Swimming upstream like a tadpole

Gen Blades. 'Who knows where consciousness raising goes?'

By Andrew McKenna

‘It’s our own inner fragmentation that we see in polluted landscapes and corrupted environments. Before we can heal the earth we need to heal ourselves.’

Gen Blades has been in town for about four weeks after moving here from Bendigo, on a circuitous route via Tibet, northern India and Queensland. She works as an outdoor educator at Bendigo’s Outdoor and Environmental Education School, and came to her interview complete with backpack, weatherproof jacket and leggings, after walking to the Theatre Royal from her home out of town. The walk took her an hour and a quarter.

Gen gave a talk last week at the Community House on The Practice of Walking Through Landscape, a subject dear to her heart. She is currently undertaking a PhD, exploring the philosophy of walking, but it won’t be an examination of hiking in the outdoor education sense.

‘Where I’d like to take this is to address our larger cultural sense (in the Western experience) of our disconnection,’ she said.

‘We can think about that on a number of levels. In environmental philosophy it would be the disconnection of humans from nature. We suffer a disconnection from ourselves.’

Children swimming in the Yamuna River, India

Which may be at the root of many of our crises today: environmental, psychological, interpersonal, health. While we’re running around chasing the externals, too busy to stop and smell the roses, (to employ a dreadful cliché), our health, our environment and other species, our relationships … all of them are rapidly being trashed.

Gen has of course experienced that sense of disconnection in her own world, and her own spiritual journey or transition drew her to Buddhism. That has helped her get to reconnect with aspects of herself and feel a deeper connection.

At her talk last week, she said organisers Janet Phillips and Jacinta Walsh from Consentric left the topic open. She wanted to explore the notion of transition, collective stories around that, the idea of transition of the self, and the notion of the ‘ecological self’.

‘I used moving from a “journey to perfection” to a “journey to wholeness”,’ she said.

‘The former is representative of the industrial growth society and the prominence of the individual. The latter is representative of gathering our “broken bits” and reclaiming our wholeness on a number of levels – self, community etc.

‘I wanted to expand beyond the ego self, which comes in many spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism, where they talk of the ultimate self not being caught up in day to day emotions.’

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And why walking? At its root, is it something like the slow food movement? Maybe. But for Gen there’s a deeper spiritual aspect than simply doing something slowly and with care.

‘You can be walking on pavement or through the bush, in contact with the earth in some way, but psychically you can bring awareness to that physical presence, be within yourself, be content with where you’re at,’ she said.

‘Walking has a profound capacity for us to be present because of its slowness. In this culture we’re bombarded by external input and our attention is often drawn to the outside. We don’t have time.

‘I was mulling over that as I walked into town. It could be a spiritual practice and it’s important to put aside time for it. Even just half an hour of being present.’

In outdoor education they talk of a bushwalking trip with a backpack, and its aim could be personal development, that feeling of success and adventure you get from achieving something substantial.

‘But if we flip that around we can call it self awareness instead of personal development,’ Gen said.

‘It’s moving from the top down approach to an emergent sense of self.

‘Most of us in education work in large bureaucracies, and the curriculum rather than the philosophy of ideas dominates. Buddhist practice is a great tool to sit with, to sit, stand or walk with that silence. I still have a chattering mind but it’s a wonderful tool.’

Mt Kailash

In 2001, before Buddhism became a focal point for her, Gen travelled to Tibet where she visited Mt Kailash in the western part of the country, a mountain sacred to Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists.

‘At the time we joined the pilgrims and walked around this holy mountain. They would do one step and then a full body prostration, take another step and another body prostration. It would take them weeks, but we did it in a couple of days.’

So walking was becoming what she calls a signpost in her life. In 2006 she travelled to northern India, and this time she undertook many retreats with the Tibetan Buddhist community, including one in Kathmandu for three months. She journeyed to Dharamsala  where the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile is based, and from there travelled overland to

Dharamsala

Ladakh.

In Ladakh’s capital, Leh, she stayed with a Buddhist nun community where she taught English to young nuns for two months.

‘Who knows where consciousness raising goes?’ she says in response to a question I ask about the future prognosis for the world.

‘For anyone trying to step out of the mainstream and speak in an authentic way, it takes a lot of courage and clarity. We’re like a tadpole trying to swim upstream.

‘That 12 months in India certainly gave me a foundation to come back here.

‘Walking is a wonderful point for us to be in our bodies.  To be walking at three miles per hour to the IGA or on a wilderness walk. We’re in our bodies, we can’t go fast, we have to rely on our legs.

‘It’s powerful, profound, and a simple means of reconnecting our humanity with nature.’