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.