A Disappearing World

We have spent most of 2019 sealed in our apartment in Sydney, seeking refuge from the acrid smoke that has engulfed much of Australia for months now. It is the only time I’ve felt trapped in this space we call home. We have watched this disaster unfold, both through our windows and screens, fully aware of the fact that we are the lucky ones. We have not had to endure the devastating loss of loved ones, of homes, the trauma of displacement, or of battling perilously against the flames as they devastate entire towns, and decimate other living beings. Our pain is far less visceral, it is the ache of bearing witness to a disappearing world. Archived but not to be lived through again.

A “new normal” is the euphemistic term for this state we are in. The relative stability of the past swallowed by escalating chaos. We must simply adapt and carry on. We must keep the engines of our economies going. As a lecturer, I seek to trace the connective tissue between myopic economic ideology and their devastating consequences to present and future generations. No shortage of writers, scholars, and elders have alerted us to this wicked trajectory. But it is one that I try to outline, out of deep responsibility to young students, with a sense of agency and hope. A conviction, though more strained each year, that we have the collective capacity to end this hubris and turn things around. It is, after all, the interests of but a few that are served by this extractive course we chart. Why would we desire an uninhabitable earth? We cannot be pathologically suicidal. “More just and sustainable pathways are possible for our species, but the masses must demand it!” This has been my refrain for years. Yet as the city of Paramatta disappears in smoke before my eyes, and the ABC flashes scenes of families huddled under a hellish sky on Mallacoota beach, I feel desolate. After years of accumulation, a tipping point has been crossed. A sense of dread ripples through me and my bones ache. Taciturn, I can only think of fading into sleep for some brief respite.

This is not out of a lack of constitution. Having grown up across Sri Lanka and Malawi, brutality, and injustice hardened my heart at a tender age. This eventually formed the foundations fo a resolve to fight for a better future. Yet there is something truly devastating about the age we are in. The rapacity with which a few ransack our planet, can so easily vanquish hope and determination. Especially as the window for change narrows, and the impacts are felt by the most vulnerable. Yet as a leader and an educator, I must confess that I often feel the need (likely self-imposed) to be positive and hopeful, to avoid perpetuating despondency. To provide courses of action. I struggle with this on a daily basis. Especially as I lack the wherewithal to be insincere, even if towards justifiably positive ends. This is one quandry I face as my heart digests the increasingly hostile world that is here before us. But I’m forming the view that it is more important for me to honest. Even if it means unleashing sorrow and having no immediate course of action. To care is to accept the burden of grief. And while grieving, I can carve spaces to care deeply for what remains.

Through the Lighthouse

Like the songs of shells in the ocean,
The past feels like an inconceivable dream,
Breathing beneath this lighthouse
as its eyes permeate the night.

Lost in the shadow of a family tree,
I was but a struggling amnesiac.
Till I felt the weight of my bones
and learnt the art of breathing,
through the length of arid days.
Till I learnt to be of service
and soothe the pain of vanity.

Now through these stone walls
and this sword of light,
Free of the borders of skin,
A stranger no more,
I am found upon those waves
that carry the lost home.

These Streets

This evening as I walked along streets I've traced countless times before, a thought took hold. 'How wonderfully fragile and changeable the human mind is'. Years ago, upon these same streets I'd nurse tales of woe and be unkind to myself in the basement of my mind. As those streetlights glared back at me, I was a particle of dust , bereft of hope and significance. Even contribution was an act of existential guilt. All this heavy on my spine as I wearily trudged through the days. Yet through the days, the months and years that were to unfold... Came a new way of being. Seemingly through attrition, the roots of despair came to wither. Exposed by questions. Starved by the ascension of gratitude and choice. No longer frivolous intellectual notions but palpable truths of the day to day realities of living .As the grip of victimhood unraveled, there was space for new things to grow. New colours where there was only black and white. New layers above a greedy undertow. A life richer than binary choices. The capacity to receive love.

What contrast upon the same streets, within the same skin. What capacity we have to shape and shift our perceptions. But is not only human to forget this power we wield? How vigilant and compassionate we must be to ourselves and others as we scale the mountains and swim through the oceans of circumstance.

Black Mirror

Themes of death seepedinto my dreams as a child. Streams of existential guilt flowing into scenes of judgement and descents into an eviscerating infinity. Over and over.

Maturity first bred weariness, Deep in teenage flux, twisting through the purpose of my time, Preordained or to be determined? My thoughts anchored in morbidity. "For I did not choose to be"

Alas I did not implode, but rather, Surrendered to the fevers of thought, A victim reduced to mere survival, till the burden set me free. Now impassioned by mortality I see...

It was a black mirror to peer inside, To find joy where I once cried.

Beacons of the Present

In the depths of the haze I was in, I found solace in the strangest things. I was waiting for the reasons to dawn on me, reasons to persevere, to rejoice in the midst of my despondency. Not the reasons of intellect, those wisps of so called insight have never had the roots to survive within me. I was waiting for reasons that would reverberate through my very being. I was waiting as I would for the train at Central Station every evening ...for a timely means to get me home. And It was here that a peculiar habit started to form...

One day I rose from the catacombs of thought and my eyes chanced upon a group of pigeons roosting on the platform's rafters. Their breathing seemingly vigorous and brimming with vitality. Their movements like uninhibited expressions of every impulse swimming within them. I was captivated by this scene and thereafter, I would habitually scan the rafters and while away the wait. Days turned to weeks and then to months. I'd often feel the borders of a rare smile on my face upon each sighting.

I ask myself what it was that drew me to this seemingly unspectacular scene each day. Perhaps it was a sense of kinship I felt in their seemingly frantic ways, their apparent lack of direction and purpose. Their subservience to impulse. Their existence in the shadows of the lives of others, relegated and labelled rats of the skies , scavenging upon the scraps of those who truly lived.

Or was it very different? Was it that I perceived their manner as being reflective of an intensity of living I sought? A freedom from the shackles of thought. Did they encapsulate a vitality and innocence lost to the largely mechanical, discontent passengers below? Were they smiling at the useless smoke I was mired in? Was I smiling back because some part of me recognised this?

Alas it is the nature of the mind to examine all of this in hindsight. To vilify or to romanticize, to simplify or to add layers to what was. The truth is that it was likely a murky mixture of these reasons that swam in the sea that is my subconscious. What I do know is that the sight of those birds brought me to the present. Freeing me, if but for a series of moments, from the tentacle grip of the past. Immersing me in the vitality of living through the sheer contrast of their impulsive activity against my rare stillness. I am of the firm conviction that this in itself was instrumental in me transcending the smokey rooms that thought created within me... so I would wield my pen again.

As I walked along the platform this morning , I paid thanks to my old friends as they flew on to their daily adventures. For when I was waiting, they were beacons of the present.