Freedom's banner...

THE granting of social and political “freedom” to the majority of a nation’s population — once so natural to most aboriginal North Americans and Australians — is a relatively new idea in European contexts.

Slavery gave way slowly to serfdom, and serfdom to indenture and oppressive employment practices… but, even today in the most libertarian countries, the ideas of a minimum wage, unemployment benefits and universal housing, health and old age care, suffrage and access to education — basic prerequisites of freedom for society’s poorest people — are widely seen as impositions on the freedom to amass wealth, and often begrudged among those keenest wavers of freedom’s flag, the proprietors of the Western economy. It becomes a contest between two desirable but definition-defying principles: “progress” and “justice”.

It surprised me to see, in Ontario, signs saying something like, “This land is our land, government keep out”: if you deny the very authority that ensures your possession, what are you saying? Don’t protect me? Don’t educate my children? Cut off the hydro? Deny my vehicles access to “your” roads? Deny me health care? Don’t count my vote? Revoke my citizenship? Erase me and my family from government records?

Despite the absurdity of this, it is with rhetoric about the “darkness of injustice” and “shadows of oppression” that The Ontario Landowners’ Association presents its claims that “the urban environmentalist, politicians, bureaucrats and academics covet and thirst over our priceless property”… which is not the tone these same people welcome when, say, aboriginal Canadians point out that their lands were appropriated without payment to provide land “owners” with the ”brightness and freedom” they say has now been reduced to “ but a dim reminder of a bountiful past.”*

The problem is that, as long as we remain social creatures, public freedoms are always negotiated, always antagonistic, always a compromise. Its brokers, as in ancient Rome, have usually been the land-owning wealthiest of the free. Those to whom it’s least extended have always been the poor, the undereducated, the dispossessed and the weak… people like the disemployed petty debtors whose homes are forfeit when banks over-reach their capacities to aggregate interest. Historically, it has too often ended badly, in wholesale bloodshed.

That said, it’s interesting that 4,600 years ago there was a wise king of Sumerian Lagash who, among other reforms, outlawed forced sales and seizures, put other constraints on exploitative enterprise and granted tax relief to widows, orphans and debtors; that, historically, Judaism and Christianity have both found the charging of interest theologically odious; that in a number of early medieval European states charging interest on loans was outlawed; and that Islamic financiers have developed a different form of banking, based on partnership formation, that obviates it.

For the people at the base of the modern Western financial food chain, the social and political freedom that’s granted comes at the cost of insecurity: spurts of consumption and indebtedness in times of surplus; layoffs and foreclosures in times of shortage. And, if there’s a choice, the curtailment of freedom has long been preferred to starvation.

“Freedom”, although it’s long proved an effective battle cry, becomes a mercurial concept when it gets to the detail, and to workable political accommodations. There are “freedoms to…” and “freedoms from…”. There is political freedom, intellectual freedom, academic freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom, press freedom, freedom of travel, freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of association. There is the freedom of the wild, the freedom of consumer choice and the freedom of ownership. It’s nice to be free from violence, bigotry, coercion and fear, “cruel and unusual” punishments, crime, invasion, enslavement, exploitation and unnecessary pain or hardship. And — in even the most ideal of states — the varieties of freedom we want to enjoy tend to impinge on and limit each other. It doesn’t help that individuals and different cultures value some social freedoms more highly than others. It becomes an endless, essential but never entirely satisfactory negotiation, ideally striving for the greatest possible good for the state as a whole and, within the state, for the greatest number of people… with some safety nets added for those least well served.

And, ironically, there is probably no more contentious issue in a healthy, freedom-loving, pluralistic democracy than the extents and boundaries of personal “freedom”.

But, in all of the clangour and turmoil over abutting rights and interests, values and egos, the greatest compromiser of freedom is oneself.


It is some nagging, unworthy thing inside me that resents humility, that gets afraid, that wants what it does not need, that frets about tomorrow and stirs envy towards the strengths or successes of others. It is prickly voices within me that ask “but what if?” when I feel drawn to something unfamiliar. It is the same voices that threaten to throw tantrums when I start tossing out old ideas, old perceptions and old attitudes. They are responsible for my fears and failures, for my possessiveness and insensitivities.

It is the voices within me that urge me to lock doors, and hang back when someone else is hurt, insulted, confused or attacked. They make excuses for me to keep a distance from strangers and encourage me to surround myself with cocoons of entertainment and consumption.

Claiming freedom from this source, from myself, is the most headily exciting form of liberation I know. For one thing, it brings revelation after revelation of ways in which I am not alone and that there is far more beauty in the world than I could previously have imagined. It floods my experience with more vivid colours, more exciting flavours, more alluring forms… it feeds a growing desire to counter in whatever ways I can the ugliness I meet with: the ugliness of cruelty and damaging ways of fear, anger, neglect and ruthless acquisition; the ugliness of power and suspicion and violence against people but also against other creatures and landscapes. “Bad” acts and impulses are always ugly when you see them with any clarity and, too often, they arise from those false voices within.

Breaking free of them is to step into a different, wonderful universe of experience. It frees us from failure because it very quickly becomes clear that each of us is part of a flow of forces that ebb and flow in ways and directions that are not responsive in precise or specific ways to an individual’s best intentions. Individuals are essential, but the actions of one are always affected by, and diminished or magnified by the actions of others. What one person seems to achieve always hinges on the actions and inactions of thousands; what one person seems to inflict out of personal vindictiveness has happened in the same way: released from a flow of malice that is rushed on its way by the actions and inactions of thousands. You and I can join these flows deliberately, or obliviously unaware… but we cannot step aside, and we all share responsibility for the outcomes. Each of us is implicated in whatever comes to pass on the planet: in the causes and the consequences.

Fortunately, it’s extremely rare for a truly free person to choose a life of destruction, ugliness and wanton brutality; these forces are seeded in fears and doubts, anxieties and anger… in failures to forgive and compulsions to judge… and they generate experiences and emotions that are, in absolute terms, as unnecessary as they are damaging.

The truly dangerous way to live is as a prisoner to all those inner voices of fear, anger, envy, self-righteousness, false need and unnecessary doubt, listening to all of those ego-manipulating murmurs of “what if?”… .

The classical Greek stereotype of slaves was negative: slaves were widely held to be fearful, acquisitive, not interested in ideas or beauty, unprincipled, dishonest, ungenerous and self-centred. The “free” person, on the other hand, was recognised as self-sacrificing, generous, learned, principled and acting with integrity and justice for the benefit of all.

Freedom that is simply self-interested offers no freedom as all. And, where one person is denied justice, there can be no assurance of justice for anyone.

The price of freedom is the sacrifice of self-interest.


If we think like slaves to our inner anxieties, we enslave ourselves. It’s only when we risk freeing ourselves from ourselves that all of those widely debated public, social and political freedoms begin to matter or have merit.

*see: the Ontario Landowners Association website: www.ontariolandowners.ca

Stories upon stories...

 

ON the local beaches of northwest Prince Edward Island, I’ve been fascinated by the variety of small stones and pebbles: their colours and textures and shapes. And, magpie-like, I often pick them up.

Each has a story that’s tantalisingly just out of reach. The pointed stone at the top right of the picture above is chert, and it has been flaked: someone once held that in skilled hands, worked it for a bit, then discarded it. It’s an unfinished hunter’s tool. Or perhaps it was an apprentice piece… a practice exercise, or an experiment, using an inferior piece of stone? I found it on a beach within a sheltered bay, among a scattering of flaked and un-flaked stone of the same sort — none of it native to Prince Edward Island. The pebble to the left of it is the same, semi-translucent material.

Was this once a Mi’Kmaq workshop?  A place where, perhaps, a young hunter learned a necessary skill from an older expert? Why was so much un-worked stone lying around? If it had been imported, probably from deposits in New Brunswick, surely it had some value to whoever worked it? What happened that it was left there?

Most of the pebbles on these beaches are fallout from the glacial morraines that overlaid the area at the mouth of the St Lawrence River during the last glacial… more than 12,000 years ago. They’re now eroding out of the soft sandstone and you realise that they were smoothed, not on the beach here, but on long-vanished shores and in rivers many thousands of years ago. Others arrive in the spring with ice that formed on, then was washed from beaches further north, probably the Labrador coast. When the chunks of ice ground on our shores and melt, they leave little mounds of the pebbles, shells and the other beach wrack they’ve brought with them.

