Things of Astonishment

Sometimes, when you've been inside too many days in a row, venturing out is a walking into astonishment.  Today at Birdsland I walked past the barbecue area, over the little bridge and alongside the cow paddock.  It's always very pleasing to me to see this paddock.  It is gently but highly rounded and accompanied by a half moon hayshed, and at this time of year the grass is getting wildly green again.  The paddock is backdropped in the near distance by many trees with green hues ranging from mid green to olive.

Today, the haziness of the air showed up against the tree backdrop.  I stopped, because my watch was beeping.  It told me that from the car to the paddock I'd already gone over my allotted heart rate limit.  I've taken this limit as my marker.  It was set by some CFS researchers who found that keeping under this rate is a handy thing to do if you wish to exercise without too much payback.  That the heart rate limit is a pitifully small 105 is particularly frustrating and slightly embarrassing, but I wish to exercise in a way that has the least amount of effect tomorrow and the day after and the day after as possible.

I gazed at the paddock and as I looked, over the top of the hill came a badling of ducks.  To describe a group of ducks as a badling seems a bad thing but apparently it's a thing.  These ducks are usually found on and around the lake that begins a little further up ahead on my walk, but today as I watched they spilled over the hill, about 30 of them, pecking at stuff hidden in the grass that was gently idling in the warm April sun.  To see them pour over the hill is really not so much of a big deal, but then when you are in a certain space it feels like a thing of astonishment.

I only walked up to the big bridge and back.  I'm trying to live within limitations so I can expand those limitations, even though sometimes I feel like taking methamphetamine and going clubbing.  But today it was the bridge and back, and I focused on not feeling hard done by but instead on feeling grateful that I was out having this walk at all.

The water ran under the bridge and pulsed over the rocks on its journey.  I leant and gazed into the water and the sun ripples glittered into my eyes in a most pleasing fashion and it felt like a thing of astonishment, the way this most beautiful world that we are a part of works.

On the way back, I was almost astonished at the two people who said hello to me.   So many of the people I saw felt like me - smothered under a layer of generalised anxiety caused by a disordered world.  I could feel it.  In that space, everything is The Other, even yourself.  When I am feeling less misanthropic than I confess I was today, I would take the opportunity to originate the hello to more than the two people that I did, and from whom I received no response in return.  I wish I wasn't so sensitive, that someone not returning a hello that they might have not even heard, let's be honest, did not hurt, but I confess that it does.
That's why I liked standing and staring at the three cows that were down near the paddock fence.  Animals just are.  And seriously, those big black cows look like enormous dogs.  Everything looks bloody well astonishing.  All of this variety of life.  It's just so truly beautiful and nothing says duality like feeling like a misanthrope while at the very same time feeling at one with the world, but hey, it's a fucking mess at the crumbly end of this version of civilisation.  But now I think about it, perhaps it says nonduality more than duality.  Perhaps the negative and the positive all fit in the same boat, all together in a messy wet blob.  I don't know.  This is why I go walking, to help ease the strain of thinking so hard about all of this stuff.

Not that there's anything wrong with thinking.  I think it's quite an under-appreciated habit, to be quite honest with you.  It's just the degree to which you think.  When you can feel steam escaping out the top of your head, you know it's time to go for a walk. 
If you can.  And when you can it is a most common, everyday dinnerset, tracky dacks kind of astonishment.

I stood, my watch beeping, and stared at the cows, the gentle autumn sun fondling their backs, and a man and his four children walked towards me and they smelled fresh.  The children had animation in their eyes.  The little boy looked at me with that twisted kind of mouth that says "I refuse to smile at you even though part of my body wishes to disobey."  The man said hello.  They felt like a switched on family.  That felt very nice to me.  When the man said hello he looked in my eyes and his relaxation and positive switched onedness flew across the path and into my head.  How very astonishing.

After they walked past one of the little kids said, "Daddy, what's that ... the thing ... that thing?" and the daddy answered, "I don't know."

Back at the little bridge just before the barbecue area, the creek was holding up some fuzzy green water moss on its surface.  The moss looked like it totally belonged there, even though there are a million different combinations of moss that feasibly could be there instead.  So many options, variable, possibilities.  And there's really something a little astonishing about that.

