takes off her shoes

I had started to write a lighter hearted blog, when events in our country took the shape they did. There is absolutely no way I could proceed with the old blog when so many of us are full of anguish.

The death of Reza Berati, brutally murdered on Manus Island, has touched into so many hearts because he had a name and a photo.The people who contacted Australians to let them know what was happening would have to be the most courageous people we know. To risk any shred that could have been left of their personal safety and future security for the good of the whole, is what it takes for them to be in the company of extra-ordinary human beings. They are in the ranks of heroes now, people we aspire to be like.

We can never thank Asylum Seeker Resource Centre enough, for sharing Reza’s name and photo with us. They gave him a name and a face, made him a person to us, and his individual identity now has a strange sort of existence in the country he longed to reach. Prejudice changes, or even willing hearts are moved, when people see for themselves that this could be someone they know and love.

For us, Reza could be our grandson or any of his friends. They are in the exact age group, they look similar, they are young men who care about life, and play sport, have dreams and ambitions and girlfriends.They watch the soccer together and go to the beach. We love the noise of their laughter and chiacking, just like Reza’s family loved his. We love their tenderness and their gentleness and their good manners around the grandparents. To imagine any one of them killed in the way he was, is almost too hard to imagine – but if we can’t face imagining it, what is it going to take for his family – already part of a persecuted minority – to absorb this? where can hope ever lie for them again.

Of course it is worse than that. It was not just the ugly and terrible death of one young man. As the hours have passed, layer upon layer of horror has emerged. We try to imagine what it would be like to be running in the dark trying to find a place of safety but hemmed in by fences, as people tried to smash us to death like vermin. We try to imagine the frenzy of brutality and blood, the fear pounding in hearts, the screaming to no avail, the distress of the ones who could not help and were trying with shaking hands to contact the outside world.

And then we had try to absorb the depth of the complicity of our Government – our country. We listened with disgust as they still tried to lie their way out of such a happening, as they even tried to blame the refugees for causing it. Revelation after revelation could not be denied, until we added up the bleak, terrible and disgusting picture of what was trying to be hidden. We were outraged at the lies and of the deeper truth they revealed, of how deliberately the conditions were made to break people. It was not just a by-product of the conditions, but the purpose of them.

We were shocked that our country, could be changed so rapidly and with such precision and planned attack on the values we thought were immutable.  We all knew that both sides of parliament were a bad bet for refugees after the election, but no-one expected what has taken place in our once-democracy, nor the determination with which it happened. We have been caught in the headlights like rabbits at the crossroads, unable to think or plan clearly, or to find a way to do anything at all to change it.

Devastatingly, it has brought to this cushioned generation hard knowledge that was already known by others. Aboriginal people in Australia suffered and still suffer similar fates today, but they pass almost un-noticed. I don’t think they would have been surprised.

Our history, both recent and the little further back that white settlement goes, contains so much ugliness we would rather gloss over or forget: wealth and privilege are built on exclusion, ill-treatment and the backs of others. Australia is no better than anywhere else. Australia has a  surface that is attractive, but if you break through the crust, underneath you find violence and cruelty. If you think that is too hard to stomach, just try living on the underside for a week or two. There is beauty and life to be found, and there is human community, but it all takes constant vigilance. It is not something to be taken for granted. The  powerful and greedy do not easily give up their power or wealth.

Former Prime Minister Malcom Fraser, has warned that the secrecy and arrogance and changes to our laws, are a setting for tyrrany. We are all left wondering just how far this can go. So many friends who have been supporters of justice and fairness as a way of living, have expressed their depression at the humiliation of being part of this country now. Too many are feeling overwhelming sadness.

Last time (oh, how we thought we would never have to say that!) we had the Tampa and the ‘Children Overboard’ as key turning points where people came together and began concerted community action that eventually saw many refugees resettled here to become citizens of great worth, even as they carry their wounds. It is not lost on us, that the way we came together then to support refugees was studied – and used as a tool to prevent us finding it easy to repeat our strategies.

