​In Australia, today is Invasion Day, or Survival Day... and I want to say sorry. Sorry for my ancestors, sorry for my government. I am sorry for my white privilege, for all the places I simply cannot understand, because I view the world through the lens of my own privileged upbringing. I am sorry that all over the world there are First Nations people who are displaced, who have had their children stolen, their oral traditions broken, their songlines drowned and destroyed by the stomp of booted feet where before those songlines were danced with lightfoot grace.
I am sorry that even in writing this post I am blind and deaf and clumsy, like Shrek at a tea party, smashing all the china with the best intentions of just pouring someone a cuppa. I cannot truly understand and I am sorry for that, that my heart cannot truly know the pain in the shards of anguish cutting the brothers and sisters I have never met to the bone.
I am sorry that the invisible webs of violence still exist, in my attitudes, in those around me, in the systems that well meaning people use to 'fix' an untenable situation and just make it ten thousand times worse. I am sorry that I walk on land that covers pyramids of bones, that my happiness comes on the backs of displaced and dispossessed and massacred people.
I ran an event last Friday night and in my heartfelt (but ultimately ignorant) acknowledgment of the original Gadigal custodians of the land, the floor upon which we danced, I also acknowledged that there is a tension in me, shame at the actions of my ancestors, in my own habitual and cultural attitudes.
Shame that I cannot change the past, and the tendency that I, that white people, can ‘do’ the acknowledgment without feeling the true cost, without feeling our own discomfort at what it really means. We can pat ourselves on the back, tick the box, yes I said the words, I am not one of the invaders, I am making reparations, all the while wallpapering over the squirm in our guts with our attempts at worthiness.
For myself, in my heart…. I call bullshit.
I cannot make reparations. How can I repair genocide? How can I mitigate the annihilation of a culture that has caretaken this country with grace and wisdom for 80 000 years? How can I meaningfully say sorry for the loss of the songs, art, the ceremonies, the history, the wisdom? It is on par with the library of Alexandria being burned. It is worse. It was deliberate. It still is.
So today, on Invasion Day, I want to acknowledge that I am a privileged white woman who walks barefoot through the blood of a culture that essentially died so that I may exist. I mourn its loss. I grieve the conversations I will not have, the things I now cannot learn, the connections unavailable to me, to those I love. I grieve the loss to the world of such a people, such incredible connection to all things. I grieve the richness that is lost, here in Gondwana and all over the world where First Nations peoples have been dispossessed and displaced and their cultures destroyed and their families massacred.
And now I am going to shut the fuck up, go sit outside with my butt in the dirt of this old old land, and I am going to listen really really hard to the grief songs from the indigenous ceremonies that are right now happening in parks and on beaches and in halls everywhere today. I am going to listen to the speeches and stories and the rage. And I am going to lay my head on the earth and thank the spirits of those who have died, those who still die, from suicide and addiction and essentially the broken heartedness that comes when someone steals the sun from the sky and the stars from the night and the animals who are your brothers and sisters and the trees that are your friends and kills your relatives over and over and says, ‘here; you can live in this concrete box now, and be grateful’.
With every exhalation I am going to say I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. And it will never be enough.
Gina

Oh dear. It’s another long one (though you’re used to that from me by now). It's a bit different from my usual postcard from the landscape of grief.

This is a post about skills for transition times. I’ve been asked what I mean by this phrase, quite a bit lately. It’s a good question, so if you’re up for a little journey, I’ll have a wee ramble. (And if it all sounds obnoxiously preachy just let me know in the comments and I’ll blush and delete.)

OK. To answer, I need to dive a bit into some of the stuff I’ve trained in and also teach. Primitive, ancestral skills of survival, hunter gatherer style.

Basically; if we were a mobile tribe moving through the landscape, hunting and gathering what we needed, making our tools; how would that look? What would we need to know?

The classic order taught in survival schools in the lineages I work with is this:
Shelter
Water
Fire
Food

Lack of shelter will kill us fastest, then water, fire, and lastly food. So if, say, I fell down a big mountain, got turned around and had to survive until I got myself out or was rescued, first I would make sure I had shelter, then find potable water, then sort out fire, then worry about food.

However, in my experience, in my observations of living things, I’d add something to this, an overarching tenet… that the actual number one rule of survival is this:

Conservation of energy.

Whether that energy comes from ingested calories or from the sun, it is the fuel for all movement, is a precious resource, and is the framework for all life’s myriad behaviours. Living things conserve energy because if they waste it they have to find more, somehow, and risk death or injury in the process. Living things only do things that work. There is no unnecessary action. Tom Brown says that an animal is an instrument played by the landscape, a quote I love.

