42 The Potentiality Industry
THE POTENTIALITY INDUSTRY
For years now I have been caught up in the language of potentiality, hot for promises of personal transformation. They have spiralled out from the insights into the life-expanding ideas of quantum physics linked with the ‘you-can-change-your-life’ type chatter so freely and dangerously available on the net.
The language of this potentiality industry embraces the knowledge that Energy never ends, it only transforms – but, from here, it quickly morphs into a spiritual sleight-of-hand that seems to elevate the unwary human onto a level of existence that neatly sidesteps the grief, sickness, feebleness and pain of endings.
The potentiality industry re-packages ideas that have come down to us through ancient pathways of thought. But is this spiritual knowhow linked to technology going to team up and cut us loose from the tired old ideas of being human. Can it really project us into a safe, clean, bio-available trans-human life that never really ends?
You are not your DNA. Your thoughts create your reality. Don’t like what is happening? You choose, you choose, you choose, be different, be better.
THE DOWNSIDE
How’s all this potentiality working out for you? I have to report I remain, sadly, workshop after workshop, a lumpen mass of protoplasm, still easily recognisable to myself and others as one A J Rowland – maybe with added wrinkles and droopy bits.
THE ANTIDOTE
I have finally been saved from the endless task of fashioning myself into a better person, and I owe my salvation in large part to Stephen Jenkinson, ace cultural commentator and extraordinary raconteur. From the perspective of feeling like a bit of a lame duck in the zone of Potentiality, listening to Stephen is like being hit in the face with a wet fish – it is shocking and ultimately - completely refreshing.
It is such a relief to ingest his basic message: to be human is to live with limitations. And we have his clear reportage to guide us, from lived experience in the wards of the palliative care institutions, that our society is Death phobic. That is Stephen’s thing. He is a Griefwalker and he is here to tell us that dying is part of being alive.
Stephen’s work in what he calls the Death Trade, has made me really appreciate my father, now 91 years old. He is in reasonable health, not on any medication except for the odd disprin and plenty of white wine. How beautifully Dad is modelling the loss of competence that comes with old age! He meets every day with equanimity – laughs at his own ineptitude in the face of a severely curtailed short-term memory. One of his favoured lines is: ‘the memory of Barry runneth not’ or sometimes, in less flowery terms, ‘your father is losing it’.
He is sometimes muddled, sometimes a bit frustrated. And remains resigned and endlessly sad that his wife of many years died and left him on his own. But basically, he seems open to whatever happens, is easy going about the shrinking of his horizons and grateful for the company of his children and those who still remember him.
THE MUGABE FACTOR
I compare my experience with my father with other friends who are facing nightmare scenarios of aging parents. I am listening to reports from others about fathers holding onto their perceived ‘control’ of life and resources - tight-fisted with anger and meanness. To the point where I have started to think there is a nation of Mugabe’s out there – hanging on like grim death, trying to manipulate and control their children, using their land, their wealth to leverage their failing power to the bitter end. In short, putting a lot of consciousness into holding onto their diminishing lives, rather than turning into their own dying. As if they can put dying on hold. As if it is theirs to order.
Stephen tells us that Death is a deity; one to be befriended, invited in, given a seat close to the fire; not one to ignore or fight….
Why? Because dying is asking something of you.
Just those words alone: ‘Dying is asking something of you”. Really? Stephen invites us to contemplate that if you are not living with dying when you are dying, if you are instead hanging on to the god of competence and control in denial of dying, you are not modelling to those that live on after you an understanding that death lives within life and creates the fullness of human experience.
Maybe all these Mugabe’s are the end result of a society that applauds the individual who models narcissistic and greater-than-others behaviour. Our society seems to be constructed around the idea that the individual is in full control of all of life’s forces – and that insistence on control and fight is part of the hubris that is driving the ecological and social collapse we are currently living with. Ultimately, we are not above life, we are part of life, and life is informed and made possible by our dying.
