waste land wastes us

In a sense it is true that every inch of every block of every city centre we have is wasted. As we’ve made a lot of cities – that’s a lot of real estate.

That’s real as in ‘commons’, ‘waste land,’ ‘abandoned land’, ‘no one’s putting it to much use.’ Oddly enough the same is true of many exceptional souls amongst us. True of each of us ourselves – to differing extents, and having had different opportunities. How can I bring all that I am to the world? Because otherwise I’m welshing out on a contract. The world needs you to be you.

Vacant land, abandoned, covered, skirted. We’ve got all these little beaches & lofts of it. Imagine it inhabited, thriving, farmed. A bearded man for years in Brisbane tended an extended family of parcels on the slope between the roads, among the sprawling Moreton Bay fig roots. It’s easier where there’s a tree. Like Charlie’s Bamboo Yard, which nothing is like – a song, fruiting and faced in luminous toy gardens by the bamboo where the industrial lots meet the river, in LA*. Charlie locks gates now against simple-minded defacers but when he’s there – he made it for people to enjoy, and as his home. I loved it & I’ve never even been there.

Why can’t any displaced person and most surely any indigenous community take up an unclaimed patch of land – as European settlers did in the year hereabouts in the far-distant land of notsolongago – and tend it? Make a sweet place: where they can feel comfortable, something they can profit from if they wish and greet the world from if they wish to? Where I grew up, there were street stalls: I miss that pleasure to walk past & walk amongst too. We have a lot of waste patches, unlike poorer countries. We got space. Pioneers can take up a claim. So it seems (look about you). Surely, then, they can build a claim shanty (look behind you). If they so desire.

To me anyone choosing to live this way offers so peaceably their own effort, authority and stewardship over some nook that they ought to be cherished, thanked, left intact. Independent, equably respected. Any buffer community that could thrive would only be an unthanked boon, surely, for the morale, sensibilities, and sense of personal urban grooviness of many city dwellers travelling about our own business.

The individual food-cart, the foldaway business in our nearest countries show the myriad ways a person without premises can be sovereign in his own manhood, in her own womanhood. In Melbourne fellows cartwheel through the traffic at the lights as if it were surf, tilting an almost irresistible bottle & squeegee toward windscreen after windscreen, light as a barista with the froth. They feel great about themselves, I feel great about them, it’s all good, we smile. Interacting with diverse and sifting communities can help us find out how we feel about each other and link actions with beliefs and in an amazing number of cases, this proves to be a good thing.

Men in Adelaide, on foot for long distances in the heat or the cold, barrel a trolley bulging with ingenious spinnaker to sift every gutter and bin for recyclables. There are many forms of service everyone benefits from, that take a kingly humility and resolve, leave a man sovereign, and do the rest of us a gracious service.

In a self-realised community, we all take our part of this beautiful effort. Look at traffic – a web woven, to an astonishing extent, of mutual co-operation.

When you look up – way above the street there’s as much outdoors in any CBD as there ever was. Like allotments, the outdoor blocks are raised individually to roof level then neglected. Most of any city’s veges & all of its aquaculture could be grown in the heart of its sky. A local transition group here can farm this – another over there – transition groups are forming all over and I’ve met two groups who lost members when locals showed up itching to get stuck into some transformative, world-regenerating project & there was nothing but meetings to offer them. It’s what people want to do – and we lack opportunity: be engaged in some way that’s real in our community. Here’s one way. Surely food that is organically grown but inner-city farmed yet eaten within hours cannot be worse for me than sprayed since a seed & sprayed to last on the shelf. Historians say, “neglect of history is a form of despair.” Howard Thurman (1899-1981) said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”