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“The ordinary is sacred.”
A different way of being present
In this fifth episode of the Force of Life series, Barbara Lepani, a sociologist and long-time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, joins Mik Aidt as co-host.
At Kindlehill School in the Blue Mountains, geography takes students down to the river. They follow its course, paint it, sing it and dance it. Barbara Lepani says they learn to see it as Grandmother River. What can a river teach you when you listen that closely?
In her first ‘Soapbox’, Barbara starts with the rent and the food bill and turns to what she calls spiritual wealth. She draws on the Buddhist idea of equanimity – staying steady when life changes around you – and asks how you show an adult child you’ve got their back when they’re struggling.
Uncle Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara Elder, told Barbara what he did as a boy after he was taken from his family. He’d sit on the beach at dawn, wrap himself in gum leaves and feel the sun as his mother’s warmth. He also told her to pay attention like a spider sensing the tremors in its web. Barbara connects his stories to dadirri, the practice of deep listening shared by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann.
Barbara describes how learning a songline brings together teachings about ancestral beings and how to live on that Country. Uncle Bob told her why certain teachings stay with the people who made the journey together – what they learnt was meant to change them. In a follow-up to the conversation, Barbara draws a parallel with samaya, the sacred commitment made at initiation in her Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It includes keeping certain teachings close and putting them into practice.
Barbara’s father took her out of school at 15, and she found a place for herself in books. Living in Papua New Guinea years later gave her a view of her own culture from the other side of colonial rule. She remembers a woman she met in New Zealand who told her the land was calling her back to Australia.
“There is no time that’s past, present and future. There’s time that’s ever present. See, it’s a different way of being present. Now you can’t as a whitefella sing up ancestral beings that belong to Aboriginal culture. But you can sing up your relationship to nature the way Bob did when he wrapped the gum trees around him. You can do it by sitting with a river.”
~ Barbara Lepani
SONGS
Barbara’s river story inspired the song ‘Sing It Up’. The episode closes with ‘Return Again’.
– A song inspired by Barbara Lepani’s story about Grandmother River in the Force of Life episode 5, ‘A different way of being present’.
– A song reflecting on our spiritual and ecological roots, inspired by Margie Abbott’s 2025 Earth Day speech in The Sustainable Hour no. 544
Music in this Force of Life episode
00:00-00:17 Mik Aidt: ‘Hearth & Home (instrumental)’ (also 0:33-0:49, 3:48-5:38 and 6:55-8:18)
00:17-01:20 Mik Aidt: ‘Force of Life (instrumental)’ (also 45:00-45:15)
01:29-03:13 Alex Aidt: ‘Icecream’
08:35-11:37 ‘Breaking Light’
11:56-13:15 Mik Aidt: ‘Soapbox’ (also: 21:02-22:30)
16:29-17:32 Mik Aidt: ‘Awe’
22:56-26:44 Force of Life Collective: ‘Sing It Up’
49:20-49:14 Force of Life Collective: ‘Return Again’
A big thank you to the musicians for allowing us to use this music in the podcast.
Episode 2 – introducing Barbara Lepani:
→ Overview: all Force of Life episodes
TRANSCRIPT
Jingle:
MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, recording from 1939: (00:05)
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.
Female voice:
The Force of Life.
Star Wars – ‘A New Hope’, episode 4 – video clip:
The Force will be with you. Always.
Joseph Gelfer: (00:35)
Historically unprecedented change. That is what is required. And a phrase I like to use is ‘In service to life on Earth’. If you’re not in service to life on Earth, you don’t deserve to be in business.
Mik: (00:51)
Welcome to the Force of Life podcast, episode number five. And yes, it’s been I think almost nine months since our last episode. So I’ve had to gently dust off some spiderwebs here from my microphone and the webcam. But this the story is still the same in this Force of Life podcast. That’s where we’re searching for the story of life, the force of life, and where we find our strength when it comes to living a good life and things like that.
Today I’m introducing a co-host, Barbara Lepani from the Blue Mountains have… – Barbara, you sort of proposed that we should run this more like an ongoing series where we talk about these matters. Is that right?
Barbara: (01:38)
Yeah, well, as you know, Mik, I’ve been running or being part of an organisation which we call the Enlivenment Network and that’s how we met. And that came out of my previous work here in the mountains running the Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network, which was a kind of multi-arts network of artists and writers and performers across the mountains. And when we wound that up, we went on to something we called the Regenesis Collective.
So we were interested in this idea of what’s the story that lies behind it, not just art, but the more positive view. I came across some work by a German biologist, I think, and he wrote about enlivenment, that we need to go from the sort of rationality of the European enlightenment to this biophilia, the love of nature, which he called the love of living, of bringing life, he called ‘enlivenment’.
So we said, yeah, that’s who we are. We’re the Enlivenment Network. So I’ve been running a blog now for many, many years across the same platform. We’ve just kept renaming ourselves. I think it goes back to my own journey on enlivenment and my own journey as a lifelong Buddhist in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
So then I thought, well, not everybody reads anymore. I might be a sort of text person, which I have to confess I am, but a lot of people now turn to podcasts as their way of exploring ideas. So I thought, why not talk to Mik about his Force of Life podcast? And maybe we can work together?
Mik: (03:30)
Absolutely! I loved that proposal because I have been reading you the blog posts that you have been sending out. You know, I receive them from you or from the system through email. And I’m very grateful for the way that you connect things from like talking about something very technical like AI and what’s happening in the world from a from different perspectives. But then you have a deep spiritual dimension to it always. And that’s what I really enjoy about your writings.
And that I’m hoping we can sort of draw out of you as well as we speak. And I know that you’re pretty good at that because we did episode number two of this series of Force of Life podcast episodes was also I think an introduction to all of that. So we don’t need to start from scratch. You have been introduced in this series. Now it’s about putting you up on that soapbox, so to say, as a presenter as well, as a co-host.
Barbara: (04:23)
It’s interesting, because even within my spiritual community, a lot of people can’t connect that to the sort of political and economic issues of the day, and people who track political and economic issues can’t connect it to their spiritual life.
And in fact, I regularly meet up with my brother, because he lives in a nearby village to me, and he’s a very strong Christian practitioner. And he said to me the other day, you know, I really value when we get together and talk, you’re one of the few people I can discuss my spiritual life with as we talk about political and economic issues. I mean, professionally, I worked as a sociologist. So I love connecting the dots, I think, is what we all have to do. Otherwise, people just segment everything off. So I love the way you work, because you do that also.
Mik: (05:17)
Well, I try, yeah. But personally I don’t have a religious background apart from having grown up in a Christian society and yes there was Christmas and yes there was baptising rituals and also sometimes, you know, funerals and so on. But apart from that, I haven’t been affiliated with any religion as such. I must say, speaking of Buddhism, I’ve been very impressed and fascinated of the Indian spiritual world.
I spent a month in an area around a holy mountain in India called Tiruvannamalai [Editor’s note: Tiruvannamalai is the town at the foot of the sacred mountain Arunachala.] where I was living together with a Danish person who had moved there and who introduced me to all the temples there and all the philosophy behind it. I was very impressed with that. The depth of that and yeah the different worldview that I was introduced to there was mind blowing actually.
Barbara: (06:10)
Yeah, well, of course, Buddhism came out of Indian culture. Its roots go back into Indian culture. that pervades Indian society, even though it’s become a very techno-modern society. It’s got that underbelly of that old spiritual tradition. And I think if you look at the statistics in Australia, nearly 50 per cent of Australians don’t follow an organised religion. So Australia is a very secular society on the whole.
I mean, Christianity is the dominant religion, but there’s quite a strong Indian community here now in Australia Hindu and there’s a strong Muslim community. But it’s small and the Buddhist community is tiny. But there’s still many Australians who are looking for a spiritual life. And one of the reasons why a sort of Western form of Buddhism’s attractive for people is it’s not about believing in a God, you know; it’s about an inner journey about discovering yourself and your inner truth and it’s more like, it’s a sort of combination of philosophy and psychology.
So for Western people Buddhism is sort of more aligned with psychology than it is with religion. But of course it also has aspects of religion because they’re statues and temples and things like that. But the thing that I think appeals to Westerners is that the Buddha has said and it goes back 2,500 years ago when he gave his first teachings in Deer Park in [Sarnath, near] Varanasi in India.
His advice to his followers was: “Do not follow my teachings for love of me or belief in me. You must test the truth of this in the reality of your own experience as a goldsmith tests the quality of the gold. So always that, don’t just believe my words, investigate, find the truth.”
And I think that appeals to modern people because they’re looking for all this fake news, what’s not fake news. It’s got to get real, know, tested in… because religion often has a bad name. Terrible things have been done in the name of religion. I mean, look what’s going on in the world today in the name of religion in Israel. People turn away from religion because of that, you know.
