Rambling through Covid

May 2020

The first day of the lockdown, I took an early morning walk up Gap Road, in autumn air so pleasant I walked on further than usual. That’s curious, I thought. I can hear the limbs of trees rubbing together. I never noticed that before. 

Then I realised, with a jolt - the human world had stopped.

To save their skins, the humans are taking a break, and all creation breathes a sigh of sweet relief. A gang of parrots squabble and shriek in the distance. The magpies’ late morning warble expresses what I love about this strange interruption to business-as-usual, a kind of spaciousness in the heart.

I feel I’ve slipped back a century.

I’m not the only one walking. The walkers are on the streets, to ease the boredom, stretch the limbs, keep the dog happy, let the kids run themselves out. In Riddell we have two bush walks right on the edge of town. Conglomerate Gully, up Wheelwrights Road, is an hour circuit, reassuringly signed. Or there’s Barrm Birrm at the top of Gap Road, a maze of untended and unregulated tracks.

Street walking is good for waking up, but afternoons are good for rambling, and the bush is the place to do it. In Barrm Birrm, where I mostly walk, you can make up your own mind as you go. Up the hill for a little cardio, or along the hillside for a stroll? Autumn rains have brought new growth to the grasses under the trees. The green cloak of the cassinia fills the air with its pungent scent, sharp, herbaceous. Wattles are setting up for winter blooming, florets branching like outstretched fingers.

Rambling leaves time for thinking about things. The bush sticks to its own rhythms, and there’s pattern and sense all around, that quietens the heart. I take heed of Claire Collie’s advice: "You don't want to be wise now. You want to be watching and being quiet and observing what's going on."

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

Clean Up time

Clean Up Australia Day Barrm Birrm 2020

 

March 2020

Riddells Creek Landcare held its fourteenth Clean Up Australia Day in Barrm Birrm, first Sunday in March. We had Scouts and Cubs from 1^st Riddells Creek Scouts along, and Gill Williams and her crew got a good haul.

Picking up other people’s rubbish is an exercise in civic responsibility, and an education. What people drop in the bush is astonishing. Stubbies tossed out car windows; energy bar wrappers; prunings from the garden; broken tiles and mortar. Great chunks of concrete.

As you know, Barrm Birrm is that lawless bit of bush at the top of Gap Road. It’s actually private property, a subdivision from the 1970s where people never had permission to build, but hoped that might change. It hasn’t and it won’t. It’s illegal to dump rubbish there, but the owners aren’t around, so if you’re too lazy to put that garden waste in your green bin, or too cheap to take that rubble to the tip and pay, you can go and dump it there.

Preaching about the bad consequences for the bush probably won’t make a difference if you’ve taken the trouble to drive in over bad tracks, maybe with a trailer, to do the drop off. You’ve already got a pretty solid ‘up yours’ attitude. You’re stuffing up a natural ecosystem, a beautiful thing that took a long time to make itself, but hey, what you want comes first, doesn’t it?  

Lecturing won’t make a difference, but what will make a difference is people who do give a damn showing up once a year to clean up the bad behaviour of the selfish. To the good folk who showed up this year – our profound thanks, and see you next year.

And to the other adults in Riddell, put it in your diary – first Sunday in March, 10-12 am, Gap Rd and Royal Parade. Every year.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

The Summer Holidays

February 2020

‘Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending’ 

Dr Kate Marvel, climate scientist.

The first English assignment at the start of each year in my primary school was … you guessed it: ‘The Summer Holidays’. This year, mine begins: Emergency Services app and weather app at the ready, phones and laptops charged, single bag packed, fire clothes sorted, wool blankets and water in the car. 

Texts flowing out to relatives and friends: ‘Are you alright? What’s happening there?’ Messages flowing back: ‘Our house is still standing, but our neighbour’s is gone.’ ‘We’ve lost the studio.’ Watching the news. Listening to the radio. Day after day.

I’m in a state of constant attention, a hybrid of alertness and fear, and in the background, a brooding meditation on the way things are going in the world. Learning to feel with fires, but also to look past the fires to the politics, and through the politics to the ways of thinking, to what we value. I sense that we’re learning to hold the feeling of situations alongside critical inquiry into those situations.

Situation #1: In Cabargo, the Prime Minister shakes the hand of a pregnant woman. She does not accept this; he insists. The video goes viral. Like a football incident replayed, Australians make up their own minds. No, he didn’t pay attention. No listening, no discussion. No connection to her feeling.

Situation #2: Out shopping In Woodend, with the NSW South Coast and East Gippsland burning, the shop assistant asks cheerily: ‘How are you today?’ My partner replies slowly: ‘I don’t know really ….’ The shop assistant drops into her body, and her tone shifts: ‘I know what you mean.’ A pause in the flow of normal business. Feeling shared.

Situation #3: He checks the latest advice, the facts, says there’s no reason to go. She senses the situation, feel s unsafe. They try to hear each other, through the tangle of feeling and facts. This scenario, a thousand times, between the man and the woman.

Untangling the mess we’re in, with no hope of finding heaven. 

Just perhaps an honorable life.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

 

 

Dear Greta

Dear Greta

You tell us again to wake up, and to act. You speak to the adults, blithely consuming the planet. It is an old story, the young berating their elders. Some get furious and tell you to go back to school; I feel the need to explain our situation.  

Coming to be an adult is a slow thing. Learning how to get the baby to sleep, how to go to work each day, settling for less that you imagined, how to keep the kitchen bench tidy, stay friends with your partner. Being adult means coming to terms with the world as it is.

We made it to 50 yours, 60 years, 70 years and more. We thought we were getting on top of things. Now we find ourselves complicit in an economic system that feeds and infatuates us while eroding the life of the earth. Single use plastics. Those handsome cuts of meat in the supermarket. The good feeling as the car accelerates on an open road. Everything is suspect. 

Your fury wakes us up. You are bold, which is what the young must be, and what the times demand. Many of us are with you in spirit, but we start with a burden you don’t have, to challenge the prosperity we thought was progress.

We have to break apart the way we live and somehow make something else, with no blueprint, and not much influence. On bad days, everything aches, the joints and the heart. If there’s something new brewing in human consciousness, like genuine care for living things, it sure is taking a while to show up in the mainstream. 

Dear Greta, Google News tells me you are sailing now from the USA to Madrid, live streaming the four-week journey. There’s another UN Climate Change Conference, and there will be more plain speaking. It is your time.

We older ones are coming to terms with having been so mistaken and so slow, and that too is quite some journey. But we will shape up to the world as it is, because that’s what adults do. 

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare