The Magpie Sings for Jakub's birthday aged 2

The Magpie Sings for Jakub's birthday aged 2
It is nearing the end of djilbaa, the Noongar spring.
We are entering early summer on the 31st of October 'Halloween,' but Halloween it isn't.
Here in Perth, in the southern hemisphere it is not Samhain, Halloween, but Bealltainn or Beltane.
It is a festival time, a celebration of life, fertility and the crop.
Here it is a pinnacle of prosperity.
The flowers of the Australian bush are laden with nectar. All matter of birds and frogs have been signalling the arrival of this peak period for weeks.
Yesterday, I had another visit from the singing virtuoso magpie.
He, or she... I find it not always easy to tell... but I think he... showed me again his ability in mimicking the singers around him.
First there was the sound and song of the twenty eight parrot, then came the song of the mud lark, then the morning honey eater and then the wattle bird and others... small brackets of song.
He and the hedge of orange murraya are in flower, all of them singing their songs of nectar and the sweet scents of the season. And my little boy turns two today.
Miles away he is, and I miss him.

The bees have gone

Beehive below the bush by the letter box where did they come from and where did they go?

The bees have gone 23rd Oct 2008
The bees have gone...that is they only hung around for three days and then leaped into motion once again swarming somewhere...
But in the days following their departure I felt something of sadness that they were no longer there.
A day or so after they had gone, I bent down to inspect where their hive had once been and noticed a number of white waxy markings on the stem from which they had hung.
I even noticed several disgruntled bees still clinging to the surrounding stems and I wondered, what if they had been left behind?
My neighbor had said that bees had ways and networks for getting back to their hive but now I am not altogether sure that that is true...no matter how much I'd like to believe it.
Poor bees.

Moths and frangipani

Moths and Frangipani 20th Oct 7pm 2008
Tonight I stepped out from my study space beneath the Social Sciences building and the sky was grey, cumulus grey and cloudy, sure, but the wind was still.
I walked past a lamp that a willy-wagtail was stalking and ensnaring the gnats and bugs that flew into its light.
The white wings of the unknowns, were drawn illuminated for a moment, in the briefest moment of time they cartwheeled like Japanese fan dancers on a stage, straight into the samurai like beak of the black and white assassins that flew waiting half hidden in the shadows...
Each insect, it seemed, was driven by an unknown desire to feed the feathered frenzy that similarly cartwheeled mimicking their momentary-lived movements - and I walked - and the lamps of Pan's sanctuary and his vestiges of Arcadia seemed caught in the twilight the liminal space and breath or sigh between day and darkness.
In this moment the scent of the native frangipani drew me near.
In this moment I became the moth or recognised the moth within my name (timothy) and I found myself free-falling winged and winging on the periphery of that scent that did all it could to draw me near.
One tends to be lost to such moments, for surely these are moments of the sensual - moments when an intuition of the magical seems pregnant with possibilities to breathe, to remember to breathe, to let go, to fall by the wayside and to lose ones-self to the moment.

Bees of Spring

Bees of Spring 15th October 2008
Today a swarm of bees came like a willy-willy dust devil with a sting in its tail. It swarmed in front of my parent's house funneling in the centre of the roadway T-junction...
It didn't seem to know which way it was going, but that it kept together showed its movement, its flight and the formation of thousands was intentional, they were seeing, seeking, feeling their way.
They moved as if they were a spirit dancing, I could see an outline of their form grouping and regrouping, then dispersing, around and around and around they went till all at once some scouts found their way to a lower branch of a rose bush.
Just as suddenly they attached their bodies beneath the apricot flowers of a Just-Joey, a sweet scented Rose.
Perhaps it was the scent of nectar that lured them there.
Equally surprising was mine and other's reactions.
Me, with my memory of bee stings went primitive, instinct took over...
"There was danger in the neighborhood, my neighborhood."
There in my mother's garden bed was a thousand honey producing stingers, each one of them irrational, poised in their possibility of thrusting their stainless steel elongated tiger-striped abdomen injecting pain pincers into my memory of allergic reactions.
Yep, and so I stood ready... ready to run, or to hide behind fly wire.
"Let sleeping bees lie" said my father.
"Stay away" said my mother.
"Show no fear" said a neighbor.
"Find the queen" said another...
But no, I stood fixed to the veranda and watched with an irrational fear that soon, any moment, they'd hatch a plan to make a bee-line - whatever that is - to where I stood watching.
But as they quietened down, and settled, so did I.
Maybe they could feel it in the watchers around them, maybe they were equally watching us as we were them...maybe...
Just like the menacing zealot magpie's watching from their eucalypt castle towers, watching for anything that moves.
"If only the world would stop moving."
I watched one today attempt to catch and savage a passing Catalina-pelican.
As soon as the pelican saw the black and white mirage fighter closing in, it dipped its wings, lifted and sliced the surrounding thermals and quickly changed course.
The magpie mirage was left in its jet stream, but I think I saw it celebrating, dancing by the way it dived, celebrating that it had seen this flying Catalina on its way.
The sight of it going after that pelican-Catalina made me wonder if it ever considered going after a Boeing A-300.
Maybe that Qantas QF72 that fell from the sky was attacked by a magpie, and not by a computer fault.
That no one mentioned it does not mean it never happened.
It is spring time after all - a time of swarming bees and a testing time it appears, for the swooping black and white menacing mirages - we call magpies.