ME AND DEATH
The strange thing is that hours of immersing myself in Stephen’s bracing world of grief and dying has been humbling, has bought me to earth. It has been a relief to loosen some of my wild, scatter gun ambitions. Really, the core of what I do, how I live, is fine. It’s the efforts to puff myself up like an angry cat to look bigger in the world that are the stupid bits.
And, honestly, what has years of semi-focused efforts to transform myself really bought? I can look back and laugh now when I think of the moments of spiritual euphoria that have led me to float off like a grass seed to other parts of the globe – not because these moments were any less real than other moments I have occupied, but because I neglected to ground these new certainties into my physical reality… my body, the soil under my feet, daily life: a total misreading of how the ‘spiritual’ (inverted commas) functions in real life.
This is my message for today. Fully embody your physical reality. Stephen relates that the worst deaths he witnessed that left trauma in their wake, were when individuals died small, meaning without embracing the reality that their ending was making way for new life. A big death, a righteous death is about connecting loved ones with the deeper meaning of human death as part of cultural and ancestral continuity.
HOW TO SHORT CIRCUIT NARCISSISIM
Tyson Yunkaporta’s book, Sand Talk, shows how Aboriginal culture endeavours to disabuse individuals of the common delusion that they are better than or greater than anyone else. That is a major part of what tribal initiations are about. According to Tyson– the initiation is to teach the youngster that ‘they are not special, but that they belong to something special’.
Again, the relief for us try hard individuals. I am re-claiming my indigeneity!
When I was coming into teenage life why the hell didn’t someone drop the mantle of civilisation, lay me on a rock and do something ritually transformative using smoke, fire, informed elders and a bunch of peeps. Why wasn’t I helped to understand that I was neither greater nor lesser than anyone else. And properly welcomed to play my own role as a vital, particular node within the vast co-operative net that made up the context of the life I was born into.
I want to be fully human, not a separate, self-operating unit in a complicated mechanical system prone to crashing – but a fully integrated part of a self-healing, self-organising biodiverse ecosystem.
It’s not all bad of course and I don’t mean to pretend that the Indigenous communities have all the answers or that Western civilisation is devoid of good. We’re all human.
RADICAL CHANGE
But what will make me take the reins for a better future? Sitting in the shadow of a fearsome roof eating, tree- uprooting cyclone heading towards Geraldton, maybe I am waiting for the direct and massive impact of flood, fire or rampant disease to whack me out of my individual box into a new way of operating. But why wait for a crisis to shift me into change?
Today I feel closer to radical action that I did yesterday. I know how powerful it is to work with others towards a common goal, to be part of something bigger than me and yet to be differentiated and valued for my own contribution – one pair of legs in a big centipede marching towards a shared vision of cultural and ecological sanity. I am feeling it now, in the loose network of confederates concentrating their different energies on driving big change in the way we manage land and food production.
How else can we face the wicked problems on our agenda, except as a more-or-less coherent mob? And I accept (at least on paper) that the fellow pairs of legs on my imagined centipede will mostly hold wildly different opinions from me. But the part of me that isn’t involved in rampant narcissistic behaviour will be on the lookout for what we share – the relatable bits, the common needs and desires that drive all our behaviours.
As long as we understand that it’s not about ‘us’ – the small ‘us’. It‘s about the big ‘us’. And the big ‘us’ needs to be nurtured, so that every day it can grow bigger, more real and more inclusive until we can register pond algae as a useful and valued connection, without batting an eye.
HOMEWORK
My contribution, the ‘us’ project I am engaged with is to do with land management systems, soil health and food production. To this end, ever-learning, I join a group down at Muresk Ag college in Northam to do a Holistic Management course.
I just glanced at my homework and found a page set up to, quote, ‘help overcome the human tendency to focus on the problem rather than deal with complexity.’
I immediately thought of cases in point.
