Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: community building

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • Department of Honour

    I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour.

    Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: the Ordnungsamt, Department of Order, takes care of ticketing people’s unlicensed dogs, illegal parking &c: a histrionic graffito in the local drug park screeches, in orange, Ordungsamt = Terror!!. Online I find a website called Ehrenamt Deutschland, which offers a definition: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath.

    As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and donating food, organising ‘Asylum Seeker Airbnb’ to help match people’s spare rooms with exhausted new arrivals. I find it so moving to think that by teaching German once a week in the giant refugee camp that was once the old Tempelhof airport, this Berliner becomes part of the Department of Honour.

  • people’s republic of woodford

    Woodford. What I forgot is that it is less of a festival, more of a place. Wherever you go and whomever you see, the valley grounds hold everyone up to the sky and in the natural amphitheatre right up back the venerable trees stand watch. It must be ten years since I was there, the farm is becoming a forest. I looked for the three trees I have planted and could not, as ever, recognize them though I know which creek they bed. People streamed past dressed as butterflies, faeries, warlocks, saggy pyjama case bears, acrobats. A girl in a hammock turned her head and smiled the slowest smile. Children who had just learned a skill in a workshop busked it. Last time I was on this land was for the Dreaming, a festival of indigenous cultures from around the world. That was in winter and only lasted a few seasons of massive fire pits attended by volunteers. My MCing friend said It’s a good day to come, the dust has settled yet it’s not actually raining. At the gate I was nervous, a reflex response from the old days when I always had to perform. This was my first festival as a punter. The ease! We saw in the year on a hillside opposite a booming stage spilling execrable local dub (“all the people are here & the people are grooving, we got the music and the music is soothing”) and then, because someone had decided they would book a Hogmanay theme, blithering Scottish dance music. I have inherited Scottish blood but musically, no Scottish soul. It struck me as comical: imagine the Scottish composers composing this music: they’d have been saying to themselves, Well, we’ve got the solid wall of screeching bagpipes. But it’s just not screechy enough. I know! Let’s add in a screechy fiddle or two! And wait, we can also have screeching penny whistles. It’ll be magic!

    Quiet on the hillside soaking in the presence of the large, grave, lit trees I was glad when a girl came on and announced, “I’m here to calm you down.” She sang a lovely slow ballad and then everybody across the whole site lit candles and stood or sat together in a three minutes’ silence. I stared into my candle and cried, in silence. The wax burned down leaving little fiery blobs on my palm and I peeled them off, in silence. The flickering silence swept all down the hill and you could hear and more, feel it extended over everybody, not one person broke trust to bellow Happy New Year, everybody “set their intention” as the girl handing out tiny turreted birthday candles had advised and I could feel the piety, the wishes of a dozen thousand all resembling one another. Afterwards the band invited yet more people on stage and in front everybody danced. The set-up between the acts was filled with tap-dancers. Body percussionists led the crowd: “Peace and rhythms!” A bare-chested boy tumbled down the hill turning somersault after somersault. A man climbed up past us, almost bent double from the gradient, dressed in a suit made of light bulbs. Five girls stripped off their clothes and danced naked under the new moon, repelling with raised hands the lit LED necklaces with which an infatuated boy wanted to garland them. The grass was filled with tiny creatures biting and climbing, we were barefoot like the moon. The t-shirt I coveted on a bamboo stall had a tiny figure in silhouette standing with a walking stock, head thrown back, among the giant trees that here surrounded us like immense quiet candles and its legend ran along the ground, legend like a snake, Respect Your Elders. Coming down from a noisy dawn in a noisy trail of irreverent pilgrims we rounded a corner and a really drunk man coming uphill said, beholding our two great heights (“Oh look! A giant!”), “Oh. Wow.” Then he folded us into a big drunken hug, a kind of Come here, you, and the three of us murmured into each other’s shoulders “Happy New Year. Yes, You too. Have a good one. Have a great one.”

     

  • new year’s stain

    I was uncomfortable at Woodford to hear the Tibetan monks who had been hired to chant the festival’s “Dawn Ceremony”, alongside the thrilling singing of Tenzin Choegyal, being largely ignored or at best treated as background muzak while many people chatted and caught up, hugged loudly and with much syrupy performance, anointed one another with detergent bubbles and photographed one another. As the sun slowly rose and Tibrogargan was revealed giving the eternal thumb to the sky I wondered whether any other performers of the 2000 who comprised this six-day event would have been treated so rudely. Drunken revellers walked and stood in front of seated and even meditating patrons just in time to catch the peak moment – the sun’s disk coming up over the horizon – and with no sense of quietude or of having intruded on a gathering that had formed hours earlier. The main aim seemed to be to get a good seat. I kept thinking, people have no sense of the sacred. Then after a while I began to marvel that even the most oblivious people, even people who will ensconce themselves right next door to non-smokers and then light up, even those who call across a quiet crowd to their friends and then unfold crackling groundsheets right in the “front row”, really do have some sense of the sacred, however deteriorated – otherwise why would they be there? why not stay on at the Pineapple and dance some more? why not go home to their tent and fill the campground with dubstep? We were all drawn to that hillside to see in the year. We were all there to observe something – but I had a feeling that something was more observant than us.

     

     

  • campfire of the vanities

    campfire of the vanities

    To me facebook is like a cocktail party, a clubhouse, a series of treehouses strung out among browsing forested hills. It resembles a cache, a sparkling wet beach, a web. It feels like the old bone fires built on hilltop after hilltop where signals could be carried by the night itself, all along the coast from one community to another. It’s our love letter to one another, to the earth, after decades of exploitation and greed. It’s our way of waking up, not our only way. Corals under the water, refreshed by the deep stream. It’s a village of lighthouses.