Meditation is not the answer. At least not for me. The moments of steady silence and deep breathing do wonders for me of course, like many people. However when I'm truly down, angry, facing emotional roadblocks, stunned or paralyzed, I've found the best cure is plain old fashioned hard labour. Pick shit up at point A and put it down at point B, 'cause it's just gotta go there. You're moving house? Pick up the phone and get me excitied. It gets me out of my head and into the bag of bones I call a body, and let's face it, we are well aware now that humanity is being run into the ground by people living in their minds far too much.
This is my blog about my experiences working on a coal mine shut-down in a small town in south-western Australia. I'm an unlikely candidate for such a project - a month long of 12 hour days, 6 days a week of hard labour as a 'tradesmans' assistant. I'm a bookish guy, university educated and I've been told i'm somewhat of a hippy (just a year ago I was campaining for the environment in Canada). I ended up back in Australia suddenly early in the year when my Mum fell ill and I had to make the snap decision to drop the life I'd built in Alberta and fly home.
If found myself in need of paid work after time spent with Mum at home and a brief stinting working on my uncle's pig farm in North Queensland. Not wanting to return to my previous life as a Canberra public servant just yet, I signed up as part of the 30 man crew as a labourer helping to service a massive open-cut mining machine. I'm being put up in town at the house of the safety supervisor, a friendly middle-aged guy who's also curious about the results of the social experiment of hurling a skinny young environmentalist into the punishing routine of long hours of labour on a mine-shut down in the southern heart of white Australia. I need the money and I'm a curious SOB.
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