Against Pollution

In the summer of 2008-2009 my family travelled around the South island of New Zealand. It was my first trip overseas, and despite NZ being considered our closest neighboring country in terms of distance and culture, I was enthralled by everything I discovered that was ‘different’ there. There were little things, like different shaped coins, no Mcflurry’s at McDonalds and no fines if you were caught without a bus ticket. There were medium sized things, like the fabulous wood and metal jungle gym playgrounds in every town, the kind that disappeared in favour of unexciting plastic ones a good ten years ago in Melbourne. But the most obviously different thing was the natural environment.

The South Island is Lord of the Rings country; majestic, ancient and unyielding. What I considered as mountains in Australia dwarfed in comparison with the steep, snow-topped alps that cropped up like giant guardians of the land that our car wound and dipped through. The terrain was so present, so demanding of attention that it seemed to become everything. It was as though vision had surpassed all my other senses, which stood to the side to augment the experience of drinking, and almost drowning in, the beauty of the landscape. Ridiculous as it may sound, sometime in the second week I found myself staring down at my dinner plate, and instead of seeing peas, pumpkin and mashed potato, I saw a birdseye view of snow capped mountains, earthy rocks and green forest. That was when I felt I understood the phrase imprinted on the mind. My external environment had found its way into my inner world. The mountains and rivers and cliff-faces seemed as much inside of me as outside.

On the way home from Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, I was startled at how flat and ordinary my environment had suddenly become. Deprived of the commanding beauty of the South Island, my insides felt instantly parched. A strange melancholy crept over me that first night back. I felt as though something that I had grasped hold of was fading quickly from sight. The sense of openness that had bloomed inside of me while overseas disappeared like water down a drain. New Zealand became photos I printed at Kmart, a few funny and a few semi-disastrous anecdotes, archived safely in the back of my mind as a place I’d like to go again someday.

Tonight I was driving across the valley from Yarra Glen to Coldstream when I glanced to my right across the vineyards and caught my breath at the technicoloured display in the sky. The purples, pinks and oranges of dusk lit up the bluish-grey clouds, and the modest Yarra Valley mountains rose to meet them. I glanced several times from the view to the road and back, trying to assimilate the radiance of the sky with the dullness of the world below. It reminded me of the way I’d felt when first struck by the beauty of New Zealand, and I started musing over the idea of vision.

I’ve been watching True Blood lately and in episode 5 of season one (yes, I’m aware I’m behind), Lafayette offers Jason the chance to “see the world with new eyes” by taking a drop of Vampire Blood. He says “V will open up your mind to everything you’ve been missing around you… let it take you deep. Follow it. Soak it in. See the world with new eyes.”

Vampire Blood might not be on the market around the Yarra Valley, but lately I’ve been talking with people about the idea of looking at the world through different sets of ‘glasses’. In my cynical, ‘disbelief’ glasses, life is meaningless, and the pain I’ve been experiencing lately makes no sense, has no greater purpose. Yet I had a couple of days a few weeks ago when I put on my ‘belief” glasses, or my ‘greater purpose or meaning’ glasses.  I can only say that I really did see the world through a new lens. My life; memories, feelings, thoughts and experiences, which had been scattered like bits of a torn-up map, seemed to piece themselves at least precariously together. In those few days, everything that had been floating disjointedly in my mind converged into some kind of coherent whole. I couldn’t see that ‘whole’ in it’s entirety, but it was there, surely and inescapably, reflecting back at me like the mountains on the island. I felt a sense of oneness and of sureness. I saw a partial explanation rather than no explanation at all. Instead of feeling like a helpless bunch of atoms trapped in the time-space continuum, I felt the loose threads of my tapestry moving on towards some kind of completion.

The people I shared that experience with advised me to ‘follow it’. And while I attempted to, my ‘trip’ seemed to gradually taper off.  I’m not sure at what point I ditched my ‘belief’ glasses, perhaps it was in a moment when I doubted the accuracy of my vision, or when I caught sight of the other people wearing the same glasses and decided that they didn’t suit me after all. But everything I’d seen so vividly and fully became only a few days later a memory, a postcard from another place and time. So today I started thinking: how do we trust the accuracy of our vision? How does a trip over seas, or a few days with a different set of glasses lose its veracity so soon?

