One of my special places

This is just a couple of little love notes to one of my special places in the bush close to home, adapted from notebook scribbles taken when I was spending a morning there. If you know me, or know Hobart, you'll probably know where this is.

Ah gorgeous, vibrant, green lawn, cropped short by marsupials. A lacy, tufted fabric of orange, green and brown. Moss, herbs, and fresh pademelon poo, glistening in the morning sunlight. Sweet smelling, cool autumn air, warm sun and chirupping honeyeaters, busy on perch and wing in the forest. The mid-slopes of a crumbling, messy, dolerite mountain. This is what I craved this morning. Not the flickering black-hole of a screen and the internet offerings of superficial connection and endless distraction. Stiff green clumps of reeds, rustling their hard brown seed heads in the breeze. Dusty, blue-green paperbark shrubs. Shiny, khaki-leaved, yellow-barked gums. The eroded stone foundations of an old building, moss covered bricks and a historic rubbish heap with old broken glass. A micro garden of lichen colonizing a rock. Prickly pink mountain berry shrubs. I’m craving exercise because I’m wired, and I wish I could run up the mountain paths to dissipate the stress. But I can’t, and if I don’t calm down my nervous system, I’ll crash. So I’ll just sit and sit and sit. Wait out and write out the anxiety. Breath in the freshness of the air blowing in from the sea, feel as it plays in my hair. Touch the cool, dewy, moss-covered earth. Rest my eyes, face, voice and the communication part of my brain. Listen to the crickets. Be here, and now, on this wild island, half way up a mountain, away from the city, a deep pool of lemon verbena and ginger tea in my cup. 

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I often think of death in this place, as I once, unplanned, participated in a gory performance-art piece in the forest, just uphill from here. I’d just come to sit on my own, as usual, and was initially annoyed to be interrupted by the curators setting up their booth. It involved hiring some headphones and an iPod, lying on the forest floor and listening to an audio recording about the processes of decomposition that would happen to your body if you happened to die, right there, and not be moved for the next few thousand years. It was totally disgusting, deliberately confronting, and also quite lovely. Shit and stink, scavengers and rot. The bloating with gas and collapse of structure, the leaching of fluid, and the hatching, wriggling and feeding of fly maggots. The gradual spreading with gravity and the sinking back down into the land. Flying in the bellies of currawongs, scurrying low with the devils, feeding the plants. Molecules that were once you, popping up in bright, ephemeral wildflowers, swaying in the breeze, being spread in pollen by the nectar-seeking bees, and shooting skywards in long-lived tree trunks. Life to death to life again. Your skeleton sinking into the earth beneath moss and roots and soil. 

Afterwards I opened my eyes, still present in my warm, alive body, and saw, amongst the patterns of shadow and light on the forest floor, rotting leaves, seed pods, moss, lichen, an orange slime mould, twigs, rolled tubes of eucalypt bark, small tufts of grass, spindly miniature mushrooms that were a soft greyish brown colour, earth, mud, and tiny 2-leaved seedlings. I heard the call of a sky-bourn currawong and the chirrups of the busy honey eaters above. I looked up through the layers of the canopy, the big, lime-green swarths of cutting grass, the crowded, papery-grey teatree trunks, the splotchy colors on the gum trunks- dark salmon, yellow and peachy brown, and thought “that would do me”. If it were possible. A slow grave in the ground, rather than a blasting furnace of gas. And, thank goodness for the earth’s decomposers.