Tribute to Frank Fisher
A great man died the other week. After a near life long battle with Crohn’s disease and an eight-month battle with cancer, Frank Fisher passed away peacefully in the presence of his family.
Frank was a kind of mentor to my mentors, and I’ve been honoured in the past year or so to share some special times with him, and to come to call him my friend. In a relatively short time, and in his inimitably subtle and unassuming way, he’s had a deep impact on my life. Rarely does someone meet a person of such a big mind and such a big heart. Frank’s ability to consistently bring such a deep attention to the people, things, and systems around him was truly incredible. He had such a passionate care for everyone and everything he encountered.
It was this care and attention that propelled Frank to become, in my mind at least, Melbourne’s original environmental guru. He was one of the first of us to see the environmental damage being caused by human ways of thinking and acting. Giving this his deep attention he has strived ever since to bring our attention to what we are doing. More importantly he helped us to understand our capacity to change what and how we do in ways that transform not just our relationship with the ‘environment’ but also our relationships with ourselves and each other.
Frank has taught and inspired so many of the people who are today working and living to transform our social environmental consciousness. Like Paolo Freire, Frank’s life has been an act of radical love, that unites mind, heart and deed in a praxis oriented to some of the most fundamental issues of life, how to be authentically in relationship with the world around us. Frank challenged us all to see deeper into who we are, collectively and individually; to understand the systems we have created to understand the world, each other and ourselves; to understand how these systems shape the way we live and interact; to understand how have the power to shape and change these systems; and most importantly Frank challenged us to all to act and live authentically from these understandings.
Frank and I share a disease known as Crohn’s, an inflammation of the bowl caused by factors we still don’t properly understand. Frank’s case was much more severe than mine, and in many ways he suffered as much from the removal of his bowel (this used to thought of as the best way of treatment) as from the condition itself. But it was how Frank responded to his condition that we can really learn from. Frank saw it not as a ‘disease’ (though his experience of it caused much ‘uneasiness’) but as a gift to be learned from, something to be given attention so that we all might benefit. He campaigned for better access to public toilets (something a Crohn’s sufferer might need at any time, but from which we can all benefit) and indeed to change the whole way we conceive of public toilets: why do they have to be purpose built, designed primarily to withstand vandalism and therefore become unattractive obtrusions we would rather not see? Why can’t we just make the ‘private’ toilets we already have ‘public’ thereby creating more opportunities for human interaction and solidarity around a basic shared need. If eating can bring us together, why can’t shitting?
Of course approaching disability not as a limitation but as a window through which to see the world differently is becoming increasingly popular in this 21st century. Somehow we’ve been more receptive to changing the ways we think in relation to ‘health’ than we have in relation to ‘environment’. So it’s been a curious fact that Frank’s radical questioning of the way we construct our world has led him to deep interactions with the health management community while simultaneously isolating him within the environment movement. Of course Frank wasn’t going to let other people’s conceptions of what was ‘right’, ‘important’ or ‘strategic’ stop him from authentically following his path. He listened to the critique, always engaged in dialogue with anyone willing, but quietly went on inspiring and provoking others to deeper insights and action.
Frank was a great fan of wilderness. Not just the wilderness of the forest, desert or ocean, but also the wilderness of the human mind. He saw that we each have within our minds the same creative capacity for new ways of being as exists across all the living organisms. He worried that somehow in the hustle and bustle and the sensory overload of our modern lives we were losing both these forms of wilderness, becoming more conformist with the ever-growing concrete structures that oppress both us and the ecosystems. He encouraged us to become wilder, in our thinking, our acting, our loving and our being. So I think that is the greatest honour we can do him:
attend to the wilderness…
A public memorial service celebrating Frank's life will be held at 11am on Saturday, 15th of September at the Edge Theatre in Federation Square, Melbourne.
Frank was a kind of mentor to my mentors, and I’ve been honoured in the past year or so to share some special times with him, and to come to call him my friend. In a relatively short time, and in his inimitably subtle and unassuming way, he’s had a deep impact on my life. Rarely does someone meet a person of such a big mind and such a big heart. Frank’s ability to consistently bring such a deep attention to the people, things, and systems around him was truly incredible. He had such a passionate care for everyone and everything he encountered.
It was this care and attention that propelled Frank to become, in my mind at least, Melbourne’s original environmental guru. He was one of the first of us to see the environmental damage being caused by human ways of thinking and acting. Giving this his deep attention he has strived ever since to bring our attention to what we are doing. More importantly he helped us to understand our capacity to change what and how we do in ways that transform not just our relationship with the ‘environment’ but also our relationships with ourselves and each other.
Frank has taught and inspired so many of the people who are today working and living to transform our social environmental consciousness. Like Paolo Freire, Frank’s life has been an act of radical love, that unites mind, heart and deed in a praxis oriented to some of the most fundamental issues of life, how to be authentically in relationship with the world around us. Frank challenged us all to see deeper into who we are, collectively and individually; to understand the systems we have created to understand the world, each other and ourselves; to understand how these systems shape the way we live and interact; to understand how have the power to shape and change these systems; and most importantly Frank challenged us to all to act and live authentically from these understandings.
Frank and I share a disease known as Crohn’s, an inflammation of the bowl caused by factors we still don’t properly understand. Frank’s case was much more severe than mine, and in many ways he suffered as much from the removal of his bowel (this used to thought of as the best way of treatment) as from the condition itself. But it was how Frank responded to his condition that we can really learn from. Frank saw it not as a ‘disease’ (though his experience of it caused much ‘uneasiness’) but as a gift to be learned from, something to be given attention so that we all might benefit. He campaigned for better access to public toilets (something a Crohn’s sufferer might need at any time, but from which we can all benefit) and indeed to change the whole way we conceive of public toilets: why do they have to be purpose built, designed primarily to withstand vandalism and therefore become unattractive obtrusions we would rather not see? Why can’t we just make the ‘private’ toilets we already have ‘public’ thereby creating more opportunities for human interaction and solidarity around a basic shared need. If eating can bring us together, why can’t shitting?
Of course approaching disability not as a limitation but as a window through which to see the world differently is becoming increasingly popular in this 21st century. Somehow we’ve been more receptive to changing the ways we think in relation to ‘health’ than we have in relation to ‘environment’. So it’s been a curious fact that Frank’s radical questioning of the way we construct our world has led him to deep interactions with the health management community while simultaneously isolating him within the environment movement. Of course Frank wasn’t going to let other people’s conceptions of what was ‘right’, ‘important’ or ‘strategic’ stop him from authentically following his path. He listened to the critique, always engaged in dialogue with anyone willing, but quietly went on inspiring and provoking others to deeper insights and action.
Frank was a great fan of wilderness. Not just the wilderness of the forest, desert or ocean, but also the wilderness of the human mind. He saw that we each have within our minds the same creative capacity for new ways of being as exists across all the living organisms. He worried that somehow in the hustle and bustle and the sensory overload of our modern lives we were losing both these forms of wilderness, becoming more conformist with the ever-growing concrete structures that oppress both us and the ecosystems. He encouraged us to become wilder, in our thinking, our acting, our loving and our being. So I think that is the greatest honour we can do him:
attend to the wilderness…
A public memorial service celebrating Frank's life will be held at 11am on Saturday, 15th of September at the Edge Theatre in Federation Square, Melbourne.
posted by James Tonson | 1:33 pm
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