48 The Elder and the Shadow
THE ELDER AND THE SHADOW
Tyson Yunkaporta has a podcast called the Other Others. During a rambling conversation with techie expert Jordan Hall an aspect of traditional Hawaiian culture is discussed. This is, if your shadow falls onto an elder, instant death results. I don’t know details, but this is awesomely confronting and disorienting knowledge about a different way of living in human society.
Imagine the orientation this discipline would impose on someone born into a tribal situation. To be always conscious of your relationship with the sun and the moon, with other people and with everything in your environment, and what that level of awareness would translate to in every other aspect of your being….
This is taking life seriously.
When your shadow is counted you are living, literally and metaphorically, as an expanded, connected being. I write this aware that I am incapable of living with this degree of awareness – how could I be? My life doesn’t depend on it! But I have reached a point where I am, at least, awed by the implications. Before delving into indigenous knowledge systems, I would have experienced uncomprehending horror rather than uncomprehending awe in the face of the story of the elder and the shadow.
TAKING LIFE SERIOUSLY
So what does taking life seriously look like?
I am inspired by the Ukrainians. As the noose tightens around activities, including access to my father in his aged care facilities here in Perth, Western Australia, 150,000 troops have amassed on the border under the rule of an unpredictable man. You might have actually heard about this…. Putin positioned himself as a champion of what we in the West loosely call firm family values. God knows what he really thinks, but adherence to religion, clearly defined gender roles and his hold on power are on the agenda in Russia. He wants the Ukrainians back in the arms of the motherland. The West is amassing its own troops and threatening sanctions and other dire consequences.
The reports say that the citizens under threat are going ice-skating with their kids. Calmly preparing for war and siege with a distinct air of business-as-usual while the world looks on with dread and wonder.
That is inspiring, that is taking life seriously. Knowing you are facing a radically unknowable tomorrow, to be able to make the most of the day , seems to me to be admirable and brave.
NO-ONE WANTS TO BE IN AN AGED CARE FACILITY
In terms of me taking life seriously I think my recent experiences are giving me a hint. Last month was Day 1 of my father’s new residency in his luxurious seafront aged care facility. It was, at times, confronting.
At dinner, in a beautifully appointed room my father and I sat together and looked around in stunned silence at the people gathered. The gargoyle faces, the decrepit bodies, the zombie behaviour. I could hardly tear my eyes from a face that had grown to a caricature of what is human – a hooked nose almost meeting a curled chin like a puppet from a Punch and Judy show.
After a while Dad observed with a distinctly Ukrainian air of understatement: ‘everyone here is very old’.
Dress it up how you like: extreme old age is confronting, especially when it is concentrated into one room. There was a wall of inert bodies, fully stretched out on wheeled beds. Human wrecks, but no doubt sentient beings. Able to eat, to respond, to connect.
They are as helpless as babies, but only love, or the (mostly) brown-skinned young women tending to their needs, could help them now.
HELPLESSNESS
While most humans would rush to help an infant, I could imagine not many of us would care to get up close and personal with these people.
One, the terror of being one of these helpless creatures would make us keep our distance – we are looking at our own future.
Two, the distaste that such an obvious and compelling lack of prospects engenders.
There is no hope, no future, no happy-ever-after here – just breath and a breath and another breath – the unvarnished here and now.
Well standing back and theorising isn’t going to get me far: these are humans. They will all have a capacity to respond, to touch, see, smell, hear – best to get down and dirty – or to be grateful that I don’t have to get down and dirty.
Anyway. This is serious stuff. How do I incorporate this new perspective into life’s ending into my blithe day-to-day existence?
WHITEFELLA WAYS
I was trying to think of a Western civilisation corollary to this idea of the ‘the elder and the shadow’. Are there areas marked: don’t go there in terms of a life-and-death engagement with respect and levels of knowledge in the culture I was bought up in?
Was my curiosity ever stepped on or curbed, or headed in different directions for the good of my culture? (I mean apart from the socially engendered effects of an education geared towards rote-learning and tram-track boredom….that’s another story).
I can think of a time when I created my own reality and applied my own secret discipline –individually crafted, outside of a shared culture, unsupported by my fellow beings – but it is in neurotic, life-shrinking counterpoint to this story of the elder and the shadow.
Have you skated in this territory?