IN most cases, the mother rock from which they came is likely to have been formed billions of years ago in the vast volcanic plateaux of “Arctica”: the highly mineralised sheet of rock that, as well as laying down the Canadian Shield, contributed to the landforms of present day Scotland, Greenland, Siberia and eastern Antarctica.

Many experts think it could well have been there that life as we know it began (see Creation Story: http://nosretap-ekim.blogspot.com/2010/10/creation-story.html).


The biggest stone pictured is decorated with patterns I imagine to be the result of some sort of fossilisation: I’d love to hear from anyone who can tell me more. And that finely-grained, shiny black pebble (on the right in the top picture), naturally buffed to a tantalising sheen, fascinates me: there are so very few black pebbles on these beaches, one like this stood out. Much more common are quartzes and calcites like the snowy-white smoothed pebble at the bottom left corner of my picture. The little deep-red one? Iron? Volcano? Earth’s core? Maybe.

 

I have no geological training and little knowledge — this’d be more interesting if I did —but I do realise that each small pebble I pick up is its own, remarkable story: story on a timescale so far beyond first-hand human experience that it’s humbling, and even a geological explanation would not dispel the feelings of encounter-with-enormity I get from holding one of these pebbles in the palm of my hominid hand.

In fact, we all occupy our own measures of time, even though there are all sorts of unresolved questions about what, exactly, “time” is. In many ways, WE are time; in many ways, we generate time. And, when we see ourselves this way, we realise that each of us is an unfolding story: a story we graft on to all the other stories around us in ways that we, individually, can shape.

We respond to story in a deep, primal way. Stories connect directly with our emotions as well as our intelligence and reason. As every charity fundraiser knows, we “feel” stories, and fall for them, while any amount of raw data can leave us utterly unmoved.

This sense of story, this need for narrative, is deeply implanted in our human way of understanding things. We’re adept at finding patterns, order and uniqueness, and excerpting from patterns of experience “our” stories and “my” story.

We’re born with the magical power of finding meaning in particular interactions with all that’s flying by, sweeping past and around us, and carrying us along. Once we have found that meaning, we’re enabled to create places to live and ways of living in company with others, even though we can never come to know them fully. But, thanks to the new stories that begin to include them, we generate resonances between “me” and “you, “us” and “them”… and the stories bring us feelings of companionship, predictability and control: we are NOT alone. We are a “community” that, as time goes by, continues to grow its own repertoires of reassuring narratives.

As our dread of the chaos falls from us, we claim for ourselves the power to act, to analyse and to shape destinies we’re able to believe are of our own making.

Intuitively, we compose and tell stories all the time. We see events and experiences as stories. Story is THE art that seeds all of our other arts, all the way back to their origins. Stories shape our political and moral evaluations. Stories are also the stuff of daily conversation, whether it’s the quick sharing bit of gossip about some acquaintance we saw at the mall the other day, or the thoughtful telling of our hopes, or a description of some activity we’re engaged in; they regularise “our” worlds.

Shared stories establish and maintain relationships, build communities and define cultures. When we hear a story, it enters the world of our experience and changes, perhaps in just the smallest of ways, the way we appreciate and think about the world — and this, in turn, changes us. It’s all cumulative: we are shaped by the stories we hear, just as we are shapers of our own stories.

THE “magic” elixir is meaning.

Information gets useful and available to us when it can be related to what things mean, when it can be seen in the context of a story or theory (and a ‘theory’ is just a good story in an academic gown). Information that stands on its own, alone, is hard to see as anything but intellectual litter. If we can’t find any place for it, we’ll disregard it altogether. At the same time, entire, coherent narratives can form around hardly any facts at all, if there’s a mite of meaning to be had there: phrenology became “science”, Loch Ness hides a monster in its depths and failing to win a lottery improves your chances the next time… for example.

