Trees and Tracks of the Sandstone Country
Category / Joy of Life
Autumn is coming here..can Spring be far behind?
Spring in my Garden
Spring in the Sandstone Winter
Phebalium Squamosum
Philotheca Salsalifolia
Native Rose
Hibbertia Fasciculata
Pimelia -Rice Flower
Dilwynia Retortata
New Holland Honeyeater
Grey Fantail
Secret Track
Shining
The Shining Ones
Have you ever seen one of the shining ones?
They’re there and not there,
like cleanest window glass,
that endlessly outpours beyond-born, blaze-bright goldenlight.
I want to be like that,
not here, that is, but there;
or rather, truly neither,
filled instead by the light my here-self merely frames,
the light where all of light comes from;
here and beyond-gone, also
where other or self cannot separate;
Because they are drawn back
to their deep-true oneness,
yet still are, still are unique
as snowflakes,
forms of the same unfolding infolding manifold
but not apart or alone,
any/ever more.
Captured creatures
Midwinter under the southern cross, and the wildflowers begin their long blooming season, wattle and red grevillea…
and the wild creatures come out to play…wattle birds, with nectar enough for all, even those who capture them only on film.
Speaking for the Sandstone Country
The Sandstone Country
Like the first people, guardians of the earth,
we, too, are in the service of the land,
caring for the Angophora, for Bluegum and Turpentine,
Geebung and Scribbly Gum.
We learn to speak a rich vocabulary of names,
tokens for an older language,
of Flannel flowers and Christmas Bush,
Boronia and Waratah, Hakea, Grevillea, Banksia and Tea Tree,
Darwinia and Dilwynnia, and the chant goes on.
We want to learn their songs
and the melodies of all the spirits of those places:
where Wianamatta shale blankets the sandstone plateau
and spills its clays down broken sandstone stairs
past algae-blackened, lichen-patched, wind-hollowed ledges,
which give abundant holds and food for:
Wax Flowers, Blandifordia Bells, Epacris Longiflora’s crimson tubes
and purple lilies flowering after rain.
Moving Meanings
Relativity
As our times become more past than present,
As they do, eventually,
They become, also, more one.
How can we speak of the still centre
Of the ever turning wheel,
While talking our lives into the shapes of our wanting,
Through intonation, timbre, cadence
And all the voice’s eloquent vibrations,
Blindly gesturing at the flickering
of meanings,
Tied to the fleeting times and places of their uttering?
Yet still,
Fishermen, Calvinists, Talmudic scholars and French lawyers
Speak on and on with the self same tongues,
Endlessly conjuring paradoxes
From the inevitable becoming of what always was,
While not seeing that,
Halfway between Alpha and Omega,
Meaning never tarries.
Fulness
Fulness
Far from the clamour of concepts,
Logic’s deepest groaning
And the murmuring of canon lawyers,
Out there,
Where the voice of the Pharisees can’t carry,
Speaks silence.
In a desert place,
Where streams of certainty sink
Into wind-carved drifts,
Detritus of doctrines,
Dunes of failed declamations,
Leaving only a stillness to mark their bubbling passage,
Speaks peace.
Refugees from denunciation,
Survivors of the cruel Constative,
Seek only the sweet subjunctive there,
And gather,
Each the other to sustain,
With mere possibility,
Trust,
And the manna of unknowing.
Hesed (Heb: tender loving-kindness)
Banksia Ericifolia: Grows in the Sandstone Country
Where there is love, There is God.
A lot of people speak occasionally of God,
Some talk of God a lot,
Some say she’s here,
And some say there,
And scarcely hesitate
To legislate
Her very nature.
But I would wish to hear
The claim she makes herself, and tremble even to appear to want to draft God-governing laws.
Whose belly gripes for want of power,
(To make a better world, of course),
Omnipotence alone will fill.
Those whose bleeding guilt
Condemns them to an endless thirst for righteousness,
Will have none but a perfect, distant God to slake it.
While those whose flesh is burned by the coals of rage,
Spilled on them undeserved, by indifferent lovers,
Clamour for the strictest justice in their God;
And the vanity of wisdom
Leaves her devotees relishing the rolling cadence
Of their second hand omniscience.
Strangely enough,
The actual occupant of the high, celestial throne
Is singularly reticent.
She who is…is alpha and omega,
Overflowing with a mother’s tender love,
Slow to anger and ready to forgive,
Herself saying nothing much
About an omni-this or omni-that.
And one of us
Has figured in this world.
Immanent in service,
Signing forth,
In brightness and in darker ways
The living shape of Hesed.
New
The Psalmists
The psalmists write themselves from sorrow into joy.
They thirst and pant and fear their way
To momentary peace,
While waiting, always waiting for a Sign:
This fallen world will someday be made
New.
inigo rey 