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Dear
All and Alan,
My
enigmatic email mentor Alan has kindly sent me the discussion that is occurring
now. I am following his advice and have also submitted an Abstract for a
paper that I am writing and which I hope to present at the World Congress in
September. What spurred me on was a simply beautiful statement, a response
to a question that I had put to him. He advised, “ …..Please write, as
you do, in ‘first person’. We need to get beyond objectifying things and
people.” I had sent a draft of the paper to him, and when this
response came to me it spun around in my mind, and all the teaching and training
that I have received about writing within the academic world has been sizzled so
magically.
The wisdom of what
my mentor suggested is profound to me because in the reality in which I live I
am always asking myself, “ When I research am I not looking for those works that
will reaffirm my conceptualisations of what I write? When I research, do I
not also look for works that counter-argue my conceptualisations of what I
write? BUT do I not subjectively decide which works I choose to counter-
argue so that at the end of the day, what will be understood by those who read
my work will be an ‘objective’ ‘valid discussion of my
conceptualisations?” Yet all that I did, the research, the interpretation,
the writing, at some level of course is first person work. From my
worldview I think what I have been questioning is succulently put in his words
to Susan,
“Questioning and
fluidizing those hard lines of definition between what's in and what's
out is right at the heart of my 'natural inclusional'
enquiry”. As I have
grown into the woman I am today I am struck by the fact that even as a child
this ‘natural inclusional’ enquiry was beginning to form its basis in my child’s
imagination. I think that because most all of my family and friends and to
some degree even myself, now see a woman who is very ‘childlike’ in many ways, I
have to confess that the memories of my childhood are so influential even to
this day.
Some of you whom I
have met through the conversations we have had in writing, fill me with
feelings of awe at what you write. The questions and the discussions that
I am privileged to read and to contemplate leave me with questions and
exclamations of “‘Wow! How did these beautiful phrases float into their
minds?” I truly appreciate that like me others struggle with the manner in
which thought, interpretation, understanding, knowledge, awareness,
conceptualising of what is written, and the context in which it is written is
appraised. That is magical to me.
When I was a little
girl growing up in rainforest country in the north of Queensland, there were
puzzles around me that I needed answers for. I used to ask my Daddy
wonderfully childish questions like, “Daddy how come the water hangs off a leaf
and looks like a diamond?” I’d only seen diamonds in books, not a real
one, but a droplet of water was a better example for me then diamonds I saw in a
magazine. And for days after he had given me an answer I would go into the
Rainforest and silently look at water on the leaves, and allow my imagination to
conjure up image after image of the response he gave to me. “Daddy how
come the clouds chase after each other all day?” I’d watch clouds as I
floated in the creek that was the boarder of our property and I used to
find it so amusing that the clouds I tagged never got caught by the clouds that
seemed to chase after them. My father’s response would often take me down
to the beach and there I would run to my hearts content trying to catch these
lagging clouds, and imagine all sorts of images that were being created above me
as I lay on the sand or in the ocean silently watching, silently trying to
understand what it was he had said to me. “Daddy what makes the sun
come up and the moon go down?” At twilight it was magical to slip away
with some of my brothers and sisters and stay in the rainforest at night for
just a while. As some of you will know it is a beautiful place and it is
spectacular when the moon beams coat the forest in silhouettes and shadows and
the morning sun filters sunrays through it to the forest
floor. “Daddy why is my totem spirit the blue mountain
butterfly?” I always knew the answer to this one, but I just wanted to
hear the story of my conception because it gave to me a place to belong and
living entities to be connected too. I sill love the answers to my
questions that he gave me, and back then I would take my answers and share them
with all my friends both the visible and the invisible. I would start my
conversations with my friends by saying in the voice of a four year old
philosopher, “Did you know that water hangs off a leaf because it loves leaves
and it looks like a diamond because it wants to make the leaf look
beautiful.” My visible friends, would look at me with four and five year
old awe and acknowledge my wisdom with a ,”Wow!! “How come you know that?” “Who
told you that?” And with the wisdom of a four year old I would say, “My
Daddy.” And we would all gather around a leaf with water on it and
we would silently and wisely nod our heads because we all now knew
the reason or so we thought.
So now, at this
moment in time in my Dreaming, I am having my unspoken questions responded to by
people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different life
experiences and it seems that for me the responses are coming from an Aladdin’s
Cave of Knowledges. This is what has been gifted to me.