The power of a narrative to manipulate information into meaning — and thereby to make it considerably more persuasive and memorable — applies to everything. An e-mail or letter that’s sensitive to the principles of narrative (by clearly linking new information into an existing story), will be better understood and remembered than any unorganised downloading of data. Computers need software to systematise the data that’s put into them; we need a story.

It’s revealing to deliberately start looking at all the “things” around you as moments in a continuing story. Nothing around you has always been the way it is now. Everything was once something else and, right now, is gradually or rapidly becoming something else again.

Think about your clothes: those synthetic fabrics were made from hydrocarbons that came out of an oil well. Chemically, they originated in some vast, dripping, decomposing prehistoric swamp. Once they were plants, waving in the sun and wind, beaten by rains of long, long ago …or creatures ploughing around in the primeval muck.

The wool you’re wearing was once on the back of a sheep. Where? Some sprawling Australian sheep station? A moist, misty Scottish hillside? Some coyote-threatened threatened flock in North America? Can you imagine the particular sheep? What hands sheared the sheep and graded the wool and baled it? It was dyed and milled and woven. People did that and many of them are probably doing the same work today.

Your genuine cotton grew on a plant … where? The Nile Delta perhaps, where Mark Antony once made his fated way? Or was it Uzbekistan, the world’s second-largest exporter of cotton where children as young as seven are conscripted to help bring in the annual harvest. Where was it processed? In Turkey or the Phillippines, both notorious for sweatshop labour practices? Your leather? That was once the hide of a cow or bull, or some other animal that grazing pastures you may never see.

Everything you touch, smell or see is like that, a moment is a story that has yet to be concluded.

And, once upon a time, every atom heavier than hydrogen was formed in the cataclysmic collapse of a dying star, then flung out into space to coalesce into the shape of the world we inhabit. Everything — a person, a place, an object — nudges everything else and is poised, ready to catapult us into experiences we don’t have time to consider … unless we choose to enter into them.

Categories — the way we’re inclined to name experience with the most obvious, habit-formed label — can trip us up because they can hide our own experience from us, they can hide, even to us, the true, personal measure of an event or ongoing experience. Few categories are as clear, as consistent or as closed as we routinely assume. We get a most of our categories from our culture and, when we stop to think about it, it’s all pretty obvious, but our culture — by way of our routines — ensnares us in habit-formed ways of thinking so snugly that it seldom occurs to us to re-examine them. Who has the time?

We all, and each of us, are surrounded by constant opportunities to rediscover, reshape and refresh our world. Taking charge of “my” story frees me to lead “my” life without loads of wanton baggage. Taking charge of “our” story helps us to shape the community that gives us our courage.

We don’t need a press campaign or massive social networking effort to do that: we simply need to express and present our essential values, insights and discovered meanings by telling the stories that are “true” to us.

The narratives we make, shared in our regular contacts with friends and the people who matter most to us, have the power to transform our lives, and our communities. It’s something we can do as we go about doing whatever it is that we do… just by sharing OUR stories.

As a way of living, it stands to extend our freedom, gain us respect… and inflame our hopefulness.

It's a wonder...

"It all begins with the sea..."

WONDER’s a word that’s long carried with it strong implications of openness to joy. It’s a word that has been traced back to the origins of our English language. It isn’t a new emotion. And it’s typically our first response to the giddy depths of mystery.

Wonder has been credited with energising human curiosity, inspiring art and the origins of both religion and science. It penetrates deeply, extending the senses and animating the intellect.

Mystery energises us. Mystery gives us the appetite to strive to understand, first of all ourselves, and then in order to become what we should. Mystery makes it clear that we’re all humanity together, and that we inhabit a shared predicament. It’s one that makes us burn with awe and curiosity, so it’s good for us to talk with each other. But is also teaches us that cleverness is an illusion: it has too few dimensions to approach truth.

Mystery is neither good nor evil; it is enfolded into one human life no more or less than any other. Human lives can in turn only enfold themselves into the mystery, one at a time. The mystery is far more to be trusted than our deepest insight or anxiety. After all, as most other species seem to be aware, it’s where we are and how we all got to be here. So who are we to be picky?

The greatest gift mystery gives us is wonder… wonder’s essential to being human.

