Memories of Movement

Shapes I See 15th December 2008

Each space has any number of individual qualities, stories of the unseen return in the blink of an eye.
Through these walls I have seen a shape pass by me, walking through the wall as if it didn't exist.
The layers of leaf litter beyond reconnect me to the mass movement of things.
The sighting of the two bobtails have brought on this sensory sighting... and in the corner of my eye the kangaroo skin over the shoulders of that shape disappears through the wall, through the hedge, and then another shape passes by me, and similarly, a kangaroo skin covers him and his thin calf muscles and spears appear and disappear.
I once saw something, imagined it atop Sgor nam fionnaidh, the mountain of Fingal in Glencoe, Scotland.
I had been hiking into MacDonald's hidden valley, and looking upon the tartan-like grasses and moss I spied the movement of ancient Scots moving unhurried up the hill. Sure, these are imaginings of an overactive mind that wants to see, and yet something of the magical herein touches me, what am I seeing?
This space beyond my window, and within this very space where I sit, at my desk has been something else than the scholar's cell in which I now dwell.
I have written about it before, imagining the straining of my ears to hear the mopoke or barking owl, and the fight and cry of the warring territorial possum.
Before me now stands a red flowering coral tree, but not so long ago it was a pine tree in a pine plantation, and before that a tree remnant of Noongar's earlier forest.
Imagine that... and it ain't that hard to see, these shapes of humans walking in between the leafy shades on their way to the river and its swamps beyond.
Just as the plane leaves show the shadows within them, of leaves that stand between them and the sun, so too might time reflect the time-swept-memories of the many, shadows and outlines of they and their shapes pinioned to places of the mind's eye, shadows as clear as the tracks left by their feet only moments before - all now outlines contained in the air-laden shapes that walk the hallways and into spaces beyond.

The tales of the bobtail lizard

Bobtales of the old Lizard 10-08-08
I saw two bobtails through this window last week.
I don't know why I feel the urge to report such observations, now a week after the event, but I had thought to but I just hadn't acted on my thoughts...
The usual story.
Actually, I know now why I am writing about them.
These two that I saw were big, fat and seemingly at home in the leaf litter.
One was following the other, nudging at its tail as it went.
I didn't know that such lizards lived in this locality, especially with the number of students and noise here abouts.
But, no, here they were, seemingly unaffected by the noise around them, and within this enclave they were hidden, or so they thought, from prying eyes.
And so the question arises, are we, too, capable of finding and living in such gardens unaffected by the dramas of the human world around us?
I know that the old bobtails are not without their problems.
Blood-sucking ticks often invade the folds of their skin and rest between the scales of their armor and sometimes dig down into their ears until they fill the ear cavity like an earplug.
Maybe we share with the bobtail more than we first realise.
We seem to be happy living in suburbia, and like the bobtail we have periods when we become fat from the food we eat.
And although we don't carry ticks, we do have any number of parasites sucking the juices from outside of us.
While we don't have ticks burrowing into our ear cavities, we do allow the media, a space between our heads, glued as we are to our TV and these TV hybrids called personal computers.
These are the human electronic ticks and all the while they are digging deeper - they have moved from our ears from the sound of the radio to the visual impregnation of our brains with their coloured blueprint visions of the ideal and the heroic.
TVs are our ticks and so too are computers and mobile phones that radiate their heat.
But no one can see it.
The ticks that dig into the bobtail are camouflaged, and the bobtail has such poor eyesight it cannot see what causes its discomfort.
How I envy the Luddite among us, the old people who relied on swarming ants and the black cockatoo for their meteorological predictions, rather than the satellite pictures on their TV, within their newsprint or computer.
We share more with the bobtail than we care to realise.
Hell, some of us even have a love of eating snails...

The Wind at my Window: Dances and Scents of the Green God

Dances and Scents of the Green God 26-11-08

I wanted to write in my blog how I saw/met God in the leaves outside my window recently.
I wanted to write how it is that something, some new level of awareness and an 'awe-entity' has came over me.

Maybe, it is a question of ripeness, a time that we notice when we need to be ripe, and ready for such things.

But I thought, and I still think, that the key to seeing God is through our senses.

I have this sense of the sight of the plane leaves straining, bowing, playing in the breeze outside of my window, that they seem to allure me to a vision of awe. The sighting of green fingers and arms bending this way, and that, has indulged some part of my brain in an interaction and has given to me an insight of a space that is practised (de Certaeu), and an insight of a nourishing terrain (Levinas) of the spiritual of the awe-entity (my word)...beyond and yet near.

Maybe, I have wanted to see God in the wind and thus the tree beyond is simply the vehicle through which God is revealed...and communicating, but then too, plunging my nostrils as I am often intent in doing, like a bee does its tongue into the sexual organs of a rose, I know something else of the awe-entity that sends another of my senses reeling, dancing and pondering on the scent of the sacred.

And this sensing in seeing, smelling such scents like the rain on cement, or the scent of rain on ancient rocks by the sea - or dust mites in the air (?) - has created in me an awareness of how my mind and my inner senses are anchoring my intuition to a growing attunement and sense of the sacred in my life.

I am beginning to believe there is a part of me that is growing more and more attune and adjusted and even charged to the possibility that God is revealed when individual senses work in unison.

Certain senses are developing an acute sensitivity to certain aspects of where the sacred is revealed. The orange murraya (orange jasmine) hedge beyond the plane leaves communicate something different to the movement of the breezes beyond the glass, but each anchors a recall of moments where I have had sightings/glimpses of the sacred - fleeting glimpses and glances and instances - fleeting moments of something of the awe-entity beyond.