This time, be on notice Prime Minister, we have reached the tipping point again. The response to the #Light The Dark vigils for Reza Berati were the visible demonstration that the Australian people are not going to let this continue. We have lost our innocence and gained our strength. We will march and be heard again and again until you understand that we will not tolerate it. We know we can be far, far better than this.

We came and mourned as if it was the death of our own brother, son, grandchild, friend. We also mourned the passing of what has been taken away from us – our pride in our country. For each who was able to attend at such short notice , there were fifty or a hundred more who felt the same.

We came and mourned but we found strength when we found the others who shared the time with us, both known and unknown. 

We left our candles to glow in the darkness, and it soothed our hearts to do it, but candles can’t do it on their own. The critical element for the future is what we will all do next. Acting together is the only way we can find our way to hope. In every way we can say it, we each must take the responsibility to say ‘Enough!’  because together is the only place that little feathered bird will still have a chance to sing.

I was a teenager in the era of gathered skirts and I learned to sew them with Mum on Saturday afternoons. To achieve the fullness of the skirt, we had to first have plenty of material. A skimpy piece of cloth would only produce a skimpy skirt, that would not twirl around your legs as you spun or danced.

The dressmaker had to start with a ‘running thread’, a thin loose thread that bordered the edge, and then with care and patience (well, that was the plan anyway) move the cloth along the thread pulling it into the centre until it bunched up. The skill was in not breaking the thread, and in settling and smoothing the gathers so that they were even and attractive, and also met the desired width for the waist.

I have been reflecting on another kind of generous gathering in this last fortnight, but a gathering that still carries a sense of the fullness and delight that was created when we gathered our skirts.

Gathering together is such a simple term but it holds such a breadth of human meaning.

For the last ten years we have been privileged to be part of a group of six friends who come together each month or so, to share a meal and our lives, in a time of prayer and reflection.
Over months and then years , our friendship has deepened and grown in the most natural and also the most profound way. We have shared hopes and disappointments, challenges and heartaches, grief and joys, questions and searchings. We have learned from each other and given to each other more than we could ever have imagined. It happened without a schedule or a plan but just through quiet pleasurable times of company – open and creative times of laughter and wonderful food.

For two years we even managed to have our gatherings by Skype, joining East Timor to Australia in our various lounge rooms. Our new challenge this year will be to find how we can connect when two of us will be living in another state. We cannot cramp our friendship by holding on to its past form, but with loose ideas of how it might evolve, we gather up its beauty, and treasure what was as we wait for what will be.

This was the opening prayer from our first gathering this year:
We come together gladly to tell of our wanderings
enriched in friendship
bound by faith
open to stirrings.
God of Wisdom, you are present in our gathering:
open us to grace and beauty, strength and hope,
and the life that fills every tiny atom of our world.

One of the odd things about humans, is our incapacity to thrive when bored by tedium, but our conflicting resistance and fear when confronted with change, especially change that was not by our own decision.

I was a Special Class teacher, which meant that my students were often in my class for up to five years, and we became very bonded. When I knew I was retiring, I started to prepare the students by teaching them about how to handle change. As I pondered on how to best do this, I learnt much myself that I have been able to use since.

The theme that I used constantly for nearly two terms, was designed to develop optimism. Lots of lessons were summarised on a two sided sheet of card that I referred to whenever the opportunity arose. On one side were the fears, and on the other was ‘But it might be…fun.. new.. .great.. exciting

I admit that whenever I got wobbly about being retired, I resorted to the same list.

