Walking under the devastated trees the afternoon after a huge storm, their fresh scattered blossoms and leaves all over the pavement and all over the road as though some glorious festival has been by, I passed an elderly man walking with a stick, painfully it seemed, his upper body listing forward. As we drew near each other I wondered how bitter it might feel to be passed, without effort, by a member of what he perhaps thinks of as the fairer or even the weaker sex. He turned his turtle head and I said, Hi. On the instant a warm gleaming coal awoke deep in his eye, he had beautiful, unusually large, well-spaced brown eyes, and as I passed him I noticed his posture had changed. He was walking almost upright and seemed struck by pride in himself, joy in life, something of that sort I could see it in his gait. I thought: it’s crushing the way we treat our own elders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep saying it til I die: we need to be kinder to one another.
Tag: waste
-
the plastic to drown us in
Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.
Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.
Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.
I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.
In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?
-
the good ship junk
At my last place I cut down one of those plastic “NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE, thank you!” stickers and clapped it on my letterbox so that it said: NO JUNK. This didn’t stop some people who felt that their pizza-shaped pizza menu, Thai takeaway special delivery offer or local dentist’s surgery was immune. So at the new place I kept the “you!” Now it says: You! NO JUNK. *dusts hands*
-
tom-tom cruise
Why such strong reactions to this week’s cruise ship melodrama? Could be because as spoilt Western people with our five-planet lifestyle we resent other spoilt Western people exposing the scam? I am tasting an element of that in my own responses. I feel like: these Americans have finally experienced a thin glimpse of what it feels like for the majority of folk alive right now, who have no running water, no ‘staff’ to remove their bags of poo, etc. But I am aware I am not super keen to give up the luxurious amenities of space, privacy, and a home in order that the rest of the world can share more equally in the goodies we’ve colonized, stolen, enslaved and mined. Far easier to blame those richer or more obviously pampered than ourselves.
-
waste land wastes us
In a sense it is true that every inch of every block of every city centre we have is wasted. As we’ve made a lot of cities – that’s a lot of real estate.
That’s real as in ‘commons’, ‘waste land,’ ‘abandoned land’, ‘no one’s putting it to much use.’ Oddly enough the same is true of many exceptional souls amongst us. True of each of us ourselves – to differing extents, and having had different opportunities. How can I bring all that I am to the world? Because otherwise I’m welshing out on a contract. The world needs you to be you.
Vacant land, abandoned, covered, skirted. We’ve got all these little beaches & lofts of it. Imagine it inhabited, thriving, farmed. A bearded man for years in Brisbane tended an extended family of parcels on the slope between the roads, among the sprawling Moreton Bay fig roots. It’s easier where there’s a tree. Like Charlie’s Bamboo Yard, which nothing is like – a song, fruiting and faced in luminous toy gardens by the bamboo where the industrial lots meet the river, in LA*. Charlie locks gates now against simple-minded defacers but when he’s there – he made it for people to enjoy, and as his home. I loved it & I’ve never even been there.
Why can’t any displaced person and most surely any indigenous community take up an unclaimed patch of land – as European settlers did in the year hereabouts in the far-distant land of notsolongago – and tend it? Make a sweet place: where they can feel comfortable, something they can profit from if they wish and greet the world from if they wish to? Where I grew up, there were street stalls: I miss that pleasure to walk past & walk amongst too. We have a lot of waste patches, unlike poorer countries. We got space. Pioneers can take up a claim. So it seems (look about you). Surely, then, they can build a claim shanty (look behind you). If they so desire.
To me anyone choosing to live this way offers so peaceably their own effort, authority and stewardship over some nook that they ought to be cherished, thanked, left intact. Independent, equably respected. Any buffer community that could thrive would only be an unthanked boon, surely, for the morale, sensibilities, and sense of personal urban grooviness of many city dwellers travelling about our own business.
The individual food-cart, the foldaway business in our nearest countries show the myriad ways a person without premises can be sovereign in his own manhood, in her own womanhood. In Melbourne fellows cartwheel through the traffic at the lights as if it were surf, tilting an almost irresistible bottle & squeegee toward windscreen after windscreen, light as a barista with the froth. They feel great about themselves, I feel great about them, it’s all good, we smile. Interacting with diverse and sifting communities can help us find out how we feel about each other and link actions with beliefs and in an amazing number of cases, this proves to be a good thing.
Men in Adelaide, on foot for long distances in the heat or the cold, barrel a trolley bulging with ingenious spinnaker to sift every gutter and bin for recyclables. There are many forms of service everyone benefits from, that take a kingly humility and resolve, leave a man sovereign, and do the rest of us a gracious service.
In a self-realised community, we all take our part of this beautiful effort. Look at traffic – a web woven, to an astonishing extent, of mutual co-operation.
When you look up – way above the street there’s as much outdoors in any CBD as there ever was. Like allotments, the outdoor blocks are raised individually to roof level then neglected. Most of any city’s veges & all of its aquaculture could be grown in the heart of its sky. A local transition group here can farm this – another over there – transition groups are forming all over and I’ve met two groups who lost members when locals showed up itching to get stuck into some transformative, world-regenerating project & there was nothing but meetings to offer them. It’s what people want to do – and we lack opportunity: be engaged in some way that’s real in our community. Here’s one way. Surely food that is organically grown but inner-city farmed yet eaten within hours cannot be worse for me than sprayed since a seed & sprayed to last on the shelf. Historians say, “neglect of history is a form of despair.” Howard Thurman (1899-1981) said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”