SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Sean Weaver

In an interconnected world there are no boundaries – neither in space nor in time. Imagine a fabric that extends in all directions without end and you all of it with a perception point at its centre. Of course, in an infinite universe everything is the centre, and yet at the same time there is no ‘thing’ and no ‘centre’. A ‘thing’ needs a boundary and a separation from all that it isn’t. But there are no boundaries. There is no escaping the vastness.

This discovery can sometimes bring a sense of nihilism – the universe being so immeasurable and therefore an individual like ‘me’ an impossibly insignificant cog in an infinite interconnected eternity. In this absolute domain that is no domain, how can there be any meaning or purpose? But of course there is no individual either, and rather than being an insignificant cog, we are all that we can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and more.

A banal advertisement mumbles out of a speaker in an airport café in Nadi, Fiji as I await my connecting flight to Suva where I will spend the next week and a half helping a local community organisation design a project to protect rainforests from the chainsaw. People come in and out of the glass doors beside me in an otherwise sleepy terminal building filled with bored staff counting the minutes till knock-off time. Someone is counting change making ready to close a duty free shop, and lazy conversation competes with the wheezing air conditioning that runs on a coolant that is 5,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

So what about the forests of Fiji or the rest of the world, or the climate system, or anything? We will all become extinct and the Earth will recover from the brief episode of humanity. For that matter, the forests of this planet pale into insignificance given that we are also merely a single star among the millions of stars in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy just one among countless others. Why bother?

I now find myself in the home of a Fijian family who live in an informal village (called a ‘squatter settlement’ by the local council) located on the outskirts of the suburbs, on the edge of the bush. Here in this simple house of rusty second-hand corrugated iron walls and exposed recycled timber framing my teenage namesake lies on the mat doing his homework as bats woop, woop about the twilight air, geckos “tic tic tic tic tic tic tic tic tic” in the rafters … and night crickets sing at the top of their voices.

This morning I sat on the mat and clapped deeply “Vaka turaga ke vau na turaga na i taukei ni tiko tiko, oqo saka e dua na i sevusevu lai lai…” as I passed an envelope thick with bank notes across the woven floor. As a consultant, I get paid an allowance to stay in flash hotels, but instead I give this money, and my daily food allowance, and some more to this family each time I travel here for work.

In the movie ‘The Peaceful Warrior’ the protagonist meets a fuel pump attendant who insists the name of his workplace is a ‘service station’ as he voluntarily cleans the windows of a car filling up. “What is the big deal about calling it ‘service’?” asks the protagonist (or words to that effect). And the sage replies –  “there is no higher purpose.”

At the end of the Matrix trilogy, Agent Smith (the embodiment of evil) engages in one-sided combat with Neo the hero. “Why do you persist Mr Anderson?”, Smith asks Neo as he prepares to deliver another beating. Neo staggers to his feet once more, sways as he gains his balance, and looks out from beneath his swollen brow: “Because I choose to”.

Sean Weaver and his wife Jo Campbell founded and host Ekodo (pronounced “ecodaw”) – a life-skills programme for compassionate agents of change. They live now in Golden Bay, New Zealand.

Sean works for himself as a climate change solutions consultant through his business Carbon Partnership. Jo is an artist and environmental educator.

Tags: ekodo