We are the only living things I have observed that do not follow this rule, because since we first broke ground and planted crops and had surplus, we have had the ability to store that surplus, therefore have riches, and haven’t needed to follow this first law of conservation of energy. (There’s a whole side thread on haves and have nots and I’m going to leave that for now)

Humans splurge energy, and this one basic action has contributed hugely to the pickle we are now in.

We haven’t had to respect the environment to get our needs met because we have calories in the bank, and we change the environment to meet our needs to maintain those banks of calories.

We haven’t had to hold onto the skills of hunting and gathering, up close and personal, respecting the lives that we take because WE take the life, there is no remove, and it is like taking the life of a friend.

We have food stored. Someone else can get our calories for us.

We haven’t had to listen to the weather, preserve our oceans and forests, make friends with every living thing as a node on the web of life, where every action affects every other thing.

We haven’t needed to spend our energy maintaining these relationships and skills, so we’ve let them slide, cutting ourselves more and more off from the natural world until so much knowledge and wisdom has been lost, now we have forgotten those old ways, cannot survive this way; we simply don’t have the skill. Not until we reawaken, relearn, remember the wisdom in our DNA.

The thing I love about biological systems on this big beautiful jewel of a planet, is that there are feedback mechanisms that keep everything in balance. If a population of grasshoppers eats all the food in an area, and they cannot move somewhere else, they die, releasing the pressure from the area and the area regenerates. Simple, elegant.

Those times when the pressure in a system is highest, when things are moving from one state or phase to another, these are what I am referring to as transition times.

What feels true to me is that we are in transition times. I don’t know about you, but I feel it in my belly. It’s not about the scientific evidence or the deniers, it’s not about the handy sound bytes and social media memes… it’s slower than that in me. There is a deep wisdom in the animal centre of me, my lizard brainstem, the part of my wolf awareness that notices the changes in atmospheric pressure, counts the length of the days, tracks the dryness of the leaves, feels the silence of the hunting hawk. My senses are still active, even if I no longer have the sensitivity or handed-down teachings in stories and songs to put my finger on exactly what the information is telling me.

My intellectual self may hunt endlessly for evidence, but my instincts have a clear message, loud as a shout. They tell me that we are in transition times, when everything is about to change. A storm is coming. Is here.

Transitions take energy. When we move from one place or state to another, we have to rouse, to shift, to generate momentum away from the place where we have comfortable settled. Transitions are scary, because we are moving from the known, no matter how crappy it is, into the unknown, and humans don’t tend to like the unknown. We are pleasure seeking, pain avoiding, meaning making machines. We like to be able to plan the day, the week, the year and bundle it all up into a nice logical package that makes sense so we can understand it and therefore predict its trajectory.

Transitions are when we can no longer predict behaviours, because systems are moving into strange new forms. Terrain changes. Weather distorts. Landscape shifts. Rhythms stutter.

Now we get scared. And this is when our fault-lines reveal themselves.

Do I go into obfuscation and denial, stick my fingers in my ears, cover my eyes with my hands, lalalalala, it’s not happening? Like the little kid playing hide and seek who stands in the middle of the room with her eyes covered, thinking nobody can see her.

Do I go into rage and blame… it’s somebody’s fault, and they should fix it?

Do I go into despair and collapse… we’re all fucked, everything’s fucked and there’s nothing I can do because it is all just too big, too hard, my heart hurts too much? Overwhelm turns to paralysis and apathy. I give up.

In my experience of 30 odd years sitting with people as they go through emotional process I see that all of these are stages of dealing with transition, and all are relevant, like the stages of grief, and grief is a huge part of this. The size of our grief is the size of our love for that which has been lost. We are losing a familiar way of life. We are losing animals and plants we have known our whole lives. We are watching destruction and devastation of life on this planet that is our mother, our home. Acknowledging and managing grief is a big part of transition. If we are to move through transition times, naming these stages and understanding that this is part of the human psyche coping (or not coping) with transition is the first step to accumulating skills to be with these emotions.

It’s simple. Our world is changing, we’re scared, and we’re acting out. Cool, good to know! There are resources to teach us how to move through all these things.
In my experience, if we work on certain skills of resilience, a fourth way reveals itself, that helps with all the others. It isn’t about big gestures, sweeping changes. It’s about small steps of individual action.

