Writing from Landscape

Photo credit: Jack Bassingthwaighte

In episode 2 of Back to Nature, ‘The High Country’, viewers are invited to listen to the landscape, write ‘a line, a paragraph, or a poem,’ then share it.

Here’s my offering.

In October 2003 I did a Vipassana retreat in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, on Dharug Country: 10 silent days practicing a meditation technique. It was extremely difficult: not the silence, or even the long hours of sitting, but the loudness of thoughts, and turbulence of emotions. But, as almost anyone who’s done Vipassana will tell you, by the end you’re fizzing with a gentle, effervescent joy.

On the morning of the last day, I went for a walk in the bush around the retreat centre and experienced a profound sense of connection with the landscape, and an encounter. I don’t write poems but did pick up a pen for this.

After Vipassana  

On the tenth morning

Having sloughed off so much psychic surface grime,

violently,

and gently,

and not with equanimity,

Here I am.

Ancient,

eternal,

new.

Without containment.

It’s the beginning of time.

A dream of eucalypt and basalt

tumbles down the ridge

into the western sky.

Half a mile away,

in a gully,

the flap of a wattlebird’s wings

reverberates across my skin

like wind

flurrying across a lake.

The gentle, pulsing heart of infinity,

the far reaches of country,

the edges of my being,

dance and flow.

There’s no separation.

I move along a path,

And there you are.

On the branch of a Blue Mountains Ash -

Fixing me

with your magpie gaze:

Don’t Come Closer.

You’re between me
And the party blower cries

of your chicks

further down the track:
Don’t Come Closer.

With post-retreat holiness

I want to test our communication

so send you thoughts

of peace

and glad tidings.

I tell you I’ll not harm your young

and imagine the inter-species kinship

you’ll bestow on me.

Yet still you stare

with your pebble eye,

your beak

steady as stone:
Don’t Come Closer.

Impatient,

I pre-empt our friendship,

and continue walking.

Bang!

- the air sucks outward.

A black and white explosion

incinerates my vision,

a blinding charge of feathers.

The barbs

at the edge of your wingspan,

propel downdraft across my cornea.

Back on the branch,

you resume staring:

Don’t Come Closer.

OK. I won’t.

I turn around.

There’s been no harm.

Just a humbling.

We shared communion after all.

- JM