The Mother's Tears

Today I watched the documentary, The Story of the Weeping Camel - released 2004, a film festival darling and Oscar-nominated. It is a beautiful, deserving film. Set in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, the story takes a slice out of the life of a nomadic shepherd family who face a particular challenge one Spring when a new mother Bactrian Camel rejects her white colt after a difficult birth.

Sparse dialogue and harsh landscape provide the perfect backdrop for the gentleness and consumate efficiency of the human family to shine through onscreen. These are people 'in their element' - great grandfather, grandparents, parents, tween, child and baby intermingle with the animals they herd, with neighbours and visitors, with the landscape, with the wind storms - at ease, with a companionable generosity and a traditional order that is peaceful and productive. There is no violence in this film. No depression. Nothing neurotic.

The efforts to coax and press the recalcitrant camel mother into accepting her ailing colt include a sacred ceremony where the shaman speaks of so much damage done to the Earth by humans that the Spirits which have always protected the herders from adverse weather and circumstances have withdrawn. He leads them in a prayer of asking for forgiveness, and they pray sincerely even though they are not the people doing the damage. They are not victims blaming someone or something else, they are active participants in the healing of the world.

However, the prayers are not enough for this camel Mum. She continues to refuse her colt milk and tenderness.

The family then send their two young sons on a journey to find a musician in the nearest permanent settlement. The youngest boy encounters television and market-place selling - all enthralling to him in comparison to the organic life he knows.

The boys return with a Morin Khuur player willing to perform the Hoos ritual. As the story goes, if the camel Mother weeps in response to the music she will accept her baby.

This camel weeps.

But it's not at all a story about whether or not the creature will weep. We knew it would from the film's title. It is a story about people who are exquisitely tuned to Life, for whom doing all one can, practically and mystically, is unquestioningly just what one does to the save the life of one vulnerable animal. The Story of the Weeping Camel offers a pertinent and pressing theme for the wasteful and war-mongering modern 21st Century dwellers - that there is innate worth in every life. Not financial worth. But Worth. The wondrous human Mum notes that the beleaguered colt is beautiful.

Beautiful Life.

That's worth a lot.

The movie was directed and written by Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni when they were film students.

Blessed Unrest

Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World - by Paul Hawken, is one of those treasured books that expand the mind, quicken the pulse and open the heart. It changes you, and you are grateful to be changed.

Hawken, founder of the Natural Capital Institute and http://www.wiserearth.org/, author of a number of best-selling books, must be one of the brightest and most knowlegable of the Earth's spokespeople.

In Blessed Unrest, he skillfully draws together a minimum of 130 000, that is actually more likely well over 1 million organisations - consisting of 10s of millions of people from all over the world who are actively engaged in environmental, social and indigenous culture protections. Hawken proposes that this disparate, 'under the media radar' movement that holds no guns, is not only the greatest Civil Rights movement in human history but also a response that is akin to a Planetary immune system arising all over the ailing Earth to counteract the rampant greed, pollution and waste inherent in free market fundamentalism.

Contrary to the corporate media depiction of a raggle-taggle bunch of ineffective, mis-guided do-gooders, hippies, activists and radicals, Hawkens argues that this global movement is rich - full of grandmothers, students, poets, professors, businesspeople, designers, tribe members, teachers, artists, friends, mothers and fathers, ordinary and extraordinary people.

It is a movement without leadership, without a single ideology. It is organic, coherent, informed, increasingly connected and self-organising - qualities of a living system, qualities that are highly conducive to Life.

Viewing it with an eagle-eye, Hawkens comments that when asked whether he is optimistic or pessimistic about the future, he responds: "When you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart."

For sure, Blessed Unrest is happening in your neighbourhood, right now. If there's a group cleaning up a local stream, a person taking kids out on Nature walks, a human rights organisation intervening in a low-cost housing scheme, a CEO funding a women's shelter, a volunteer bird-watcher protecting a pair of Black Eagles, a school planting a Permaculture food garden - it's all part of Blessed Unrest.

