Making Music With What We Have Left

22 December 2019

As most of the east coast of Australia, my home, goes up in flames; as the national parks, the last sacred habitat lands of the animals and plants burns sending ash and smoke and remains over the lands further from the sea; as my home town of Canberra grows brown and dry and crispy in the heat it is hard not to panic, to drown in grief and horror.

It is not too much to say that most of the people I know and speak to are in shock and feeling fear and sadness rising from the earth itself as well as our own hearts. This is unprecedented. This is a dying we have not been part of before: the fires, the country-wide drought, the heat.

Last night as I lay awake, the smoke haze lying heavy among the trees and a wet handkerchief over my face so I could breathe easily enough to sleep I wondered, How? How can I be with this? How can I even begin to touch on the horror and sense of impending collapse and death? Visions of all the movies of apocalypse flooded my being. I saw my city as becoming one of those deserted wastelands, the country around it dry and dead – a barren world where once there was life: animals, plants, people, laughter, play, mating, beauty.

I have found myself listening, wanting to listen beneath the fear and destruction for something deeper, something that speaks of renewal, of a strength that can rise through and bring new life and new ways. And I have felt I have heard it. But last night that was gone, there was only death looming. And a desire to run. I have places to go, another country to which I have citizenship, relatives in less affected parts of the country, but in the end what does that achieve? It saves my skin but it avoids the truth of the truth. There is a death happening and I am part of this particular dying.

What would it be like to stay? To feel the crumbling, the death, to let it happen, let it play out? To accept that I will die one day, maybe one day soon if I go with what happens to the country? To truly see that all around me animals and plants are dying right now, and the ecosystem in which I live may be on the brink of collapse and it could take me with it? It felt better, strangely. It felt true. It felt honest and I felt a kind of spaciousness return, and I finally fell back asleep listening to Eckhart Tolle talking after 9/11 of allowing the truth of disaster to be present and open to something else that is also present so we can respond.

It is times like this that it is the artists and the sages that lead the way for our hearts, I think. It was Gandalf who gave heart to Frodo’s whimper, “I wish the ring had never come to me; I wish none of this had ever happened.” He said, very gently, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world beside the will of evil.”

For me, I have to keep asking: How can I best be with what is? How can I not add to the distress and despair? How can I be part of good and not evil. It is not always easy. There is so little we can do and so much of what can be done seems to cause more horror. Take for example the choice that had to be made between letting the fire near me roar into a coal mine and blow up the seam that runs for over 50 kilometres or use the only water left, the toxic treatment water from the mine. The latter was chosen, and why not? Now an explosion has been averted, and burnt country drenched in toxic chemicals. All as we who are trying to survive the extreme heat turn our air-conditioners higher. It is like living in a double bind so terrible that it is easier to not think. It is like being caught in a maze with no way out. We are all embedded in a system that is predicated on relating to our planet in ways that destroy rather than create relationships of love and love and care and deep connection. From the crystals around our necks, to the toxic metals in solar panels, to the fuels and plastics and glass and metal that are ripped from the ground and reformed at a price far beyond what Country can or should bear.

This is a truth, and a way of being woven into a system of destruction that in some ways feels unbearable to state. And yet it is truth. And there is no easy way out of it. For me the answers now, beyond using my car and electricity as little as possible, beyond handwashing clothes so that I use less water, beneath the practice of buying food that is as ethical as I can find, are deeper, they are the in some way the evoking of what is deeper than the death, a call and a way of touching the love that is beneath it all.

I am reminded of the story of the violinist whose string broke just as he began his solo in a concert. Instead of getting up and changing the string, he played on. Later he remarked, “it is the artist’s job to make music with what we have left.” The music was, according to the story, divine: full of vigour and an intense creativity, a different kind of beauty.

There are answers and ways of engaging that can only ever be practical. But they must be made on the ground of feeling into what is true. Without seeing clearly what is happening and being honest about it, we cannot possibly hope to find a way forward, we cannot play music with what we have left. And without feeling into our place in the order of things, without touching in on the love and the desire for life for ourselves and others we cannot hope to respond with any wisdom or skilfulness, we cannot find and create beauty and renewal.

Maybe this is the beginning of the end in a big way: maybe the ecosystem of this country will collapse to the point that life becomes largely unsustainable – as it now feels. Maybe we will have to make the choice of being part of the dying and not trying to escape to somewhere else, to let ourselves go with the animals and plants that are falling around us. God knows, given our country’s appalling refugee policy no one should feel obliged to take us in.

But in the meantime I want to say this. What I feel today is tenderness. There is music being made with what is still here. When I went for a walk this morning amidst the smoke haze and the dead grass and baked dry soil there was a magpie family pecking quietly at the ground, miraculously finding things to eat. There were small flowers still surviving and touching my washing line so sweetly. There was a branch fallen from a tree touching the scarred trunk like a child leaning up against its mother.

Amidst death, during destruction, there is also life finding small ways to continue on, to reassert itself, to bring small wings of hope if not for us, though it remains to be seen, for someone yet to come.