DAVID | MELBOURNE

My name Is David Green, 75 years of age, living in Melbourne, Australia, social worker and teacher, parent and grandparent, now exploring again the question of how am I to live today.

I welcomed Bamboo because it started with that question—how am I to live rather than what do I believe. Looking back, as you do a bit at this stage, I realise how much of the formative years and beyond were founded on what I believed, led by the key institutions of my life—faith based, political, ideological, professional. I allowed the key institutions of my life to define the meaning and implications of what was happening in the world Being too busy for contemplation, over time orthodoxies and sometimes dogma (and the comfort of being a true believer) diverted me from many of the difficult and complex question of our times.

The Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul has called my generation (in the affluent West) 'the unconscious civilisation'. Some of us have become increasingly detached from our responsibility for future generations and the natural world by progress, technology, the speed of change and politically/economically constructed individualism.

Bamboo offers the opportunity to reflect with others, to 'read the signs of the times' and to commit to be 'a contemplative in action'. To have the chance of sharing this experience communally and globally is very welcome to me.

David Green

David Green is a social worker and teacher and late life explorer of pathways to a more just and equal world. Some of these pathways include caring for grandchildren, growing vegetables, writing and walking on the streets of Melbourne, Australia.

And now Bamboo meditations each month at a Jesuit bush hut on the edge of the city.