In the entire history of humanity, there has never been so much energy, skills and creativity committed to the restoration of grace, justice and beauty in the world.

It is an immense time.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1fiubmOqH4

Read: Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

In the Mirror: One Species

Before I was a Mum, I could read a book in a day. Things change. I am currently enthralled by Peter Heller's book "The Whale Warriors" - his account of the 2005 expedition of the controversial Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's campaign to save whales from hunters in Antartica. Despite being gripped by this rollicking and wrenching eco-escapade, I feel like I am actually limping through the chapters, grabbing at the time it takes to absorb the words on the page inbetween my other loves and responsibilities.

What is echoing in my mind though, in the spaces between the absorption of a great story and living life, is Heller's quote of Sea Shepherd leader, Captain Dave Watson that: "To the Earth Warrior, a redwood is more sacred than a religious icon, a species of bird or butterfly is of more value than the crown jewels of a nation, and the survival of a species of cacti more important than the survival of monuments to human conceit like the pyramids." Heller adds that Watson reitierates that all of our human arts - music, poetry, architecture "were as dust when compared with the survival of a single species of bird or insect."

I have a great love for human arts - but I still agree wholeheartedly with Watson.

Our greatest, most meaningful love is a fundamental love of Life. Irascrible pirate that he is, Watson's call is a call for Reverance. I believe this is so vital to human beings today. Without reverance for Life we are so very vulnerable to follies. Unacceptable follies that cost other species their existence, impoverish our present world and degrade the places our own children will inherit.

To be of any real good use, our capacities to respect and care need to extend throughout the Web of Life that sustains us now, into the long future. Every species counts. Whaling and logging, polluting and mining, burning and treating with chemicals must stop. Why are we still doing this? Let's use all that human ingenuity and energy to renew, restore, re-create and re-build. It's not just time, it's overdue...

A Species is Important

A couple of years back I was at a social gathering with a father-of-four who is a keen ocean windsurfer. He was bemoaning the fact that our Atlantic coastline is so polluted that is dreadful for sportspeople to be in the water, and that our Indian Ocean bay is now so riddled with big Great White Sharks because of the hunting ban, that is it perilious. He advocated the hunting of adult sharks in the East so that his sport could be safer and cleaner. (Not that we clean up the West.)

I took him to task as a father, rather than a sportsperson, and I did so, insensitively. I have always regretted that I was adverserial rather than constructive in that moment. But still, I did have a point that is even more critical now. We do need to care for existence of all species. Whether or not we like them. Whether or not we know and understand them. Whether or not they inconvience us. For the sake of our children.

Whoever we are - parents, sportspeople, urbanites, searchers, researchers, investment bankers, singers, professors, presenters etc. - we need to be aware of our connections in the Web of Life that supports us and our offspring.

The odd thing about us humans with our gigantic intellect and our arrogance is that we don't even know what there is on Earth. We destroy without knowing the names - to our own detrimint.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327224.600-e-o-wilson-we-must-save-the-living-environment.html

Friends

How different everything would be

in a world without enemies

without the need to define anyone else as 'other'

without the need to make anyone else 'wrong'

without the need to call anyone else 'freak'

to understand, truly understand

that We are One

to love, to support and encourage

to hold, to uphold and protect

to delight, to rejoice and give thanks

that We are One

circles

Let Beauty Be Enough

Keen on Kindness

If I were a boy at a Dance

- which I am not -

I would seek out the kindest girls

and ask them to move the Earth with me

If I were a vigilante in my Community

- which I am not -

I would seek out the kindest families

and do my utmost to protect them

If I were a whale in a Pod

- which I am not -

I would seek out the softest souls

and stay very close to them for a very long time

If I were a speaker in a Corner

- which I am not -

I would stand on my box and talk about kindness

Fierce Kindness

Fierce Random Acts of Kindness

Bring them on

I Am...