Grandmother

My grandmother died on Tuesday morning. She was 98 and had been declining for the last three or so years. In the last few months, she had become bedridden and unable to speak. When I saw her three months ago, I was shocked at how much she had deteriorated. She no longer seemed to be there anymore. I knew it was just a matter of time. I hoped for her sake that it would be sooner rather than later. Still, when my father called with the news, I was surprised by how sad I felt.
The last time I saw her properly was three years ago just after I’d finished up in Darwin. I’d given her a pack of dominoes as the colours had worn off her old pack. We played a couple of games to break the pack in. She won one. She was very frail then but she was still very much my grandmother.
No one spoke at her funeral today. I guess it is not the Chinese way. She lay in her coffin for two nights and a day in her living room during which friends of the family came to sit with my aunts and uncles and pay their respects. I spent a couple of hours there last night. I didn’t speak about my grandmother. As far as I could tell no one did either.
This morning after a short final viewing we drove to the crematorium and my father being the oldest son there pressed the button that lowered her casket. We then all went for lunch during which we did not talk about her. Throughout this time, people were sad and openly grieving but no one really spoke.
My father did recall some stories as we drove around.
“She was a very practical person.” he said.
My grandmother was born in a village outside of Shanghai in 1912. She was brought out as a young wife by my grandfather and eventually bore him 8 children. She lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaya, the communist emergency, independence from the British and the anti-Chinese race riots in 1969. She outlived my grandfather by over 30 years.
I don’t know the names of most of her great-grandchildren.
My visits to KL over the last few years has been as much about her as it has been about my family here. I didn’t see much of her or anyone else in my late twenties and early thirties. To be honest those times I made the journey I could never stay long before getting restless. Cultural and language barriers had always been a factor. But I knew she enjoyed my visits and I regret not having done a little more a little earlier when she was able to appreciate them more.

Occupy Melbourne and the use of public space

Having been quite interested and ambivalent about Occupy Melbourne in the last couple of weeks, a couple of things struck me about the whole “occupying” of public space scenario. It boils down to this:

1. City Square is public space and meant to be used by the public. However, it also needs a guardian so no group can claim it exclusively for their own private use. Also, it needs a coordinator to schedule and timetable when different groups are be able to use the space in a temporary exclusive way. This is common sense and the way we run our public spaces.  The coordinator/guardian of public spaces is a representative of the public, duly elected, and in the case of Melbourne city happens to be the council and the Mayor, Robert Doyle. In his function as the representative of the Melbourne city public, he calls the shots. This is how the system works. If he makes a bad job of it, he gets voted out.

2. Occupy Melbourne, in spite of their claims, do not represent the public in the same way that Robert Doyle does. They are a bunch of people who claim that their grab-bag of issues represents public concerns and are of public interest. Given this and our mostly excellent system of governance, they were able to exercise their right to protest and use City Square for a period of time

3. What right does Robert Doyle have in deciding 6 days and no more? As the Occupy Melbourne people did not apply for a permit to occupy City Square for a set amount of time, someone has to decide when the limit it. He could have consulted more of course but it is, IMO, within his power to set the limit. I generally elect people to lead and make the hard decisions. 6 days IMO is pretty good and is commensurate with other festival or events that take place in the city. (Why do the Occupy Melbourne people need a permit? See point 1)

So, from my perspective, the only thing that is of issue is whether the police exercised undue force in enforcing the law (ie protecting my rights to use City Square without the presence of the Occupy Melbourne people). The discussion around this is healthy and part and parcel of our mostly excellent system of governance. I believe that they could have done things smarter of course. They certainly could have been more sensitive. The ideal police force is un-corrupt, efficient, smart and sensitive. However, given that we live in a less than ideal world, I am happy with a police force that satisfies the first two. Ample warnings were given after all.

4. EDIT: The other thing to also note that the eviction of the people from City Square is often conflated with the stopping of the protest and hence infringing on the rights of the protesters. I think it is important here to distinguish between stopping an illegal method of protest as opposed to stopping an individual’s right to protest. The question here for me is: Is it reasonable for a group of people to permanently or at least indefinitely inhabit a public space as part of a protest? Given that the protest movement has free access to the internet, to private spaces and has the ability and the right to organise other protests in public spaces, I think that it is not reasonable for them to claim a right to monopolise any public spaces indefinitely under the shield of their right to protest.