GOING NUTS
In my 20’s, living in St Kilda in Melbourne, I started picking up elastic bands on the street on my way to Art school via the tram stop. Harmless, until it somehow over days or weeks grew to be an action crucial to my wellbeing. It progressed to the point where I would have to retrace my steps to pick up a laccy band because the sense of impending doom that would result if I didn’t pick it up became stronger than my rational understanding of the action as an unnecessary act.
Eventually I started to experience my laccy band action as neurotic and life-denying – and managed to break the connection between the sense of crisis that not picking up the laccy band would induce, to walk on by without causing myself psychic injury. It became an unhappy but instructive period in my life when I was forced to acknowledge the thin gauze lying between me and an involuntary, institutionalised lifestyle.
St Kilda in the 1980s was a suburb that contained cheap accommodation and boarding houses. Official attitudes to the treatment of mental illness shifted in the 80’s, and people were ‘released’ (in inverted commas) from institutions to become citizens. While I mightn’t have been aware of this structural change, I was aware of the increased number of people behaving in odd ways on the non-glamourous end of Chapel Street. There were many souls chain-smoking, some subject to jaw-cracking involuntary mouth movements that I was told was a side effect of medicines used in depression and bipolar disease. Many muttered to themselves (this was pre-mobile phones when muttering to oneself in public was understood as a signature of the mentally unstable).
Has this story got anything to do with the dire consequences of a shadow crossing an elder in traditional tribal culture? I am trying to say something about the ’seriousness’ of contemporary life….. I’ll leave the connection standing because I think it says something of the isolation and neuroticism that our culture’s tendency towards individualism rather than collective care can induce. I am wondering if anyone listening to this can dust off a moment in their lives when they fell into a pothole of their own mind’s making – but I’m happy hanging out on this thin ice on my own if need be – blaming Western society. And give thanks to whatever accident of nature or nurture kept me out of a psych ward during this period.
FROM SOIL TO SOUL
Since living in Perth for longer periods, what I have been writing about has shifted as my life has shifted. I seem to have gone from Soil and Human Health to Soul and Human Health. It is still all about regeneration in my mind – but, when the season breaks, I hope to be getting back on the land, gazing out over paddocks rich with plant diversity.
The regenerative agricultural work has become more about the plants and systems that I connect with in the parks and gardens and landscapes of Perth.
There is a sturdy Euro style conifer just outside Dad’s flat in his Retirement village; common name Cyprus. These types of trees belong to the yew (Taxus baccata) family. It is one of those neatly clothed and shapely evergreen conifers that belong in colder climates but seem to survive well in our part of the world. They stand guard, contained and dense, in different spots across the retirement village, holding huge amounts of shadow and a rich unAustralian pallet of dark greens to inky black with the occasional nod towards yellow. They are discrete, mysterious and secretive and carry with them the whiff of Old Europe, the graveyard, ancient spirits.
Each branch of the cypress shifts with the wind without breaking apart the variegated green form. If you peel back one of these ‘hands’ of green you find a branch curled like an arm holding a soft internal cushion of dried brown fallen needles. I discovered this hidden cache of dried litter and quickly filled a bucket to use as mulch…hopefully the cypress are not as toxic to life as their cousins the yew trees.
The Romans believed that yews grew in hell.. It is thought that yew trees were planted on the graves of plague victims to protect and purify the dead, and also in churchyards to stop 'commoners' from grazing their cattle on church ground as yew is extremely poisonous to livestock. Perhaps because they are extremely long-lived they have been linked with immortality
The cypress trees are a particularly powerful presence because they are so antithetical to the most common scribbly gum trees and shrubs of the Australian bush that fling their limbs in all directions, shedding leaves, bark, shadow and sunlight with gay abandon, refusing all but the most dappled and uncertain of shade.
ZACH AND THE BUSHES
Do you remember me talking about Zach Bush MD? I did a podcast last year called Thank You Monsanto in his honour. He is a USA based doctor who put together the story of glyphosate – common product RoundUp - and its insidious long-term effect on human health – going on to work with farmers to help them make the connection between soil and human health
WHAT IS CHEMOTHERAPY?
Zach worked for years with cancer treatment and tells us that Chemotherapy solutions are made from compounds harvested from plants. These compounds are essential to human health if ingested (as nature intended) in tiny amounts every day from the food we eat. But because our soils have been deadened and augmented by additives, they no longer contain the diversity of microorganisms necessary to grow plants with the full complement of processes.
