City Living, Nature Calling – an ecomythic film for our times

 What better way to support the new myth, the ‘big story’ that is growing within and around us in response to our need to treat the earth better, than to make a film. Film is the great myth-making machine of the modern era. And when impactful visuals are combined with convincing narration, documentary film can help change the world. This is what is intended for City Living, Nature Calling, an ecologically inspired documentary film that shows how modern societies can be adapted to meet the challenges of climate change and bring more balance to human/ecosystem relations.

City Living, Nature Calling is an ecomythic documentary, a story for our times that points out that the dominant myth of the modern world has been one that promised technological abundance for all. Nowadays we know that this is a convenient fiction and our hearts, minds, bodies and souls draw us on to the next grand vision of life in balance, of flourishing life for all on this beautiful planet. This doco draws upon our innate care for our home, wherever we live, even when our ‘natural environment’ has become a landscape of city grids, motorized traffic and credit cards, tall buildings lit at night and bustling pedestrians on mobile phones. City Living, Nature Calling offers answers to the ‘big story’ of modern society by looking first at how we got here and then at how technology can work hand-in-hand with respect for nature to heal our wounded world.

 

City Living, Nature Calling opens with a story about how humanity evolved, over countless millennia, in close contact with wild nature, before so many of us moved into cities with the rise of civilization. The doco shows how the current ecological crisis is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the human race now live in urban environments, which now dominate the planet and its ecology, drawing energy and resources up from the planet around them. It points out we all love our home to some extent, but that transferring our loyalties from the countryside to the city leaves us alienated from our ancestral place in nature. The ‘big picture’ that this film presents is that we need to relearn how to fit in with the cycles and limits of nature rather than assuming that our advanced technologies will continue to provide us with abundance.

Author and narrator Dr Geoffrey Berry draws on his academic research into the mythic history of civilization from an ecologically-informed perspective. So rather than presenting a merely materialistic account about the benefits and dangers of technology, his work also investigates the timelessly shifting mysteries of symbolic stories and their relationship to human consciousness. Geoff asks questions like: how do we think and behave in terms of the kind of environment we grow up in? And what effect do our technologies have upon our attitudes and feelings (and vice versa)? These questions led him to uncover the mythic substrata of human consciousness and the way great symbolic narratives motivate human behavior according to certain historical and environmental contexts.

      How we love to light our cities at night …

Geoff’s ecomythic presentation in City Living, Nature Calling aims to motivate mainstream populations towards ecological adaptation by reminding us that the home we love includes city and country, in a wider sense of biodiversity. But just as importantly, the doco also discusses the modern myths that are holding us back from the rapid and systemic transformation required of us today. Geoff’s research into myth and symbol taught him that these powerful stories and images convince us that the way we live is natural and ‘true,’ as if they (and therefore we) are aligned with some greater reality beyond the material world. His work led him to the discovery that we still live by a dominant myth, a dangerous misconception that is now being dismantled by environmental science and our collective recognition that we cannot continue exploiting the world forever.

The ‘dominant myth’ that Geoff uncovers in modern society is that we can endlessly consume the earth’s resources as if they were unlimited; it is an ‘eternal feast’ in our modern cities of light. This vision implies that we have overcome the vagaries of seasonal cycles, which afflicted traditional societies with famine (as well as providing feast). We know such afflictions still threaten us, but somehow the imagery of modern consumption works to avert our eyes from this reality and draws us instead to constantly dream of the glowing treasure available at the end of the shopping aisle. For more on how this kind of dreaming can be adapted to the limits of nature, please see the film trailer and crowd funding campaign at www.startsomegood.com/clnc

Following a successful funding campaign, Geoff and film maker Darcy Gladwin will head out to ask experts in fields such as climate science, renewable power, permaculture design and urban development how we can adapt better to ecological limit, right now. Geoff also aims to interview other kinds of influential voices such as Aboriginal elders and politicians. This footage will then be interspersed with visually poetic reflections on the big questions of our times. Join the many of us already on board the City Living, Nature Calling movement!

 

 

Mythtelling around the Campfire

After facilitating the first Belonging workshop last weekend, i want to reflect upon one of the themes that arose there: how do we find embrace technology and express our innate love of nature in the same life of body and soul? And how can we do both in an ecologically sustainable way? This is a core issue for modern people to come to terms with and it runs right through my work, including the documentary film City Living, Nature Calling (more details soon) and my mythtelling story session around the campfire in Castlemaine this Friday evening. (If you’re anywhere near there, or are coming to the Local Lives, Global Matters event, see details below)

 

 

Let’s start with Prometheus, the mythic character who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. He was a Titan, which generally puts him on the side of humanity against the haughty Olympian gods (Titans descend directly from mother earth, or Gaia, and father sky, or Uranus). Sometimes he is even credited with creating humanity, but mostly he is known as the same culture hero who was responsible for granting us the powers of technology. There’s the irony, because even though modern technology has become so powerful that it is now seen as a major driving force behind the destruction of the environment, it was originally created out of loyalty to the earth and its people. Obviously, the problem is not technology per se, but the ways it is used. Prometheus, in another myth, is also responsible for lifting up our chins towards the heavens, in what sounds like an evolutionary shift from primate to free standing homo sapiens. From then on, we are looking at the stars, employing some of my favourite of all human qualities: imagination and wonder, dreaming of future and further possibilities, looking beyond immediate experiences with hope and maybe even love for the universe.

This is the force that expands us beyond our bodies, hopefully in a way that increases our appreciation for this physical life, this embodiment of consciousness and self-aware intelligence that we are so lucky to have. There is no reason we can’t have all of this dreaming and be good ecological citizens of the earth at the same time. But in order to do so we might have to recall the Greeks’ great warning against hubris, or over-exaggerated pride. If the philosophical attitude of this culture may be summed in the oracle to Know Thyself, then obviously this ‘self’ must also be restrained by the ecological limits of its home. While the ancient Greeks were no doubt just as often warning against the excessive domination of tyrants in the polis – a social ill, rather than an environmental one – there are precedents for my intuition that there is a notion of ‘care for country’ in this mythic cycle. King Oedipus becomes aware of pollution in his land, for instance, when it is laid waste by plague.

 

Across the seas in ancient Britain, a similar set of circumstances besets the land as the Knights of the Round Table set off in search for the Holy Grail. There, the ill health of the king is directly associated with the suffering of the land. Metaphorically speaking, when cultural authority is weak (the king is wounded or defiled), so nature becomes barren, the land laid waste, the fruits of the forest left to rot or the desert sands dotted with corpses and crows. There is a direct association, in the Grail and Theban cycles of Kings Arthur and Oedipus, between vigorous rule and the fertility of the land. And again in both sets of stories there is a concern with just rule, with the good king, who serves his people with honour and in accord with a higher calling, a greater law, something more than mere political convention. There is a myth, or metaphysic, of interconnectedness between the way we live and the flourishing of our bioregion. Calling this the law of the land might make a nice counterpoint to the unsatisfying way Darwinian evolution has too often been reduced to a ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology that suits capitalist aggression a lot better than it suits an empathic collective of caring souls who like to cooperate towards a better world.

 

Also, this myth of culture and nature being strengthened by the same commitment to a just society also links mind and matter in a way not dissimilar to the identification with nature we recognize as a core feature of so many indigenous traditions. Where Psyche and Gaia are seen as codependent, the warning against hubris can be seen extended to become the magical formula of Hermes Trismegistus, “As Above, So Below.” This is another way of saying that what is within is without, or that our individual minds can ultimately be identified with the world, that what we see is what we are, only with a particularly human kind of reflection added. I find this way of thinking obeys the laws of both myth and reason, once the unlimited inter-relating qualities of metaphor are taken into account. And while we can imagine better worlds beyond this one, it is now our duty and pleasure to imagine a better way of living right here on this earth, amongst a community of inter-related beings dedicated to the flourishing of all. According to this logic, it makes perfect sense to act as if we are born out of the earth and must remain loyal to it, because it is mother and matrix, the ultimate ground of being; technology and all.

