It’s been a wet week.
One small three-letter word is enough to describe these past few days.
The earth is full to the brim, like a giant overlapping bucket of water, the trees are dripping, and the bush is again sprinkled with waterholes and streams.
The English response to Australia’s daring cricket victory was wet.
Donald Trump Jr’s cancelling of his anti-cancel culture tour of Australia was wet.
The giant new political canvas being created to give Indigenous Australians a voice in parliament has been muddied by doubt and fear while the paint is still wet.
When our kitchen ceiling sprung a leak, it seemed like winter was intent on telling us something. It only dripped for an hour and then stopped. So, in a perfect metaphor of the global response to climate change, I ignored it because the prospect of tearing half the roof off to find the cause was just too complicated and expensive.
So, I kept on listening to the news and the weather reports.
But if you pay too much attention to the world, things get crowded and noisy even inside your own small house.
Eventually, I braved the rain and went for a walk with Finn in the sodden bush.
The trees, normally cream and rust-coloured, were silvery grey and dark. The sky was low and close. The ground beneath our feet was soft and yielding like a sponge.
It threatened to give way and swallow us as I picked my way across the muddy trenches left by four-wheel drives and motorbikes. Goodness knows how deep they were. Finn raced around, his old bones given new life by the cold air and the damp decay of wood and animal droppings.
Eventually I was forced off the beaten and waterlogged track into virgin territory because the imprint of human activity was just too dangerous and messy to negotiate. The gums towered above me and the ground was a carpet of green, mostly oxalis, but it was a vivid, surreal lemony green. An old fallen tree lay next to me, sinking silently into the soil as emerald moss crept across its dark trunk. I stood still and breathed in this funk of decay and timeless transformation.
Then, out of the stillness, I heard whistling. A chorus of descending whistles travelled through the trees like the soft unfurling of an invisible curtain. I stood and shivered as I listened to the whistling. It was ghostly and unsettling. For a split second I felt the presence of something watching me. It wasn’t threatening; it was a gentle gaze, inviting and ancient.
Afterwards I was told the whistling was probably currawongs calling to each other. To me, the sound was primordial and took me out of the moment.
At the time, standing in the dripping bush, I thought this must be the sort of connection Indigenous peoples across the world feel to the land that has been taken and so irrevocably changed for commercial gain. Nothing much remains of their ancestors’ homes, just as hardly anything remains of my ancestors’ beginnings in the forests and caves of the northlands. What does remain, however, is a feeling of connection to something bigger than us.
Occasionally, in a few special places and moments, the veil is lifted, and we catch a glimpse of the big wheel and our place in it.
These places and moments are only ever found in nature, and we are so lucky here in Shepparton to be surrounded by forests and rivers. Despite its clumsy human footprint, our bushland can still be a sacred place, with doorways to eternity.