The Valley, It Speaks

I am wide awake on a deeply embodied level. The expansiveness and potentiality of a brand new cycle of life is written along my skin. Inside, my children sleep, worn out and brimful after a night of running through the dark, making new friends and strengthening old friendships.

How do I describe who I am at this moment?

A mother, a woman in love with my home. Living a blessed life. Starting to warily stalk around the edges of my middle age years, but not yet fully reconciled with this. A wife, a daughter. A dreamer who has strangled her own breath for two decades. My own saviour. A student of the Mysteries. Ego. Obese. Stretched. Open. Ravenously hungry for the next steps on my path of creativity, directed outwards once more after years of pouring it into my mothering. Walking with fragility.

Immersed in this landscape.

The night until now has been raucous; the convergence of voice and guitar and resourcefully created percussion from spoons and hands and boxes, the gleeful chatter and squeals of children staying up late; spontaneous affection and affirmations naked with the effects of cocktails and elixirs.

But now, the peace. I am alone instead of surrounded. I am in the darkness instead of the lights of the veranda of a community house down the road, late season Christmas Beetles flying spinning circles among fluorescent light and cobwebs. I am silent, instead of singing off key, or murmuring low conversations in corners with a friend or two, or laughing by the fire.

Two spectrums of my being, all in a space of hours: balance.

Renewal.

I lay in our chipped old bath tub, dug by my husband into the steep incline of the hill from the house down to the river flats. The bath tub looks out over the riparian zone and then up the ridge on the other side of the valley, a mix of eucalypt forest and rainforest species that blend into one great wall of greens and bones and browns. A lushness never really understood until I walked away from it, far away, into lands of desert and dryness. Memories of travel anchor me to home.

This valley, this space in time.

Incense smoke rises sinuously, into the night, dark of moon and well past midnight. Tea light candles flicker in rhythm with the gentle breeze and the scent of roses rise with the steam. The cocoon of warmth from the bathwater meets a need in my skin- that memory of mild warmth, rather than the heat of summer daytime; skin slick with sweat and vulnerable to the sun, the heat moving from the dermal layers right down into the marrow and deepest places of the body, held there, only to be released hours after the sun goes down, slowly, that heat leaves a mark, a stain. Or, on more lucky nights, blown away by a summer storm, the type that starts with swiftly growing mountains of cumulonimbus and progresses with sudden winds, rolling thunder, spectacular lightning. The type that drops the temperature twenty degrees in an hour.

As I settle into the stillness, I hear the chitter of fruit bats feasting on the fruit of the Moreton Bay Fig Tree nearby. Nocturnal birds call to each other and crickets thrum a raga that is eternal and grounding. I hear my breath. I feel my heart.

As sublime as this moment is, there is a pull out of it for me. In years past, at this time, I would be dedicated to setting goals for the coming year. The hours just before and just after midnight reek of potency for me: time to vision, to create and to set a tone for how I want to go on, what I want to endure. Moving backwards from where I want to be in a year; how I want to be in a year. What needs to happen now? How do I hold myself in this moment?

Years of not seeing my heart’s deepest resonances manifest have tempered this urge and practice within me. I have separated myself from my dreaming, with mercy and disconnection in equal measure.

Now, as I enter this next great cycle of creation, where energy has shifted from growing, protecting and raising tiny little humans, to tending my art and craft again.

My thinking mind wants to make the most of this time, to dream up goals and intentions worthy of this beautiful life I am gifted. To make best use of this one wild and precious life, as poet Mary Oliver calls it. To honour all the ancestors who have lived and died to give me this moment of choice and potency, laying under the stars, safe, secure and in a position to give back.

To be fully human in these times of need. Who am I not to live my most passionate and giving life, when so many are persecuted, are starving, are abused. Is this not the greatest selfishness?

The stars shine above me. I consider their gentle light and repose. But this gentleness is only an illusion. In truth, the stars are inconceivably hot, volatile bodies of gas and fire, spinning and flying through infinite expanses of space. If we could be closer to them, if that was even humaly possible to witness these bodies close enough to see them in their true nature, surely we would see them as violent. The burn and expulsion and transmutation of matter: radical and raging acts of chemistry. Alchemy of the spheres. Alchemy that has direct impacts on the landscape for so many millions of light years. Again, inconceivable.

But here, back in my old bath tub in the valley, hours into a new year, I gaze at those stars not only distant in space but also time: I am literally viewing the past, how these stars looked in ancient times, such is their remoteness and the time that their light has taken to reach my eyes, tonight. And instead of fury and force, I experience their light as soft and gentle, the radiant equivalent of a lullaby: soothing and comfortable.

I lose the thread of intention setting under this beauty and alchemy. This ancientness. This vastness.

And the potency is lost. Instead, my attention is caught by the small section of fencing I have been working on in the past week. There’s a tangle of lantana, camphor laurel and privet growing up through the fence. It’s been difficult to prune back and eradicate due to the slope of the site, and the fence itself which has been patched up with baling twine and bits and bobs a bit too often. But amongst it, precious, is a rainforest sapling. I am not sure of the species, but I now it is of worth. It’s the kind of thing I want growing here. In years, it will grow tall and lush and perhaps attract wompoo doves and bowerbirds and fairy wrens and all the other bird species I feel very lucky to share the land with.

This makes the job of eradication more difficult. I can’t just mow it all down. I have to destroy and protect at the same time.

Perhaps I need to take a more organic approach to the curation of my life, just like the fence area. I need to be keenly aware of when those worthy saplings grow up, and give them light and nurturing and protection (and get rid of the invasive species around them).

Perhaps- and I know this, really- intentions that are forced are inauthentic. To fully follow my heart’s resonance as a compass for my individually lived, divinely inspired path (whatever that might be), I need to be fallow. I need to simply break down all the dead wood of my life ready for the time when the next project or dreaming hits me right in the heart. Deep in the womb. Under my skin.

In the meantime, I can converse with the land. I can ask it what it needs, explore my relationship to it and all of it’s sacred biodiversity. The conversation that comes from the play of water across bare skin as I swim in the river, the charging up of cells as I lay in the sun and send love deep down through the humus and the rock below, the observation of birds across the day. A conversation back and forth between me and the landscape.

And I realise, I have already been doing this, right now, in the bath outside, past midnight.