the mess
I spoke to a friend earlier about parallel pressures. Competing demands. What to do when it adds up and feels too much. My largely unsolicited advice: quit.
That sounds glib. It isn’t. Leaving the thing destroying you is the radical act. It’s what makes room for hope to rise. And it gives space for change making, not disengagement and solitude.
But we are in a mess, and it feels big. So let me try to unpack it.
God, unpacking, what a corporate wank. But it’s 12:20am so let me have this one.
The world, right now, is in a grim state. But it’s not just that it is grim, it’s that the atmosphere feels dire. Everyone is fracturing, teetering on the brink of something big. Will it be the long-awaited self-collapse of capitalism that Marx and Engels envisioned all those years ago? Probably not, because the circuit breakers aren’t in place to stop us falling back to capitalism 7.0. Will we see the rise of new dictators and the outbreak of even larger global wars to float the trillion dollar enterprise of the military industrial complex? Perhaps, but we’ve seen that play, and we knew our parts, and we ended up … well, back here.
Just like the ‘Great Depression’ and the ‘Great War’, in the era of ‘Great America Again’ we have seen depravity and the deep anguish of loved ones ripped from their homes. We have seen neo-imperial wars started against sovereign nations. We have seen new waves of genocide reimagining the worst of horrors on an even greater scale than the Holocaust. And, yes, many of us mourn this, as a collective, even if it is not conscious.
However, some glaze over and allow this to pass because it is easier to rest in their un-earned privilege. Allow me some time to qualify.
Humanity has been led to subservience. We have been drawn to water and forced to drink. Rug pulled, the water is poison.
And still, through all of that, people get up. They feed their kids. They tend their gardens. They organise, they grieve, they care for each other. They rise again.
Nanakorobiyaoki, 七転び八起き: Fall seven times, stand eight.
There is a naturally connective power in this resilience. Resilience is a gift from Country. We need only watch animals make their homes in the most inhospitable conditions; still raising their young, playing, and running free. Country holds us the same way. Human and nature are not separate, and never were. This is in us.
In (re)rising, and not surrendering what you hold dear.
But this, too often, is a line we let ourselves fall past. And these days, it feels like everything we do demands we step away from our line. We give up what we hold dear. We accept we must ‘go to work’. We accept we must ‘pay the bills’. We accept we must ‘forgive the behaviour’ of evil men. We must accept that the ‘most disadvantaged should suffer most’. It is not up for negotiation — unless a diversity publication is due.
But as my wife, Hera, says: isn’t there something bigger here? Not only is she always right to ask, she’s right that the mechanisms we fall into have such hold on us that we often don’t realise what is happening, what we’re repeating, what we’re performing.
Subconsciously we know there’s something wrong. We know that we are at breaking point on many fronts… again. Be it a collapse from oil crisis, a megalomaniac deploying an atomic weapon after a demented moment, or a techno-trillionaire deciding that 6 billion eyes on their platform a day is not enough, these all play over and over. One way or another they occupy real space, and make a real mess in our minds.
Someone said to me tonight, “I have disengaged from politics”. I feel the surge to blurt “what privilege!”. But it’s not that simple. Because it’s how we are comforted into accepting the status quo. Our lines in the rock — our foundational blocks that make us into us — aren’t front and centre any more. And because the system in which we are enslaved requires workers, not marks on the rock, our us evaporates into air until we’re left with withdraw or revolutionise.
This binary — withdraw or revolutionise — rests in privilege. Palestinians, being removed at gunpoint by zionist invaders from their home while starving and surrendering all they have to protect their children, cannot withdraw. Mob having their grocery shop sale denied because they didn’t force their child into colonial torture every day this week, they cannot withdraw.
To be clear: this kind of withdrawal isn’t the same as leaving what destroys you. Quitting the abuse removes you from active harm — the radical act, the one that makes room for hope to rise. Disengaging from witness is something else: a choice to stop seeing, which closes the door on people who can’t. I’m not saying we all must witness every horrible action, but withdrawal from one nearly always signals withdraw from everything ‘political’. And then One Nation wins.
However I feel I need to qualify even further, no one person has more or less validity in how they feel their day. Spilling coffee on your clean white shirt on the way to work is a real experience. It can be destabilising, and it can absolutely be as triggering as anything else. Fighting for your children’s lives is an equally real experience. The felt weight is real in both. But the structural conditions producing them are not equivalent, and pretending they are is its own kind of violence. I’m not making a value judgement on what anyone feels. I’m inviting recognition of the privilege we carry — the privilege that means for some of us our hardest day is a coffee stain.
No one person can shoulder the massive number of terrible things going on in the world, and I’m not asking you to try. All of what is going on in the world is a massive, global, and impossible to track set of stuff. And we can’t grasp all that stuff because we are not meant to shoulder all of this, alone. We are a collectivist and cooperative species. We got to where we are now by building tools to make our lives better, easier, accessible, and possible. Our true power, our differentiator, is that Country has enabled us to create better together.
(Re)claiming and (re)rising remain the message. And the carriage to better is hope.
