Breaking out

We are marauding the Earth garden
from which every hope grows

and we alone
who threaten it
are we alone
who can protect it.

Bob Brown, from ‘Earth’

After a rare sweltering night where the daytime temperature had topped 39C / 102 F degrees, I was outside in the still warm dawn air pondering the significance of the previous day’s visitors: first, Lincoln and Suzy Boehm from America who had arrived at the nearby, former penal colony Port Arthur on their privately co-owned boat ‘The World’, and later, Australian Greens leader Bob Brown with his long time partner Paul Thomas.

Looking up, I saw reflected in the rigid linearly fabricated doors of my house the trees I was standing under.

What sprang immediately to mind was Rilke’s poem “The Panther”.

The Panther

His gaze, forever blocked by bars,
is so exhausted it takes in nothing else.
All that exists for him are a thousand bars.
Beyond the thousand bars, no world.

The strong, supple pacing
moves in narrowing circles.
It is a dance at whose center
a great will is imprisoned.

Now and again the veil over his pupils
silently lifts. An image enters,
pierces the numbness,
and dies away in his heart.

Rilke, (translation Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows)

Because I had gone to Port Arthur where their boat was moored to pick up Lincoln and Suzy, the relationship between the horizontally aligned, vertically stacked windows of the prison cell block and the equivalent “cell like” windows on the cruise liner caught my imagination.

I realized that in many ways our contemporary culture has imprisoned us all in many subtle and not so subtle ways by locking us away from our own animal, earthy nature; and, in so doing, the smallest blossom of a different reality of how to live dies daily in our hearts and prevents us humans from breaking free of the cultural chains that continually bind us to so many addictive behaviors.

Today, there is the Occupy movement. We also need a Breakout movement.

Here, the 1% is representative of the people already freed and engaged in social and environmental causes. The numerically massive 99% must join them. Only together will success come.

Our imperative
is to rescue ourselves
from ourselves
by ourselves.

We can no more escape
this responsibility
than we can escape our birth
on Earth.

We will succeed together
or fail apart.

Bob Brown, from ‘Earth’

Port Arthur with it’s massacre twelve years ago of 35 people was the impetus behind the creation of the Windgrove Peace Garden and Peace Path.

It is a way of using art and landscape together as a healing mechanism.

It provides an opportunity to contemplate the three forms of peace: peace within the individual, peace between individuals, and, peace between humanity and the rest of the living world.

It has a lot to do with kindness.

It is also a way to bring like minded visitors together who, each in their own way — through politics, through philanthropy, through therapy, through farming, through science, through the arts — are doing the collective work required to rescue ourselves from our numbness and, by so doing, offer all of us a glimpse, an opportunity of how, working collectively, we can open up those doors that lock us away from our birthright and walk through them to the greater green treed world beyond.

During the intense heat of the day, my four guests demonstrated, through their personal stories, an equal intensity of kindness towards those close to their hearts and to the world at large. I offer them my sweaty salute.

It Happens All the Time in Heaven

It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day

It will begin to happen
Again on earth —

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are Lovers,

And women and women
Who give each other
Light,

Often will get down on their knees

And while so tenderly
Holding their lover’s hand,

With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,

“My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more
Kind?”

Hafiz (translation Daniel Ladinsky)