 

Geoff presents mythtelling around the campfire at Murrnong Co-Housing Community, Castlemaine, from 8pm this Friday 16th October. Bus leaves Market Building Steps, Mostyn St. Booking essential! See locallivesglobalmatters.org

Social Media Meditation

 For when you instinctively reach for the social media communication platform of choice and realize you don’t really need to do this and that you would be better off meditating:

 

Put the phone down – but with reverence. This is your communication device – and it is magical. By sending and receiving wavelengths, which have been manipulated to tell a story (be it of commerce or romance, leisure or work), this device puts you instantly in touch with your peers across space, anywhere on the planet. Respect that, even love or revere it.

I love the way this woman is hunched over the machine, in expectation – and the reflection of electric blue on her face. Possibly a bit close to the machine, then …

 

Now, remember that you must balance the time you communicate with silent time; the degree to which you stay in touch with others, with the degree to which you listen to yourself in quiet moments. Listen. To your breath. To your heartbeat. To the vibration your body makes, as a physical being. Listen to your thoughts. They are not getting in the way of the silence. They are the unlimited potential of the universe coming into being. They are the emanations of your unique self, expressing a unique vision, a way of being not replicated anywhere else, a complex refraction of light through an infinite variety of phases, times of life, eras of stability and change. You are a kaleidoscope responding to its environment and you are the driver of the way you compose yourself in this moment, given the circumstances available to you right now. Use this time to reflect.

 

If you maintain too much contact with others, you can be lost in the haze of wavelengths flying about. You can lose sight of the way your own sets of being, becoming, reflective powers and insight are working to re-place your self every day. Now is the time to check in with that process. What pressures are on? Where is the stress in your body, in your mind, in your life? Who do you care about? Check this one carefully. If you are wearing thin, you may be caring too much, heading for compassion fatigue or any other kind of burnout. Remember how often our loves, including our projects in the world, are designed to replenish the love we have either had and lost, thought we had, thought we should have had, wished we had, or other [fill in the gap]. None of these relationships or projects will ever completely succeed, because we cannot fill the inside of ourselves with love from the outside forever. Something always needs to be worked on, worked out, worked over, left behind or broken. We can only find deep, lasting satisfaction within. Social media is awesome and magical, but it can also be a cage, where the mental or emotional being within rattles the bars looking for more attention, more love, more affection, more validation. When it gets like this, it’s like a house-sized microwave, which has just has a car-sized metal plate inserted and turned on full power. It’s bad electricity, because it becomes an affliction. When we become addicted to social media, we are not wielding it to our own best benefit, or putting our efforts towards the good of the whole. We are making ourselves sick, thrusting our heads and hearts back into the microwave house with metal in it. Pull back. Turn the power off for a while. And reflect. Communication is good, but we need to have ourselves together if we are to be effective, for the good of ourselves and others. Take some time to check in and tune the wavelengths of our processing, moderate the way we are composing our responses to the world and to our own inner states, to pressures and joys and anger and sadness. Practice being with self in order to be better at being with self – and with others.

Give yourself at least 5 minutes for this. Half an hour is good. Get comfortable, feel your body, sense your mind, get in touch with your heart. And take it easy.

Definition of term: re-place – to put back, in better order, with emphasis on the act of placing (as in being here and now), with volition (similar to the more straight forward replace, meaning to put back or replenish).

 

Images: 1. “Cellphone X-ray” by Canadian Light Source Inc. – http://www.flickr.com/photos/clsresoff/6801463830/in/set-72157626582093415. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cellphone_X-ray.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Cellphone_X-ray.jpg. 2. “Woman-typing-on-laptop” by Matthew Bowden http://www.digitallyrefreshing.com – http://www.sxc.hu/photo/145972. Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman-typing-on-laptop.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Woman-typing-on-laptop.jpg

So what’s it all about then?