I don’t have any answers, but something that came back to me was these verses from two songs by The Mountain Goats:

“Love love is gonna lead you by the hand
Into a white and soundless place
Now we see this
As in a mirror dimly
Then we shall see each other
Face to face”

- The Mountain Goats, Love Love Love.

“When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are”

The Mountain Goats, Against Pollution.

Both the songs rip off parts of the Bible, and I have to say those are the parts that I like. Before my ‘belief’ glasses fell off, I was sure I could see at least “in a mirror dimly” rather than not at all. I could see some kind of greater meaning and purpose in my life. Then I started to wonder if I just wanted to see something, grasp at some larger meaning that probably wasn’t there at all.

Yet isn’t my experience of seeing with my ‘belief’ glasses the same as my experience in New Zealand? Just because NZ has been reduced to 3x5inch matte photographs now doesn’t mean the experience of actually being there doesn’t exist in a greater reality. So maybe it’s the same with belief, with seeing the existence of a bigger picture beyond our current experience. You may have to fly there, or put on your glasses to see it, but perhaps it is waiting for you, if you’re willing to follow it.

New Zealand

'in a mirror dimly'

all up the seething coast

Eleven days since my last entry. Not because I’ve had nothing to say. My head has been pounding with thoughts, running all through the night til those thoughts manifested themselves in bizarre dreams. In the last week I dreamed that I married my best friend from high school. I dreamed I was pregnant. I dreamed my dad, my mum and I had a screaming match about the aforementioned two events. I dreamed I saw about a hundred versions of my dog Oscar running down the street, but they had blue, grey, white and black coats. I dreamed I forgot to open the shop at Eastland and slept all day. In the end I decided to run away.

Sometimes you get to the end of your rope unexpectedly. On Sunday, I thought I had a good couple of metres to go, but the frayed ends suddenly began to unravel in my hands. I realised I needed to escape. I had to get far away from the frantic pace of the metropolis, from crawling up and down the traffic-ridden highway to work in every stifling, enclosed zoo of consumerism in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. In those regulated climates, it doesn’t matter what the weather is outside because it’s always a mild t-shirt and jeans appropriate 21 degrees. You substitute daylight for fluorescent lights, fresh air for the air-con, real nourishment for the food court, genuine conversation for a mass-produced ‘how’s your day been?’ and in the end you start to rot away. You close your eyes at night and all you can see are a thousand shoe-boxes in numerical order. That’s when you realise you’ve forgotten what it looks like outside.

Later, when the crawling traffic begins to fall away behind you, and you begin to pass fence posts and cows and hills, you start to feel it. A little more alive, that is. Like perhaps somewhere, there still does exist a space where you can breathe a little more freely, where you can think, or you can choose not to think. Where you can just be, for a little while.

So I went to the beach, because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be free. I let the salty breeze tangle my hair and I didn’t worry about what it looked like. I lay on the damp sand, reading about the Source and the Divine and the Great Mother.

I rolled up my jeans and stuck my feet in the icy waves, feeling the cold ache right to my bones. I thought about the tides and the moon pulling them back and forth and how the earth both changes and remains the same and will always be that way. I hopped across rocks in my sneakers and didn’t worry when I splashed into unexpected rock pools; miniature universes of their own.

I picked up crabs and watched them scuttle across the palm of my hand. Slowly, my imagination began to crawl out of it’s hiding place. I turned to face the wind with arms outstretched and imagined it ripping me off my feet and carrying me away. I smiled at the feeling of sand still stuck between my toes at the end of the day; a souvenir, a clue.

I stood at the cliff’s edge, I looked across the ocean out to the horizon and let myself be enveloped in its endlessness. I contemplated my own insignificance in the grand scheme. I thought about religion and power and organised societyand suddenly they just seemed like words instead of great hulking oppressors. They seemed, for an instant, unreal, laughable; non-existent except to those who choose give validation to them. All at once I realised I could choose not to. I thought about the rules people make for themselves, rules they try to impose on others through creating a God made in their own image. A discourse that has been constructed to control and demean, to destroy souls. I thought about the way nature quietly resists that control. I thought about how it both comforts and threatens humanity. I thought about how mostly, humanity threatens it. Enough thinking.

I drove home along the coast road, listening to The Cranberries and watching the wind tearing and buffeting the bushes outside. I heard it’s faint roar outside and felt safe in the snug warm space of my car.

* * *

“I am piecing a potion to combat your poison.

She is risen. She is risen.

boys I said

She

is

Risen.”