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.