Lawerence of Arabia
Background
Navigating Insurmountable Obstacles
I think most people have experienced a time in their lives when they feel like they’re trapped in a bad movie. Have you? It’s like facing a brick wall, with nowhere to go. But if you are able to take a step back, rise above it all or even distance yourself form the scene, a way out that wasn’t obvious before may come into view. Therefore it’s really powerful to practice shifting you point of view, like being both the main character and the author in a story you are writing.
I was about 9 or 10 years old when the epic film, “Lawrence of Arabia” was released in Australia. It coincided with a visit to see relatives living in Brisbane. My uncle suggested were should all go to the movies, it would be a treat for us country folk. Dad wasn’t interested and mum really just wanted to spend time with her eldest sister. But my uncle was really keen. He had served in a transport battalion during the war and this film was one not to be missed. So he took my big sister and me and hiskids about our age to go to and see it.
We sat wondering in darkness as a long musical prelude played. I was overawed, right out of my comfort zone but the action soon got under way, a grand epic of old testament proportions and just as brutal. It would remain one of my favourite movies of all time. I think it left us all disorientated and I clearly remember my uncle describing to mum and dad how the projectionist got the reels of film mixed up and couldn’t find the first reel in time so played music while he organised. Thenin his haste started with the iron reel, so we got to see Lawrence’s death and funeral first, then went back to tell the story of his life.
I knew there was no mistake but didn’t have anything to say about the movie. I wouldn’t know where to start. The locations, the characters, the story arc, I had never experienced anything as grand not even in my imagination. What stayed with me was the scene following the perilous camel treck across the Nefud Desert in which Lawrence, against all advice from those who know better went back to rescue someone who had fallen asleep with exhaustion and was now stranded without water his death certain. After the rescue a fight breaks out between feuding tribes and a man is shot and killed. Unless the murderer is brought to justice there will be an uproar and the entire campaign fail. But the crime demands a life for a life yet if the executioner is from the feuding tribe old wounds would be opened. Therefore Lawrence carries out the execution himself, executing the very person he rescued.
Sherif Ali is resigned, the death is written:
T.E.Lawrence:
Nothing is written.
Sherif Ali:
Truly, for some men nothing is written unless THEY write it themselves.
In the course of our personal, professional, business and organisational lives we face irreconcilable challenges and forced to rewrite our story or succumb to the inevitable.
Joseph Campbell’s insight that all great stories, whether they be cultural Myths or biographies conform to a deeper pattern that alert us to greater freedom that is available to us. But theability to author our own stories past impossible challenges must be earned and it is through a “The Hero’s /Heroine’s Journey” we discover a pathway to a freer, wiser way of living.
Therefore having a sound navigation system stops you from getting lost on the way. But the Hero’s Journey is both a mirror and a window that enables us to reflect on our deepest passions and desires as well as providing us a perspective that can reorient us in our life’s journey.
I find mapping my current circumstances relative to a personal or professional challenge onto the hero’s journey points to the form of what to do next. That in itself is encouraging and opens maybe an escape hatch or even a double barrage door to an alternate trajectory for the story. Knowing that this current road is one of trials also implied that this too shall pass. At another time the realisation of receiving a boon calls for celebration to fortify oneself for the onward journey. At another time it may be the awareness that I am refusing my intuition that may have the key to unlock a mystery.
Fractals and stories
Numbers can be convincing just as much as we are moved by stories. It is a cultural preference. Other cultures prioritise relationships over transactions. What is most important to you, making friends or making deals. I’ve oversimplified here to make a point, and that is that we have a preference that can be confusing if we try to do both simultaneously. But ultimately we make meaning using stories. Numbers need context, that is to say backstory, to have meaning. Furthermore the meaning we make of numbers vary as the stories about them change. In this way I believe stories are primary and being able to write our own stories is extremely powerful way to direct our lives. Whether consciously or unconsciously this is what we do anyway. The polls may predict which political party gains office but it is their narrative the determines if they do or not. Ultimately they are two sides of the same coin.
