7 Birds

Today, the creek ran with fresh water after a little rain on the weekend. The sky was blue. The sun warm. Three bright green Rosellas darted across the creek and under the telephone wires. Three Common Myna's bathed themselves where the water coursed over some rocks. And a solitary grey heron with sulphur yellow legs stood on the lip of a tiny waterfall, where the fresh rain water tumbled down and diverged left and right.

The creek is flowing.

Beauty

Sparrows

There were five sparrows on the back lawn last night. Under the clothes line at dusk. Pecking at the grass. Such fragile creatures. Such plump examples of life. Of un self conscious existence. Meanwhile, I flail around, kicking at the confines of my skull. Weeping with a grief that wont stop. Like a river flooding its banks, it carves deeper and deeper recesses in me. Flattening the grass and smoothing rocks. Redrawing the land.

It would be nice to say it was a beautiful thing. In time it will be. People always marvel at the Grand Canyon, or the cascading red rock at Ulluru. Devestation accompanies the forming of beauty. Out of the quake of anguished longing comes purer and purer forms of love as quiet waters trickle down into the violent rending.

Grasping for the union we all crave. The loveless and abandoned become flooded creeks that turn to roaring foam. Deadly currents that carry us along and drown out our frantic squeals. Our calling.

Would be nice to find a blue or dark green lagoon. Quiet. Still, but for the haunting calls of floodplain birds. Long billed and thin limbed. Elegant anglers. Created by chance for deep and lasting purposes. Darting lidless eyes trained for flashing shadows in the murk.

Yes. Flashing shadows. All these flashing shadows in the murk.

Wind Swept Hill

I took a wander around a stretch of parkland by the river that snakes its way up through the north western Suburbs today. Its a section of land that was closed of to the public all through my childhood.

Now its been cleared, planted, mulched, and gravel paths laid down that follow a curve in the river that goes to the right, up, over a ridge, and then down again quite sharply to a tiny trickle of a creek, over grown with tall reeds. Around the edge of the river, on the western bank, white trunked Eucalypts, almost bare of foliage,their spindly limbs blackened at the top by creeping drought stood yawning in silent prayer. The river was a blue olive green. Very light around this part of it. Sparkling with sunlight that shot down into its unseen depth. A small flock of black cormorants were sailing down the river in a southerly direction. Diving for fish, one after the other. The unseen breeze gathering little wavelettes at their breasts.

My footsteps crunched over the gravel and up the brow of the hill. It was pretty steep. Scrubby bushes and dead trees and orange lichened rocks dotted the peak of the ridge. And I wondered to myself why it was that I felt so connected when walking in nature. My sould grew quiet and attentive to the life that is so crowded out among street signs and telphone wires, and blaring consumer porn.

The wind blew over the hill, pushing the bleached yellow waist high grasses and weeds down , scurrying northward. A thick brown dust was under my feet. And I kicked white and yellow stones and chunks of rock down the path. I stopped at a bench on the other side of the hill that over looked the surrounding suburbs below, and in the far distance, the spiked blue monoliths of the city sky line, jutting up. Blue glass an steel anthills in the distance. A cacophony of activity under the silent blue. There was a midget tree with the brightest yellow fruit I could imagine, dangling from gnarled and thorny limbs. The wind blew over the hill, and swept over my face. The aroma of slow baked land and leaf litter. The sense of Ancience. The sense of time. Slow erosion. unseen growth. I catch the wind sweeping over the hill in my lungs. And I breathe deep. I am alive.

I wish I could write about creation like this...

"I would often get up early in the morning and go out on my patio where the valley, stretching off to the mountain ranges in the north and east, was silver with predawn mist. the birds, eloquent voices in an otherwize silent world, had already begun their hallejulah chorus to welcome in the new day. The song sparrow sings with an enthusiasm which rocks him almost off his perch atop the apple tree, and the goldfinch chimes in with his obligato. The thrush in the woods is so full of song he cant contain himself. The woodpecker beats on the hollow beach tree. The loons over on the lake erupt with their plaintive and tormented daemonic, to save the whole thing from being too sweet...I feel again the everlasting going and coming, the eternal return, and the growing and mating and dying and growing again. And I know that human beings are part of this eternal going and returning, part of its sadness as well as its song."

- Rollo May

- Love and Will

The Cradle

It had been a difficult day. I came home feeling tired, drained. As if I had been constantly running into a brick wall and knocking myself out all day. So, I went to my haven. My refuge. Me, my guitar, and the sky. The night was warm. Didnt feel like playing. The notes sounded flat and dead as I strummed. Even they seemed uninterested. I tried to play something all the way through but it was a half hearted effort.

That was how I felt. Half hearted.

I rested my head in the cradle of the guitars curve, like a womans waist, and plucked absently at the strings. When I looked up, it was nearly dark. The street lights bathed everything in orange. Cars and trucks hissed by intermittently on the freeway.

The silhouette of some bird was high in the trees, listening to my half hearted prayer. My melancholy notes rising into the dark with his.