I have been moving … home to my birthplace Perth.
I found a little house under a great tree and I am making a new home in a familiar place. The tree brings immense solace with its changing colours, bird life and shedding bark. When I wake at night it feels like a companion and comforts me with its presence and magnanimous beauty. Early morning brings the sun rising from the east, glistening brightly through its leaves and branches. After midday the shadow is welcome relief from the heat of the day. Evening brings the return of birds for their meal and a last chorus of sound, heralding the evening. I have never noticed the colour of the bark before, it is pink but unlike any other pink I can name or know. It changes with the light – for now I am calling it ‘bush pink’. Strips of it fall into my courtyard along with the leaves. I don’t rush to sweep them away – I enjoy their unruly yet patterned presence that creates its own beauty. An unruly wildness lingers in Perth. I came home for this. Without knowing exactly, I knew I had to come home to this natural world. It’s the sky, the wind, the birds, the air itself. Something untameable I identify with lurks around. As I sit here I hear the wind in the tree outside and the raw dry sound of crows and parrots. Nothing quite like it anywhere else. It’s in my bloodstream, as familiar as anything I have known. My skin soaks it up.
In the process of moving I found some writing I did over 10 years ago on my return from residencies in Europe. I was surprised by the find and what it reveals to me now, in my seventh decade. How do we listen to the body and to feeling our way into how to live each decade anew?
“I board the plane home without nostalgia. I don’t want to live in Europe and I no longer want Europe to live in me.”
It startled me to find this entry and what it revealed – I knew somewhere the future was beckoning me home to my country.
In honour of my tree here is Bill Neidjie, Kakadu elder and great story-teller speaking about feeling:
Tree …
He watching you
You look at tree
he listen to you.
He got no finger, he can’t speak.
But that leaf …
he pumping, growing,
growing in the night.
you dream something.
Tree and grass same thing.
They grow with your body.
With your feeling.
Bill Neidjie (1989)