Mik: (08:34)
Am I right, Barbara, that in Buddhism… Many people in the Western world have this sort of almost entitled feeling of that life is supposed to be good, right? So if it’s not good, then there must be either something wrong with me or there’s something wrong with society, and so on. Whereas in Buddhism, it’s more like: no, nobody promised you that life would be good. It can be very painful. And that’s maybe more something you just got to accept – that you were put into this world, and there will be a lot of pain.
Barbara: (09:06)
Yeah, well, more this way: what the Buddha taught was, it’s called the first Noble Truth is the Truth of Suffering. So when you investigate your own experience, you realise that suffering is pervasive. And it identifies there’s physical suffering, but there’s also mental suffering, which is when you don’t get what you want, or you get what you don’t want. And so that sort of frustration that comes into human beings is a kind of mental suffering, right? And then things change, it’s called the truth of impermanence.
Life’s not settled, things are changing all the time. So having identified that that’s the nature of living life, it’s called the Truth of Suffering, it’s pervasive. It takes many different forms. And it’s why no amount of accumulating material goods ends it. Rich people also have this kind of suffering.
Mik: (10:04)
Barbara, that seems to me pretty much like what we need in a modern society that looks the way it does at the moment, doesn’t it? It fits quite well there.
Barbara: (10:12)
Yeah, well that’s right. This Buddhist teacher that was visiting me recently, he pointed out that if you go back in time, the level of wealth—he was quoting the UK, people have now got 70 times more material goods than they had 100 years ago. But the level of mental well-being is, if anything, it’s worse. So it just shows you that although we love all those material goods, it doesn’t deal with this pervasive suffering that affects us. We still get sick. We still die.
I mean, many people think that the doctors should be able to solve every form of sickness, right? Every form of pain. But, you know, the body’s frail. Different things can cause sickness. So what Buddhism teaches you to do, they say you can’t… it’s your attitude that counts. If you accept that suffering is part of life, what you can change is your attitude to the suffering. If things happen that you don’t want, then you investigate what’s gone on.
The goal of Buddhism is not so much happiness as equanimity. How do I maintain my equanimity in the face of all of these changes? And that comes back to what I was talking to you about as inner spiritual wealth, is this equanimity.
William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s prime minister in 1939: (11:42)
“Unite in a national effort to save from destruction All that makes life itself worth living.”
Barbara’s Soapbox: (11:58)
I want to talk about spiritual wealth because at the moment everybody’s freaking out about the cost of living and I understand that they’re worried about paying the rent they’re worried about meeting their food bill. I’m caught in the same thing so I do understand it, but there is another form of wealth that we’re not paying attention to, which I call spiritual wealth and some people call mental health.
So we know there’s a mental health crisis in our society and at the moment we think it’s all an individual problem. Someone’s got depression, they’ve got anxiety, you send them off to a counsellor. It’s all dealt with on an individual basis. But I think it’s because we’ve completely denuded the spiritual wealth of our whole society because we’ve put all the emphasis on material stuff.
So people are endlessly trying to buy more stuff or change more stuff or change the way they look in order to be happy. But it doesn’t work. So what do we do about developing our own spiritual wealth? That’s my soapbox.
There’s two ways in which we can develop our spiritual wealth. One is individually, because it’s a quality within ourselves that once we develop it can’t be taken away from us. We can even have this quality if we find ourselves in prison. But it’s also the quality we can develop in our relationship with our community. And we all live in a community. We live in streets, houses connected to one another, friendships.
So that spiritual wealth is also the way we relate to one another. So we can do it through getting angry with one another, like on social media where we just fuel all the anger and frustration, or we can do the opposite, which is fuelling how we support and relate to one another through kindness, through warm heart, warm feelings. Through not giving into anger and frustration because I think we’re going to move into very, these difficult times are going to continue. They’re not going to get better and they’re going to get worse for our children and grandchildren.
So communities are going to have to learn how to pull together, not compete with one another about who’s got the best house or the best new car. It’s all going to be how we’re to one another and help one another through difficult circumstances.