How can I feel what I feel and still respond in a way that is useful?

It can be summed up thus…
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

For me, transition times are exciting, once I get over the 'o shit, everything is about to change' panic. Transitions are when things get interesting. When I get called to step out of my comfort zone. There's huge power for me in the moment when I let go of the reflexive need for control and start to respond to what is in front of me. There's a freedom in that. Transitions are when we grow, learn, transform. Where we discard the chrysalis of our old stories and flex those shiny new wings. Yes, it's painful. Growing is. It's also, in my experience, worth it.

Transition times teach us how to eat an elephant. They call for us to break the overwhelming call for global action into the little things, the really little things, the mundane tiny movements that break us free from the claw of despair.

If we can all do just one small thing, every day, those tiny things add up to bigger things. And more than that, we have changed our trajectory, we have broken our habit of relying on external authority and now we are on stepping stones where we are learning new skills, taking responsibility for ourselves. We are doing what all life is programmed to do; adapt or die. Without judgement, without a story… just adapting to the changing conditions. Every living thing does it. So can we.

We are so geared to demanding that our environment adapt to suit us, we have lost touch with the reality of nature connection. Capital R reality says that there are forces of wind and wave and weather that are quite simply bigger than us, and that we are at the mercy of, that we can’t just magic into the shapes we want. We’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, which is an invitation to change our moves.

How do we skill up to be with these changes? How do we eat the elephant?
One bite at a time.

We look to the little things, and we find the ones that we can start to do right now, today. Whether they are skills of resilience and emotional well being, physical skills of self sufficiency, skills of real community building and tribal support, survival skills for moving through the environment, skills for processing our emotions so we stop blaming everyone and everything and take responsibility for the stuff we can change, embodiment practices to make sure we are grounded in the real world, making things with our hands… all the little things. Just pick one thing, and do it.

One Small Thing, this crazywonderful group that’s seemingly sprung out of thin air, is just one hub to support this movement. It gives light and air to the simple wisdom seeded in the little things.

I wonder, if we see enough people doing these little things, maybe we’ll today have the courage to take our own first wobbling steps, gather our bundles, let our hands remember that they are born to be clever, be kind to our neighbours because if our house blows down we may need them; teach each other from our own experience; try new skills, fail until we succeed, forgive our lack of perfection on the way; and above all help each other learn because in transition times we don’t operate from the top down, we grow from the ground up.

I’ll follow my own rules for the One Small Thing page, and offer a doorway to individual action, if you’re up for it. It’s simple.

Look at your hands. Your clever, wise, creative hands. Those cunning opposable thumbs. These hands that are the reason humans can create in the world, all the things we do; caress a lover, break that which no longer serves, carve a spoon, wield a sword, call music from clay and wood, make art from dirt and paint and clay, build a bridge, plant a seed, grind flour, bake bread, fix broken things, wipe a tear, hug a child, take a life, welcome another one into the world…

My invitation is this. If your hands are your passage through transition times, if you could try one small new task with them, what would that thing be? One tiny thing to teach yourself that there is hope, and it will come through these hands.

What is your bite of the elephant?

Mine was to buy a metal container to take with me when I go to a cafe for lunch, so there is one less takeaway container in the recycling. I’ve been meaning to do it for months. And today I did. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was when I saw my dumplings nestled in it. And then when I left the cafe, still in the glow of my small action, I picked up three bits of rubbish on the footpath. Such little things. Adding up to big things.

A friend, in the comments, just remarked that it’s got him thinking, about that One Small Thing. Like becoming vegan for a day, or going a day without using any additional plastic. Imagine if that became a movement of radical achievable action. Just One. Small. Thing.

So today, why not pick something.

One small, inconsequential thing.
And do it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

Hope 2020. (Now called One Small Thing)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

This is a call to action, not just for Australia, the singed canary in the coalmine, but for the whole world. Pay attention. What is happening to us is coming for you.

We have reached tipping point in Australia, which means the rest of the world isn't far behind. Tens of thousands of climate refugees are right now evacuating vast areas ahead of another predicted day of firestorms. Thousands still stranded and now many towns have no viable drinking water as it has been contaminated by aerially dropped fire retardants, metals, arsenic, ash and debris and the treatment plants have been lost to the fires. States of emergency declared.

This is real. Not dry scientific statistics and reports, not predictions, not pretty graphs and models you can bat away and think about later. Real, right now, affecting tens of thousands of living breathing humans. And many dead ones, with more to come. This is just the beginning.

