumed new creative leadership roles in all city planning projects. Before too long, city-building processes began to change. Architects began to embrace spiritual principles that were becoming popular before the Turning, breathing new life into buildings and giving them what they called The Quality without a Name. People began to talk about ‘the timeless way of building’ and architects and builders became much more respected members of the community.

The wider community of all ages became deeply involved in the process of city imagining, city dreaming and city building. Visioning, they called it. Or creative visualization. In workshops in the community centres, people would sit together and decide how the cities should be planned. Their voices sounded like Tibetan bells: so many different languages, softly spoken at the same time. People dreaming together about their cities. The adults and children listened with their eyes closed.

There were great outpourings of love and reverence, as people flocked to public meetings, events and ceremonies to work out ways to save and repair and protect the Earth so it could be passed on to the future generations. There were gatherings and activities everywhere: vegetation and food planting events and days devoted just to collecting and saving seeds and others where people built small shade structures and benches so that they could sit alone or together in the parks. Other people made paths so you could stroll though these places and then sit and just reflect on things. In these places, they sensed spiritual inspiration, in feelings of peace, oneness and connectedness and a sense of freedom, reverence and humility. Gradually, people came to understand the restorative qualities of Nature — that it could restore mind, body and spirit.

There were places in the city that already had significance to people and, with the help of the planners and the artists, their stories were woven into the wider community story. The environment of stories changed, as well as the physical environment. People started talking differently about things like stigma and failure. They found brighter words to fit their new optimism. They talked about imagining, flourishing, strengthening, resilience, reclaiming and community partnerships.

Probably the most marvellous thing that happened during the Great Turning was that the distinctions between the separate and defended territories of the formal religions and alternative (often older) wisdom traditions began to melt away. It was not necessary to have one definition of ‘spiritual’. People spoke about spiritual ecology and spiritual geography. My Nan remembers that talk of the creative spirit was present and easily evoked in these new and rediscovered city places. Places that held special sacredness.

In the newly sacred places in the cities, groups of children and teenagers often gathered and played. They loved the vitality and aliveness of those places and preferred the wilder places. The adults slowly grew to accept that this was natural and tried not to be fearful when the children went there. These places were initially the undeveloped lots and places that had been flooded or bombed or damaged in other ways by earthquakes and cyclones. Many of these places, though spoiled, were once again yielding to the forces of Nature. Colonising plants rambled over old structures and pushed through the cracks in the old concrete below; colourful insects hid in humusy undergrowth or buzzed in the sharp hot stillness of desertified lands. And in the riverbeds there were fossils to find — and rocks of extraordinary shape and colour. This was the ecotone, the edgeplace of healing between the old way and the new.

All of these wild spaces were alive, but for many, the favourite wild places were the natural wooded areas left alone by development. The children gathered in these newly consecrated places and were at the forefront of the community activities to renew them. With so many children playing in places that were natural and wild, consecrated to the work of community building and spiritual development, a new breed of young people emerged. They came to love Nature with a great fierceness. These spiritual warriors gave birth to new children, who — as children and adults — reaffirmed the sacred place of Nature in the city and worked to preserve all aspects of the living Earth.

And so, today we have everywhere precious natural places — deeply nourishing and spiritual places — that were saved and cherished and handed down by those courageous people at the time of the Great Turning. In their quest for spiritual nourishment, they rediscovered something vitally important.

 Everyday spirituality they called it.

 Some just called it love.1

Sources:

Alexander, C. (2005) The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Four volumes, Taylor and Francis, London

Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford, New York

Callenbach, E. (1975) Ecotopia: the Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Heyday Books, Berkeley, California

Hester, R. T. (2006) Design for Ecological Democracy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Korten, D. C. (2006) The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

Le Guin, U.K. (2001) Always Coming Home, University of California Press, Berkeley, California

Macy, J. and Young Brown, M. (1998) Coming back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, our World, New Society, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada

Peavey, F. (2000) Heart Politics Revisited, Pluto Press, Sydney

Piercy, M. (1976) Woman on the Edge of Time, Knopf, New York

Starhawk (1993) The Fifth Sacred Thing, Bantam, New York

Today the Gypsy and I were sorting hardware. Nails and screws. It’s been a rough week in community engagement and I had to do something else than listen to bureaucrats and aggrieved residents.

I had to get my hands dirty. Get grounded.

Living on a building site generates a massive amount of mess. It’s hard to manage from day to day, particularly with few dry places to store things. Today we were sorting roofing screws from other screws from nails and clamps and tools of all descriptions. Rusted saws (it’s humid here), worn-out paint brushes. Dead paint tins. Odd unidentifiable objects.

Very therapeutic.

Gypsy’s work bench

I have attempted to clean up the Gypsy’s work bench a number of times in the last sixteen years with little success. He’s always tinkering. Genuinely of Romany blood (probably about one-third), he’s a tinker by nature and genetic disposition. There is nothing he cannot fix. We discovered that the solar garden lights you buy at the hardware store have a life of about three months and then they start to decline into fickleness, eccentricity, dementia and finally death…

But the Gypsy keeps at them. Resuscitating them. His table is littered with carcases of globes and pickets as he revivifies them one by one. He recharges their yellow batteries and cleans their connections with my nail file. The he gently sets them back to glow along the gravel path.

There are knives to be sharpened and electrical equipment to be repaired. And when the rain took out the phone, endless tinkering with a huge range of cords and adapters to make the phones work again.