And if I was to choose one really strong example about that recently, like this incident that occurred to Helen Haines. Now what happened there is we know that a man of 43 was isolated, he was well-educated, he was concerned about the environment, but he was suffering from significant emotional distress. Even though he had a house that obviously his parents had let him stay in that they owned, they had cut off all communication with him as their way of trying to cope with his what we call mental illness, which I would call spiritual distress. So he was alone and frustrated and got more and more confused and he lashed out because he’d probably seen on social media how you can use a motor vehicle to just ram it at someone to express your anger, and unfortunately he took it out on his local member Helen Haines. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t our normal view of what terrorism is. It was a middle-aged guy who was alone, frustrated and spiritually unwell, who’d lost connection with his own family, who happened to be close friends of Helen Haines.
Now many of us are going to face that in our extended family systems. We’re going to find adult children who are not doing very well and as older generations, I belong to the baby boomer generation, we’re going to have to work out how do we support our adult children when they go through difficult times. Because they’re in turn trying to support their children or younger ones. So it’s this intergenerational kindness and support, a sort of unconditional kindness that we now need to learn. Where there’s no expectations. We don’t get angry because they don’t do what we want them to do.
We show them that we’ve got their back. I mean, we don’t indulge their nonsense, but we show them we’ve got their back so that they feel they’re not alone in the world. That’s what I call communal spiritual wealth. So it’s not pathologised as a sort of health problem [where] it belongs to the health department and individual health practitioners that you have to pay to go to. It’s intergenerational and communal ways of supporting one another. Why is that not naive? Well, I think it’s naive to think that individuals working with professional counsellors can solve this wider social problem of spiritual poverty. I mean, our consumer society has created this spiritual poverty. We’ve locked people into what they call hyper-consumerism. Buy, buy, buy, buy is the only way you can keep the economy turning over.
And that just brings frustration and it doesn’t nurture people. So to me that’s naive. It’s naive to think you can buy your way out of this. What’s not naive is to recognise that we’ve created this problem of spiritual poverty. And I’m not talking about religion here. I’m talking about the capacity people have to nurture their inner spirit and their relationship with one another, with other people in an unconditional way that sees clearly what’s going on but doesn’t descend into dismissive judgmentalism.
Now, I know that can be difficult because people experiencing severe mental loss can be extremely hard to deal with and so of course people who are in serious psychosis requires expertise. But we know from the statistics a lot of it is anxiety and depression because people’s nervous systems are completely stressed out. All this information coming at them, all this anxiety about the future, it’s just stressing out their nervous systems. we all have to learn how to nurture our own inner spirit. So let’s talk about what spiritual wealth looks like for all of us. Spiritual health, it’s as simple as breathing.
You know, take a breath.
If you slow your breathing down, can learn to simply find a beautiful place to be, even a tree or a flower, and you sit with that and you consciously breathe in the beauty and freshness of that. And if you can’t be in nature, then a beautiful picture, something that inspires your mind, and you slowly breathe in and you feel that goodness coming into your own heart, nourishing you on breath and as you breathe out you let go any frustration you’ve got, any bitterness you’re holding about some situation, you just breathe it out, and then you wait a few moments in that silence and then you gently breathe in again. Breathing is free. We all breathe, you know. It’s the stuff of life.
So that’s where you begin. You begin with working with your breathing. Because we know when you’re anxious you hyperventilate. so breathing is how you bring yourself down, you bring yourself back to yourself.
But you use your mind, you visualise goodness coming into you and feel it, just imagine that it’s possible, this nourishing, beautiful, warm, glowing light that’s coming into your heart and healing you. And imagine it coming from whoever for you represents goodness. And different people have different things that they regard as their sort of source of goodness. Individuals use different things.
And I have a lovely story about this. My Aboriginal friend, Uncle Bob, the Yankunytjatjara Elder I worked with, he was stolen from his parents when he was seven and sent off to a mission station, thousands and thousands of miles away from his country. So he grew up on Croker Island, right off the north, the tip of Arnhem Land. And he was with other kids. There were no parents, and told me what he used to do, used to get up at dawn, he’d go and sit on the beach where the sun was rising over the ocean. He’d wrap the gum leaves of the tree around him and imagine it was his mother’s arms and he would visualise the warmth from the sun on his face and body as his mother’s love. And that’s how he mothered himself in those very difficult situations.
And he was the kindest man I’ve ever met. He’d been through difficult times, but he was just full of this ability to be very loving and kind to everybody around him. And he did it this way. He practiced it. When he stayed at my house, I watched him. Each morning, he got up, he had this little book of sayings and he would read them and he would visualise that loving kindness. Because when he walked out on the road, because I was living in a community that was all whitefellas, people would look at him as if he was a stranger, like, what are you doing here? So he had to live with that sense of not feeling at home in those communities. And he did this by this personal practice.