Mm the Moon Man

Mm The Moon Man 14th October 2008

Mm The Moon Man murmurs to the trees at night;
Holds every leaf and their trunk so tight,
Glazes their form in its light, so bright,
Mm the Moon Man murmurs to the trees tonight.

And Venus is the star that moves on high,
The siren queen singing in her vault of sky
- for blessed are the beings that move and fly -
celestial bright beings who in the heavens lie.

Black Duck Blue

Bronze Wing Green

Bronze Wing

Bronze Wing 5th October 2008
Once again I found myself following that ribbon of gravel, following the stream to Hovea Falls.
Each time I arrive I am reminded to live in the moment.
I find myself thinking, it is not the destination but the journey that matters... and so I am walking, listening and watching.
Today the floral arrangements that surround me are vivid.
Vivid blues and reds, and occasional orchids line the path.
And that distant bird sound, that one with its ethereal high-pitched melodic whistle seems to follow me, singing in harmony with the nearby gurgling bubbling brook that borders the walking trail. And I am walking...
Today in the company of a friend I was walking full of child-like anticipation for what flower or oddity of granite formation we might find.
And later, finding ourselves at the John Forest National Park Tavern, drinking tea from a sparkling silver teapot, we sat talking sipping tea in the company of a dozen grey doyens of the bush with their pouches full and twitching, and we saw them...for there, stepping between the half-shadows of grey feeding kangaroo were the fearless bronze wings.
In Noongar the bronze wing pigeon is called the Moritch but, unable to glimpse the deeper meanings of their naming, it is the English adjective in describing their wing that resonates most deeply.
But this bird, ever-determined moving in and out in the shadows of paw and claw-footed kangaroo exudes a wing that shines metallic green as well as bronze.
Its wing's colouration resembles the blue-wing inner-linings of the black duck, which in turn finds a connection with the dark green of the European mallard.
But this colouration, this distinct patch shining glistening on the upper forward tract of its wing seems to speak of some function or other, but attractive and attracting to whom?
It is spring and perhaps the vividness of its colouration speaks of its biological intent and endeavor, its intentions to find a mate, or to signal it has found one. Perhaps what I am seeing reflects the success of the species, an adaptation formed from a life spent deep in the forest, an adaptation formed amid the forest green, something born and worn of signification and magnification, magnified in the eyes of their species, but half-hidden in the grass, camouflaged from the eyes of the predator.
And yet to imagine the formation of such a markings is to imagine and to see it in other life-forms as well.
All of us are marked or camouflaged at some time in our lives.
For the Hindu, both woman or man, for example, adorned with their third eye, their sari or bangles, or for western woman, for some, with their nose rings, tattoos and bright colours speaks in signs, and signals the evocative vocabulary of unsaid words and narratives and stories that never end.
Sometimes I find myself mingling with the throng.
Sometimes, half-stepping the fruit carriers at the markets, my head is spun from the scent of patchouli.
It is really a hippie's errand - a message to the world, that to both the wearer and receiver, it speaks in a tongue meant to allure, to transform.
For some who wear it, their scent is forgotten and only remembered when others make comment, who know its attraction.
And it seems to me, that just like the bronze wing, that we too share something in common attempting to allure and to speak without speaking, either in scent or in colour.