More than any tool we have ever created or been gifted: hope is humanity’s universal defining feature. Hope has endured countless ideologies, endless challenges, and a depth of suffering which should never be allowed.
And yet hope thins out, because we do not know one another. Not proppa way.
The suffering we’ve explored above — and the hundreds of examples by the day — cannot be fully realised, because we are not communities in connection by humanity. We are communities in connection by unseen economic levers which demand sacrifice, extraction, dispossession, and fierce fracturing of identity.
For instance, before I was irrevocably wounded in the workplace over three occasions, I led a team of exceptionally talented Aboriginal thinkers in the creation of the warle, ‘residence of knowledge’, of a university course which could have challenged — no, utterly done away with — the foundational pedagogies of un-tracked Grecian descent. A truly different relational approach to learning which honours our old people. However, the work of holding open the space to do this work cost me personally more than it should cost anyone for anything. And too many times I saw my line on the rock evaporate, and this was before I even knew where my lines were. Or that I could even claim such a mark. I was actively annihilated, assaulted, and abandoned by (members of) the academy and none of my work ever saw the light of day.
This defeat, and the ongoing depth and complexity of shit through which I must wade every day, have left me with actual trauma. Full-blown, raging, bodily affective PTSD. Flashbacks, panic attacks, numbness, silent screams, all feature every day. And yet, even now — through another show of inhumanity just days ago from a system which should be supporting me to get back where I was — leading the co-creating of change — I have to find the strength to get up for the eighth time and fight again for my line on the rock. But that strength can only come from relationality.
All this because relationality fosters hope. It is because I know my (growing) communities, I am anchored to my Country and I know my value. The accompanying practice is simple:
Where are you from?
Who are you of?
(For non-mob) Where are you guest of?
(For non-mob) Whose Country allows your form to enter or engage this world?
Where is your place?
What is your story?
Who are you named for?
In this, what do might find that binds us together?
You can do all of this by feeling. And only in actively sharing this can we find each other.
This, sometimes in westernised literature, is called a positionality, or in critical indigenous studies, a standpoint. It is something in which we find pieces of story about each other that connect us far more deeply than: “so, what do you do?” A question that I have no end of frustration to be asked. I don’t do anything. In fact I am certified, by the western world, to have total incapacity for work. And even thinking about work is excruciating — mentally and physically. The whiff of re-exposure to work ends my day. I am confined to bed, in a state of deep panic and existential dread. But a standpoint? A common place to share and learn with each other from? That’s no ice-breaker, its a completely different world view.
This practice — of finding each other through sharing yarns, small parts of ourselves that enable us to connect — breaks ‘work’ > ‘humanity’. It sets aside all that pain and framing, capitalist framing, of our value and worth. It asks: who am I to you? What do we have in common? What is common? And the answer is a lot more than:
A senior lecturer; and
a senior executive officer.
It’s:
Ko Tyurretye te maunga.
Ko Larapinta te awa.
Nō Arrernte matyerre te iwi.
Ko Ntaria tōku kāinga tūturu, ko tōku apmere tērā.
Ko Aidan Tuhoro-Bell ahau.
Kei tōku apmere ahau te nuinga o te wā,
Ka haere hoki au ki Tarndanya, ki Narrm.
And it’s:
Ko Taiarahia te maunga.
Ko Ōhinemataroa te awa.
Ko Mataatua te waka.
Ko Ngāi Tūhoe te iwi.
Ko Hamua te hapū.
Ko Waikirikiri te marae.
Nō Ngāti Porou me Rongowhakaata anō hoki.
Ko Hera Tuhoro-Bell ahau.
From this, we find connection. We share hope. We imagine differently. And we clear the mess — because we find relation. In relation we find empathy and true understanding. And we don’t get knocked down to need to stand back up. And we certainly don’t stand up alone if we happen to trip.
Capitalism demands we surrender our line in the rock, the something we treasure, what we know to be true to us. Like my story: laying my whole body down, my whole mental health on the line to go against an abuser and an institution to — foolishly alone — fight for us-mob’s rights has ended me. I thought I was special, that I could hold open room for better inside their broken colonial system. I hoped to show a little crack of what being in relation could be. Instead, the institution betrayed me and kicked me over and over to the curb, and I betrayed my sovereignty in trying too much, allowing too much and letting too much go. Either way allows the hand of capitalism to win: one costs us our soul, or our mental health; the other, an exit and a possibility. But only if we take action.
This is the mess. The cession — sometimes a yell, sometimes a whimper, sometimes nothing visible at all — that sits hollow in our chests forever. But action, and hope, are always possible.
So let’s connect over what binds us.
Let’s have an honest yarn.
Who are you, what do you care about, where are you from, what lore do you carry, and what futures might we imagine together? No structure, just one at a time with the angkeme anpere making (even subconscious, for the shy) connections.
Around we go in a circle yarning: weaving together different stories to find strength and create art. No hierarchy. No performance. Just human connection. As it has always been:
Much has passed since the dawning of Dreaming.
Still, the Rainbow Serpent brings life through the rocks.
Carving and creating entangled ways of being whole, again.