Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: magical

  • you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

    you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

    Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books.

    In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had a four-year-old boy and he and I fell in love. The grown-ups strolled on ahead down the wickety dunes, talking and idly watching the seagulls wheel overhead, and the two of us scampered and bolted, climbed under and hid. We found things in the sand which have no name. We found soft glass and seagrapes, rusted and tasting salty.

    We burst back onto the roadside with its sparse traffic, three heads disappearing far out in front. In a rush of inspiration he turned to me: “I know! How about, you sneak up on your daddy, and I’ll sneak up on my daddy!”

    I remember the feeling of protective love that washed me in that weird warm moment. I was so frightened of seeing the hope and ambition, the trickery, fade from his eyes and their expression subdue and dim. I was frightened he might suddenly realize: Ach no! You’re one of Them! But we did it. He sneaked up on his daddy. And I sneaked up on mine. Ambush!

     

  • cradle of many things

    cradle of many things

    Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and bare against the sky but, if I were to reach up and drag one down, already the infestation of buds and bugs that’s Spring.

    H2O HoL leafy smear windscreens

  • with my bare hand

    with my bare hand

    Interesting coincidence between the accidents of physics and the compulsions of human nature: so often when a glove falls, in the street, like a leaf it will lie palm-side-up, as though its fortune is about to be told. That way when you walk past these lost lonely single gloves they are usually in postures of imploring, or appeal. It occurred to me retrieving my own glove outside my door that a nice filmclip could be made by stooping and dropping a coin or small offering – even a leaf, perhaps, as Balinese do – in the palm of each glove, randomly about the city.

    H2O HoL streetlit tramstop

  • København

    København

    København magical, sunken in the deep, dark water like a turtle from the undersea land, and all of these strangers (to me) riding the waves on its back. The water stretches away into the dark, black and pulsing with lights. Candles in the windows, restaurants which opened in 1694, boats creaking in the wind which have sailed past the horizon, although the horizon keeps moving and we know it. It is our own. At the rim of the sea equidistant, seemingly, all the younger lands I’ve known in this dark and troubled lifetime, where everything I touch turns to silver like leaves. At the rim of the world darkness falls away, falls away but here it is so dark the stars crust the harbour sky like satellites. Creaking of the trees, creaking of the hawsers, creaking of the wind. *@,)

     

  • finally, in Europe

    finally, in Europe

    I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than lush Queensland.

    How I got here was, hopped on the wrong train on platform 14 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was carried several miles into the region of Whereonearth as I slowly realized my mistake. Went pale and sweaty with panic, leapt off at Whereonearth and scampered back to Berlin in a cab. The blessed Deutsche Bahn which runs on time like oil on water was blessedly late; forty minutes late! hooray, got on the right train. Travelled all day through increasingly Protestant countryside with this dark soil like crumbled bread and then, so exciting, the whole entire train drove very slowly onto a huge ferry and we all got off and rode in silence across a featureless expanse of water, greeted by waving wind towers on the Nordic shore, sky white and hanging low, out into the fresh cold misty Danish countryside. The coins are so heavy and beautiful when I was given change I had to hold them in my hand and turn them for long moments. I found a restaurant with a wall of old glassed bookshelves where they flame crepes at the table. I found a park where the sweet gates came up to my knees. I found the harbour. The haven. København.

  • “high, wild, savage and frightening”

    “high, wild, savage and frightening”

    What is that book you’re always carrying? my friend wanted to know. So I opened it and read to him:

    “But the first of the thunder and lightning was always high, wild, savage and frightening. Every year people in our part of the land were killed by lightning. Yet long before I learned at school that lightning was electricity, and all else physics had to say about it, I caught the symbolic ‘other’ from Klara, for whom it was a pure phenomenon of the spirit. While the women of our community on their different farms would fold up the silver and metal in the house in sheets and blankets in the belief that otherwise they would attract the lightning, hanging towels over all the mirrors and drawing the curtains in their haste, Klara would sit with me on our great verandah and make me look at the lightning because she said that every human being had the same light as the lightning in his eye, and the fiercer the lightning outside, the brighter the light with which the eyes must look directly, steadily and without swerving, back at the lightning. She believed that if the light in one’s own eyes did not respond and flare all the brighter because of the example of the lightning, there was a form of lightning that would go black and invisible, and that that form of lightning was the lightning that killed.

    “This was for me one of the earliest and most convincing illustrations of how symbolic the Bushman spirit was, how rich in the primordial wisdom stored up in that two-million-year old being of which Jung spoke to me later, describing at as ‘a living treasure of the all the experience and knowledge gained since the beginning of time’, and warning that if one lost touch with this innermost source and its symbols, life, rootless and adrift on the tides of fate, would fail and die. Fairly early in my life, thinking of the Bushman symbolism as I had done from the beginning, I thought of the lightning and the light in the Bushman eye staring back at the lightning as images of consciousness and awareness, and I ended up where I still stand today by thinking of lightning as the call to the battle for increase of awareness which is the imperative in creation.”

    ~Laurens van der Post, The Voice of the Thunder

    HoL blue point tree