Hills Ambivalence

I remember when I first started seeing my partner.  He lived in Belgrave in the Dandenong Ranges on the outskirts of Melbourne (still does - and now I do too), and when I came to visit I'd get enraptured about the animal life in abundance out the door.   I still do - the kookaburras, the rosellas, the king parrots (especially the king parrots.  The combination of their beautiful silky eye and the sweet sounds that come from their throats won me over immediately).

And I fell in love with the cockatoos.  Such enormous things.  So smart.  You could see them sussing you out and thinking about stuff.

I fell in love with a cockatoo who I worked with for a day.  Our boss was away and so my co-worker brought in his pet to work.  Now, if I was at school with Mary and she'd brought her lamb, I'd be the kid vomiting from overexcitement, laughing and playing like a mad thing, to see a lamb at school.  It just breaks up the monotony, right?   An adult bringing in their cockatoo to work while the boss was away was altogether too delightful for even my shite memory to forget.  I commandeered Ollie for as much time as I possibly could that day.  I sat, working on a typesetting machine that seems now like it's something out of the 1890's even though it was 1987, while Ollie nibbled occasionally upon my ear.

It was a good day.

And so because cockatoos are so cool, I was a little curious about why my partner was so antagonistic towards them.  What's there to hate, right?

Well, this, for example, done entirely at the hand - or beak, rather - of those gorgeous cockies.

 

I think cockatoos chew up stuff for pleasure, along with other practical reasons like beak-sharpening and cleaning purposes.

Wouldn't it be nice if cockatoos could be trained to mess only with wood that's not attached to your house.  Like the masses of trees surrounding it, for instance.  If I could become the cockatoo whisperer, I'd be in great demand amongst Australian house owners.  Or if I could build a beaking post that cockatoos were insanely attracted to, that was painted in an environmentally friendly cockatoolian version of catnip, I'm pretty sure there'd be a market for that, too.

Nature is amazing in its resourcefulness and reuse and upcycling.  Animals (including people, before Bunnings existed) use what's there in creative ways.  And that's why one bird's pleasurable destruction has become (at least temporarily) another mammal's home.  Take a squiz, a little closer.

See that greyish-lookin' thing?  That's a bit of a possum. 

Perhaps there aren't enough hollowed-out bits of logs to go around, and the last possum in for the night is stuck with the crappy digs, like a shitty, cheap motel with poo stains on the carpet.  This is not the biggest of spaces - I've felt inside.  That possum sleeping in there would be squashed.  And it was hot last night.  It sure can't be all that comfortable rammed in there with fur on top.

The Theoretical Garden

I was talking back in May about how big my garden would need to be if I grew my own ingredients from every plant or tree that I ingest in handy form from the shops.  There are a few more that need to be added to my list at the moment.  Those who have read here for a long time (all three of you) know that I'm on an ongoing quest for better health, and for ultimate recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome.  It's an ongoing quest because, quite frankly, parts of my body are not in particularly good, well-functioning order after a long-term illness and antibiotic regimens.  Those parts of the body are also the ones that are not generally spoken about in polite society.  (I find in my online readings of forums that women, so often, seem to have to go on with the requisite "Eww" and "That's gross" and such comments so that everybody knows that even though they're talking about such gross stuff like their own bodies, they're still feminine and all, you know?  But honestly, there's so much of that stupid squirmy my-body-is-gross stuff that goes on that you would think that they had Barbie mounds and their shit didn't even happen, let alone stink ... but anyway, I digress :)

Hmmm.  Anyway, so even though I diverged there, I do most heartily concur that trees and shrubs and living things are far prettier than me talking about my bowels.  Even though it's fascinating (did you know, for instance, that the gut has receptors in it that are connected to your brain?  A second brain, as it were.  Hence trusting those gut feelings because they balance out the brain in your head with a different kind of wisdom.  A body brain.  And also, my father's comment to people he disliked on the  TV and to us kids that "You've got shit for brains" ... well, Dad, you're not so far off in some respects).

Anyway, my digression digressed.  As I was saying, as my bowels are not of interest to you, instead of talking about them I will add a few more plants to my theoretical garden (which looks far more organised than the real garden, which does not have any of the herbs or vegetables we had planned to plant into it by this stage but instead is growing a lovely pile of daisied weeds at this point in time).

