What is yours to have, to keep, to protect?
Are we property of the nation, the kingdom? Owned by our nationality, swayed by the identity to do another’s bidding? Are we really free or dominated by a story that results in ownership?
And what about owning land?
In the UK, rivers were property of the monarchy, with watch towers to spot illegal fisherman, who were punished severely for fishing. These days owning a dynamic, ebbing and flowing mass of water as it passes through the land is bordering on the absurd.
Perhaps owning land is absurd. Owning anything once recognising its own autonomy and consciousness is likened to owning a slave.
When a life of paying rent unfolding before us we either live beyond our energy to pay a mortgage, live at the mercy of landlords or move to land in less demand.
Moving to land in less demand seems to have the most freedom. Is owning more than two properties becoming an ethical dilemma, stripping community from tourist towns and elevating the market beyond the reach of many young people aspiring to own a home.
When does owning property go too far? Is it really for us to own?
This fortnight’s discussion on property, took us across a wide range of fields. From animism, language, communal living, sharing, the property market and getting our foot in the door, to non-violence, surrender, invasion and how our lives lived on this land is but a moment, for the life the land has lived and will continue well beyond our deaths.
Who are you as a piece of property? Are you land, a town, a street, what aspects of this land express your character?
An exercise we started with in this discussion on ‘property’. Some people described themselves as broad swathes of land reaching from the mountains to the sea, others were treacherous, windy, rocky mountains with small sanctuaries impossible to reach, and some were tidy towns with big developments and gentrification.
What if we viewed property or land as a person or a living being with characteristics and a personality? What if we understood, what we call property, in the same way we understand the autonomy and consciousness of each other? Would owning land become a form of slavery?
In a lot of ways this conversation had a lot of heavy lifting because a concept of animism is difficult to perceptively grasp when we live in a world of static reductionist ideas. Animism is the concept and belief that every part of our earth has a living soul, is conscious in one form or another.
On the podcast, the Emerald, Josh explains that our current world view of an inanimate world is a blink of the eye in its 12,000 years, from conception to the present, in comparison to the history of our species. He further suggests that animism is normative consciousness, having existed for a longer period of time; 188,000 to 6 million years as an estimate.
Looking at our inanimate trajectory we seem to dream of further in-animation with technology increasingly becoming the entirety of what we engage with. Population’s isolated from the environment in urban sprawls while companies and corporations capitalise on a land depopulated of humans, extorting resources from the land with no regard to the life it destroys in the process. This can only happen if we view the land as an inanimate one dimensional resource and in extracting this resource we create that reality. With the trees, soil, animals, oil and gas represented as one dimensional numbers on the screen. Our action from the belief of an inanimate world is quickly creating our world as inanimate.
An example of this is our reading the world through books, watching the world through screens and interacting with the world through ideas and pre-conceived notions and educations.
While the world has since changed from the moment the words were written down and can only truly be listened to from the present.
We discussed how our listening to nature has been supplanted by terminology, words, and stories explaining everything. Once our listening stopped we were separated from nature and began to abuse her blinded by our technologically created ignorance and separation.
Presently we all want to own land because it gives us a reprieve from a life of servitude to our hopefully kind and benevolent lords and ladies, I mean landlords. Sounds medieval doesn’t it?
However in this current system buying land simply creates another form of servitude, to the banks, unless we are so lucky to be able to buy it upfront. We scrape together a deposit and then we work for the rest of our lives trying to pay it off. Worst case scenario but very much a reality for a lot of people. Do we need to own land? Is it unrealistic? Does it simply enslave us to the capitalist system?
Perhaps we can share the load? Communal living has been an ideal since our separation from nature and has been explored by Gandhi, Tolstoy, the counter culture movement and does exist in every part of the world.
Everyone’s eyes lit up when we envisioned living together, creating, building and growing. Doors open we drop in on one another throughout the day and collaborate in child rearing, creativity, projects, and growing food. My whole body relaxes as I envision this but soon tightens up when I think of ownership and property. Who will pay for this? What will I own? Will it be equally shared?
Property a possession, controlled by the owner. Fear is deeply ingrained in control as a symptom. Therefore there is personal work to be done to expand our ability to trust in order to share. We discussed how our fears are triggered within the stories we live through; the portraits we paint of each other are all in an effort to control the environment or situation. We must know what to do, who we are and where we belong, otherwise what? Uncertainty, ambiguity, the void of the unknown.
Animism is an adaptation developed through ambiguity and uncertainty. It was a way in which to respect the intelligence of every beings expression as it unfolded in the present moment. For example, Dave is grumpy this morning, and he hasn’t emptied the compost, which is a requirement of the community. We force Dave to empty the compost with confrontation. His grumpiness is not accepted and is relegated to the shadow, the unconscious. But what if we understood that the universe was being expressed through Dave in a new and interesting way that would encourage us to listen deeply and move with his present state of being, understanding that there was an intelligence to his expression that we might just be able to catch a glimmer of understanding. Instead we are now happy to empty the compost for him because Dave is channeling the universe in a new way and the universe is being listened to. Perhaps Dave needs a break.
Can we listen to the land like this?
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