In my culture
‘silence’ or being silent is an integral part of our language. When I was
younger I thought it only related to our meditative practices, or our healing
practices. But I have come to understand that ‘silence’ has a space and a
place in our language that is rather difficult to explain, probably because when
a person is in the habit of practicing it as part of every day life it seems to
become so familiar. But it is complex. Perhaps I can offer the
following that I have extracted from a paper that I wrote in 2008 and which was
published in a journal in New Zealand. Because when I think of ‘silence’ I
come back to the training that my parents gifted to me about Aboriginal
spirituality.
“
Aboriginal
spirituality culturally respects the secret and sacred nature of Aboriginal
men’s business and Aboriginal women’s business. Aboriginal people throughout
Australia have their own explanations, definitions, views, opinions and
interpretations of this phenomenon. Aboriginal spirituality is not based
within a religious conceptualisation. …..As Yavu-Kama-Harathunian (1998)
suggests there are seven generalist layers that define it within Aboriginal
cultural perspectives and which maintain cultural integrity and fluidity.
The seven layers are: reflection (deep insightful meditation); recherché
(transcendence-the ability to bring the Spiritual world into the language of the
human realm); refulgence (illumination of humanness into the Spiritual world);
‘Corpo santo’ (acceptance that the human body is holy); reverent obeisance
(inner prostration that hallows Creator Spirit); synergistic cosmology (spirit
of the earth and the spirit of the universe flows from and into the Source of
‘All’ Spirit) and, omniscience (spiritually enables the human to integrate into
the ‘All’ ‘knowingness’ of Creator Spirit’s ‘Oneness’).” (Yavu-Kama-Harathunian:1998)
.
Silence to me is
part of and is a vital part of who and what I am. I do not know if it is
or can be separate from my essential self. Is it possible? I
have yet to contemplate this more fully. Thank you for awakening me to the
fact that although we may view this in thousands of different ways, the way I
view it is just adding to the knowledge pool that we share about it. Go
well, stay well, be well.
Cheri Yavu-Kama-Harathunian (B.App.Sci.
Indigenous & Community Health; Masters Criminal Justice)
Coordinator
Nulloo Yumbah Learning Spirituality and Research
Centre
CQUniversity
Bundaberg 4670
Phone: 07 - 41507091
Email:
[log in to unmask] <https://staffmail.cqu.edu.au/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
“Junjarin-nga dhar’guna yau’eembai’ya ngoolam’bula dhar’kun yar war gow”
These are Kabi Kabi words. They are from a 40,000 year old blessing and
they mean: “May the spiritual forces of Mother Earth guide and protect your
inner self and truth”. I offer this blessing to you.
From: Alan
Rayner (BU) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 18 May
2010 05:25 PM
To: Practitioner-Researcher
Cc: Cheri
Yavu-Kama-Harathunian
Subject: Re: Education and Learning Virtual
Networking Stream for ALARA's 8th World
Congress
Dear Susan, Pip and
all,
Yes, what you say
here, so evocatively, Susan, echoes my own thoughts and feelings very
profoundly.
Questioning and
fluidizing those hard lines of definition between what's in and what's
out is right at the heart of my 'natural inclusional' enquiry. But when and
where to stop or stay silent? Especially when pragmatic urgency demands action?
In the latter case there is always the danger that the 'action' taken in the
short term may prove ill-considered in the long run and do more harm than good.
That is why I think that the philosophy which questions the
reasoning/motivations underlying our actions is so vital and needs to be a
continual undercurrent of our lives, if our actions are not be 'thoughtless'.
Perhaps there wouldn't now be a need to 'decolonize' if a hegemonic philosophy
founded on the simplistic and abstract imposition of hard lines of
subjective and objective definition hadn't been allowed to entrench and
self-perpetuate?
The question I ask
myself continually is 'how may I respond receptively and reflectively in this
situation?'
'Stopping' and
'silence' are amongst the responses I include in my consideration. Both have
presence and in a sense could be considered 'actions', which, at least in my
case, require an effort of will and much circumspection. In a way, both
responses acknowledge the vitality and continuity of space across figural
boundaries, which distinguishes natural inclusional and transfigural logic from
the intransigent logic that regards space and silence as an 'absence' that
counts for nothing. Living naturally includes opening and closing of
boundaries - but there can never be absolute closure or absolute opening without
coming respectively to a dead stop or formlessness.
Here's to the
pregnant pause!
Warmest
Alan