Opening the blinds which have previously reduced my study to a wide closet with papers and pens instead of brooms and vacuum cleaners, I experienced the cathartic realisation of how important it is to have the odd organic form around you. Just to be in touch with living things- the feather-duster pine signalling jerkily against the glass, the tree standing like an old war soldier against the wall with limbs crooked, gnarled and dismembered, the idle vine which lounges and sprawls…It’s amazing what this colour green can do to your disposition. Imagine what it would be like in the cities devoid of nature. Looking out from your yellow-white, air-conditioned office to see only man’s industrial advances, or, man’s environmental devastations…with only a bare blue sky to remind you steel and granite and brick were not the materials that built the world.
Sometimes I’m rather proud of Australia, although the thought of being a patriot is terrifying. I shall not yield and assimilate with those ridiculous zealots who fly flags in their own backyard! Preposterous expressionism. Appreciation, but not devotion is my practice. Perhaps not enough appreciation though…how easily it slips from mind that I perhaps should believe in a god just because I’m not starving somewhere in a warzone, oppressed, alienated, exploited like in some godforsaken deeps. Although the common phenomenon is the opposite, isn’t it? Repression encourages faith more than it repels it.