He shakes my hand.
Wild old man beard whipping in wind.
We are all strung out against the fence at yet another climate action.
The Australian Federal Police look bored.
The grandmas look determined and this Quaker, the one with the beard,
is shaking my hand.
‘I got arrested with a Quaker once’
I say: ‘I think that was me’
He responds: ‘Yes, it was me!’
Over five years have passed since we stood together on the Adani Blockade.
Over five years.
And still we are witnesses to this ‘great unmaking’
which is how ecologist Deborah Bird Rose describes the unfolding
cascading
climate
crisis.
The great unmaking
She also writes:
‘The beauty and greatness of life on earth is not a problem to be studied and resolved, but actually entails a particular kind of ethics – an obligation to keep faith with life by participating in and contributing to its immensity.’
God I feel so sad today.
Standing in the wind with a daughter by my side and faithful older activists to my right and to my left and a quaker gripping my hand. Is this action a participation in immensity?
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