He told me another great story actually about, it was one of the Australian guys that was traveling with us. He’d never been able to get a girlfriend. And Bob said to him, that’s easy, he said: ‘You know, if you’re honey, the bee will come to drink.’ So he said: ‘All you have to do is imagine that you’re honey and you will draw people to you. The bees will come to drink,’ he said. That’s love magic.
. . .
SONG: (22:56)
‘Sing It Up’
Verse 1:
The children are at the river
Blue shallows at its bank
They’ve taken off their shoes
and dance the way it moves
Bridge:
Can you hear last night’s rain
coming round the bend?
Grandmother River has come alive
It’s her rights we defend
Chorus:
We are the voice of the river
We sing it up! And we dance the song
A different way of being present
as we travel around the sun
Verse 2:
We sit till the mud we stirred
settles round our feet
A fish holds still against the flow
A bird is joining the retreat
Bridge:
Can you hear last night’s rain
coming round the bend?
Grandmother River has come alive
It’s her rights we defend
Chorus:
We are the voice of the river
We sing it up! And we dance the song
A different way of being present
as we travel around the sun
Verse 3:
The boy was only seven
when they took him from his mum
He’d wrap himself in gum leaves
to feel her hug in the sun
Interlude: (many voices, no instruments)
Relationship to nature – sing it up!
A different way of being present – sing it up!
No time that’s past, no scary future
Only time that’s ever present
Bridge:
Can you hear last night’s rain
coming round the bend?
Grandmother River has come alive
It’s her rights we defend
Final chorus:
We are the voice of the river
We sing it up! And we dance the song
A different way of being present
as we travel in a circle – around the sun
Outro:
Hear the voice of Grandmother River.
There is no time that’s past, present and future.
There’s time that’s ever present.
Now, you can sing it! You can sing it up.
. . .
Mik: (26:44)
I really like what you’re saying there, Barbara. And this Uncle Bob must really have left a big impression on you. This story about how he feels the gum tree leaves and imagines them being his mother’s arms; that’s so powerful, you know. How being in a physical contact with nature and then using that for something that is so positive. And the whole thing about slowing down, that is so much what we need in this time and age, isn’t it?
Barbara: (27:13)
Yeah, it is. I mean, there’s an indigenous woman from the Northern Territory who actually was one of the Australian, older Australians of the year. Her name is [2021 Senior Australian of the Year] Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann AM. She came up with this idea of Dadirri. And she says it’s the greatest gift we Aboriginal people can give all Australians; and it is: quiet inner listening and that practice of being with nature.
For the quiet inner listening and allowing all of that feeling that it’s getting into the feeling mode rather than the thinking mode. In that way you tap into the deep intuitive knowing that we think about as coming from our heart and our gut rather than from our heads. That’s the kind of knowing that Uncle Bob was using to wrap those gum leaves around himself and feel his mother’s love through the sun. Yeah.
Mik: (28:10)
Uncle Bob must have left quite an impression on you?
Barbara: (28:14)
Yeah, of course, because it’s actually the first Indigenous person I ever really got to know.
Mik: (28:21)
Do you think he changed the way that you move forward in the world since then?
Barbara: (28:25)
He did in the sense that I think one of the greatest challenges whitefellas like me face is how do we make contact with the ancient cultural foundations of this country? How do we get to know it? People say, well, you just get to know Aboriginal people and somehow that’s how you’ll know it. But that wasn’t good enough for me.
I met Uncle Bob because I went in search of what does it mean to be an elder, a wise elder, in Aboriginal culture. That’s how we met, right? So we had this ongoing conversation the whole time we worked on his book of what wisdom was, what wise eldership was. That was the kind of, and I was coming from my whitefella way, from my Buddhist background, and he was coming from his way as a member of the stolen generation, but also an elder of the Yankunytjatjara people of the central desert. It was a rich experience.
I also, through Uncle Bob, I had a direct experience of what Aboriginal people call sorry business, which is just the constant flow of death and trouble that pervades Aboriginal communities. And also this idea of prescience, which is common in Aboriginal culture, which is they know, not through a telephone call, they just know something has happened in their wider network. They immediately ring up: what’s happened? what’s gone on? They can feel it on this sort of invisible network of connection that they have.
