Dharma Gaia - forum Friday Mar 28

The trees, mountains and rivers are my true face.

New eras produce new challenges which require new responses and initiatives. The Dharma Gaia Fellowship is one of these initiatives.

As practitioners of the Buddha Way we understand that all life is sacred — we practise to protect, care for and save the multitudinous beings, sentient and non-sentient, dissolving the three human poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance.

The motto and the credo “Greed is Good” has now come to dominate much of human activity on the planet, producing disastrous and tragic effects on our environment and climate. The insatiable, greedy pushing for endless growth without limit has been like a cancer, out of control. It has created chaos and havoc in human populations, our beloved plants and animals and indeed the entire ecosystem we call Earth. Economics has more than ever become a moral and a survival issue.

Over 90% of world climate scientists are now convinced that the prevailing climate crisis is the result of human activity. Much of this activity is propelled by ignorance and greed. Ignorance usually precedes greed and hatred. We know that the power of mindful awareness can dissolve ignorance and therefore greed.

Innumerable historical examples show that when groups of like-minded people meet for a common purpose great changes can happen.

The first aim of the Dharma Gaia Fellowship is to meet, share and discuss these issues together  — dispelling ignorance around our relationship to our environment, our Earth and the current climate crisis. To enhance and empower our discussion we shall include periods of mindfulness practice as part of our meetings.

The second aim is to encourage, share and discuss skilful means and knowledge which may facilitate our meeting the lifestyle, food, energy and building challenges which now confront us as a society. How can we most readily and practically make the survival changes which are required?

In our meetings we shall aim to share knowledge, skills and creativity about these matters.

The Dharma Gaia Fellowship brings together two of the most important threads of our lives: our cherished Dharma spiritual practice concerning the Great Matter of birth and death, and the need to return to our mother Earth — giving up ignorant, greedy and destructive pathways by learning and adopting life-sustaining, creative solutions.

Peter Thompson

May All Beings Be Happy

Billy's pool

 photos - Janene McNamara


It was a hot February day when I went walking down the Six Foot Track with companions. Our destination was to be the Cox's river, and part of our route, Megalong creek. We were to come out at the junction of the two.

The leader, Rogo, allowed me to divert the group in to Megalong cemetery so that I could show them where Fanny Lynch is buried. After some searching, I found her headstone and grave. She was a Gundungurra woman, and one of the people camped on the Wollondilly river, who gave anthropologist R.H. Mathews the Gurangatch Mirragan story in the 1890's. This story or songline tells about the creation of the Wollondilly and Cox's river. She died in 1895 when a flu epidemic swept through.

I was excited that we were being taken to the junction. We clambered over the smooth granite of Megalong creek very carefully, as it's very slippery. The water falling down through the boulders was brown - the odd dragonfly hovering above. At the junction there's a waterhole and we all stripped down to cossies. I have been told that Billy Lynch, Fanny's husband, is buried near this junction. He died in 1913.

Billy's pool
cools
our white skins

 He sold land that he owned ( amazing achievement for an Aboriginal man) to a white man, in exchange for the funeral trip to this place, so that he could be buried on his beloved Gundungurra country. It is said that he had a traditional Gundungurra burial.

 As I enjoyed the water,  I thought about how many thousands of generations of Gundungurra people would have enjoyed exactly the same thing!

Later on the same walk:

the leech

wants to get close to me

unlike you

the Cox's river
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Yatras for this year

When the weather settles down, I'll lead the first of the Blue Mountains yatras for 2014. My vision for this year is to lead both yatras four times a year, so that there is some continuity of walking practise if you would like it. I will lead the easy yatra on Saturdays, and the middlin' yatra on Sundays. Emboldened 'easy' yatrees can then tackle Sunday if they want to. 

The dates are:

EASY                                                 MIDDLIN'

Saturday March 29                          Sunday 30 Mar ( leaves falling)

Saturday June 14                             Sunday 15 Ju (mountain devils)

Saturday August 30                         Sunday 31 Aug ( wattle bloom) 

Saturday Oct. 11 (if no trackwork)     Sunday 12 October ( boronia)

 xxxxxxx

Something from 2012...

Her farts are precious - 

the old dog

back from surgery 

Christmas in New Zealand

-->

Christmas is the time to be with family, have a holiday, and go to the beach. I went “across the ditch” to New Zealand where the weather is cooler and less dramatically changeable. Last year the entire North Island was drought-stricken…unusual.  But when I went north of Auckland to Whangarei, it had recovered its usual green. I was driven through my grandmother’s country, and then through her grandmother’s country, Kaukapakapa. My great-great, Flora McLeod, had been born in Nova Scotia but then sailed to Waipu Cove with her family, to settle there.

I stayed with friends at Whangarei Heads. One day we climbed Mt. Manaia.

Old volcano cones

ice-cream of native bush

a sprinkling of walkers

A cloud of McLeods settled in the area, and from the top, Waipu was just visible in the distance.

 I walked on my native soil very aware that in another era I would have been part of that clan. My uncle from that side of the family had worked on the Marsden oil refinery opposite, as a fitter. 

One day P. and I kayaked around the foreshore. Manaia! In Samoan it means “beautiful, lovely”, and I used it a lot when I travelled to Western Samoa years ago.

Seaweed trails up

from the emerald depths –

I drift along

 The water of Whangarei harbour is clear, clean and judging by the number of shags who fish there, alive.

The shag-engineer

draws a straight flight

just above the waves

 A group of these black and white cormorants sat up in an ancient pohutakawa tree on the shoreline and overhanging the water, but one appeared to swing in the breeze. Paddling closer we saw that it was dead, and hanging by its neck from transparent fishing line. I suppose when they dive down into the sea they sometimes encounter the leftovers of clumsy human efforts to catch fish.  Another secluded spot was alive with birds, oystercatchers nesting on top of a rock that was surrounded by water, and another pohutakawa dense with shags. They were quite unconcerned by another shag corpse, stuck to its perch in their midst. 

  

..............

I had some most beautiful swims in surf, in harbours, in clear water, in murky water (are there sharks down below?), in the morning, in the evening, at high tide, at no-particular-tide, to a yacht, around a buoy, shoes on, bare feet, don’t–put-your-feet-down, swam past weed, anchor-rope…saw the mist on the hills around Kawhia harbour rise and the colours change, each time I turned my neck to breathe. 

…….

Pony club

the excluded horse

gallops along the fence

 A senryu:

 “House for sale”

four cars sleeping it off

in the front yard

……….

Auckland museum -

the rain blots out my decades

overseas