The first new tree to the theoretical garden is the black walnut tree, or juglans nigra.  It's a gorgeous-looking thing, and I could sit under it in my garden and read.  My partner with his magic hands could fashion it into woodish things, as according to this site it is "unquestionably the finest wood in the world."  But what I'm after in my apothecary is the nut, the black walnut, picked green and hulled.  This little baby goes into a nice little concoction with the two items listed below to kill parasites, the latest of my health quests.

Creative Commons pic by Jean-Pol Grandmont

I would need to be careful about where I planted this next shrub in my garden because it can inhibit the growth of other plants grown near it.  Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood, is the bitter herb that goes into absinthe and drives you into beautiful before it drives you mad, according to folklore (although this Wikipedia entry argues that it is no more harmful than other spirits).  The pretty silver-green leaves will be pressed for their oil, to go into the tincture form.

Creative Commons pic by Matt Lavin

Can you guess what spice these flowers are?

Creative Commons pic by Dainee.

They're more easily recognisable in their dried form as cloves (syzygium aromaticum to you, Jack).  Apart from being the most wonderful-smelling air freshener when you boil five or so on the stove with a cinnamon stick, cloves go well in apple pies and, less appetisingly, here in my tincture, where they kill parasitical eggs.  Those tiny little sticklike buds come from a tree that can grow from 8-12 metres tall.

Creative Commons pic by Adrien2008

It is winter, the time he is loudest in his call for a mate.  And so though he hides, being shy, twice in a row we have heard his array of fine impersonations on our walks to the falls.  His range of bird mimicry is top-notch, one imitation after another to such a high standard that you'd think there were 10 different varieties of birds all hanging around in a hidden clearing beyond the ferns.

And although it's funny and impressive, it's his kookaburra impersonation that ultimately makes you know it's a lyrebird you're having the privilege of hearing.  Not being a speaker of kookaburrian myself, I nevertheless can spot something a little off-key about the call - it ends differently, a little too soon, like a kookaburra with Alzheimer's.  It's as if someone comes reciting an impressive paragraph of prose to you, with a fine command of the intricacies of the language, only to furrow their brow when you ask them what their name is :)

The lyrebird's native call is a hard-to-describe sound, a sort of downward ewwwwww followed by an upward sort of something which sounds the way a whip made of cool mint would, hitting the air.  Sometimes it rings out so clear, the sound lingers for a second or two, like a singing bowl in the air.

I have posted this before on my blog but it's worth a repeat.

Hell is empty, all the devils are here

Hell is empty;  all the devils are here.

~ William Shakespeare.

It's a funny sort of coincidence isn't it, considering the narcissism and self-absorption our culture encourages us to dwell in, that it has not yet become an acceptable idea in our Western cultures that your normal everyday Joe or Gina on the street - or you - have a deep, dark, nasty side.  A side that we may see occasionally, but flinch from.  Our shadow sides.

Even more so the idea that contained within that shadow side could be something scary, destructive, diabolical.  Sure, we like to examine the darker depths of those who we perceive as "monsters" or "animals".  Those people we examine under microscopes, horrified and compelled, at the levels that some humans can stoop to.

But just not us.  Or at least, not me.  Maybe you.  Maybe everyone I come into contact with, but certainly and definitely not me.

We find it very hard, almost impossible, to believe that we could be capable of the same sorts of things as those people.  We scrabble to distance ourselves from them because we cannot bear to think about the alternative - that we are all capable of abhorrence.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the storyteller and Jungian analyst, talks about the predator, the part of our psyche which is unredeemable, which cannot listen to reason.  The demonic part of our souls.  Many of us in the nominally Christian West rail at that idea on several different levels.  Firstly, the Devil has been perceived via the childish abomination that is the Christian religion to be something outside of ourselves, some stupid caricature.  It all seems so childish.

