Stand Still Day

Today is solstice. In the southern hemisphere it is the Summer Solstice, in the northern it is the Winter Solstice. Many cultures over many millennia have marked solstice with various rituals and celebrations.

In an era in which many people are constantly on the go, continuously busy, and ever on the look-out, perhaps it would be fitting to inaugurate a new ritual for the day of solstice.

It could be Stand Still Day, and it would occur twice a year; once on the December Solstice and again on the June Solstice.

It would be easy to remember the dates because solstice literally means sun stands still.

Our busy westernised lives expose us to anxiety, frustration, hyper-vigilance, angst, worry, fear, and a plethora of other stresses. Timetables, deadlines, expectations, schedules, wars, and physical violence all constrain us and force us into a chronic state of stress.

Studies and research carried out over the past few years consistently show that negative feelings amongst people from all over the globe are on the increase. More than one-third of people say that they felt sad or had been worried on the day before being interviewed. Similar numbers reported that they felt angry. Moreover, the proportion of people reporting these feelings had increased compared to a decade earlier, often up by 10% or more.

During the same decade, the proportion of people reporting positive feelings (such as enjoyment, being able to laugh or smile, and being well-rested) remained steady, with no appreciable decrease or increase in the proportions.

A number of explanations for this increase in negative feelings have been put forward: lack of peace, the pace of life, and the threat of environmental collapse amongst them.

How can we deal with this?

What if, on the two days of the year on which the sun stands still, we also stood still?

If we all simply stopped and stood still for an hour (say) on two days a year – December solstice and June solstice, what might happen? Some possibilities include:

• Firstly, noticing that our breathing slows down and our heart rate drops.
• Realising that our bodies do have the capacity to relax.
• Understanding that our frenetic day-to-day activities are undermining our health.
• Finding that we have time to talk with our children, our parents, and our neighbours.
• Appreciating our surroundings. Perhaps we look up at the sky for the first time in a long time and watch birds flying past.
• Comprehending the vastness of the cosmos.
• Becoming conscious of our inner psyche (our soul).

At first it could be just one hour, twice a year. Two hours out of the 8,766 hours each year provides us with. Surely, that is possible. After a few years we might be able to simply stand still for a few hours twice a year.

If the Sun can do it, and it has been alive for billions of years, then so can we.

Where Are The Men?

A few weeks ago I attended a question-and-answer session with a woman with elderhood status within the local indigenous community. She spoke eloquently and with an authority based in cultural values and history. I left the session feeling privileged to have had the opportunity to listen to, and be transported into, a realm of the heart.

I also left with an unsettling question: Where are the men?

In the room there had been approximately 80 people. I didn’t count them, as there were too many. I did count the number of men present though. Only six!!

Six men in a group of 80, only 7.5% of the total. Women outnumbered men by a factor of 13:1.

I have been involved in community development, social justice, and environmental movements for more than fifty years. In those fields I have noticed similar ratios in gatherings of what might be called politics of the heart.

Politics of the heart could be a phrase for utilising emotional responses, personal experience, and deep internal reflection to inform one’s philosophy and practice. Politics of the heart asks questions of my own self, it asks me to consider how my choices and actions impact upon social, community, and international situations.

Politics of the heart requires me to stand aside from my ego and to honestly look into the feelings of my heart. It is not easy. It is not straightforward. It may not even be conclusive.

Where then, I wonder, are the men when it comes to this politics of the heart? Why do women, time and time again, vastly outnumber men in workshops, seminars, retreats, and presentations that deal with the politics of the heart?

Yet, when it comes time to march on parliament, or to organise protest actions, or to stand for governmental positions, why is it that men tend to outnumber women? Although this latter situation is changing, it is a tendency I have noticed over 50 years as much as the tendency for women to outnumber men in politics of the heart.

I have not found any serious research attempting to answer these questions, so all I can do is offer some thoughts based on my personal experience.

Historically, and still mostly the case, men have been the privileged gender. It may be that this privilege means that men consider the issues raised within the politics of the heart unworthy of consideration because men are not impacted by such issues. Men have the privilege of not having to think about these issues.

