Spoonbills in the rain

A family of white Spoonbills waded in the shallows of Skeleton creek as I walked the dog yesterday. The sleeting rain and low skies that cast the wind and salt swept landscape in a dusky grey palette, set their white plumage in a shock of  brilliant contrast that delighted the eye and shook the mind from its wrestless winter musings. Silently, they glided their precisely evolved, strange bills through the current coming in from the ocean  along the  salt encrusted bank.

As my eyes blinked and my body hunched against the stinging rain, and the dog strained against his leash and shook the the water from his coat, one dipped in the air above the creek, appearing suddenly, as an angel or a metaphor, then ascended again over the footbridge, and silently glided down to join the others.

The Grey Heron

There's a grey heron that stalks the vacant block across the road from the shopping centre. Black crows gather in large, prophetic covens on the street lights,  the edges of car parks and around bins to collect scraps of  discarded fast food meals. Their presence in mythic law foretells of a coming death. And I wonder if  their presence around the dumpsters and bins foretells the future of this time and place.A flat, windswept suburb close to the sea that can drive you mad with its carefully planned, funnel like streets and housing.

The grey Heron takes careful steps through the brown grass of the vacant lot. Head angled like an indigenous dancer. Eyes blinking. The pie and chip wrappers that blow  like tumble weed across now asphalted and landscaped  shell middens, collecting along the fences and in the low growing salt bush, don't interest him or anyone else for that matter. The blurred faces passing in the constant stream of traffic that flows up and down Merton St, morning and night and all afternoon, intent on their pressurized existence don't notice the adaptation of bird life to their decaying culture.

Wetlands

This blog that has laid dormant for so long is being reinvigorated by a desire to write something. The previous posts that have laid here unread by almost everybody have been recently edited,collated and published DIY style as a zine which was a rewarding thing to do as so much of this blog was written in almost total obscurity during what turned out to be a major depression. I thought it was beautiful in its way, being obscure, and I hope to recapture my love of writing, obscurity, and attempt to hold the tension that exists in the space created while you are at the same time striving to make something approaching real "art".

This seems to be a much more difficult task once you say to yourself, "I am going to make some art." Then, it seems, something vital to creative life, something I dont have a name for, evaporates and leaves your efforts feeling dry and contrived.

So, I am loathe to label what this will be about.  I will only say that since I stopped writing this blog, I have begun to live in new surrounds. A place void of hills or valleys, and close to the sea. A place with hardy native plants and a fierce wind that blows everything flat or crazy most days. Its a place of grasslands, factories, manufacturing plants, and oil refineries. A place of contradiction, in that these awful refining plants that blow smoke and fire day and night like strange volcanos lie within coo - ee of a large and protected coastal wetlands that host migratory birds who  travel up to 20 000 kilometres to get there.
 

The Final Summer?

This might be the last entry on this blog that perhaps no one has ever read apart from one or two people. And thats fine. I intentionally never added a site metre to this page. Coz I didnt really know at the time, but I needed to write this blog for myself. It became like a sacred space. Its uselessness and obscurity actually became very important. Its random meandering through three or four years of watching the seasons change. A hike through some pretty desolate interior territory. Some pretty black winters. Both physical and mental. A lot of looking out the window wondering what, if anything the future held. Noticing the smallest, insignificant nuances of nature around me, became like a kind of Psalmody. Even the black, gnarled empty branches of the Apricot tree became a symbol. A longing. Maybe a prayer. That there might be some kind of life on the horizon. Though you never really believe its possible. And it has actually formed part of my "journey through anguish to freedom" to borrow a line from a favourite Nouwen book of mine. Though I dont know if real "freedom" ever means freedom from anguish... So who knows if this will be the last entry here... time will tell.

But this entry seems fitting should it be the last one, as it kind of closes the circle, in a way.

I helped Frank to pick the fruit off the apricot tree this summer for the first time since I came to the hermitage. He's getting too old to get up a ladder, so we stood out there together, the other day, while he held the ladder and I filled about four or five plastic shopping bags with the little burnt orange gifts, and then passed them down to him. We left a few branches of fruit that were a bit difficult to get to.

