Thought for the day
Traditionally oriented Aborigines are constantly on the move but paradoxically they are existentially the most stationary people on earth. Like the Dreamings, they move eternally along the tracks and networks, but remain rooted in and identified with certain places. The ancestors stopped travelling and sank into sacred sites, but they are also simultaneously present at each of the many sites along their creation journey. They are eternally travelling and eternally fixed, like the human beings who created them and were created by them. People of the Dreaming are always "at home" in the deepest possible sense.
Compare that to extreme forms of the detached perspective that agriculture gave us. The Rapture fundamentalists, for example, who ecstatically await the end of the world which, they say, should be any day now. Things like global warming, wars in the Middle East, and ecological collapse are signs of the prophesied apocalypse, and they are to be encouraged because after Armageddon, Christ will take up true believers, of which there are frighteningly large numbers - several million it is said. For them heaven is our true home; earth, expendable rubbish.
It is a pathology that places man so far outside nature, so alienated from the earth, that he would happily destroy it entirely. In its place, pyramid heaven, with a life-hating God on top.
'No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet' by Robyn Davidson, in Quarterly Essay Issue 24 2006.
Compare that to extreme forms of the detached perspective that agriculture gave us. The Rapture fundamentalists, for example, who ecstatically await the end of the world which, they say, should be any day now. Things like global warming, wars in the Middle East, and ecological collapse are signs of the prophesied apocalypse, and they are to be encouraged because after Armageddon, Christ will take up true believers, of which there are frighteningly large numbers - several million it is said. For them heaven is our true home; earth, expendable rubbish.
It is a pathology that places man so far outside nature, so alienated from the earth, that he would happily destroy it entirely. In its place, pyramid heaven, with a life-hating God on top.
'No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet' by Robyn Davidson, in Quarterly Essay Issue 24 2006.