Men have been socially conditioned to believe that politics of the heart involves soft issues, whereas the role of men is to deal with the hard issues. Becoming involved in soft issues for men opens us up to vulnerability – a notoriously soft issue. Male conditioning is for men to be strong, logical (not emotional), and to take up positions of leadership.

Male politics, in general, tends to be outwardly focussed. Questions dealing with law and order, foreign trade, defence systems, financial markets, machinery, and building and construction are more often seen as the male realm. These are all outwardly directed activities.

The politics of the heart, in contrast, is inner directed and deals in emotions, intuition, feelings, compassion, empathy, true connection, and self-reflection. Men (at least westernised men) have been told for many decades that these are not matters that men need to consider. Indeed, men have been led to believe that such matters are beneath them.

The sad thing about all this is that what men have been conditioned into is untrue. Sad too, is that what men have been told, what men have been led to believe, is also untrue.

So, men, let us overturn that ratio of women to men, and start involving ourselves in the politics of the heart.

Who Am I?

How often do we ask ourselves, ‘Who am I?’ If we seriously ask this question, what sort of answer do we come up with?

We are not alone in asking this question. The question has been one of the most fundamental questions of western philosophy. The answer in most cases has been that I am I, or that I exist. The most famous statement of this conclusion is that of René Descartes who in 1637 published Discourse on the Method.

Writing in French, Descartes expressed his famous maxim as ‘Je pense, donc je suis’ (translated as ‘I think, therefore I am.’) Descartes considered this declaration to be his first principle – a “first principle” is a principle that cannot be deduced from any other assumption.

At first glance this principle seems logical, even intuitive. Yet, it is a circular argument, verging on tautological. The British progressive/symphonic rock band The Moody Blues articulated this tautology on their 1969 album On The Threshold Of A Dream. The confusion inherent in the maxim is expressed in the opening lyrics of that album; ‘I think… I think I am. Therefore I am!… I think…’

Of course, Descartes was not the first to express such an idea. The ancient Greek philosophers had been pondering existence, individuality, and the distinction between body and soul more than 2,000 years earlier. Aristotle, for instance, declared that ‘…whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist…’

The existence of an independent and autonomous self (the “I”) has underpinned western worldviews ever since. Over the past few centuries, the I has become a cult of individualism, and more latterly, toxic individualism, narcissism, and the rise of the rugged individual.

Descartes maxim contains the roots of this individualism within it – “I” think, therefore “I” am. The phrase begins and ends with an individualistic notion of being in the world. The phrase did not immediately kick-start the cult of the individual, but it is one of the foundations of that cult.

We can recognise the inherent individualism within Descartes’ principle by contrasting it with two other, lesser known in western cultures, assumptions. The Zulu concept of ubuntu is especially vivid. Desmond Tutu (the South African Archbishop and opponent of apartheid) describes ubuntu as, ‘the philosophy and belief that a person is only a person through other people. In other words, we are human only in relation to other humans. Our humanity is bound up in one another … This interconnectedness is the very root of who we are.’¹ Tutu begins from a place of relationship between people as the root of who we are, even as individuals.

In a different part of the world, and another religious tradition, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, coined the term interbeing to sum up his understanding of the way in which relationship is at the heart of who we are. He defines interbeing as, ‘the many in the one, and the one containing the many.’ In a nod to Descartes, he articulates it as a first principle: ‘I am, therefore you are. You are, therefore I am. We inter-are.’²

These two expressions of the self are at odds with the western view, and point to a philosophical and psychological road that western thought failed to travel upon.

During the 20^th century the westernised path of individualism incorporated a number of philosophical ideas and spawned others, such as existentialism, one form of anarchism, libertarianism, and Ann Raynd’s objectivism. Together, these ideas paved the road towards the toxic individualism, egocentrism, and narcissism.

The relationship understanding of who I am, reflected in ubuntu and interbeing were not only rejected, but never considered during the construction of individualism. Community, society, the public good, and even kinship were all discarded along the way. By 1987, the then Prime Minister of the UK, Margaret Thatcher, was able to paraphrase Ann Raynd’s objectivism with the words, ‘There’s no such thing as society.’

