life

The year of YES

January 19, 2012 by mbaumgart

let optimism rein

I am determined to start 2012 off in a positive frame of mind. I recently met a charming Australian woman who had lived in Portland, Oregon for several years. She reminded me of that most endearing of American traits – of American people, that is, not American popular culture – an unbridled and vibrant capacity for positivity and enthusiasm, and a corresponding lack of the cynicism and pessimism that is so prevalent in Australian culture.
It would be easy to be cynical about this – which is I suppose the point – but instead, I have decided to be inspired and wide-eyed. This doesn’t come easy to a Melbourne pseudo-intellectual, but I am giving it a go. So rather than looking at the glass half full, as I seemed to be doing for much of 2011 (everything was problematic), I am beginning the new year by counting the positives and moving on from there. Things are good. Uncertainty is a fact, but I am learning to live with it.
On this basis, I hereby declare that 2012 is my year of ‘YES’.

Reverie

December 15, 2011 by mbaumgart

Memory is a strange thing. Just the other evening I had a sudden flash of remembrance, not of something profound, but of something more mundane. I remembered a cobwebbed string of brass bells, Indian in provenance, that I had tied up outside the window of my bedroom in Canberra, many years earlier.

My father had kindly built a deck outside my window at my request, and I liked to sit on the deck and look at the distant hills surrounding Southern Canberra. Those hills were a comforting presence, and they represented an ‘other’ place, a counterpoint to the suburban sprawl in the valley in which I lived. I had walked up those far-off hills one day, many years before that, crossing the border into New South Wales and winding up through a pine forest to break into the paddocks on the hilltops. The views of the Brindabella Mountains from up there were expansive, and served to elevate the otherwise drab suburban expanse of the Tuggeranong Valley in the foreground.

These elements formed the landscape of my life at a difficult time, and I am forever grateful for the calming presence of those distant hills, and indeed those closer to my home, where I used to walk for hours on end. I would walk for up to three hours at a time, climbing to the highest point above the suburb of Monash, and sit underneath the trig station on the crown of the hill. This was important personal time, and intensely creative – I would work through ideas, and imagine different realities, as if testing out fictional settings. The experience was formative.

If I am lacking something in my life on Melbourne’s city grid, it is perhaps the presence and view of distant hills, or an appropriate substitute. There is something dream-like about engaging with such a view, and the reverie it inspires is rich sustenance to the creative mind. I still associate those bells with this strange, floating, inward-looking feeling.

Some reassuring facts about theflawedmind.com

August 30, 2011 by mbaumgart

Well, I knew attending a church service was radical – an act of subversion, even – and this was reinforced by the reaction I have received from friends and readers in general. Let me lay down a few home truths.

1 – This isn’t about to become a blog about spirituality or religion. Thinking, design and the city – those are the three themes.

2 – I don’t have any belief in a supernatural god, although I think the role of religion after the philosophical ‘death of god’ is worthy of further investigation. Don Cupitt’s post-religious theological/philsophical ideas – the idea of a ‘religion of life’, which is affirmative and resolutely complete in the absence of god – is of interest.

3 – I am far more likely to become a practicing magician than a religious observer in the traditional sense.

4 – Jung’s archetypal psychology is more interesting than the bankrupt structures of organised religion, and potentially more relevant to the concept of design, particularly in architecture. Investigation into this might surface on this blog in the future.

So relax, everyone – no conversion on the road to Damascus.

Today I did something radical

August 28, 2011 by mbaumgart

I did something radical this morning. I went to Church. Now, I don’t want to alarm the people who know me well, I haven’t undergone a sudden conversion to this or that creed or dogma. I have certainly not been ‘born again’, at least not in the last 25 years. This isn’t Dylan goes electric.

What I have done, though, is realised that the spiritual dimension of my life needs some attention, and I am interested in particular in what one might call the spiritual dimension of creativity. This is a quiet feeling, and one that I can scarcely account for. In this regard I have recently been reading a lot on topics as wide as kabbala, witchcraft, paganism, ritual and high magic, meditation, Epicureanism, depth and archetypal psychology, and indeed the life and thoughts of Carl Gustav Jung, the master of the archetypes himself.

The strange crossover between psychology and spirituality led me in a roundabout way to the figure of Dr. Francis McNab, Melbourne’s very own radical cleric – albeit of the apparently mild-mannered, Uniting Church variety. Interested in hearing first hand what Dr. McNab had to say, I wandered up Collins Street to St Michaels. The experience was quite engaging. Not a bit like paganism or witchcraft, it must be said, although some of his critics might suggest that it is a slippery slope. I was made very welcome, I got to sit in a beautiful space and listen to some glorious Bach and cheeky Mozart, and I found the sermon intriguing.

There was also something deeply reassuring and engaging about using my city in a new way – entering and using a sacred space for its intended purpose, even if only for a while. Well, it’s new for me. From this little outing – unexpected as it was, even to me – I have much to think about. More in due course, my faithful pagan readers.

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