Arrival

After a bumpy 14 hour flight to Sydney from San Francisco, and a smoother flight to Melbourne, I arrived at my hotel actually invigorated. Everything is going smoothly and wonderful things are happening. On the bus from the airport to downtown Melbourne (The Bus station is only 2 blocks from my hotel) I met a woman who wasn't going to the Parliament but was involved with a women's gathering prior to the Parliament that was working on the situation posed by the Australian Government's forced reclamation of aboriginal villages in the Northern Territories. This is a complicated situation similar, in some ways, to the US's relationship the the native Americans. Apparently, in Australia, the government's attempt to reclaim the land is not as hostle as it might seem but is an attempt to be helpful and kind. But it is raising the profile of the "aboriginal question" which has been ignored for eons. It happened that the people behind me, who happened to be Wiccans, were very concerned about the disappearance of indigineous spiritualities around the world. The dialogue that followed was amazing for the breadth and variety of concern. No answers were forthcoming, but what struck me was that these kinds of discussions can take place with such openness. Each person was trying to learn what the other person saw so as to expand the understanding. I felt that this was but the beginning of the kinds of conversations I have to look forward to at the Parliament which begins in earnest Thursday evening.

After a shower, and a conversation via Skype between several people in different hotels here in Melbourne and the technician for the webcasting in San Jose where we continued to work out the details of the webcasting we hope to do, I and several of us wandered the side streets of Melbourne searching and finding a pub where, over lagers and platters of appetizers, we had conversations about our spiritual journeys and issues about science and religion and "religious science". Soon I will go to bed in preparation for tomorrow's webcast experiements, if we can get the press passes we have been promised and scope out the convention center and solve some of the technical problems before we begin the actual webcasting.