"Gotta leave something for the birds to eat," Frank said. Indeed, Frank. You've gotta leave something for the birds. It did my heart good to help the man. Given that I had watched those limbs and branches through my window over the last four years, through the blackest moods, the darkest questions and terror. The fear that gripped and strangled my heart. The vacuous nothing that seemed to be closing in on me. Sucking any oxygen out of the air, making it unbreathable. Suffocating the flickering light of hope.

At times it truly was terrifying. I wish I could make you understand that.

But Frank didnt know. No one did. And it doesnt matter now. Summer is half done. Soon the leaves will be turning yellow again, and dropping to the ground.There will be more death before there is more life.

There was a green parrot in the top branches of the Apricot tree this morning. Almost the same green as the heart shaped leaves. There wasnt any fruit left for him to eat, so he squawked belligerently and took off over the rooftop and out of sight.

Summer

The Apricots are turning a deep orange, with burnt red speckles. I picked a bag of them for someone that came by to visit on Christmas day, late in the afternoon. They seemed happy and tucked into them, right there in the front seat of the car. "They will only fall on the ground and rot." It was nice to give a gift to someone that hadnt been born in the cogs of a dying empire, but grew, on its own at the edge of an eight lane freeway. Unseen. Unknown. Except for the invisible threads of relationship.

Spring

Ive been noticing the growth of the Apricots this Spring. They grow so quickly. A week or two ago, they were just tiny buds, barely visible in the armpits of spindly branches. This morning, as I took a moment in my day to meditate on the incredible mystery of growth and life, I was quite amazed by their size. I find them to be quite amazing. Such an ordinary, forgotten thing.

I also noticed, while playing my guitar in the back yard the other day, a pair of Willy Wagtails flitting around the apex of the roof and by the fence. I havent seen a pair together before.

Spring.

I dont, however, find that the exuberance of life present in this season to be something that sets my spirit soaring like it does for others. There is a breathlessness that takes me in the mystery of growth, and seasons and warm days, and something like love, or intimacy, but it is never completely free. It must find again the melancholy earth. It can not soar on warm breezes and long bright days only. The twinge of the thorn still stings, (blood must flow from the vein) even in brighter months when you might like to believe that everything in life is good.

Last days of Winter

In the last days of Winter, it is cold and raining. Real Winter rain. Steady and monotonous. But not the kind that soaks you immediately. The kind that soaks you without you really noticing it.Your feet are cold. Your fingers and your back feel the chill of the air. I do miss the Melbourne Winters of old.

I turned from my desk and there was a magpie lark sitting on the fence in the rain. I looked at him for a while. He looked around and sat there a while too. We didnt make eye contact. He has his life and I have mine. We are interconnected yet quite separate. Im not sitting on a fence out in the rain, and he's not looking out the window from a desk strewn with papers and thoughts and words and bits of hair that have formed into tumbleweeds in the corners. When I looked back he was gone.

I didnt hear him go.

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.

Where d o they go?

Theres a good soaking rain today. Soaking rain makes me want to write. You dont hear any birds when its raining. Where do they go? Ive been seeing green rosellas alot lately. In pairs, usually on telephone wires, or shooting low across the train tracks in little squadrons. Lots of black crows as well mounting bins like dark prophets...and the magpies on the lawn have been quiet, now their young are more mature. They graze the large spaces across the road under the gums.

The rain has been pounding all morning. And it feels good. The sound of it outside is very soothing to the ground. You can forget how dry your soul is sometimes. You stop noticing the little things that nourish you. The relationships, weathering the storms of many years, and weathering themselves, like good leather. Coming and going. The rain may continue all day. I hope it does. The birds in their hiding places. Life and its weathering.

Strange fruit

Its unusually quiet and still this morning. the freeway traffic sounds pretty heavy, but apart from that everything is very quiet. Its warm, but theres a gentle rain falling - that lovely humid smell.

The leaves of Eucalypts out the window are hanging down in lifeless silhouettes, like strange fruit in the trees. Nothing stirs in nature, not a twig, not a leaf.... And all the while thousands upon thousands of cars roar up and down the free way. Going where I dont know...