But what if the demonic lives in here?  What if the Devil is a part of us all?  It would mean, yes, that we have to face and fight that which we are terrified of, which we almost cannot bear to admit lives in us.  But if the Devil is a part of us all, then for balance and hope's sake could we not also believe (and maybe even experience in oure more enlightened moments) that the God is in here too.  To help us.  Whether you see God/Devil as individual personages or as archetypes doesn't seem to make all that much difference in the outcomes of things, from where I'm seeing it today.  But then that's another story for another time :)

To face and do battle with these elements of our own psyches is, from where I'm sitting, turning into a matter of life and death.  Because if we do not face the dark elements of our own psyches, we will find it harder (or maybe even impossible) to face those same dark elements in the world.  And those dark elements are routinely and systematically destroying our earth, even in the face of climate change, for their own shortsighted ends.

As above, so below.  And as within, so without.  Those destructive forces that I see in my own soul, they threaten to overwhelm me, to destroy me, just like they are threatening in the outer world.  Those same forces are in you.  It is only by acknowledging them, facing them down, learning to not bow to them, learning to not be terrified in their presence - owning them - that I  learn, almost in disbelief, that these elements only have the power that I give them.  And that I can take that power away.  

It is where anger comes into its own.  It is an energy.  It fires itself slowly in your belly, into flame, into the energy that it takes to rouse yourself into productivity, into movement, out of torpor, out of stupor.

Being an account of soup, bisexual flowers and healing bark

I often wonder how big my yard would need to be if I had to grow everything I ate there.  Well, I don't often wonder that.  That would be sorta weird, wouldn't, it, but I do think about it from time to time as I go about my life being able to purchase vast quantities of herbs and spices and thingymies and jiggeries that wend their way to me from parts round the globe to end up looking rather dull in the local supermarket, so that I have to actually take the time to ponder their origins and write, in sentences far too long for good readibility, about how rich it makes me feel to have all of this stuff to be able to cook with and drink whenever I want.

Whereas these Indian women who are picking the camellia sinesis leaves that go into my five-a-day tea habit do not.  We are very lucky, my friends.  When I feel displeased because the era impedes on me with its whirrings and ringings and connectedness-but-notness, I remind myself of the basics of a rich life:  a bed, a roof, and a full pantry.

Image: Nac Datta

This is capsicum annuum.  From this variety we get regular capsicums (known also as bell peppers), cayenne pepper and paprika.  It would also need to grow in my garden because the paprika's gone into the slow cooker for tonight's chickpea soup.  Today it freezes in Susieland in a raining winterishness, and so a bit of pepperishness goes into the soup to keep the immune system running hot.

Image: Douneika

The brassica oleracea, or cabbage, is very unsexy.  It's sort of like the vegetabilic equivalent of a pair of daggy tracky dacks with the bum hanging out.  But I love cabbage.  Whether I love it in the above soup remains to be seen, because Chickpea and Cabbage Soup ain't exactly the thing you dream of rushing  home for when Mum's cooking, but we shall see.

Image: Frank Starmer

This is fabacae, sp. caesalpinioidae, and while we're here, aren't these Latin names rather tiresome?  There's not a lot of timbre about them, is there?  It's like other Latin words, like clitoris and testes;  it just takes all the humanity or shrubanity or life essence out of these things and turn them into something cold and antiseptic that you certainly would not want to touch even with a bargepole, let alone anything else.  Whereas plenty of people like to touch clitorises and testes, and actually find it quite a pleasurable experience.

Drinking this is also quite a pleasurable experience, although not in the same category.  But a cup of senna tea  is a lovely thing to help ... well, you know, move things along down there.  

Yeah, I know, I'm getting all coy suddenly talking about poo, after I've just talked about clitoresis and testes. But those are generalised clitorises and testes, not my personal ones.  Whereas now you all know that I had a cup of senna tea today because the cableman came round and there wasn't any cable to lay.  

Image: Lalithamba

This last one is my favourite.  It is ulmus rubra, commonly known as the slippery elm.  It's not the leaves or the flowers or the fruit that are eaten this time, but the bark.  

Speaking of the flowers, Wikipedia informs me that the flowers of elm trees are bisexual or unisexual.  Well, there you go.

Image: (C) Steve Baskauf

Ground down into a fine powder and drank, the bark becomes very moist and sticky when mixed in water, which helps to soothe inflamed parts of the body.  People use it to help with their inflamed gastrointestinal tracts, bringing relief to sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome and leaky gut syndrome.  