We had some heavy rainfalls inland that led to big floods in the Gascoyne region recently. Huge damage to horticulture and plantations around Carnarvon. Previous efforts to face the tendency of cyclonic summer rain events to wipe out agriculture have focused on the site of the worst damage, near the coast. This is where Engineers constructed a big, fiendishly expensive bulwark against the floodwaters that rage in from the Rangelands. It failed, bigtime. They were focusing on the problem, which was really a downstream symptom of a much bigger scenario.
Over summer it is easy to see that a lot of the country inland from the Gascoyne is in bad shape. Lots of bared ground, not enough living roots to hold the earth in place and sites of extreme erosion.
It’s here, deep in the Rangelands, hundreds of kilometres into the interior where the Gascoyne river begins, where a solution could be nutted out once the true sources of the problem are identified.
Human creativity plus all the tools we have at hand guarantee a good outcome for those suffering on the coast, if we step out of the old way of thinking.
Mechanical means such as dropping rocks and pushing up earth barriers to defuse the speed and direction of water flow can be applied at strategic l points across the plains where the floodwaters arise. Once water starts sinking into the earth, plants start repopulating bare ground and eventually it will be possible to use grazing animals – managed in big mobs over short periods of time to stimulate microbial and plant growth.
You get the drift. It’s a long term, multifaceted, broadly applied approach that is needed. It’s pretty low tech, and redefines the idea of infrastructure, as it is more about many dispersed, co-ordinated small interventions than whopping great walls and requires an aggregate of input from all land users: miners, pastoralists, farmers, Indigenous communities.
We have the tools and the know-how, but we need to communicate across a big network of people and things, to connect the dots and then ride those connections to see the bigger picture.
EUTHANASIA
Another example of focusing on the problem rather than the complexity comes from the Griefwalker. Stephen contends that dying is a cultural act – and that if you hand your dying over to the people wearing white in institutions, and make dying an individually curated event - then euthanasia is, if not inevitable, then an understandable outcome of the thinking.
Up until this point I was neither for nor against legalising euthanasia. How could I vote against it in view of the heart-breaking tales of suffering that have been used to push for legislative support? But where else to get my bearings? Between the unappealing rigidity of religious thought and individual tales of pain, I have been all at sea.
Now I see how linear and inadequate the arguments around assisted dying are, because they start at the site of the problem rather that looking at the complexity of the culture and the system within which we undertake – or don’t undertake, as Stephen tells us – our dying.
Euthanasia is like the wall erected by engineers, but our dying is the rain that hits bared ground 100s of kilometres inland. How we begin our lives, how we understand what it means to be human, informs how we die. I offer no solutions, I place no vote, I just contend there are richer conversations that could be had about the cultural poverty that exist around dying.
HOLISTIC THINKING
This Holistic Management course is broken up into 4 session of two days with part 2 due later in April. This one is about context - linking with both Stephen and Tyson’s thinking. One of the best things about it are my fellow participants. Twenty odd producers and a small sprinkling of designers, IT workers, Carbon project developers and workshop facilitators, all being trained to focus on setting up good systems for decision making and planning – on farms specifically, but applicable in any organisation.
Allan Savory’s work turns conventional grazing and cropping knowhow on its head. It challenges what is still being taught in Ag schools across Australia. For this reason, Brian Welhburg, our trainer leads in with a lot of work on paradigms, forcing us to examine how our actions are formed by our, often unexamined, belief systems. And acknowledging how challenging it can be to identity and challenge belief systems – even when the need and desire to change direction and the advantages of doing so, are clearly defined.
CULTURALLY INDUCED WEED PANIC
One farmer in our group reported feeling heart palpitations when faced with the idea of a paddock full of capeweed (a broadleaf plant common in WA) and a (theoretically) locked poison cupboard. For this bloke, looking at even one capeweed plant, training kicked in hard: unwanted plant = weed = poison action needed = good farmer practise = good farmer neighbour.
We were all asked to shift the focus and ask different questions of the plant and the broader environment. Like: Why is the capeweed there? What is this plant’s function in the land?