Thirsty Bones

Its quiet this morning. The moisture that condensed on the window over night blurrs and obscures a view of the yard, excpet through thin rivulets that streak down like tears. The grass is bright green and standing at attention. Powder blue lichen on the reptilian bark of the apricot tree is brilliant under the ashen sky.

For three years Ive been looking out on that tree. Watching it change through the seasons and produce fruit. Watching as Frank fills up shopping bags full of Apricots every Summer. Watching the blossoms bud and blaze their little magenta hearts to the world, then fade and drop to the ground like martyrs in their graves, nourishing further growth.

I watched the plump heart shaped leaves take their familiar form. Almost peripherally conscious of them, you come and go, smile and cry, taste the black salty blood seeping through the cracks in your soul, and one day you look up and are slapped in the face with a bonfire of green and yellow. You watch it die again and again. Over and over. And sit with its barren limbs through the winter months. the two of you silhouetted together against the darkening sky and shortening days.

Theres a silent yearning in those limbs. Those black, skeletal fingers that curl against the icy backdrop of the unknown blue love that mourns over them. Longing for what they know, without any speech, must surely come. Longer days and a gentle sun. Warmth spreading in their thirsty bones, lying dormant under the earth.

Winter

Theres something about seasons and weather that reminds me of the fragility of humaness. The winter months cause what is now considered to be a recognised depressive disorder in modern society. The ongoing drought and lack of rain cause a rethink on how we live and what we live for. The weather and seasons slow us down. Remind us of our roots. That we are but dust, and to dust we shall return.

Speaking of rain, there has been quite a bit lately. I took a walk along the creek after the first steady twenty four hour deluge we've had in perhaps a year or more. It was very refreshing to see the creek flowing and everything sodden and wet. The limbs and foliage of trees and bushes were heavy and wiliting under the weight of the approaching winter. The creek sounded fresh. The air smelled clean. The houses are sleepy under the gaze of the melancholy sky that hangs its mourning brow low over the roofs.

The community of ducks that make their home here were swimming around happily. Their demeanour is visibly different after a good rain. The bubbling creek is joy to them. The sodden earth and long wet grasses that become a luminous green in this light, weeping over the banks with sad gratitude, are their love. The sky was a heavy grey, and a wintry haze blanketed the suburbs. People were walking their dogs in dark jackets and heavy clothing.

There is something comforting and energising about the melancholy season.

The seasons and weather can force us into interiority. Then we realise the fruitlessness of many things. All the needless attachments we have. We spend so much time in panic. Building our modern edifices in defiance of the natural order. God must weep for our brilliant, gleaming cities like Jesus did for Jerusalem. In our modernity, we have come to fear nature. The fire, the earth quake, the flood. It cracks us open. Spills our hubris in the dust to be soaked up by the thirsty ground. They will all inevitably come upon our humanity with devastating force. But the still, small voice of the Lord will not be in any of these.

I hope for a dark, sodden Winter.

(Un)Happy Feet

A fairy penguin was found 12 kilometres up the maribyrnong river. ( Very close to where I grew up)It was the first that had been spotted so far inland in the northwestern suburb of Essendon, and was found by wildlife Victoria volunteers near the Anglers Tavern.

Unfortuantely, the little fella died. So far from his natural habitat, and normal diet, it wouldnt have taken him long to lose a lot of weight. There have also been a few callous attacks on these little birds around the subburban beaches recently, where they nest in rocks and breakwaters.

Look at the Birds...

In the Northern Hemisphere, spring begins to bud and flourish. Here, the days grow short and the leaves begin to turn yellow. Soon cold will settle, while up north, the earth will begin to warm once more..

Still, the life of birds speaks to both seasons..

SongBird

I hear alot of birdsong where I live. Magpies nest in the trees across the road and regularly forage in my front yard. Sometimes, they even stand outside my open front door on the concrete, as if waiting for something.

Apparently it has recently been proved that songbirds originated in Australia..

"In 1986, it was thought that all songbirds like robins, wrens and nightingales originated in the northern hemisphere before migrating to Australia via Asia."

Apparently, it aint neccessarily so..

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