Stories contain patterns. In its simplest form, let’s say you hear some crying out, “Help!” You can’t get much shorter than that. Just one word. But when we hear that we process it as a story by making various interpretations and assumptions based on that one word. We will infer direction, perhaps the age and sex of the caller. We will also make a judgement on urgency and intensity.
We recognise stories as having a beginning, midle and end and with that comes a sense of satisfaction for the listener and the story teller. Some stories are multi layered and have stories within stories. Often they have repeating patterns either within the story arc or within the story layers, stories within stories. This introduces the second idea, that stories have a fractal quality, the stories within the stories may follow a similar parttern to the larger story, they are self similar on multiple levels.
The purpose of some stories is to repeat a pre-existing pattern, the purpose of other stories is to ‘change the narrative’, and there are many devices through which this takes place. There are ways of drawing the audience into a story, for instance by setting up a story and then not completing it, or by creating an emotional alignment and then avoiding distractions that would break the spell so cast. But most of all “the Hero/Heroine’s journey” illuminates the mostly unconscious workings a story telling and listening and provides not only a predictive tool for how the story might unfold, because this is one of the essential things about stories, our imagination becomes aroused when we catch a wiff of a story and we will provide our own elements for missing parts of the story based on our own experience and then eagerly anticipate being found correct in our assumptions or that there was something altogether different going on.
We are hard wired for story and when there is inadequate data on what is happening in a storied situation we encounter our inclination is to fill in the blanks based on what we already know from other situations encountered previously. It is an emotionally charged instinct for our very survival.
Coming of Consciousness
Becoming self aware
Gaining experience is really just having a story for some phenomena many of which arise incrementally over a long period of time. There are times when our incremental learning is interrupted and we learn something not by gradual accumulation but by an ordeal that changes the way we think about things. What was true before is never so again. There are new factors (data) that have to be taken into consideration that change everything. In short we are in some way not longer who we once were. Sometimes we grapple with finding the new stories that make sense of a new situation so alien is our current circumstance to our previous reality. We find it valuable to have help to map out where we are going either by finding a mentor who has experienced something like this already or we go within and find our own answers, or both. When this happens, and it happens to a greater or lesser degree for all of us, we know we are on a hero or heroine’s journey. Some look to old traditions for answers, others to progressive ideas some do both. Whichever way you choose, you find yourself writing your own story, with a new ending and sometimes it is useful to rewrite some past stories to better fit and provide the foundation for a new trajectory. With current understandings of stories, neuro plasticity and mindfulness we have more power to write our own story than ever before.
Encounters on the Ngintaka Songline
Travelling in Mythic Landscapes
We were on the Gunbarrel Highway returning to Fregon after a trip to Nyapari. I was high in a way that often happens from very full days, discussing Tjukurpa, freedom and the struggle for cultural maintenance around the campfire at night and sleeping under the starlit outback sky in a swag that is one of the most comforting beds I have ever slept in. We were travelling in convoy of two troopies, mine in second place some distance behind, allowing the dust to drift away from the road before we encounted it. Murray, John and various family along for the ride were travelling in front, or perhaps John was with me, I don't recall.
Up ahead was a Landcruiser stopped by the side of the road. We stopped and checked to see if we could help. It was a day's walk in either direction to the nearest community. Thinking, we have one of the most adept bush mechanics with us, perhaps there is something we could do.
"Have a look underneath, maybe there is something wrong with the driveshaft. Perhaps they can drive temporarily on the front wheels."
Hey! Open the bonnet. We peered in. Where one would normally expect to see the engine, there was a vacant space."
It was then we noticed the chain connected to the front of the vehicle. Clearly, the vehicle had been towed to this place, then left, for whatever reason.
The occupants were a couple of young women and a pile of kids plus some bags of groceries suggesting that they had been to the store recently. They didn't want to talk. After a while, a young man walked in from the north. We saw him coming for about 20 minutes before he arrived. My Pitjantjatjara wasn't good enough to follow the conversation that ensued.
Murray said, "Come on. We'll go." And that was that.