BUT, a little while ago, when I searched the word “mystery” in the “books” category at amazon.ca, the title that popped up at the top of the list was a work called: The Mystery Method: The Foolproof Way to Get Any Woman You Want Into Bed. So, expecting an tale of rejection and disappointment, I read the first “reader review”… but, no. It was glowing. And I soon had to look up “PUA” in Wikipedia. I discovered it means “pick up artist” and that there’s a “PUA” genre of “literature”.

Putting to one side the images this suggested of sullen, drooling men with low foreheads, their long, over-sized libidos slithering along behind them, I returned to amazon.ca where I discovered that, for $18.96, I could buy another favourably reviewed book called God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. Here, in a single non sequitur, was a title that simultaneously trivialised concepts of “god”, “woman”, “dating” and “disaster”. Breathing deeply, the moron images came right back.

It really gets wearisome, beating a path through the morass of mindlessness that the “rise of civilisation” has managed to generate.

We of the West claim to have spent thousands of years in the pursuit of knowledge, human dignity, truth and the “just” society… we have aimed for the stars, walked on the Moon and, inexplicably, wallow around in neurosis, vacuity, trashy dependencies, violence, despond, timidity and credulity, and the inane trivia that endlessly belches from the bowels of a global entertainment industry.

A human consciousness needs real food to flourish. It starves on trivialities and simulations. A healthy human consciousness sings with birds and breezes, weeps with a suffering friend, is grateful for goodness, needs and gives love, is distracted by beauty, seeks and values friendship, enjoys laughter, esteems intellect, is endlessly curious; it loves more readily than it hates, opposes injustice and is from time to time fired with inexplicable joy.  But it has to be fed. It can’t thrive in stasis or find peace in one place: it has to journey.

A starting point is immediately at hand: beauty.

Although “beauty”, too, is a word that’s been savagely trivialised, beauty itself is inviolate. Beauty is an experience of the BE-ing of goodness. It attracts. It inspires. And it redeems words like “mystery” and “wonder” because beauty lies at their core.

Beauty, it is commonly said, lies in the eye of the beholder. That isn’t true. Beauty is primal. But beauty undoubtedly exists, long before it is beheld.

Among the varieties of stone most favored by sculptors in marble for more than two and a half millennia — since the time of the Athenian cultural efflorescence — has been the luminously white marble of Naxos, a small island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea.

Marble quarry on the Aegean island
of Naxos.
(The black seams to the right are emery.)

Its fine grain and capacity to take a lustrous, polished finish made it a prized material for temples and statues of gods. Naxian marble has a capacity to glow as though it is on the point of being animated by an inner energy. Glistening in the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine of 2600 years ago, the freshly erected, 25-foot high statue in Naxian marble of Apollo in Delos must have been every bit as breath-taking as its creators intended.

It all begins with the sea: like time, its long, regular oceanic risings and valleyings, its sharper, breaking pitching and heaving, its rush to shores and hissing retreats, and beneath the sinewy flow of currents, a dark, seeming stillness. And beneath even that, there continue the achingly slow journeyings of the earth’s mantle itself… sliding and folding under to soften and grow molten or, prised upwards, rising and hardening so that the seas toss their wrack against new shores whilst patiently gnawing away at the old.

It all begins with the sea, like the surface-parting exhalations of whales that loom for air from their ringing depths, the majestic passage of sharks, the otherworldliness of depths where colour is washed away and countless creatures live lives that shake off everything we know from our circumscribed lives on earth to inhabit a three-dimensional freedom that surpasses even that of the globe-circling albatross; the heaving, changing otherness of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the ever-presence of it, the plunge and crackle of surf, and the lurch of a surfboard catching the wave; the yawing roll of the deep ocean swell, lucent-black under a keel, and the trailing wake that slowly vanishes; oyster-clad rocks and spray-drenched mussel beds, tresses of kelp on the rocks, the thud and thrust of a filling sail and a ship’s churning wallow through the waves, that ship-smell of tar and cordage and iodine, the glowing trails of fish through phosphorescent subtropical seas at night while overhead the stars reflect on the open water where swells rise and fall as they did for millions of human lifetimes before the first human appeared, eons of motion, never the same, never different.