And in fact, Uncle Bob had another story about that for me. He said: we need to be like the spider. He said: the spider lives in a web. And that spider can feel through the web if there’s any danger. He can feel if there’s food coming. He said: we need to be like the spider. We need to be able to tune in and feel the tremors of those connections in our own lives.
Mik: (30:36)
Hm. That sounds… that really sounds to me like you say: wisdom. I hear every week in The Sustainable Hour, Tony reminds us about the ancient wisdom of the Aboriginal people. And I must admit that I’m still waiting to understand what that wisdom is. But I think your spiderweb there… that just certainly opened up… is that, you know, an example of what we’re talking about?
Barbara: (31:04)
Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because I was trying to get with Bob, know, like what was their idea of how mind works and Bob would keep pointing to his heart, not his head. Right. And then he talked to me about what happens through the initiation process, right. And I realised then that what Aboriginal people develop through their traditional learning is they really massively develop their capacity for intuitive knowing rather than deductive rational thinking. And that intuitive knowing is always anchored in space, it’s spatial. The people have often commented about how aboriginal people can find their way across country, get lost but they can find their way because they have extraordinary spatial awareness.
And for them, knowledge is not so abstract. For us it’s very abstract and conceptual, but for them it’s anchored in place in connection to country, in a way that we’ve got to go on a journey to reconnect with that way of knowing. I think one of the ways that we can get to know what they mean by this, mean Bob called this ancient wisdom, it’s called Tjukurrpa, and other people call it the Law. And senior custodians of law in the Central Desert, they’re known as Law Men. But when you go into what this Law is… And then Bob talked about what you do on a songline, which is what, when you go in and you learn a songline through an initiation process. So you begin at one place and you travel along the songline, and as well as learning sort of ancient secret business knowledge about ancestral beings, you actually learn the ecological knowledge of that country and how to survive on it, a songline records. Both those forms of knowledge are not separate in an Aboriginal way of ancient wisdom. There’s no such thing as spiritual knowledge on one hand and secular knowledge on the other. They’re intimately interwoven and entangled. So, you know, the ordinary is sacred, and in some ways the sacred is ordinary.
But the reason Uncle Bob said… because I said to him, you know, well, why have you got this rule about people being speared in the leg if they break the rules of initiation? What’s all that about? Because we couldn’t talk too directly about these things because within that culture there’s men’s business and women’s business too. So, you know, we had to work around it. So I could ask him, but yeah, but why is it sacred business? Why are people killed if they break that rule? What’s that all about?
Mik: (33:57)
Can I say, Barbara, that I think the secretiveness is what really holds a lot of Australians, including myself, back from trying to investigate more because you sort of meet a wall of okay, that’s secret? Hmm, okay. Rather than if it was something that the children were taught in the schools.
Barbara: (34:14)
I think the difficulty is that because there is, first of all in our culture we don’t understand secret business. We’re big on transparency. All knowledge should be shared. So that idea of sacred secret belonged to old culture, where priests had all the knowledge and ordinary people didn’t have it. So the whole enlightenment, the age of reason, was getting rid of all of that.
But in the process, we kind of lost the idea of what sacred means. We reduced everything to sort of everything should be known by everybody. So when we hit that wall, you may not know. We feel first of all rejected and then it feels like funny. What’s it all about?
So what I would say is the best way for ordinary people to get to know what that is about is to read one book. It’s not a very big book. It’s published by the National Museum of Australia. And it’s in a series of books called First Knowledges. And it’s edited by an indigenous woman who’s the curator at the museum called Margo Neale. And this first one is called ‘Law: The Way of the Ancestors’. And I’ll just read you two quotes of people that are on the front cover reviewing the book. One’s by woman called June Oscar, who’s an Indigenous elder. She says, “Our laws are forever present and provide the pathways for all Australians to truly learn how to belong to this continent.” And that’s what we all yearn for, isn’t it?
Mik: (36:00)
So much.
Barbara: (36:01)
The great Australian historian Henry Reynolds says, “No other current work has been able to so comprehensively explain the significance of traditional law in all its manifestations.” This book was written by two authors, one is Marcia Langton, who most Australians know. She’s regularly on the news. She’s a professor at Melbourne University, and the other is a non-Indigenous person called Aaron Korn.
So in this series, which I also think is remarkable, they are often co-authored by an Indigenous scholar and a white or non-Indigenous scholar. So it shows you they’re making it available to us to understand without breaking any of those rules within their culture of what can’t be revealed. And it can’t be revealed to Indigenous people without the right initiation, not just to non-Indigenous people.