Ngintaka Hunt
We took up our positions and continued towards Watinuma. Up ahead, I watched as Murray's vehicle turned off the road making a big loop through the tall grass to the left of the road. As we drew closer we were signalled to stop. We got out of the vehicle to investigate. A full grown ngintaka (perente lizard)standing on his back legs peering over the long grass was pointed out to us. He had been crossing the road as the first vehicle approached. I took a minute to locate him, standing there still as a stump. No rifle at hand, Murray picked up an hatchet and a jack handle and got in position. The hatchet flew slightly to the right of the ngintaka, but now with his eye in, crack... the jack handle caught him right on top of the head. A short scuffle ensued and it was over.
We lay the ngintaka out on the road, and inspected him, a mature male I was told. Murray sent one of us to get a branch from a small bush nearby from which he fashioned two short pegs with sharp points. "This is how you do it," he said and used the back of the hatchet to break the legs and fasten them back on top of the body using the two pins through ankles and wrists. The tail then takes its position coiled around to pass under the arch made by the pinned legs. Whether it is done because the animal might recover and deliver a venomous bite or whether there is deeper law I do not know. From experience, I suspect both.
We stock up on bread and tea at Watinuma Roadhouse, then proceeded to the gravelly creek bed. Murray demonstrateds how to eviscerate the ngintaka and then cooks it in an earth oven we make there on the spot. I filmed the process which is included in Two Brothers Walking.
In the Flow
It was hard work travelling on the APY Lands. As the youngest adult male and the least skilled culturally, a fair share of the menial camp tasks fell my way and it was often difficult juggling roles of driver, cameraman, caterer, student etc. But the experience was out of this world. I was struck by the correlation between the ngintaka we hunted that day having an abscess on one of his feet, and the dreaming ancestor Wati Ngintaka, surreptitiously spearing himself in the foot so as to be excused from the hunt, giving opportunity to seize the special grindstone which produced seed cakes superior to all others.
That evening, I asked Murray about the people we found stranded on the road. He said, "No, don't worry, they will be right. Their family will help them." This gave me as renewed sense of both the resourcefulness of Anangu, the connection with kin far beyond anything that I have experienced and a reminder that pirinpa's (white fella's) reflex to help often does not take account of subtleties, and how good intentions can inadvertantly become interference, because in our eagerness to assist it is too easy to impose our "solutions" assuming that western culture is the envy of all others. For a fuller discussion, Check Out: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/twobrotherswalking for our documentary on keeping Tjukurpa alive.
Misplaced Concern About Ageing
I'm turning 63, It's time for something new, and I'm looking to the future.
There has been a lot of discussion about the burden retirees place on society as the baby boom bulge moves towards ageing. To my mind it is applying a stereotype from a time gone by to today. It simply doesn't apply. Describing "Youth" as a discrete category was only invented in the 1960s. Before that, when children grew up they became adults, now they grew up and become youth.
There is increasingly a new demographic appearing, one that Mary Gathering Bateson calls "active wisdom". Yes, there will be some who devote a couple of decades to golf and cruises but I believe that they will become a smaller and smaller proportion of the population over time. Older people simply want to be creative and use the skills, insight and wisdom they have acquired during their working life and to make valued contributions to society.
The Hero's journey is a powerful tool in making an inventory of such qualities to move into a time of renewed creativity, service and satisfaction. In one study of tertiary graduates 20 years on 80% were unhappy with their lives. With hindsight they reflected on could haves and should haves. With a slight altering of perspective that can be turned around.
Review your skills, insights and wisdom at Soul Talks
Interestingly using the Hero's/Heroine's Journey paradigm is useful at any age or stage of life. It is the subject of my presentation this Thursday, 10th August at Soul Talks Click for more info.
I'd like to leave you with this TED Talk from Mary Gathering Bateson. It's particularly for my age group and anyone who is thinking ahead.
Flooded Memories
Dad, Me and the Wheat Board Inspector at Brookstead c.1962:This picture appeared in the "Grain Grower" newspaper with an article about the change from delivering wheat in bags to bulk handling.