Birkenstocks glued back together

I grew up in a household where everything was broken. So I love this quality in the Gypsy. He’s glued my favourite Birkenstock sandals back together so many times they were mostly glue. He’s taken to collapsing Ikea furniture with an artisan’s disdain and made it stand upright again. He’s built, maintained and endlessly repaired our tarpaulin “hootchie” where we lived for the first few years.

Old skills

HIs are the old skills. Resilient skills. Like mending and sewing. Knitting. Chopping firewood. Canning peaches. Putting up jams.

Skills we need for the Great Turning: persistence, repair, restoration and loving care.

From my office, I can hear the sounds of kindling being chopped. My chilled limbs predicting another fire in the chiminea. 

I am blessed to be the beneficiary of these old skills.

Blessed to be with the Gypsy.

“Don’t plant any more trees,” he said. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to live uphill from a gully?”

No more trees.

A hard ask when it’s so hot in the summer.

We’re doing what we can.

When there’s smoke on the horizon, as there was earlier this week, I get to remembering how frightening fire can be in the bush. All my neighbours know this, of course. And my “fire” experience has to do with a very different bioregion: the Top End of northern Australia.

Everything is different there from this subtropical paradise: dramatic thunderstorms, fierce winds, endless periods of rain and dry in strongly defined seasons. The Aboriginal people say there are six: Yegge, Wurrgeng, Gurrung, Gunumeleng, Gudjewg and Banggerreng.  

My first bushfire was in August 1991. In Humpty Doo.

I can still smell the fear of it.

I remember the dramatic differences in the “before” and “after” landscape. 

Before and after the Fire, 1991

 
 
And I still sense in my body my own terrified response:
In the middle distance I spotted dark smoke rising above a wall of orange. The horizon, formerly hidden by a rich woodland understorey, trees and shrubs, now expanded for acres, revealing the scarred landform’s idiosyncrasies: stream banks, hillocks and depressions. Scattered across this moonscape were burning and smoking stumps, charred skeletons of acacia, woolly butt, kapok bushes, ironwood, carallia, billy goat plums, some without leaves or branches. Only the tallest retained a thin green canopy crowning their blackened branches.

The black, twisted stumps of leafless cycad ferns like amputated limbs. Large birds I’d never seen before spiralled overhead, wheeling and diving on insects and small animals seeking refuge at the fire’s margins.

And the sound of it: the tearing and thudding of huge trees crashing into the earth.

I feel like my life is about to be burned down. With me inside.

That day a hundred acres of neighbours’ bush burns a quarter-mile from my house. Cause unknown. Spot fires burn everywhere, as far as I can see.

Spot fires burn in my heart, burning all my raw places, burning away my shell, exposing vulnerable new places.

Flames are spreading with every breath, spreading throughout my being.

Our neighbour to the west, Trevor, has just planted twenty new shrubs to give us a bit of privacy from each other.

Neighbour Lis, a horticulturalist, bought the plants and Karl helped Trevor with the mulching. I hope they won’t be a problem because we really need to shade the western wall of our new house.

Like Robert Frost, we believe that “good fences make good neighbours”. In this case, trees, rather than fences.

So we try to be prudent and meet our other needs. It’s always this way for us new ones on the block: a sort of awkward, inexperienced, balance … a searching for some sort of equanimity in this rural place …

I try to be reasonable. But I know I’m not reasonable when I smell gum trees burning.

I was too close to that once and it really frightened me.

You can download the full (true) story of  ”Watching the Fire” by clicking here:  Sarkissian Watching the Fire 2009

But the urgent task became a meditation and yielded a great blessing.

My father’s American Green Card (such a valuable treasure for a Canadian!). His Maui driver’s license with his photograph dated 1973. Yellowed newspaper obituary clippings about my great-grandfather, the charismatic Armenian preacher, Rev. Harootune Sarkissian, describing what could only be called a “triumphant death”, surrounded by family, singing Armenian hymns. He was in Connecticut, aged 96. I remember visiting his grave.

Then I discovered the letter from my former partner.

It was only a few lines and printed in pencil. I remembered the circumstances. I was standing at the table sorting papers and had to sit down as sweet memories washed over me.

It was a mutual decision to part after eight years and we were both grieving for what we had lost. We engaged a Sydney therapist for four sessions to say our goodbyes.

This tiny scrap of paper was my partner’s letter to me, written as a child would write to a dear friend who was moving away. Printed in his non-dominant hand. That’s what the therapist instructed us to do.

The letter said we’d soon be parting and he would miss me greatly. He asked me to remember the good times we had and closed with an expression of love.  I’d printed a similar letter to him, I recalled, tears now streaming down my cheeks.

Yes, I remember the good times and I missed them — and him.

I bless the friendship we have shared since those painful sessions. I count him as a dear friend. In over twenty years, I doubt we’ve said one harsh word to each other. In fact, the therapy sessions were so powerful and effective that, other than a small altercation about lending the car, we never argued or disagreed. From places deep in our broken hearts, we told each other what was important – what needed to be said.

We sang songs to each other and each gave the other a small gift.

Our therapist showed us great kindness and compassion. He even cried with us, perhaps for his own losses…

I carefully folded and packed away the tiny letter, more cherished than photo albums and other treasures.

A plea from the heart for love to be validated and remembered.

My heart opening a simple — and undeniable — recognition of that reality.

An unexpected blessing in the midst of chaos.