And that brings me to another point that perhaps explains this a bit too. Because when I asked Uncle Bob, well, why are the rules so strong around this? He said, well, you’re not allowed to talk about what happens on a songline initiation to anybody that wasn’t on that initiation journey with you. He said, and the reason is, he said, that knowledge is not something you gossip about.
It’s meant to transform your very inner being. You’ve got to swallow it. You’ve got to take it right within. And he said, so that’s why. If you just turn it into regular gossip, you just lose the entire purpose of that journey. And you see, that’s pretty similar to what happens in Tibetan Buddhism. So I kind of understand that.
Mik: (37:56)
I think maybe if there’s one problem, you know, I would put my finger at what’s wrong in Australia, it is that the concept of belonging is not really taken very seriously. I see a lot of people I feel they’re a bit lost because they don’t feel they belong anywhere. A third of this country are people who were born overseas. So when they live here, almost per definition, they don’t belong here. They have come here as a choice and then they’re sort of finding their ways, but do they feel they belong? And I think we really need to work on this as a nation.
Barbara: (34:51)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting, you know, because you’re Danish, you’ve come here as an immigrant.
Mik: (34:57)
I know! But you know what, I really very quickly adapt and feel I belong somewhere. It doesn’t take me more than a year or two, suddenly I feel like I’ve lived here forever. And I really feel I belong. I think because I quickly get integrated in the network of people who live around me and all that.
Barbara: (38:57)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting when you talk about belonging because there was a recent survey called the Resilience Index. And what’s really interesting in that is you’re right. It said almost 45 per cent, I think, of people didn’t feel they belonged where they lived.
But what was really interesting is that percentage rose to more than 70 per cent of Indigenous people living in remote communities. And that’s because they’re forced to live in a world that’s dominated by whitefella culture in terms of the legal system and access to economic wealth and power, but also respect, cultural respect, and you know… So a huge percentage of them end up in the criminal justice system. So they feel like even though they’ve got a deep sense of their connection to country in terms of the modern culture they don’t feel they belong.
And then there are other people on the opposite side of that coin, and you’ve got it recently with there was One Nation spokesperson I think in Victoria that started talking about The Great Replacement theory. You know, that all of these non-European immigrants that have come to Australia are sort of taking away the whitefella’s sense of belonging to his own country. And then they regard Australia as this world that was created by British colonialists 240 years ago. So for them it’s that world where Anglo-Europeans had complete cultural dominance in terms of the government, economic opportunity, all that stuff. And suddenly now that’s being eaten away by blackfellas demanding their place in the sun and it’s being eaten away by Indians and Chinese and people from the Middle East who are all saying, ‘no, no, no, we’re Australians too.’
The positive thing is that we’ve embraced the idea of multiculturalism. So, you know, the illusion now that you can only be Australian if you’re Anglo-Irish descent is gone. The so-called White Australia policy. We’ve all recognised now, although people still fight against it, of course. But then where do you ground that multiculturalism? It’s being grounded in the soil of Australia. And we are a sort of multicultural South Pacific nation. We’re not an outpost of the British Empire anymore.
And we’re still finding our way there. It’s an open journey yet. And many people are struggling with it. And that’s part of the belonging story, I think. Finding how we belong here, in this place, in this land, and from wherever we might have come from. So that, and then the other side of belonging, of course, is the impact of the digital age.
Mik: (42:05)
So to yourself, Barbara, do you feel you belong and why?
Barbara: (42:10)
It’s interesting, Mik, I didn’t feel I belonged when I grew up. I grew up in regional Queensland. And my family, I mean, my father’s side is Irish and Danish. We share that link to Denmark. But my mother’s side is English. And I was brought up in a family that was caught right in the rift between Catholics and Protestants. My mother was Protestant, my father was Irish Catholic. And her family forced them to be married in the Anglican Church. My grandmother was madly anti-papist. So that tension between Irish Protestants and Catholics, which sort of doesn’t really operate in Australia today, but in my childhood it was very strong and of course it played out in Northern Ireland in horrific ways. So when I grew up, also I always had a lot of intellectual curiosity and that was frowned upon in rural regional Queensland. I mean my father pulled me out of school at 15 because he said education was wasted on girls. So I kept thinking, how did I end up here? This isn’t where I belong.