My old doggy had a bad day yesterday, throwing up his guts all over the floor.  A visit to the vet last night reported an overindulgence in bones (mea culpa) resulting in an overtaxed system and an inflamed stomach.  And so I was particularly heartened this morning when Lester, after not eating anything yesterday, partook of his very own soup:  broiled chicken in slippery elm and chicken stock-flavoured water.  Dat dog knows what's good for him.

Which may very well end up being tastier than the version the two leggeds have this evening, but we shall see :)

Image: Swamp Dude

Evolutionary Unfoldments

I was listening to someone on the radio before talk about the evolutionary history of octopusses.  As he was speaking he kept referring to the evolutionary process as if it was something outside of the octopus, something imposed on it.  He'd say things like, "Evolution has done X, Y and Z".

I don't like that.  I prefer to think that the evolutionary dance of a million possible variations came out of the octopus.  Not as some boring, mechanical sort of a thing, as if it only had one way of becoming itself, but as Life dancing itself outwards.

Of course, the octopus is a product of its environment, so of course where it has grown up over millions of years has shaped the way it has turned out.  Of course.  No octopus is an island, after all, any more than any human is.

But still, despite all of that, I like to remind myself that the octopus had an infinite variety of evolutionary unfoldments it could have taken from within that frame.  A myriad of possibilities.   A dance that it danced in the way it danced it and now look how it has unfolded.  Looking so itself that we might forget it could have turned out any other way.

Gloomy Octopus by Richard Ling

Squirmy Squirmerson

The sound of 200 locusts flying through the air at once is a gentle one, like soft rain.  Inside your A-frame holiday house they ping themselves against the roof outside for hours on end, one after the other.  You begin telling yourself that the sound is simply the roof contracting in the heat.

When you are in your car, tons of them fly into the windscreen every second.  You can tell the locals on the roads by the mesh patches covering the front of their cars to protect their radiators.

Even the windscreen carnage becomes something you ignore after a while.  You just block it out because it's gross and you feel awful that all of these bugs are dying.  But even feeling gross, you simply do not notice it after a while, in the same way that familiarity causes the mansion dweller with the million dollar views to not see the Harbour anymore when he looks out his window.

When you both clean the front of the car with a brush and soapy water, you make sounds and feel ill.  The colour of a splattered locust is mustard.  A darker yellow than the fat on the dead human bodies when you watched Anatomy for Beginners and almost as vomit-worthy.

You feel awful for the locusts;  they are just going about doing their locusty thing, after all.  The weather conditions in Victoria have been ripe for them.  The state government has spent millions of dollars trying to eradicate them. You don't want to think about the chemicals they have been using to eradicate them.  One more toxic load of chemicals to add to the already toxic liver load that human beings suffer under every day.  Perhaps it would have been easier to leave them be.

Only to die on the windscreen of a Ford Focus.  You feel guilty, because you are a hypocrite.  You want to practise non-violence towards all living beings.  Your Jainist heart wants to wear a piece of fine material over your face so you don't inadvertently swallow even a bug, but you have killed hundreds of little beings on the way to your holiday destination, where you spray flies with fly spray and eat chicken.

You wonder how you would feel about the locusts, however, if they were to become a swarm.  The ones you saw were not a swarm.  There were large numbers of them, but the pesticides kept their numbers down simply to large numbers of locusts, flying in all different directions, diffuse.  In higher densities, just like humans, their behaviour changes and they become an army, moving as one, out of necessity, for food (unlike so many of our army movements of recent times, based on overactive fear and greed and power hunger).

You do not think the sound of locusts movements would be like gentle rain then, if it was a swarm.  It would be something more sinister, that would strip crops bare.  And then you wonder, would you begin to hate them then, when they have wreaked so much havoc?

You observed a locust at close range late one afternoon when you were out preparing to eat barbecued chicken sausages and salad and the locusts were preparing to bed down for the night, back into the holes from whence they came.  It looked different somehow to the others you saw - no striping on its body.  Perhaps it was a juvenile.  You looked at it right up close.  Its eyes were closed, and it looked intricately fashioned out of a piece of wicker.  A beautiful thing, really.  Beautiful like a human, potentially destructive like one too.  But still, like a human, wanting to live, intricately fashioned, beautiful and awful, simply living in the best way it knows how.

