During a Parade staff in-service prior to Easter, I chose an option which was to include a video screening of part of a lecture given last year in California by Brian Swimme. I knew of Brian, and was aware that his thinking was influential amongst those searching for a relevant contemporary spirituality based on reconsidering how one looks at and relates to the world. I relished this opportunity to engage Brian's way of "seeing" the world. He explored three foundational views. The first was that each of us, and every living and inanimate part of the world around us, is "discreet". Each is a separate and unique entity. My reaction was to judge that this is how I too "think" about the world as I encounter it. Not new. Brian's second foundational position was that all of the discreet entities are "interdependent". This was not altogether new. I recalled that I did not always see the world this way, and once held some of the patronising and arrogant human views which see those other-than-human elements of creation as inferior and disposable. Since the early 1990's I have been exploring the thinking of Fritjov Capra and the transpersonalists, and have been recognising that each discreet element of creation is in dynamic relationship with every other element. All are affected by, and affect, all else. This was sometimes dramatically evident for me in the psychiatric hospital, where rational boundaries frequently receded. I know that I think and can speak this way with conviction, but it remains a challenging view to fully integrate. Brian's third foundational view was new for me. He saw every discreet, interdependent component of the universe as having "being". I have always thought of the human person as having being, and more recently seen animals and plants as beings. But I had not embraced a thinking that saw rocks and planets as beings. Brian illustrated his view by talking about the planet Mars, and reflected that the only barrier to Mars achieving its limitless potential was opportunity. In Brian's perception Mars holds transcendent (my word) possibility within its being.

Still pondering this confronting challenge to my thinking and spirituality, I joined a party to travel to south-western New South Wales and Lake Mungo for the sacred days of Holy Week. We stayed on the western edge of the dry lakebed in shearers' quarters, beside the Mungo Woolshed built in 1869. Lake Mungo flourished and dried between 60,000 to 15,000 years ago. On the eastern horizon across the lakebed were low dunes, The Walls of China, named for some Chinese workers rather than any likeness to The Great Wall. Prevailing westerly winds have created lunettes which now house the artefacts of up to 60,000 years of human occupancy around the lake. Prior to the establishment of Mungo National Park and listing of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, sheep grazing denuded the dunes and now wind erosion exposes human remains and artefacts.

I walked on the lakebed through Black Bluebush and around clay pan scalds with stone flake human artefacts, out of the lakebed along dune trails through Pearl Bluebush into stands of Cypress Pine and Mallee and drought-resistant Rosewood with its capes of Mistletoe, and onto the Copperburr and Casuarina plains. I encountered Western Grey Kangaroo and Major Mitchell Cockatoo and Wedge-tailed Eagle. I sat and read the story being told by geologists and anthropologists. I read of the remarkable geology fieldwork by Jim Bowler from Museum Victoria, and Jim's discovery in 1968, on the southern shore of the lake at "Mungo I" site, of Mungo Lady, a young woman cremated 26,000 years ago whose remains were the oldest dated Australian skeleton and earliest known cremation. And of the subsequent extraordinary find by Jim in 1974 at "Mungo III", of the 30,000 year old red ochre-daubed and ritually buried intact gracile skeleton of Mungo Man with arms folded across chest. Of the 135 human skeletons and fireplaces and artefacts unearthed around the Willandra Lakes. Of the extinct rhinoceros-sized diprotodon marsupial and 7-meter extinct megalania lizard which were hunted by humans in this region 30,000 years ago. I climbed amongst the wind-sculptured pinnacles of the dunes, with their lowest 100,000 year old pink soil horizon of dry times, and higher sand horizon of permanent lake times, and uppermost recent clay unit of the filling and drying periods. I sat in the bitter cold dunes before dawn to await the rising sun, watched emerging colours and shifting shadows and the blazing red of a dawn, celebrated a Good Friday liturgy in the dunes listening to stories of suffering and death of a people, watched in silence a sun setting below western dunes, and felt the cold and dark of night. I gazed at stars through clear desert skies, and watched a moon rise.

And without anticipation I experienced the "being" of Lake Mungo. A birth in glacial times; many dyings and rebirths with ebb and flow of waters; a life of nurturing teeming aquatic life and lakeside human communities; times of waiting; memories recorded in ever-accumulating dunes; recent remembering and story-telling with the uncovering of dunes; an ancient son, Mungo Man, and daughter, Mungo Lady, and emerging cultures nurtured; a recent son and story-teller, Jim Bowler; so many stories nurtured and witnessed and recorded. There was a "discreetness" about Lake Mungo, and there was "interdependence". But there was more. There was "being". And if there is being, then there is Exodus and Paschal Mystery and Eternal Life. And when I subsequently listened to the Ascension Readings I knew too that this is not new wisdom. Paul reflected on the "fullness of the One who fills the whole of creation".

Related sections

Go Back to... Brotherhood: About the Author Spirituality Essay Index Main Page:Marine Science Marine Scientist Marine Science Papers