Vanellus Miles

I've been reading up on root systems and plant technicalities. There are a few pine trees by the creek that have been knocked over in the wind. The humpy is now gone. Cleared away completely. I wonder if anyone ever steals down there in the dead of a cold winter night looking for shelter? If anyone is left standing in the under growth scratching their heads, and wondering what they are going to do while the suburbs sleep on contently.

I've figured out what common starlings are, and saw a small flock of them yesterday. Most of the birds you see from day to day are introduced species. I nearly stepped on a small parrot that was foraging on the footy oval. He looked like an escaped budgie. He and his less colourful mate didnt seem frightened of me at all. Practically all parrots are native.

A pair of Masked Lapwings were feeding there aswell.

The pleasure of Birdsong

I can hear birdsong this morning. As well as the daily freeway traffic growing louder. Yesterday, I read an article in New Scientist about the roots of music. It is thought that birds sing for pleasure. They have the same dopamine chemicals as us, at work deep in the primitive parts of their brain to release pleasurable feelings when they are singing. It is also thought that male birds feel more pleasure when singing to a girl bird. This is very poetic. But in typical scientific fashion, the poetry of nature is reduced and pared away until the only meaning it has left is a mechanical function.

I will admit, it disheartens me to think that the pleasure of birdsong, both for them and me, at its core is nothing more than a hardwired biological drive. Just a mechanism of survival. If that is the final meaning for everything, then all art and poetry, all of life, and sadly, even the pleasure of birdsong, are dead, mechanical things.

And there may be nothing in the world sadder than that.

Winter

I walked south Yesterday. Following the creek all the way from my house to the criss cross of overpasses that thread the western edges of the inner city.

There was a man pruning his fruit trees in his front yard along the way. Winter tasks. Cutting back bare, cold branches. Emptiness. Death. Survival. Waiting. I looked to my left and down the steep embankment where the water threads its way through the back blocks and overgrown slices of ground that are no good to anyone, was a flourishing family of what looked like Madonna lillies. Their delicate white curling chalices stood brightly and regally in the winter sun. A hidden testimony. A witness. A prophesy. That unlike our carefully controlled and manipulated lives and environments, where wildness roams, you can be arrested by unlikely, shocking beauty and unwarranted Grace.

Further along, a myna bird was bathing in the creek near a bridge. He sunned and dried himself on the concrete embankment that has been covered in fresh grafitti. Then a troupe of Sparrows did the same thing. Swooping down out of nowhere into the creek, fluttering their wings and puffing out their feathers in the cold, running water, then taking to the air again as one mind. One entity. Disappearing again into nowhere.

And then I began to notice something. Eucalyptus wattle. Brilliant red and yellow little fronds with sweet tips. Bright pink Geraniums. Pale Roses. The most luminous little expressions of life were finding my eyes where ever I looked. Even while many stood in the cold damp of their gardens menacing the empty branches with flashing blades . Why hadn't I noticed this before? It was a stark contrast to the previous three winters, where mostly I looked out on the bare Apricot tree by the fence. Sat in the cold with the emptiness and waited. Prayed cold prayes to a cold God. Just like that silent tree with its barren limbs by the fence. Expecting nothing from the absence of life or growth but the absence of life or growth.

But now, meandering south along the the creek, with the thoughts of a dead season still lingering, and not a thought of anything but the darkness and emptiness around, suddenly I couldnt seem to help but bump into life. Poking out from insignificant and abandoned spaces in the urban landscape. A reminder perhaps, that growth and budding occurs in some, even while in others there is only death at work in the limbs.

Winter

Looking out the window again. Another Winter. Another thousand cars thrumming by on the freeway. No wind. No sound of birds. Why do you not hear them as much in colder months? Are they rugged up in the nest? Contending like the rest of us, with the seasons and their attendant effects on the brain and limbs, the daily chores and disciplines?

The mid morning chill. The damp limbs of deciduous homes. Their world is our world. Their world is mine. We are creatures together. Interconnected. Yet I look out on them and their Winter silence through a window pane like some other world, separate from the one I inhabit. I look out as if through just another screen. A TV. A computer. A zoo. An Asylum. Just another screen through which I am entertained and distracted from my creatureliness. From my fellow creatures.