Hiroshima

Last Friday was the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I was asked to give a reflection at the Educating for a Purposeful Life Conference at Kingswood College on this important historical event, and how it might have ongoing meaning in our lives today. Greg Beck reminded us of the atrocities of the bombing, and showed excerpts from a powerful movie called: White Light Black Rain. I then went on to speak about how the shadows left on the pavement of the city of Hiroshima can act as a reminder of the personal shadows we carry with us everyday. A few people asked for the text from this presentation and I have made it available below:

“The city of Hiroshima was reduced to ashes”


“A person who sat on the step evaporated, leaving only a shadow.”









A shadow, permanently etched on the steps of the city of Hiroshima, reminding us of these painful memories.

When I see these photos, I feel a deep sense of dread. A fear that I can’t really explain. How do we get our heads around the fact that humanity is capable of such atrocity.


I am terrified,
I look away,
I avert my eyes.
What are we capable of?
What am I capable of?


I know I’m capable of many things, both good and bad. My personal story contains pain and joy. Helen McGrath and Julie Perrin both reminded us yesterday that grief and pain are part of each of our stories. My story has made me afraid of things. Some of these things seem small and inconsequential:

1/ I’m scared of heights.
2/ I’m absolutely terrified that my husband will beat me at board games.

These concerns are indicative of some of my larger fears:

1/ I am scared of my pride being hurt.
2/ I have a fear of abandonment
3/ I fear the damage I could do to those close to me. I worry about what happens when I act in my own self interest. There are small examples of this – (eating the last bit of chocolate) to large examples (like finding myself letting down those close to me or skewing the truth of a story to paint myself in the best light)

“Everyone carries a shadow…and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the bigger and darker it is.”
Carl Jung

We rarely share our fears. It’s not the most popular opener in the staff room or at a café:

“What’s your deepest darkest fear about yourself?”...
"I'll tell you about my shadow if you'll tell me about yours"

We are terrified.
Are we bad?
We stop ourselves from speaking our own inner truths
We fear our own feelings
We push down our struggles, but they don’t go away
We can’t run from our own shadow

I came across an artist recently who makes large scale murals in which he lists his fears. These pieces are part of an exhibition called "Visions and Fears", currently found at a gallery in Barcelona. The artist, Brian Rea says that he had realised that his fears had started to define his behaviour. His fears fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter chalkboard. He says the time it took to write all these words made the process particularly rhythmic and reflective.

“What seems bad to you within yourself will grow pure by the very fact of you observing it.”
Dostoevsky.

We must discover our shadow as well as our gifts in order to become effective and whole. Our fear is interconnected with our deepest longing.

When we stop to consider our shadows, our fears, we start to better understand ourselves, our capacities and our limitations, our longing, and can live the lives that we are called to live.

“If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials.”
Parker Palmer.

And then:

As educators, we can encourage fragility as well as success in those we teach. We can allow the spaces we create to encourage vulnerability as well as zest and passion for life.

“What happens if I do not welcome some aspects of myself and banish them to a life outside? How can I find wholeness if some of the pieces are missing?”
Michael Lindfield (Psychologist)

“I’d rather be whole than good”
Carl Jung

It is only when I come to terms with my own shadow, my grief, my fears, my mistakes that I can even try to understand others. My shadow loses its power over me. Compassion for others only comes when we find compassion for ourselves.
we join our grief, our pain, to the larger story.
to each others’ stories.
we yearn for wholeness, for peace, for meaning, for home.

today we stop.
we acknowledge the shadows left at Hiroshima.
we remember the people who were ripped from this world.
we turn around and face our shadows.
the shadows found in all humanity.

The reflection ended with a piece of spoken word and a song by Pádraig Ó Tuama . His CD can be purchased for download here. A huge thank you to Cheryl for giving me his CD a few months ago. It is earth shattering.  



Please feel free to email me if you would like a copy of the power point that I used with this presentation. More than happy to send it on...

A brittle life (in haiku)

this strange existence
in order to shift, change, shape
I must surrender


I had lunch with the very wise John Allison again last week. We spent a lot of time discussing the scary notion of surrendering into our own lives. John continues to leave lasting impressions on me; his reflections on story-telling sparked this blog entry on our Drop Bear Theatre blog last year.

Embrace a chaotic world

Social commentator Douglas Rushkoff wrote these words 11 years ago but they spoke loudly to me this morning as I read them in the snug cabin of my country Vline train:

"Our children, ironically, have already made their move. They are leading us in our evolution past linear thinking, duality, mechanism, heirarchy, metaphor and God himself towards a dynamic, animistic, weightless and recapitulated culture. Chaos is their actual environment."