The over-identification today with the I has resulted in the wanton destruction of ecosystems, polarisation and hatred of one another, and paradoxically, individuals unable to cope who attempt to escape with drugs, alcohol, fast cars, inordinate wealth, and in its extreme, self-harm and suicide.

We, individually, culturally, and socially, have to reconsider the fundamental philosophical and psychological question:

Who am I?

Notes:

1. Desmond and Mpho Tutu, The Book of Forgiving, William Collins, London, 2014

2. Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, 1987

Five Environmental Songs (late 60s/early 70s)

There have been a number of songs with an environmental theme, but these five from the late 1960s-early 1970s are amongst the best. Coincidentally, the period in which these five songs were written was concurrent with the global transition from humanity requiring one planet to live on to requiring more than one. Overshooting the planet’s ability to restore what we extracted and to recover from the pollution we created globally occurred around the time these five songs were recorded.

The first three of the songs lament what was being lost, and the other two rejoiced in the pleasures that nature still had to offer us.

After The Gold Rush – Neil Young (1970)

Neil Young’s song encompassed a number of themes, although Young himself called it essentially an environmental song. The lyric ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s’ was a particularly poignant observation on how nature was being exploited, ravaged, and abused by humans. After the turn of the century, whenever Neil Young played this song in concert he amended the lyric to, ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 21^st century.’

Nothing had changed in the 30 years following the original recording. Mother Nature is still on the run in late 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Zf4D1tHdw

Where Do The Children Play? – Cat Stevens (1970)

When Cat Stevens was growing up he and his family were living in the midst of some of the bombed out areas of London following WW2. He recalled how the playground at his school was in the basement of the school building, because there were no playgrounds.

By the time he wrote and recorded his fourth studio album, Tea for the Tillerman, Stevens noted that there were still few areas for the children to play, and that nature was being encroached on so much that the question, Where do the children play? was begging to be asked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBCJhNiKhFE

Big Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell (1971)

In the late 1960s Joni Mitchell visited Hawai’i for the first time and arrived in the evening, and booked into her hotel. When she awoke in the morning and pulled back the curtains she could see beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then she looked down. She was looking at a huge parking lot, and the adjacent hotel was building another parking lot just as big. ‘It broke my heart…this blight on Paradise’ she later stated. The jolting experience was to be the inspiration for one of her best known songs. ‘They paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot,’ she sang.

A further lyric from the song, ‘They took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum’ is likely to have been stirred by a trip to the Foster Botanical Gardens in Hawai’i where she had to pay an entrance fee to see the trees.

Nature is still be paved over and commodified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2595abcvh2M

Mother Nature’s Son – The Beatles (1968)

This song features on the Beatles untitled double album – often referred to as the White Album (the cover was entirely white). Credited as being written by Lennon-McCartney, John Lennon said it was inspired by a lecture the Beatles listened to by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi whilst they were in India. McCartney says he was motivated by a Nat King Cole song called Nature Boy.

The simple lyrics evoke a pleasant day sitting by a stream in the mountains. ‘Sit beside a mountain stream, See her waters rise, Listen to the pretty sound of music, As she flies’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMMiXjwhODU

Nature – The Fourmyula (1969)

The Fourmyula were a band from New Zealand with several hits during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The biggest of their hits was undoubtedly Nature. In 2001 the song was voted as the best New Zealand song of the 20^th century by the Australasian Performing Rights Association.

The band’s guitarist/keyboards player, Wayne Mason, wrote the song, ‘in an hour on the front porch of my mum’s house, looking out on a beautiful day with trees and stuff. Bees were buzzing and my heart was fluttering.’ He was just 19 years old at the time.

The lyrics, including, ‘Up in a tree a bird sings so sweetly, Nature's own voice, I hear
Rustling whistling trees turning breeze to speech, Talk to me now, ease my mind’ evoke the ability of nature to soothe us and ease our stress levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB2EiHOB0Mw