This afternoon I was sitting on the verandah listening to the bell birds that at times frequent the surrounding forest. Those birds have the most delicate quiet ‘bell-like’ call that in my mind has always typified northern NSW, and yet, as far as I’m aware, I’ve never actually seen one.
We are all, every single one of us, born from this earth, but the molecules that comprise everything on our planet, including our bodies, originated in the stars. The bell birds, the other creatures of our world, we people ourselves are life being expressed and expressing values. We’re all beautiful beings blessed with the gift of life on this beautiful planet. And when we allow ourselves to look beyond our biases and our prejudices we can so often see a different people, people who aren’t the meme or the stereotype. Not one of us is free of our societal beliefs, our conditioned responses, our cultural dogmas, or our native and conditioned concepts of what this world is all about. This baggage that is thrust upon us when we’re young creates within us all the constructs of what we all individually should be, those concepts and constructs that underlie what it is we’re expected to be when we ‘learn to become a man’, when we ‘learn to grow up’, so often just cages to our free individual expression of our own innate values, dreams and aspirations. And so often that baggage can be so hollow, so shallow, and so bereft of anything approaching human values and “True fellowship among men” or “the goals of humanity”.
And right now, when looking up, it’s that perfect blue above, one small wispy white cloud that’s no chance of blocking out the sun, a most beautiful day within a most beautiful land. And in the silence all around I hear no bell birds today, others calls blending into and becoming an extension of the silence instead. But no bell birds today. Bell birds gone for a while.
But their beautiful warm sun, that giver of life to all of earth’s myriad forms still shines.
And although there’s no bell birds today their forest is still here, the gums, the gums, and the ever more gums, gums always here.
And a butterfly here – and a butterfly there.
And at some stage today I’ve somehow got to summon the energy to plant five sweet potatoes. Sometime today it’ll have to be done. Sometime today.
And in time some things change. And at some time in the future the patch of trees I now look at may no longer be there, a small vineyard in its place. And if after planting that vineyard I were to walk away from this place and not return for a hundred or so years would my artificial additions to this landscape, the sweet potatoes and the vineyard, still be here?
To familiar eyes the landscape will have changed. The acres of grass would be largely gone, the forest having reclaimed it’s own. The house would still be here, the people who built this one built it to last. But in the interim, no doubt, it will have been subdivided into eco-friendly strata accommodation for the mice, small lizards and snakes that live here already.
The concrete slab may well be cracked and decaying, possibly not even visible in some places, its seemingly tough resilient substance having succumbed to the roots of small, seemingly insignificant plants, weeds, that will be relentlessly excavating it to it’s core. Those plants, nature’s vanguards of re-colonisation and restoration, will one day give way to the medium and then longer-term presence that future eyes will look upon, with those future eyes being oblivious to the processes that will have transformed the landscape they now survey, the seen and non-seen, the measurable and the non-measurable, the expected and the unexpected, the physical and the non-physical.
Our earth will have restored the balance it created this patch of dirt to be.
And the beautiful warm sun, that giver of life to all of earth’s myriad forms will still shine.