Locust housing

Sunday Visitations

The rainbow lorikeets sit in the shrub in the garden and call for a sunflower seed delivery.  They have two rather different sorts of conversational tone.  The first one is sweet and chirpy, talkative.  The second is screechy, almost imitative of cockatoos in its harshness.  These little buggers are territorial - even amongst each other.   A long, long stream of seeds, laid out along the railing of the decking and flung onto the ground - enough for everyone - does not stop their in- and outfighting.  They will yell at birds twice their size without a qualm.  Must be something to do with those little demonic red eyes :)

Pic by Fir002, used under a GNU free documentation license

I have a soft spot for the rosellas.  Far more timid than the lorikeets, they wait their turn, slipping in where they can.  They have the lovely soft chirps and conversational tones of the lorikeets without the screech.  When I was a second-floor flat dweller in Kew over a decade ago, I would be visited each day by a bunch of these guys.  They helped me feel grounded whilst on the second floor, even as they flew in and flew out.

Pic by Fir002, used under a GNU free documentation license

Hills-dwellers may squirm to see this bird here because cockatoos are pests.  It is hard to be amenable to a large bird who insists on eating portions of your house and who bullies the smaller birds but oh, I really do have a soft spot for these creatures.  They are so smart and they are such good listeners.  They sometimes sit on the eaves of the house and watch me as I come out the door, bobbing their head, thinking it through, missing nothing.  Their screech at dusk is cacophanous.

When I was an apprentice typesetter and our boss was away, one of my workmates brought in his pet cockatoo.  I sat working, with the excitement butterflies swimming around in delight in my stomach, with Ollie perched on my right shoulder, nibbling my ear.  These birds learn a lot and belie the term "birdbrain" at every turn.

Pic by Bloody Nick

The little kookaburra dudes have captured my heart - and the heart of a man I know who purchases mince especially to feed his gaggle of eight, who fly in from the surrounding trees to  grab a deftly-thrown portion from out of the air.  Their beaks make a most satisfying sound when they click them.

This one has been visiting for years.  Literally eats out of your hand.  Their shape is so round and satisfying, their call puts a smile on my face.

(See the eaten away parts of the decking to the left of the kookaburra?  Them's those naughty cockatoos).  

Pic mine

You Love the Thunder, and you Love the Rain

It's been raining here off and on ever since last evening.  Wrapping me up inside my house. A bit more pleasant now it's cooled down somewhat and it's not so muggy.

Rain used to be something that was an interruption to whatever I was doing.  Now it is an interruption to whatever I am doing but a sort of call back to myself, to simple things, to what matters.  A pause in my day, the smell of the earth rising up to remind me.

So beautiful.

Strutter

Yesterday, as the train pulled out of Footscray Station taking me home, I watched a pigeon, businesslike, walk in its bizarre Egyptian way down the middle of the platform.  Heading towards what I don't know, but it sure had a strutting but relaxed purpose about it.

Sometimes the smallest of things ground me into the earth. The way a pigeon can walk in that awfully jarring way and be relaxed at the same time 'cause that's just how it is in pigeonland.  The criss-crosses on the side of their necks.  That sort of thing.

One of these things is not like the others ...

... one of these things just doesn't belong
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

It was chilly at the Olinda Arboretum today. I'm talking spencer and long johns (sexy), long-sleeved top, windcheater, thick jacket, hat and gloves. After taking the little path wending its way off into the trees, I sure warmed up quick though. Heart attack walking. I need more of it.

I want to live in Olinda. I'm going to see if the mountain is there after this next firebomb summer. If it is, I seriously want to think about it.

It smelled so fine amongst all those trees. We saw nobody else on our walk. Heard nothing except the birds. It was rejuvenating.

Goodness me, look at those wrinkles :\

This below is Blob. He is my inner critic. As you can see, he is a surly bastard. It's funny, but externalising this part of myself has allowed me to have more compassion towards it somehow. Blob is scared. I can see it underneath his horrid ugly surliness :) I am hesitating about whether to smash him to pieces with a hammer. If I do, I am going to do it at Spring equinox. My inner perfectionist, which Blob fuels, however, feels much more inclined to smash him now that I have ruined him. This morning, while hollowing out his base, I inadvertently gouged a hole in Blob's throat. Which is ironic, really, considering that he's the bastard that gives me such struggle with speaking my own truth. Ha. See how you like it.