If you are witnessing this from outside Australia, you probably have no real idea of the scale and scope of this thing as the international media has been strangely muted about what is actually going on here.

The size of this climate emergency is staggering, and it is being fought principally by volunteers, who have ordinary lives and jobs and are not being paid, and have been on the frontlines for months. They go out day after day, night after night, into a war zone, without proper protective equipment, in worn trucks that can malfunction. There is no real help or leadership from our government. The rage in Australians is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like it.

If we had 30 000 displaced people, 1300 houses lost, 2000 outbuildings lost, 100 facilities destroyed, many people dead, dozens more missing, and 6 million hectares of land annihilated from, let’s say… terrorism, there would be such a huge international groundswell of attention, support, commentary and action, it would galvanise the whole world.

Instead, there is global apathy, starting with not only our own government, but us, the people, the on the ground Aussies. I think it is because Australia is the canary in the coalmine for climate change, and nobody really wants to accept that our world can really change this way. Not really, because if it can, we feel doomed.

Let’s face it, we’ve left it too late to tackle carbon emissions in any real way. Because we don’t want to lose our comfortable way of life. We don't want to make the necessary changes to our comfortable lifestyles. We wait, and wait, saying, later, when it’s obvious, it won’t happen in my lifetime.

It’s one thing to put out the recycling and talk about policy and point fingers at politicians, but it is another to make the very real sacrifices that are coming, whether we are willing or not. We’ve all got our fingers in our ears going lalalalala to drown out the increasing howl of the hurricane that is coming.

The hurricane that is here.

Our world just changed, forever. This is a dramatic statement, but a whole country is on fire and the devastation is beyond comprehension. Whole towns gone. Half a billion animals dead, and that number will rise substantially in the next weeks as there is no food or water in the aftermath and habitats are destroyed. People talk about the Aussie bush regenerating, and in our traditional bushfire patterns this is true, but what is happening here has never happened before.

Usually Aussie bushfires take out the underbrush, the bark and leaves, and some of the canopy, but the trees still live. When there is rain, new shoots rise out of the black. It is a beautiful thing to witness, the incredible unfurling of green through the ash. Fires happen in sections with corridors so animals can escape.

This is different. People are calling the firefronts monsters, without exaggeration. Towering fires have stretched in unbroken fronts for 80km. Imagine an 80km wall of flame so hot and huge it creates its own storms and fire tornadoes, like the one that flipped a five tonne firetruck, killing two of its volunteer firefighter occupants. Flames higher than the opera house exploding into columns of chaos. For real.

There is no escape for animals, birds, insects, all the marvellous and varied living organisms that make up an ecosystem, from such a thing. Now vast national parks are made of endless silent sentinels; trees are black twisted sticks in lifeless forests of eerie silence and clouds of ash. Not a birdsong, not an insect buzz.

Our natural world is giving us feedback, right now, in the real.

How will we react? How will we respond? How will we act?

Governments, whose only focus in on the next election, have no vested interest in long term planning, environmental or otherwise. The simply won’t be here for the consequences.

They know populations are dangerous, once the peons realise that there is power in numbers, so we are sedated with distractions, with banalities, with PR blah blah; with tv and shopping and alcohol and a million messages to buy stuff instead of messages of how to skill up for transition times.

We are discouraged in a zillion ways, covert and overt, from uprising. Once a mob is roused it becomes its own raging firefront, a ravening beast that can overrun governments. If we ignite, we can burn the whole house down. In Indonesian there is a word for a crowd gone berserk. It is ‘amok’. To ‘run amok’ is to see a crowd boil into action, to become a creature greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, wishing I was in some position of power, to be able to step in, but I am not a political animal and I don’t have answers on that level.

What I am, though, is the matriarch of a little community, in the real, a community that gathers in the wilderness 8 weeks a year to explore a different way of being human, using ancient tribal technologies to weave a basket of community and safety, where everyone gets their needs met. There is no alcohol, no internet, no spiritual bypass… just real people sitting in circles telling the truth, kids being mentored by a host of aunties and uncles, everyone taking off their masks with a common agreement to look after each other, no matter what. We have been through things in our little Rewild Tribe that could have been disasters, except we looked after each other, and they weren’t. Crises fostered trust, resilience, communal strategies, safety. We look after each other to we learn that we can.

No matter what.

I don’t know politics but I do know this. That if we agree to look after each other no matter what; magic happens. It is such a little thing but it is everything.