I mention this because Anti-cancer compounds are harvested from the foliage of Taxus baccata and used in modern medicine. And I am again struck with the weirdness of a society that strips the soil of its capacity to grow nutritious food – reducing the resilience and health of its citizens– and then offers cures to the resulting diseases based on toxic doses of these very same compounds that have been destroyed through extractive agricultural practises.
Well we don’t eat yew trees, obviously – but I mention it because I am astonished all over again by this paradox. Poor mother earth. THERE WILL BE A RECKONING!!
Oh come to think of it. The plague! Environmental disaster breeds its own brands of corrective viruses. But we White fellas aren’t serious about life. Clearly.
MY ANCESTRAL LOT
My attraction to the YEW and other conifers is part of my particular genetic consciousness – thousands of generations wedded deep to the Northern Hemisphere. I am descended from the Indigenous, earth-centred Celtic folk from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England and Scandinavian – so perhaps I am drawn to these trees on a deep level and should acknowledge this attraction as an unconscious gift from my ancestors.
THE LOCAL PINE
The Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), while a fabulous presence in my WA life, hasn’t quite got that mysterious, internal power of the cypress and its spookier cousins, the yews. But they have presence and their own secrets. I was shocked when I first saw one of the seeds of the Norfolk Island pinecone sitting on my front verge. This one was coconut-sized, heavy and so prickly and dense that I could barely carry its weight in my unprotected hand. Strange as it seems it took me a while to work out what this thing was, as these monster seed balls are usually hidden from view metres in the air. I had lived in the shadow of these trees for years without ever seeing one – or one of this size.
It seems that the Norfolk Island pines are networked, they all decide together when it is time to propagate themselves. In mid-winter when this moment is reached, these huge seed balls start exploding, and for days every house on our street in Geraldton experiences an intense clattering as seeds rain down on roof, pathway, road and garden. Soon after this, all nearby gardens and all uncleared gutters start sprouting baby pines. By my observation this wild sex event happens roughly every 10 years amongst the various communities of Norfolk Island pines of the Perth and Geraldton coastal suburbs I know.
A few winters ago the seeds rained down and I had a brilliant business idea. I took it upon myself to dig up and pot 50 of these seedlings. People are prepared apparently, to pay good money for a Xmas tree in a pot. There is a catch – how to keep them alive over summer and then during subsequent summers, because these plants really take their time growing…..after a year or two I took the 30 odd survivors to the Drylands Permaculture Farm, knowing I wouldn’t be home enough to keep them alive and healthy over another summers and hoping that there will eventually be a pay-off for the nursery.
THE NORFOLKS AND THE FUNGUS
Incidentally, there is much worry about the health of the grand old conifers in Perth and Geraldton. Cottesloe is losing trees to an attacking fungus (Neofusicoccum parvum, pine canker or top-down disease). Some of the old peppermint trees (Agonis flexuosa) that live in the streets between Claremont and Swanbourne between the highway and the Perth to Freo railway line are also looking unhealthy.
Why has this fungus taken hold? In Geraldton we can blame the corellas as well as the fungus, but is it possible that in an environment with a much reduced rainfall and human use means that underground water levels have dropped. So the cumulative effects of the changing climate have weakened some of these established trees and made them pest magnets
PROTOCOLS
Getting back to Tyson and Jordan, after the diversion engendered by the Elder and the Shadow story.
Their long ranging conversation underlined the importance of that word ‘protocols’ – something I am only just starting to get my head around, in a more nuanced way than before.
Tyson and Jordan were discussing the centrality of protocol in terms of Indigenous groups moving into the creation of software and a new iteration, new generation of the Web. Is it possible to create software where the programmes are predicated on placing their abstract computation within a context? Which means within the limits of human and ecological reality - where the machines’ logical computations are halted or influenced at the point where they negatively impact the real life of other beings and ecosystems.
My attempts to explain these hi-level ‘tech’ thoughts are laughable …but I feel, rightly or wrongly, that I have an intuitive grasp of the idea…try to imagine the world wide web being powered by relational rather than transactional considerations.
A web for team human. A web that acknowledges limitations to economic growth based on use of natural resources.
It’s food for thought isn’t it?
And let me acknowledge IT expert, Douglas Rushkoff. He is always so supportive of our species, and his podcast, Team Human, is a continuing delight.