I could yell it at him but it wouldn't make any difference because while I was hollowing him out both his ears also fell off. I tell ya, my inner perfectionist screams seeing this thing with a hole in its neck and no ears. It maketh me to laugh.

I went to the Counihan Gallery yesterday afternoon specifically to see this. There were two of them, stuck up on the wall like deer heads. Amazing. And very confronting (as is much of the work by amazing artist Sam Jinks). Amazing, so unbelievably lifelike. A most disconcerting experience too because the heads are about half the size bigger again than a human head. So you're standing in front of this bloke looking at his nose hairs, literally, and feeling almost like he's going to open his eyes, this larger than life tattooed human with no body. Made me ponder and think lots about different sorts of things which I wont go in here because I don't want to sound like a wanker :)


Pic: Most likely copyright violations going on all over the place here, but you can see them at their rightful place at www.samjinks.com.

Liar bird?

Just came across this on my cousin's Facebook page. I'm wondering how many northern hemisphereans have heard of the lyrebird? They are the most amazing imitators of other birds ... and anything else they may hear in their worlds, as you can hear for yourself :)

There are plenty of them around the Dandenong Ranges where I have my art therapy sessions. Their own song is pretty as well but add this sort of repertoire and I'm sure they must be roping in the broads no worries :)



God love David Attenborough. The love he has for the natural world brims forth on his face; beautiful man.

Tree Fix

Birch trees at the Olinda Arboretum



Room to breathe

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

+++
Seen at White Flint Farm

Wintahh

His approach feels entirely different this year. Much less Old Man Winter. While in the past decade he's felt decidedly like a palliative 87 year old, this year a younger and more virile version is presenting himself to my senses, all black eyes and smoulder.

It is true that if you can cope with Winter you can cope with anything, but it is also true that you have to have some sort of baseline of health to be able to do that in the first place. Now I have that, my Summer lovin' self is climbing on the Winter horse and sorta enjoying the feel of the saddle.

Feels kinda dirty, as if Summer is going to find out I'm off having an affair with his nemesis :) Still, that golden haired boy will make his return soon enough and when he does I will be willingly enfolded (he is my true love), but until then, let's just love the one we're with, shall we :)

This dark man Winter grown young, he's alluring me into his depths with promises this time where in years past he just sneered.

I know, I know - it's not even officially winter yet. How can I be all enamoured with romantic notions of black eyes and mist when I don't even enter the darkened doorway for another two weeks?

That's true :) Still, skipping up the approach instead of being dragged and dumped on my arse by sister Autumn is a pretty good start :)

Autumn Equinox

Well, this is the official day when the light begins its slow handball from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, the earth is all nicely balanced. I do like that thought :) Today, the sun sat at 52 degrees above the horizon at noon in Melbourne town (which is a nice place for it to sit. When it is positioned in summer at 75.5 degrees above the horizon, that extra 23.5 degrees adds a bit of extra oomph to the burningness. To have the warmth without the bite is sorta nice, even though the melancholy comes and bites in autumn). Today, there were roughly 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark.

In six months time it will be exactly the same situation, at the spring equinox. In-between we have the darkening of the earth, the inwardness that is preceded by the beautiful weather that is Melbourne in autumn. Then we have winter, the season I struggle with the most. But still, there are nice things about winter too, a sensuality that is absent in the brightness of summer. I have a funny feeling I am more creative in the darker months, too, although I haven't really tested that theory in any way.