And now, on social media, I am struck by the disparity between the political animals and the human ones. While our prime minister reveals his lack of empathy and compassion with every gesture, meanwhile in the epicentres of the fires, people are fighting together to save each other’s homes and lives. Firefighters, volunteers, risking their own lives over and over, day after day for months to save another’s house, only to find their own has burned to the ground. People taking in the wounded, the displaced, the shocked and distraught. Families screaming from the bank of a lake as their house burns and the fire is at their backs, being picked up by another in a boat so loaded it is almost to the waterline. People going into burning houses to pull others to safety. Thousands clustered in beaches or huddled in evacuation centres while the sky is luminous red to black and the ash so thick you’d choke, all singing so the kids don’t get scared. In the lines of traffic stuck for seven, eight, twelve hours trying to escape the disaster zones, everywhere there are stories of people looking after each other. A man with his foot in a cast going up and down the lines handing out water and food to families stuck in cars. Another with a guitar, singing funny songs to make the kids laugh. People offering places to shelter; their homes, their yards, their clothes. People helping complete strangers because in times of crisis we remember that we are a community.

This is an amazing time. And to me, to the matriarch who sings in my bones, it is time to forget the politicians and remember that we are tribal creatures. That we know how to do this without relying on some so called leader in a system that is broken, kowtowing to mining interests that suck the lifeblood of water from an already parched country, for money.

I’ve been wondering where my power actually lies, and the matriarch whispers that it lies in community.

It is up to us to take personal responsibility. Not to wait to be told what to do, but to make the individual choice right now to behave as if we have been given a path through this.

We love our way of life, We love our comfort. Humans will take the easy way if it is available. To prepare for transition we have to make sacrifice. We need to choose the hard way so we are prepared for new times. We need to find the path of hope.

So this is my call to action.

Can we start a hub for groundswell community collaboration during transition times? The transition is here. Let’s get our fingers out of our ears and our hands off our eyes and recognise that our world is changing and this is just the beginning. We cannot rely on things being the same.

Everywhere in our global media, in social media, in governments and communities and families there are reactions to climate change moving from denial and obfuscation, through rage and blame, to despair and collapse, none of which are useful. All are paralysing.

What if we find a middle way where we look to our communities, look to our heart connections, look to the places where we come together, and work on skills to support each other through transition, through emergency, through a world in fire and flood, ice and storm.

I’m talking about real, practical tools for transition. Social media is a gift here, a tool we can use for all our benefit, a place where we can gather to share information, to reach out to our people, making decisions at a grassroots level.

How can we form better connections with our neighbours? How can we personally start to make the sacrifices we need, not from the top down, but from the bottom up, regardless of government policy? How can we take this rage and turn it into action that is useful? Grow our own food, purify our own water, drive less, become self reliant? Learn how to read the book of nature, to make friends with our environment, drink less booze, connect open eyed, have community days, prepare for disaster? How can we learn to move with our families through a changing landscape? What if instead of going into numbness, we go back to school, start to train and prepare, in small groups, pods that can thrive in any conditions?

A dear friend just said that the most beautiful child’s name he knows is... Hope. What if we all birth this child together? The child of our best intentions, our sacrifices, our education. What if we grow the fuck up and stop expecting someone to save us and then blaming them when they don’t?

This page is a place to share useful skills for transition times. How to nurture myriad small communities into self reliance. What we can actually do individually to mitigate the changes in our world, and how to cope with those changes that are inevitable.

This is a call for ideas, thinktanks, practical solutions for support on all levels. Community builders, scientists, researchers, activists, artists, gardeners, rewilders, families, elders, fixers, dreamers. Between us we have the skills to teach each other, to remember the wisdom in our DNA, to solve problems as a tribe. This page is the beginning of a hub where we can move into constructive action.

Any political commentary will be deleted; there are plenty of places for that. Any negative chat is not welcome. Calls for prayers, while beautiful, can find other places to fly. This page is a forum for practical solutions.

If we face the possibility that the world as we know it will change in our lifetime, and if nobody is coming to save us, how do we save ourselves? I know we can.

If we look after each other, no matter what, there is always hope.

If this speaks to you, welcome home. Let's see what we can do. Together. Share your skills. Share your ideas, no matter how far fetched. Share what you know in your bones. Be courageous. Speak up.

This is the link to the group Hope 2020 (EDIT... now called One Small Thing). See you there. (Make sure you answer the three questions and agree to the group rules or you won't be able to join.)
And if you're called, share this post far and wide so we can collect all our people.
Big love,

Mama G
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/