When the new teacher came to meet them, she was young, bright, experienced and professional – and she drove a huge black ute with shiny chrome bars on it. Oh, and for the prepubescent hormonal ones, she also had trendy clothes and a swinging pony tail! During the next year, I had occasion to revisit the school. One of the older boys sought me out in the yard and said “Hey, you know that thing you said last year about ‘But it might be…well, you were RIGHT!! ”

This past year I have been more faithful to daily silent meditation: not perfect (more on that later) but faithful enough to know how much I miss it if I let it slip by for a few days, and how I have moved from ought to desire. That time of silence, usually when the household is asleep, is precious and beautiful. The shifts in my inner being have been remarkable, and the most amazing for me, is the surrender of my fear, and the growth of a deep fundamental trust. It has shifted from meditation simply for my own psychological health, to answering a yearning to let go of my head’s borders and enter the liminal space of Love.

Moira Deslandes in her Letters to Hildegarde reminded me of the image of ‘a feather on the breath of God’. Over the year, my eyes have spotted several little light fluffy feathers and each one has spoken a word into a situation or emotion I needed to understand. Each one has urged me to let go of my fear and embrace the new, wherever the breath of God takes me.

A few nights ago I realized that I am no longer continually working on courage to overcome fear, but I have entered the realm of trust and fearlessness. What release! Along with twelve year old Corey, I have to say “Well, you were RIGHT!!”

When you search for a name for your new blog, you soon realize that you are not nearly as individual and unique as you had hoped. Every catchy title has already gone, every allusion to a poem has already been lifted. Even the photos and the formats that you have dreamed up are there by the dozen.

At first that made me wonder if there was any point in writing (blogging) at all. Has it all been said? What has one Australian white middle class woman got to say that can add to the conversation?

Why not just get out and do something useful – for instance clean the windows that are silently accusing. Or reverse the Government and Opposition Asylum Seeker Policies single handed?

Sometimes the world gets overwhelming in its nastiness and it is all too easy to slide into thinking that nothing is worth the effort, and another shorter step into thinking that what you think yourself is not worth sharing.

Well , I am committed to being part of the respectful conversation of life. I offer you my thoughts and hope that you will in turn be part of the respectful conversation too. As well as through comments, I hope that from time to time other people might like to write on this page too, to keep the mix of ideas alive and stretch our imaginations. (Of course, if you are rude you are off!)

So here the two of the titles that I was playing with:

takes off her shoes and the thing with feathers

Probably everyone already knows that the first is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth’s cramm’d with heaven

and every common bush afire with God

But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

It reflects for me the attitude of awe at the sacred, that is symbolised in so many cultures by the act of removing the shoes. It is present when we remove our shoes at a mosque or a temple, when we put our bare feet in the sand or dust and let ourselves absorb the expanse of the horizon until it in turn expands us from the inside. Removing our shoes strips off the layer that removes us from contact with the immediacy of what is real. Shoes are important and I am grateful for their protection and support, but there is time when I need to reveal myself to myself and reconnect with where I stand in the web of life without pretence – with all my beauty and with my inadequacy.

Removing shoes also calls up the common act of weariness after the day, when you sit back and take off your shoes and rest, often with a sigh of pleasure. I love the conjunction of both meanings because that’s where I find the sacred: in the common mess of life, the laughter, work, joy, fears, love and struggle.

But the sacred is not limited to the domestic. When we lift our gaze we see an expanded vision of where the sacred is: it is when we are able to look into another’s face and see our own, it is when we feel another’s pain as our own, it is when we know that another’s right to a life of freedom and security is as valid – and as urgent- as our own.

The second title, the thing with feathers, is from Emily Dickinson :

Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul

and sings the song without the words

And never stops at all.

Is not hope the thing we all need, singing in our collective soul? If we are to sort the mess, small and large, then start the next day to sort it again, and still have laughter and love in amongst the doing of it all, we need to cling on to hope as strongly as that little bird holds on to the tree.

Sometimes the hope we need, is just that we can hold on to the knowledge that everything is part of the whole – the wonderful along with the disillusioning, the achievements along with the crashes, the movements forward along with the steps backwards ; that in the longer and wider vision, we live in a mysterious place of graced existence that is big enough to hold it all.

And I dare to call that place God.

In the end, WordPress decided for me – the title that was available is this: takes off her shoes.

And so it is.