The answer came back, profoundly simple: the capeweed is there because the environment suits it. It likes shit soil. And observationally, without prejudice, while it is there, it is clearly in service of soil health, keeping the earth covered and roots in the ground over the hot months.
The plants our farmer wants to see there, the juicy, money-making annuals, can’t grow in the conditions on the ground at the moment, so what are his choices?
If he goes the herbicide root he is on the path of chemical dependency, requiring a lot of product to be bought in from the ag supply shop: big expense, big list of environmentally destructive side effects. Within the group we toss around ideas that don’t start with focusing on the capeweed as the problem, and focus more on getting the environment, in this case, the paddock, into the right frame of mind to support diversity and get the mineral cycle up and running.
If not a chemical response, how about mechanically slashing the capeweeds? This would create a carpet of green manure - then with the start of the season, the farmer could sow an assortment of seeds and grains into the cover to kickstart the microbes that will help bring the soil back into balance, away from what is now, pioneer plant heaven.
Or use animals as slashers and fertilising agents. Crash graze the paddock with a big mob over a short period of time to chew down and churn up the soil – apparently at certain times of the year capeweed will make your animals fat and content. Then sow a diverse range of seeds for the microbial livestock to get to work on. Start to conjure the symbiotic magic that will help balance pH levels, clear toxicity, tip the environment away from bacterial towards fungal dominated soil, suitable for desired annuals.
HM IS AGNOSTIC
Holistic Management is context based, big picture thinking and it is agnostic. It doesn’t mind what tools or strategies are used on the land, as long as observation and monitoring tools tell the practitioner that soil is being built rather than mined, biodiversity supported, rather than reduced.
CHILD’S PLAY
To take us from a linear problem-solving view to the broader 360 vision holistic management demands, Brian created a simple game. He blew up a small plastic beach ball painted with the countries of the globe, then stood us in a circle, each of us holding a little card with a printed word and a thumb stuck in the air: butterfly/plant/soil/earthworm/fungi/rain/sun/cow/seed/bacteria/bird/grass/tree etc
He then ran around within this circle unrolling a ball of twine, linking us across space, thumb to thumb: seed with rain/cow with grass etc gradually creating a net that became more and more complex until it had enough density to hold the globe.
IN WHICH TYSON INCREASES
At the time this felt obvious – a child’s game. But reflecting on it later I realised how helpful it was to have this embodied picture of the relationships upon which ecosystems and communities are constructed.
Tyson Yunkaporta (you know we are far from finished with Tyson)…when he talked of the ceremony of ‘increase’ that is part of Indigenous tribal culture – my Western mind skipped ahead: yeah yeah, keep the resource coming, more fish, more yams, more of everything thanks. Then was thrown wildly onto another course by what he was actually saying; that the increase ceremony was geared towards strengthening relationships, re-energising connectedness between all visible and invisible participants of an ecosystem.
RELATIONAL FORCES
It’s taken me a while to understand that the labels, the nodes in this cooperative system were being moved in relation to each other by these connections. It is what runs back and forth along those stringlines, the relational forces that are moving the nodes that create the patterns that need to be focused on.
There is a subtle difference in the Apalech man’s words that contrast with the Western version of ‘increase’ which is invariably about growth – unlimited growth.
In the Ag zone the concept of unchecked growth, is of systems that are stuck endlessly in harvest mode. This is sometimes referred to as ‘more-on farming’.
Yeah, it’s not really funny is it? It’s a sad sort of joke. And not helpful to those producers stuck in a chemical and mechanical cycle not of their own making.
TWINE OF LIFE
But this child’s web has become a living map I can see. A way forward. I will keep linking with other beings, by written words, in conversations, by my actions and thoughts - tagging anyone who cares to listen, listening to anyone who cares.
I will keep that twine unrolling until the weave is dense enough to hold an ecosystem, a community that can express my yearning for a biologically and socially sane and diverse world.