Over the past two decades I have learnt a lot about Australia's first peoples, around the campfire, listening to stories, watching inma and travelling over country. Like so many "Europeans" it's a curiosity I have had since growing up on the farm in South East Queensland. We lived near the Condamine River and when it flooded, which it did more more then than it does now, the Grasstree Creek would flood and cut the road for the school bus at Yandilla. Canal Creek and the Condamine would cut the road to Pittsworth and flooding on Dog Trap Creek cut us off from Warwick. No school. Now normally it would be welcomed as providential, a bonus holiday. But not so one year, one of the few times I felt I was missing out on something by being kept home from school.
This was the middleish 60's, we'd only had the electric wireless for a couple of years and ...
Read moreIlluminating Our Personal Story - Soul Talk 10 Aug 2017
Only the past is written, the future is an exercise in our creative imagination.
Knowing Joseph Campbell's hero/heroine's journey can help us return to and maintaining the creative flow. It is especially useful when we want to create something new, express ourselves in a new way or develop a new project. Our destiny is how we make it.
I don't subscribe to the view that you can be or do anything you want, but I wholeheartedly believe that the possibilities in becoming fully yourself are inexhaustible. I am convinced that consciousness is a quantum orchestra not simply brain chemistry operating on a biological hard drive. I expect that future research will shed new light on its mechanisms. I hold as equally true that First Nations Peoples have known about these phenomena for millennia, not through science but through story, song and ceremony.
The thing is that we don't have to be neuroscientists, quantum physicists or sharmans. It is not rocket surgery. Being able to orchestrate our story with mindfulness, imagination, commitment and resolve is sufficient. There are as many tools as there are cultures to help us on that journey, each with it's own nuance, tone and perspective.
August Soul Talk
On the 10th of August I will be giving a talk in which I invite you to choose something that you would like to have happen, something that you believe is possible but not highly probable at this time, something that you are passionate about, something that would require more of yourself to come about.
It is not necessary to know how to bring it about but it may be an advantage to be open to having fortuitous things happen to assist you on your creative journey in unexpected ways.
The presentation will provide a practical introduction in realising the fruits of your creative imagination through applying the hero/heroines journey to your life.
Sometimes, it is not so much a question of how to make things happen, as knowing what you really want. I will have something to say about that too.
It's a free event, organised by the wonderful Joy Nugent and sponsored by Bird In Hand. There will be and additional two sessions in the afternoon:
- Carrie Faggotter presents Your Spirit Calling - Aligning to the signs and synchronicities of your life, and
- Anne Rogers presenting Demystifying Mindfulness
Download a copy of the Soul Talks program here.
Bookings are essential by email:
Bad Prickles
By the time I showed our documentary, "Two Brothers Walking" to the senior men and women at Umuwa we had been working on it for about five years. It was a time of discovery for me. I was acutely aware that I didn't have any experience of how first nations peoples see the world. I knew that interpreting what I heard and saw in terms of what I knew would filter out the most valuable insights. I was on a journey of discovery. The big question was, "How do you discover new things when being there stops it happening?"
The colonisation of Australia was as brutal as ...
Read moreThere's An Old Bridge
There's an old bridge on a farm where I grew up. The approaches have grown over and the deck is in a sorry state of disrepair. (Link to Google Earth Image) Every flood demolishes it further. Locals with wheat crops on both banks of the Condamine used the gravel road to get to their paddocks and bring in their harvest. When public demand for the bridge subsided, a few local farmers still needed it.
So ownership was passed to local interests on the proviso that ...
Read moreNight Sight
Belinda posted this evocative image on her FB page, check it out. From https://www.facebook.com/belindabroughtonpoet/phot...
I remember this night. This time of the year, 2015. We were camping out at Mulga Bore. The feral donkeys were particularly raucous that night, braying and galloping around at 3 in the morning, waking us with a start, anxious not to be in the path of a stampede.
Hardwired for Story
Men having kupati in Fregon
It usually happens in the sandhill country north of Pimba on the Stuart highway. I don't know if it happens for everyone, I guess not, but for me it is as palpable as it is subtle, and as perceptible as it is predictable. I call it a brain reboot.
In 1978, I completed a science degree. Wow, now there's a ...
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