Cyclone Dreaming 1 – INTRODUCTION

Here is my meditation on the (potential) role of cyclones in our lives. There are a number of things I want to say by way of introduction. Firstly, it is in several parts – it does not read from beginning to end in the same voice.

We start of by jumping straight into the deep end with the prose poem The Celebration of Cyclone Dreaming. It’s the next post, and already posted under What about climate change then, but it’s repeated here in the interests of completeness for this work. It was the first thing that its intended audience saw. It was on the back of the menu in our restaurant for several weeks in 1995; and for the Bureau of Meteorology golf tournament in Townsville in 1996. So I recommend that you read it first.

That is followed by a pamphlet made for interpreting the names in the menu itself. I should explain here that it was our practice to make themes for all of our menus, the names of which celebrated people places and events in the local landscape. Local is a word that can mean many things. In this case, local is not only Northern Australia (Cyclone Country), but many places on the Earth with which a connection is established by the point of view taken in the meditative process. It is the point of view in which our locality is the Universe, by virtue of the fact that each of us is the Universe.

The first part of the pamphlet, a Tropical Cyclone Advice such as you might hear on the radio, takes the point made in the prose poem into the realm of geo-politics. It is meant to be light hearted – to show that the deep and meaningful tone of what follows is not the last – or even the first – word to be uttered. If you get through the prose poem you may well need some light relief to come back to. But if you don’t manage to finish the long meditation that follows, you’ve got the essential point in opening skit.

That brings us to the Main Course. We welcomed you with an aperitif – the literary equivalent of a good strong drink – or a joint – to get you into the right head space. Then we brought you to the mood of celebration by providing an amusing little entrée. And now that we are in a state of at-one-ment through our shared laughter, we can enter together into the somewhat more serious, and hopefully more satisfying, business of taking substance and transforming it into ourselves – of trans-substantiation.

The next two parts introduces the theme of vulnerability and our response to it – specifically, the notion that by embracing our vulnerability we prosper.

Then comes apiece on a character which shares top billing with cyclones – the Wandjina, which, like cyclones, is not limited to one manifestation.

The next few parts highlight similarities in the disposition towards vulnerability developed in various parts of the planet – India, China, the Pacific and Meso America.

There is then a bridge that connects the forgoing to modern science, specifically, Quantum Physics, in which startling similarities can be seen with ancient intuitive forms of thought.

Science, at its cutting edge enunciates a paradox that itself is the gateway to Mystery. Yet it provides us with the means of penetrating the physical nature of cyclones.

That leads on, finally to the explicit elucidation of Cyclone Dreaming as both Name and Process (as Yahweh is both the Name and Nature of the Hebrew God) in terms that reconnect with the context of the Wandjina.

Clear? No. I didn’t think so. But then, it wouldn’t be a meditation if it were, would it?