Right blog, right time

Today seems to be one of those days when people send me links to blogs that make me simultaneously happy and weepy.

Two of them are: Daily Poetics (thank you Cheryl) and Before I die I want to... (thanks Eddie and Bri). I am also addicted to thxthxthx which makes me smile nearly every morning.

I'm not sure if it's the blogs or the cold and flu tablets, but I'm feeling calm and warm right now.

One Hundred Languages

The Reggio Emilia Approach is inspiring me in my work today. It strengthens my belief that the arts is not a subject area, but a means by which children can create and communicate meaning across all learning areas. It also reminds me why we need to encourage all kinds of spiritual exploration with young people. The hundred languages poem says this much better than I could ever hope to:



The Hundred Languages

No way. The hundred is there.
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.

A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling, of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.

The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.

They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.

They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.


-Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)
Founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach

Advance Australia

Last night I went to see an art exhibition curated by a friend of mine called "The Australia Project". Many artists were invited to respond to questions about the Australian identity and I was overwhelmed by the diversity of the artwork. People from across Australia are now invited to answer the question, "what makes you Australian?" and send in their postcards. You can download your postcards or order some here:

Some of these postcards were hung up around the gallery last night. One 12 year old student had answered:

"What makes me Australian is cultural diversity...My mum's parents moved to Australia in the early 60s, to have a better future and quality of life than they would've in Southern Greece....My dad moved here (from France) in 1970 when he was 22. My friend came up with the term "Freek" (half French, half Greek) for me, and I'm Australian too, so for fun I'm a Freekalian. So watching Japanese TV, and American Movies, while eating Indian takeaway is why I'm proud to be 100% Aussie."

another 11 year old student wrote:

"To live in Australia means a lot to me because it is a kind of country that doesn't kick out people from other countries and cultures. I am thankful for that because my family comes from a different country and I have a different culture." 

Contrast these hopeful messages with Pauline Hanson's comments yesterday, saying she would not sell her house to Muslims because they are "not compatible with our culture". Click here to put in $100 to collectively buy Pauline's house for a group of Muslim refugees. Let's embrace diversity and be the Australia that the school children believe we are.

my husband is a cartographer

I think I might be the only person in the world who gets into bed next to someone reading an atlas. I find novels relaxing, or perhaps a spot of poetry before goodnights, but not Tadhgh. Nope. He is- well- he's a cartographer. When I first met Tadhgh I had no idea what that was. "OOOHHhhhhh....." I eventually realised: "you make MAPS...how cool!"

"Well, not really", is his standard reply. Tadhgh also thought working with maps would be "cool" back when he started studying Geomatics. Surely map making involved adventure, risk taking and sailing through dangerous, unchartered waters. But it wasn't long before ideas of wild seas and impenatrable terrain were replaced by a clicking mouse, a quiet office and too many hours in front of the computer screen. Tadhgh loves maps: the possibilities and the information, but the realities of map creation aren't quite like they would have been in the 18th century.

Maps intrigue many of us (I mean, I don't take them to bed with me, but they are pretty amazing.) So much information fits on such a little page...and WE ARE STANDING ON THE BIG VERSION! Woah. It answers so many questions about the space we inhabit, while also opening up conversations about that very space. Maps have a part to play in a variety of spheres, from the political, the geographical, the historical, the metaphorical...

Years ago I was driving with friends to a rehearsal in an outer suburb of Adelaide, over an hour from where I lived at the time. We pulled up at some traffic lights and looked over to the next car to see my brother and one of his friends sitting in the car next to us. Never surprised to learn about the antics of my brother and his friends, we heard that they were heading to- "end of map"- the last page of the Adelaide street directory in the northern direction. What would they find there? What happened after "the end"? These guys are truly the Burke and Wills of our age. Turns out that when they got to the northern edge of the UBD and stopped the car, there was a mobile phone lying on the ground. Weird. But good for my mum because she used that phone for a couple of years. I love that these guys went on this adventure. It illustrates to me that we are all exploring the prescribed boundaries of our world, blending the metaphor and the physical in our own delightfully strange ways. (I think they did south and east 'end of maps' at later times too)

Cheryl Lawrie wrote a blog post a while ago that explores some of these ideas in a style that goes more for the poetic and less for the absurd. She writes of the space beyond the map;

as it turns out
every map has an artificial edge
prescribed by those
who define its scope
who draw the thick black line,
however arbitrarily,
around the edges of the world.


Beautifully said.

Thanks Tadhgh, for increasing my appreciation of mapping life. I look forward to learning more...