But before that, autumn. I hope that many of the trees that were heat stressed during our bizarre summer and were shedding their leaves have recovered sufficiently to put on a show this autumn, the Grand Final of deciduous trees :)

Happy autumn and spring equinox everyone. Even though I am sad to see the beginning of the declining of the light, simply because of my own retarded circadian rhythm, I do joy to think of all you peeps up north who have been labouring under snow and such coldnesses. Happy spring to you :)

It is strangely exciting to me to think of a sphere that is all nicely balanced between light and dark the way we are now. It feels neat and tidy to me somehow, hehe :)

Dogalog of Dogs and Logs

This is Wysiwyg. He is Kel's doggy and ain't he just so cute! This bone is just a leedle bit too big for this doggy and he did not want a bar of it :)

Now, it might just be me but I swear when I look at his little nose, it looks like it has a picture of a cat on it! Can you see it? Please tell me you can see it :)

This is Lester. He's pretty cute too. Here he stands in the leaf mulch and ferns of Kalorama Park where we recharged our batts today after my art therapy session. There is nothing for it but to describe the smell of Kalorama Park as something if not erotic, at least of the same tonal value. It is humus at its best, and if that is what we come from it then that's fine with me. The combination of bottom notes of deep dank earth and rotting leaves with top notes of leaves and fresh air is heady perfume indeed.



Here are some logs. One of these logs on the path is in its natural habitat. The others have been planed and sawed or whatever you do to them for them to become these posts, which were particularly helpful in stopping me from falling over. Thank you, logs of all varieties.

Here is the dog. Can you see him? See Lester jump. Jump over log. We went a bit off the beaten track. He got a bit puppylike jumping logs. Certainly not behaviour of a dog who is going to be 70 years old, that's for sure. But I think he was enjoying the unfurling too :)



Here is the dog log. I am so glad I took that track that is beginning to be reclaimed by the ferns to come upon this handsome beastie :) I hope whatever the accident was that claimed his ear, that he has recovered now!

Contemplative shit

It's an interesting sort of a health milestone to see how much easier it is these days to wake at 6am because your dog needs to go outside, to step in dog diarrhea as you go, and then to clean up said dog diarrhea with a plastic spatula into a plastic bag after around five hours' sleep. I scrubbed the rug with bicarb soda and vinegar, and poured bicarb all over to get rid of the smell that had inserted itself as firmly as a child's finger into my nose for the forseeable future. I would have been cactus trying to do anything at 6am on five hours' sleep when I was ill. It seems like one of those mini miracles only I can really appreciate now that I can :)

It was enough that I could do that and then go outside with a cup of tea and joy over the sky with streaky clouds and light interplays before the light grey clouds rolled in. I sat and watched the pair of pigeons scrabbling on the garage roof, the same ones who walk on their stalks over the roof across my head when I'm waking up in the mornings. I love the brown crisscrosses on their necks. If it was possible for pigeons to hold pens, they could play very small games of noughts and crosses on each other.

It was enough to sit outside and rub my (washed) foot over the shiny brown back of my dog. To sit in the peace and smell the relatively fresh air, even though only 10 kilometres away from the centre of a small city.

I joyed over all of those things and thought about how far vision goes. What do things really look like if we could see them at their essence? Would we be inclined to fall down and worship blades of grass, pigeon necks, each other? I suspect we would. I am all for more and more of this kind of seeing, as long as it doesn't lead me down the crazy path of bursting into tears on the train because of the play of light on a woman's neck, or into rapturous delirium about the colour of the trail of branches hanging down over the high brick wall of a fence.

Because then I might get locked up :)

I think, however, those early morning joyings may be about the extent of it for me today. Which is unfortunate, because my holidays are coming roaring to a close and I wanted to take myself off today on some sort of an artist date, the first one in weeks and maybe even months. But it's all I can do to stay upright now, unfortunately, the joy of the early morning having been dispelled somewhat by my return to bed for three hours' sleep which has left me feeling worse than I did before I went back to bed.

Still, feeling crap aside, this is the third time this year I have been up to see the beginnings of the day, its aching newness. I kinda like it ... as far as a night owl can, anyway :)

It Made Me Smile - Two Walks

It made me smile to see sister moon baring almost all of her soul in the sky this eve.

It made me smile that the sky was full of cloudy fluffiness and the colour of the clouds was the colour of children.

It made me smile that the woman wore her hot pink dressing gown and slippers to put the rubbish bin out.

It made me smile when the mad Pomeranian and the mad mother cat both rushed out simultaneously and buffeted Lester on either side with malice and he took it all pretty calmly, really.

It made me smile when the plane flew right into the bum of the pink fish-shaped cloud and disappeared from sight.