A Meditation On Movement and Stillness

Oh to sit at peace in the garden

Oct 20, 2024

Slowly but surely, Melbourne is welcoming spring. I wasn’t sure if I was intensely sad and totally unaware of it, or suffering hay fever, but it appears to have been the latter. I

At such a time who on earth has the time, effort, or energy to sit at a laptop and put together their Substack?! I’ve made two wholehearted attempts thus far and neither of them has been worthy of the title ‘attempt’, so I spared you them both.

But the show must go on and the obligation to you all needs filling. More than that, finally I feel as if I have enough pent-up energy to put into words.

I’ve been running non-stop for the better part of four months, with that little pause of vipassana being completely and utterly needed and at the same time entirely not enough. This ‘running from/moving towards’ has been driving me steadily, but it hit an absolute fever this week with the full moon.

It’s all been physical and with community, and I’ve been enjoying the absolute shit out of it. That said, my journals, notebooks, and my laptop have been feeling the pains of neglect - and perhaps rejection - but my soul has been tapdancing on those motherfuckers, singing at the top of its’ lungs ‘oh to be with people, oh to move around’. No regrets, whatsoever!

But there’s a price to pay for such things, and the bill is coming due. For all my recent vipassana efforts, my ability to sit and be in silence seems to have atrophied phenomenally. I find myself impulsively reaching for phones and distractions whenever I have a silent moment, I am making no progress with the books I’m reading, my work project has shifted from active to ideation (necessary, as we’re looking at the next phase but the sitting down and doing has almost vanished), and even sitting for five minutes fills me with the feeling that I need to be doing, rather than being. So here I am, sitting in the sun, trying to find the space for both.

Melbourne is great at doing, but it’s not at all versed in being. In its current form, it’s young and inexperienced, it has no comfort within its own skin, and it is changing with such rapidity that it can’t sit with what it is for more than a minute. We need a new Major Project. We need a new Public Holiday. We need a new Social Justice Cause. New new new.

This rubs on everyone who comes to visit, myself included. I’d love to make a tangent here and rip on 5G towers and how they’re frying our brains, but I don’t bother researching things like that, so I’ll leave it to the ‘well informed’ people of the internet.

I will say that the far-reaching prevalence of the internet makes it a whole lot easier to ‘stay connected’ (that most ironic of expressions. I challenge you to find a less connected person than one watching videos on their phone) and in staying connected to the technological sphere of existence, the textures, tones, and intricacies of reality fly past you.

The dance typically looks like this:

You pick up your phone in a moment of boredom, almost instantly forgetting the motivation for doing so
You receive an input from it, which has absolutely no relevance to the reality of your present situation
You set the phone aside and come back to your reality, meanwhile your mind processes that information that you downloaded from the phone
You process the information and somehow ‘solve’ the integration of that information, but the solution necessarily creates another ‘problem’ for the mind, being peace and boredom
You pick up your phone (again, in a moment of boredom) and almost instantly forget the motivation for doing so – again.

It’s tantalising, it’s unending, and it’s entirely empty. As I sit here typing this out, there is a garden before me filled with colours and textures that run absolute rings around the tedium of a blinking black cursor on a pale white background, refreshing at such a speed my eyes are incapable of recognising it; yet I give my attention to the screen more than the reality.

Only in the moments of uncertainty, when I’m searching for the right word or looking for the correct expression, do I allow my attention to float into the world of non-linear form and technicolour.

I realise how few plant names I know in moments like this. I recognise the forms, and I can identify the colours (green, different green, stripy green, leafy green, soft green, dark green, light green. Then I realise my colour identification process has been deadened to a digital Red Green Blue spectrum the likes of which is used for digital creation and a tiny part of me dies inside), but name them all ‘plants’.

I recognise the rose, a solitary pink beauty standing about 6ft above the ground, tall and upright with nothing else around him. I know the wattle tree, red and spiky, who is attracting countless bees and, as the name would suggest, the occasional wattle bird. I’m homies with the monster plant, and the parsley, and the tulips, and maybe that’s a lemon tree. A couple of succulents in the corner – names irrelevant, I group them all together – and I think I spy a yucca tree as well. This might sound impressive (and I actually surprised myself to get such a list of names) but I reckon I’m batting a 40% average for what is in front of me and what I can name. But I can identify an insane number of combinations on this laptop, and I am tapping these words into life with a complex pattern recognition system spanning maybe 30 different small pieces of plastic, which all look and feel identical.

That brings me back to the laptop, and I return with answers, every single time. I rest there for a few moments, a couple of seconds, sometimes up to a minute, and in no time I’m replenished and certain of what I wish to say. The certainty came from the time spent in wonder, gazing at things I don’t recognise, can’t break down, haven’t become familiar with to the extent that I can pay them half attention and use them for creation, not from the time spent in the digital plastic realm.

This is but a small example of the powers of nature. It has a dual purpose: it pulls us away from the technological world of distractions and uncertainty, and fills us with peace and a sense of understanding from a world free from distraction yet equally full of uncertainty.

Although the leaves, flowers, and animals are also refreshing at a rate so fast that I can’t recognise it, I am able to stare at them and there is an exchange rather than a download. They give me something, but I also give them something. The digital world seems to give emptiness, and take attention. It’s perhaps still an exchange, but the exchange is living with dead, rather than living with living.

I am falling into a meditation of man and machine and nature all together. I find that, by virtue of overuse, I am able to allow my eyes to rest on the little bee flying from purple flower to purple flower while tapping away and creating a picture for you, the reader, but the feeling will be lost to all but the most highly sensitive of readers. Those who read digital media in the standard form, which is to say they consume it, will miss the fly that has landed on the largest piece of tanbark in the garden, they won’t catch the wind that is moving the blades of grass in the green pot plant, and they definitely won’t hear the sound of that same wind rustling through the gum leaves overhead. (For those readers who tune into the feeling beyond the words, I can’t recommend

Renée Eli, Ph.D.

’s Substack enough. Talk about living meditation!)

And with this reminder, I am back in the garden and in the reality that is all around. The Brunswick lifestyle is fast, even if it isn’t the same speed as Berlin, but it’s constantly moving and for as long as you wish to rush along with it, it’s happy to carry you in its current. But the answers are in the trees, the plants, the flowers, and the butterflies, not the 5G towers, smartphones, and laptops.

I will endeavour to spend more time connected to this vibe, that I can share more from that place with you . I hope this full moon didn’t rattle your skull too much, it’s been high intensity! Catch y’all on the flipside <3

Nick lets rip

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