Extinguishment

One of the main lures of Buddhism is extinguishment or cessation of defilements and hence suffering. Many religions offer the same thing of course but Buddhism seems to be the only one where the main focus of its practice is the permanent ending of suffering. From the outside and depending on the specific tradition, this can come across as mystical and something to do with escaping the cycle of death and rebirth but it doesn’t take too long to realise that for many schools especially in the west – the goal (or rather the lure) is the ending of suffering in this life.

The problem is that this is impossible.

Integrating

Over time, I’ve slowly started to integrate the various aspects of my life.

It started quite simply: I decided that no matter what I would not untag any photos of myself on Facebook. It didn’t matter how terrible I looked or what I was doing, I was going to wear it. Actually, seeing as my wild days are well and truly behind me, it wasn’t that big a deal.

Australian values

What with the Australian government waving the southern cross all over the place once more, I got to thinking about what I have learnt about Australian values in the last twenty years of living and travelling all over this adopted sun-burnt country of mine.  A couple of things have influenced my views: the majority of my interactions have been with native Australians and my innate values from my cultural background weren’t that different to start with.

A strong caveat here is that I do not include indigenous Australians in this, their plight and moral claim to being true Australians are indisputable but I cannot speak for them.

So anyway, here’s my list.

Heritage overlays

I first found out about heritage overlays when I started investigating building a front wall in front of my house in Thornbury. Apparently, the local council had imposed a heritage overlay on my street to preserve the character of the neighbourhood – the general look and feel of the street in other words. Exceptions were granted – my neighbour had a whopping great brick wall.

Anyway, after being away for nearly four years, I moved back into Thornbury a couple of weeks ago and started thinking about putting up a front wall again. Traffic had got worse on the road since I’d lived there and these days massive trucks were hurtling down the narrow road. A community meeting between local residents, council and Vicroads which I attended didn’t seem to indicate that matters would change any time soon.

Easter Confest 2011

I’ve been going to Confest pretty steadily for the last 7 or 8 years and it’s always been an up and down event for me with its fair share of emotional turbulence and struggle. It’s tempting to retrospectively say that they were also periods of growth but I’m not sure how true that would be.

The last two Easter Confests have been different however and I’m hoping that they’ve set the pattern for the future. On the mundane but essential comfort level, I feel like camping is pretty sorted. The combination of having a van with a built-in bed, early arrivals who pick a good site, great cooking and food-storage gear plus assorted carpets, fabrics, tarps and chairs has taken lush camping to new heights.

the four sights

The sense that life is fragile and easily disrupted has been growing in me over the last few months. It probably started last year when I visited my grandmother who is extremely old now, nearly bed-ridden and unable to speak. In the last couple of months, I’ve found out that my sister’s health has been deteriorating too. She is younger than I am by 3 years.

I’ve always thought I knew that life is relatively short, people get old or sick and eventually die. But I didn’t understand that my knowledge lived on the intellectual level and that on the deepest level, I didn’t believe that it could happen to me. That has shifted and for the first time, I’ve started to feel some dread about  illness and the change that illness brings, about death and the cessation of existence that it entails.

I’m not sure if this has changed me or if it will. I hope that I will not be more fearful or anxious and that instead, I will be more appreciative of my health and the health of those I love, more compassionate to those who are ill. It may be that it is a package however, that as with so many things, vulnerability engenders compassion.

eBooks and dinosaurs

I’ve been resisting purchasing eBooks for some time now  because the Australian implementation seemed so utterly flawed and geared towards protecting the local monopolies rather than looking at the consumer. The last time I checked, some dinosaur from the Australian publishing industry was actually suggesting that people should bring their e-readers to their local bookshop and upload it there. And no, this wasn’t in the early nineties sometime, this was two years ago. But then what can you expect from an industry that fights tooth and nail to protect its archaic parallel-import-regulations (see here) when the e-book market is going to well and truly kill it.

Buddhism and consumerism

Mark Vernon in the Guardian recently wrote an entry about how Buddhism or rather certain western Buddhist meditation practices provide a remedy for the stresses of modern western life without addressing the underlying causes of it. The article isn’t terribly good even though there are some good points in it and it brought Stephen Batchelor, an atheist Buddhist writer, back to my attention.