 

 

I guess i’d better define my terms and honour the inspirations behind this blog site, before i go much further.

‘White Fella’ is a a term used for ‘new Australians’ by Black Fellas, which is what many Australian Aboriginal people proudly call themselves. You’ll note there’s no gender distinction; it’s a bit like the old fashioned term ‘man’ as used for all humanity. As a matter of fact, great and influential Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner’s collection of essays was titled White Man Got no Dreaming, which was a wry comment on the comparative poverty of our connection to the land (or ‘country,’ which has a very definite connotation of a place filled with living resonance and relationships amongst kin, both human and more than human). The idea that we have no Dreaming applies in some way to all modern people who are removed from that kind of kinship identification with the earth that sustains them – and sadly this means even those living right where their ancient forebears lived, if they have lost that connection.

Therefore white fella doesn’t necessarily connote Caucasians, or those of British descent, or western Europeans on the continent or displaced … it just means those who are not living (or who are now beginning to live) in deep connection to the land upon which they live. But for me, as a white fella, it can also mean that, because we live in a westernized world, a Hindu or Chinese wearing jeans and t-shirt, any shopper anywhere out for a dose of retail therapy, all those speaking and reading English and using this kind of technology – the kind I’m composing on and we are using to communicate with – we are all implicated in white fella ways.

 

The train – it seems such a symbol of western technology, following inflexible straight lines mechanically to the next trading post.

 

It could have been different, but the combustible steam engine was invented in England, where there also happened to be a steady supply of local coal and a competitive market … and bingo. Now us ‘new worlders’ are a long way from our ancestral lands and we have a lot to learn. But how many modern people anywhere today are really in touch with the traditions that link them to the sacred, to earth wisdom, to celestial intelligence? How many Europeans still living in the same ‘hood where their ancestors lived, breathed and worshipped still ceremonially link themselves to their indigenous soul, follow rites to embody an animistic conception of the sacred, regularly get in touch with the pulse of the land and rivers and seas and trees and birds and animals around them, as well as to the stars above? In my PhD i traced this loss to the rise of large scale settlement civilisations – basically, the same story being told by many ecocritics, that the agricultural revolution changed our relationship to ‘resources’ such that soil and fresh water were now thought of as the basis for farming, trees became known for timber, the discovery of metals leading to open cut mines and so on. While we need to re-know ourselves as nature, we also need to redefine what we are prepared to accept as culture; and enjoying mutually sustaining relationships with the land and its other creatures is part of the redefinition project that i like. White fella dreaming draws from ancient traditions, but in a way that is true to self. A black fella once said to me, you’ve got to get your own dreaming back. This is my report, my thanks, my path back to the earth and the stars.

 

A billabong amongst the Henty Dunes, Tasmania

 

‘Dreaming’ is a term to help cover all these possibilities. Thinking up new ways, having vision and making that real, creating, or divining, or perceiving other worlds, whether asleep or awake; experiencing otherwise hidden realms behind or within this one/these dimensions, bringing forth and holding true what we find sacred anywhere (in the mind, heart, body or world), getting in touch with the creative force of the universe and staying there (thanks to Joseph Campbell on that one), finding responsive ways to mediate conflict or to evolve towards a higher synthesis of complexity beyond seeming oppositions … recognizing the underworld journey we all take beneath the veneer of this ‘ordinary’ reality every day; becoming something fresh and new, emerging transformed from the night, waking up to new realities where utopian potential hasn’t been erased or edited yet, where cyber codes rain down from the stars, where breath rises up through us from deep within the earth and from the rivers and the salt water and the sand dunes, where we give thanks to the trees and welcome kinship with the other creatures and live more free of unworthy concerns.

 

 

White Fella Dreaming is a lot like all the ancient stories from everywhere but in new forms. Respect for the ancestors (that story coming soon), experience of the immediate sensory aspect of timelessness, embodiment of the unlimited spark, grounding of all that is and was and ever will be in self-aware primate bodies … breathe it in and let go into the Dreaming. All the time.