Wednesday 8 May 2013

Land and story

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. William Blake

Heavy cloud draped the top of the hill; or perhaps it was mist masquerading as cloud, or cloud transformed by the pull of earth to mist – whatever it was, it gave the hill a grave mystique on a dark and cold autumn morning.

The hill was one of a chain undulating for several kilometres in this part of north-east Victoria, a volcanic regurgitation millions of years ago with scattered grey rocks to tell the tale. I looked out at it from the kitchen of a friend’s house on a sheep farm.

Staring at it for a while, the urge came to explore and climb: I pulled on my boots and the hill beckoned me forward. My friend had planted trees to stop erosion and there they stood, at intervals, with brown-orange bark peeling. Not much else was around except a tough-looking sedge that grew in clumps. A track that had been ploughed in red-clay mud by the farm’s quad bikes was fringed by the droppings of sheep.

A clammy cold touched my skin as I climbed to the mid-point of the hill. Here the rocks began, covered in dry and seemingly dead lichen. Occasionally an old white or red box tree appeared crookedly on the slope, incongruous amid the barrenness. Occasionally the rocks congregated to a natural seat or vantage point from which you could see for miles the changes of farmland, forests, ridges, gullies and flats; the land at times creased, then smoothed itself out, then as unexpectedly became jagged.

At the top of the hill more rocks and some dead trees dragged to form a spot for shelter and fire – a place for coming together, maybe celebration, on warmer days. The quad bike trail continued along a dip at the other side of the hill and on to the next one. This was solemn, out-of-the-way country; a mob of kangaroos scattered somewhere far below, some twigs crunched underfoot, little else rippled the profound silence.

Well after my experience of climbing I wondered about the story of that land. Indigenous people, no doubt, would have weaved creation stories for these quiet, rocky hills, binding human consciousness deeply with the country. Would the land not have stories still? How could a person recover and retell them?  

Our modern Western consciousness is focused on the concrete and the separate. Reality is largely comprised of physical objects that exist in themselves and that can be seen, felt and touched. But that’s not all that reality is: there are subtle, intuitive dimensions that don’t fit a strict materialist view, and the more these are explored the more it becomes apparent that much of life is non-rational, non-linear, non-separate, and that it is healthy to acknowledge and affirm this.

How do we approach these “spiritual” dimensions of life? I think mystery is the clue here. It’s about paying attention to the silence, the unseen that exists with everything we look at. It requires a broad but measured opening of the senses with focus on the energy or quality of objects. It is cultivated in disciplines of meditation and yoga and contemplative prayer. Its doorway is the relationship of things, and its language that of metaphor and symbol. What comes forth from mystery undergoes a certain filter as we translate it into the concrete world; it registers in the body and mind and passes through the particularities of personality, life experience and training. A certain painter will feel its presence and paint, a certain teacher will hear its call and teach, a certain carpenter will be touched by it and produce inspired work. And so it goes.

I think the land that I was privileged to visit in north-East Victoria does have a story and that it is accessible through intuition and patient listening. It would not be arrived at rationally and objectively and would not stand up to secular, rationalist scrutiny. It may have changed over time as the land has changed over time. It may, in all likelihood, be slightly different with each individual who cares to tell it. But the point, really, is the purpose of the story, the moral of the tale. It is to connect to the land, to see ourselves in it, our life its life. When we tell its story, we are walking with it in its evolutionary journey just as it feeds into ours. We cannot help but care for it, mythologise it, celebrate it, just as we celebrate our own life and those of other humans.

In a way, my simple description of the walk up the hill is a beginning of that process. In fact, any response of openness and wonder is a beginning – it is then up to us to carry it further, to act in whatever ways we can to bring the sacred back to a meaningful presence in our world.