Abstract

City parks and gardens are environments established to enhance, complement and offset the economic and residential conditions of urban living. Composed of life forms attributed to the ‘natural world’ for human pleasure and wellbeing, these ‘green spaces’ are socially inscribed with liminal potentialities. As ontological islands in geographic space, urban parks and gardens exist in, and generate tensions between, orderings of reality in modern societies. An Adelaide group of environmentalists and their friends meet regularly in the Adelaide Park Lands to practise Reiki spiritual healing. In their group healing sessions, they bring a cultural discourse of health and harmony associated with green and natural places to the social foreground in their use of spontaneous, ambient vocalisation. Drawing on understandings of healing energy derived from notions of ultimate truth as a universal, animated energy of love, the members of the Reiki group give voice to their spiritual experience of communal healing. As a feature of improvisation, the emotional spiritual tone of vocalisation is not a formal component of Reiki healing technique, and it challenges the social constraints of conduct in public place as rational space. This chapter explores how ambient vocal sound produced as spiritual emotion takes up conceptual gaps in social ambivalence about ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ space, composing public space as cosmic spiritual space.

Just begin making a sound, then it becomes comfortable. Next, explore … the sound, directing it to the person; then become immersed, absorbed in the energy of the sound and there's no … space between oneself and the sound for … thought, a dissolving of barriers, preconceptions, self‑consciousness of whatever is between you and the other person. (Interview with Tom, 1 April 2011)