A Reader's Summer

 

It's been summer The beach people have made their way to the beach, and the river people, if they can manage it, have idled a week away beside a river. Readers have made their way back to books.

All the long year, they have suffered email and reports that must be read, exhausting Zoom calls, wasted time on YouTube videos in a vain attempt to break their boredom. There's probably been a book or two on the bedside table, but sometimes those books sit there for a week or more unopened.  The reader sighs and knows …. they are missing books.

Now it's summer, and the holidays, and it is time to give over to books.  Several simultaneously, or bang bang bang, three between Christmas and New Year. It's time to let the imagination off the leash, time to give over to a long conversation between just one person, the author, and the crowded tumult of their own thoughts, memories, feelings.  

I've had a good summer.  I started early with essays by Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind), then The Yield (hard work), and Frugal Hedonism (which I got the hang of after a while).  Inspired by Claudia Kavan's ABC show on books, I went to the library and put half a dozen books on request.  The first through was a biography of Gillian Mears, which I finished last weekend: I believe that in time, I will recover.

Around New Year, I think, I started on Rewilding the Urban Soul: searching for the wild in the city, by Claire Dunn.  The title indicates the ambition.  I'd be happy with Rewilding the Urban, or just Rewilding, but it is true to its promise.  Each chapter opens a door to the wild. It’s written from the flesh of the thing: at some point in most chapters, I cried or cried out, surprised by her audacity and her honest speaking.

Pretty soon into the book, I settled into the rhythm of reading a chapter in the morning, after waking, in bed with my cup of tea. Then I would take a first walk in the garden, to let the chapter ricochet around me.

It’s now late January, and my working year has begun. I'm polishing a draft report and writing a bid for a project I care a lot about. I have moved on to other reading, but I still have a few precious chapters of Claire’s book to eke out, and I want to hold onto the spirit of summer. Read a chapter. 

Walk out into the valley.  

Feel your life.

Isn't that what summer is about?

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com
20/01/22

 

Belonging

14 June 2021

I trundled my luggage through Melbourne Airport at 7 pm on a Saturday. Completely empty. The flight from Perth had been empty too: in the middle of a lockdown, who wants to come to Melbourne except for people like me, workers returning home.

I had thought long and hard about catching that plane. Perth, 19°, sunny day after day. Why not stay by the beach for another couple of weeks? The Leeuwin Current was still running, and I had settled back into the swim from Cott to North Cott, a good long swim with the swell of the ocean under me.

4pm Cottesloe Beach

 But Cottesloe is not my place now, and those well-groomed, pleased-with-themselves people drinking coffee at Il Lido, they’re not my people. I took a cab up to the edge of the ranges and overcast, rainy Riddells Creek. This is my home, my place, where my people are.

 A little town, people getting away from the big city and those that did the same 40 or 20 or 10 years ago, who look warily at the newbies, and sigh, and know it’s the way of the world. Riddell, where the post office people know me, where I drop in on friends who put the kettle on and say ‘how are you then – have you been away?’

 I’ve been listening to Stephen Jenkinson on Youtube. He's a Canadian with a lot to say about the mess we’re in. He says its hard work to repair the world when we’re broken ourselves.  Don’t know our ancestors, lost our traditions, left our neighbourhood, always on the move to the next big thing, chasing comfort.  Watching a Zoom conversation with him (search Youtube for Jenkinson and Bodhi Be), there’s a couple of old guys shooting the breeze, and then around 18 minutes in, my ears perked up.

 ‘The ability to belong’, says Jenkinson, ‘is the willingness to sit still long enough to forsake all the other options but the one that’s before you. Take up the work of occupying a place, not the entitlement of doing so.’

 I hear the Shire is putting gates across the roads of Barrm Birrm. There’s weed trees in there that need cutting, but it’s hard to get started. What’s happened to the traffic management study of Riddell the Shire said they were doing? And yes, the Amess Road developers will be back with something that suits them. We’ll win a bit of ground, but not what really suits the coming times, just the tired old game of profit and growth.

But that’s the work of belonging, of occupying a place.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com