So I initially found my belonging through literature. And then I identified with people. I identified very much with existential sort of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and all those kinds of people. And then, you know, I went on lots of different journeys, but then I married someone. I mean, I always intended after I left university to go and live in Paris. I wanted to be an intellectual bohemian. That was my kind of destiny.
But I fell in love with someone from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea when I was at university. So a 360 degree detour took me off to Papua New Guinea. And again, I didn’t belong in Papua New Guinea. I was part of the colonial power that they were trying to shrug off and get rid of. So I experienced myself there as the wife of an indigenous leader, but I was the stranger. So I kind of learnt, I learnt to see what my culture looked like from the point of view of someone from an indigenous culture.
That was incredibly valuable, being the stranger in someone else’s culture. But also, that stranger that I was came from a powerful point of view because I belonged to the dominant group. So then when I came back to Australia, because my marriage broke up and I had to find my place back here, right? But gradually, my sense of being Australian became stronger and stronger actually.
And I realised, yes, I was from this place. And it was interesting, I went to live in New Zealand for three years and I met someone there, because I thought I’d end up living in New Zealand. And she said, no, Barbara, you’ve got to go back, the land is calling to you. And I thought, yeah, it does. It calls to me. It calls to me. And I think, interestingly enough, I think it was my long journey in Tibetan Buddhism that opened the door for me to make that deep connection. Because Buddhist practice uses something called invocation. Through prayer you invoke ancient wisdom leaders of the Tibetan tradition to become present in your mind stream.
And I thought to myself, that’s what Aboriginal people are doing when they sing up their ancestral beings. They’re invoking them from the ancient past to be present right here and now in their being. And if you’ve ever watched Aboriginal people dancing, where they do a kangaroo dance or an emu, that’s exactly, they become that totemic figure. So they sing up and it becomes present now.
And in that way, there is no time that’s past, present and future. There’s time that’s ever present. And that’s part of ancient wisdom. How to do that, how to live that is part of ancient wisdom. See, it’s a different way of being present.
Now you can’t as a whitefella sing up ancestral beings that belong to Aboriginal culture. But you can sing up your relationship to nature the way Bob did when he wrapped the gum trees around him. You can do it by sitting with a river. And then I’ve got this school here in the mountains called Kindlehill School, and they take their kids for geography lesson along the water course of a river. But they learn to see that river as ‘grandmother river’. And they paint it and sing it and dance it to hear the voice of Grandmother River.
So these ways, you know what I mean, it’s opening up this intuitive knowing. So you’re not just learning about it rationally, this is water is made of this chemical compound and this type of fish lives here. It’s also a personal relationship with nature.
Mik: (47:37)
I love it! This is very much what force of life means to me, Barbara. And thank you so much for co-hosting this first episode. we are running out of time now, but I must say you have just opened a door to a very big landscape of possibilities when we talk about the ‘force of life’.
JINGLE
Mik: (48:04)
To our listeners, if you want to find more episodes here from the Force of Life, you can go to the website climatesafety.info where we put up also shownotes with links to the things that we’ve talked about. And you will also be able to go to the Enlivenment Network. And Barbara, what’s the web address for the Enlivenment Network?
Barbara: (48:24)
enlivenment.network. As simple as that.
Mik: (48:27)
Ah! As simple as that! That’s great! So, thank you, Barbara – and thank you for listening. We will be back with another episode… the sixth episode of the Force of Life is coming your way.
Barbara: (48:41)
Thank you, Mik, my wonderful co-host.
Mik: (48:44)
And may the Force of Life be with you.
. . .
JINGLE: (48:49)
“Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.”
. . .
David Attenborough: (49:01)
And it just could be a change in moral attitude from people worldwide, politicians worldwide, to see that self-interest is for the past, common interest is for the future.
. . .
SONG: (49:20)
‘Return again’
Verse 1:
I hear you, Mother Earth, not in words
but in the silence beneath the trees
A heartbeat in the soil
a whisper carried by wind
The soil breathes
The trees remember
Tending the Earth
as she has tended us
Bridge:
We came from you
and to you, we will return
Every breath we take is a gift
Every drop of rain
is kindness of Planet Earth
Chorus:
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care
Verse 2:
We are not separate
We are not above
We are the air
the birdsong
the trembling leaf
Bridge:
There is still time
To touch the ground
To touch the ground
with bare feet
To teach again
the language of kindness
of courage – of enough
Chorus:
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care
. . .