The loneliness of the sea’s constant, animated companionship, its power to console or destroy… this it where it all begins. Even the marble began here because, for at least 500 million years, small one-celled creatures called Foraminifera have teemed in the seas. We need microscopes to see them, but they take up calcium salts and carbon dioxide from the water and transform them into tiny shells for themselves. Their shapes are countless and striking in their life-formed beauty.

Over the millennia, these tiny creatures have lived and died, and their tiny shells rained slowly to the ocean floor to form deep beds of nearly pure sediment. The gathering weight compressed the small shells into limestone.

In some parts of the world, beds of limestone rock were lifted upwards by the planet’s slow re-adjustments. Water, slightly acidic from decaying plants and deepening soil, seeped into crevices and very gradually mined out dripping tunnels of underground watercourses and, as each small droplet of minerals-laden water evaporated, it left a trace of calcium carbonate behind. The residues turned underground caverns into pillared, chandeliered, glittering wonderlands that can be seen by human eyes only when people make their way into these unlikeliest of places — squeezing through tiny passages, scaling sheer, underground rock faces, swimming through dark pools and crawling through fine, clinging mud — then light lights and look about… and wonder. It is still possible to be the first person ever to stand in such a place and to reel with the revelation of it all.

In other parts of the world, the deep sheets of limestone were carried far into the Earth’s mantle: to depths where the core’s intense heat melts rock. Molten, the limestone was lifted again, and as it cooled, crystals formed. In a few places, where the limestone was sufficiently pure and the crystals that formed in the cooling were small, the rising layers contained lodes of fine-grained, white marble.

The neighbouring islands of Naxos and Paros rose from the sea endowed with such a stone. And, eventually, human beings stumbled upon this remarkable rock and, in their desire to honour the gods they’d moulded from the mystery, found a purpose for it that was appropriate to its worth. It is another wonder, an afterthought of nature, that placed beside the shimmering white marble are black seams of emery: the abrasive rock that is perfect substance with which to work the sculpted surface of marble to that heart-stopping polish.

My point in all of this is that beauty cannot be confined to this place or that. It permeates our world and is discernible everywhere and its discernment is a conscious act that ignites feelings of hope and “rightness”, meaning and gratitude: a “fit” with goodness.

There’s something elemental and universal in its character. The beauty of a musical note has been a part of the Earth’s acoustic capacity since the Earth was formed. The beauty we experience in various configurations of light, of sound, or form may be more of less apparent in different ways to each of us but it is there for us all. Nor does beauty ever seem to be a sufficient end in itself: it propels consciousness forward. It nags at its every beholder to take the next step, to continue the journey.

When and where did our sense of beauty get marginalised? Why? How did the idea of “beauty” get reduced to a broad-spectrum, unnecessary buzz-word? What makes us so often the arbiters and trivialisers of beauty rather than its discoverers and celebrators?

Real beauty is everywhere. Every insect I’ve ever seen, every creature I’ve seen, has been a masterpiece of dynamic design, a fusion of form and function that fascinates the mind as well as inspiring the spirit … an aesthetic marvel. Scientists estimate there are close to 10 million different species of insect. They pollinate our fruit trees and flowers, they give us silk, they give us honey, they are food for many people … and most are benign: unsung contributors to our wellbeing. And, moreover, creatures like this have been around for 400 million years, compared with our 750,000 or so.

We have a few blueberry bushes that produce delicious, health-promoting fruit. Blueberries are the sort of thing we tend to talk about “by the pound” — and there's nothing like commodification to rip the meaning from things.

But look at the complexity of one single blueberry: the seed-bearing pale flesh that tastes so different from the astringent skin. But two flavours complement each other beautifully and uniquely. And they’re not really very “blue” at all. Each berry is a gifted thing to pop into your mouth, but it’s also beautiful in its form.

So what gives us the capacity to be transported by beautiful flavours?

And sounds …

And colours …

And smells…

And textures …

And sensations …

And what does it mean? We seem to have evolved with a capacity to apprehend an infinite array of beauty, and to grow our wisdom in its “soil”.

And, primed with beauty, consciousness itself can hope to become beautiful.