Hello Earth #24

Hello Earth

Here I am, on a morning cold but sunny, about to have a late breakfast. First, of course, coffee. Well, first after looking out the door to see the mountains directly opposite, behind the houses across the street. Today the deep blue is slightly misted. No, I look again and realise it’s not that at all. It is that the clarity is so perfect today that inside that sharp royal blue I am seeing grey-green, individual rocks and trees. Amazing! What a place to live!

Earth, this area of you where I live is always pure joy to contemplate. It feeds my soul. I lived in the city of Melbourne longer than anywhere else (still, although my time here is fast catching up) and in those days it was pleasant living as cities go; the place had its own beauty. But it was still a city ... and now, decades later, is less beautiful and more of a screaming metropolis. (I know; I visit family there sometimes.) 

Leaning in, giving thanks for the unexpected circumstances which brought me to live here twenty-five-and-a-half years ago, I marvel at my good fortune. 

Listing gratitudes, they are: the parents and grandparents who taught me to value and reverence the natural world, it’s beauties and wonders; that natural world itself, and the sheer luck of beginning and ending my life in places rich with such beauty and wonder; trees, rivers, mountains, ocean, clean air, open skies, birds.... From far south, temperate Tasmania to sub-tropical Northern Rivers: rainforest places both, in their different and not-so-different ways. I am blessed and know myself blessed, beyond imagining.

Offering tears of thankfulness and delight, sitting here comfortable in my body, I pause our conversation, Earth, to be resumed next time, and go and get my coffee.

I'm sharing this, nearly two years later, with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #24: Your Landscape. 

The complete 'Hello Earth' series (unillustrated) is available free from Smashwords in epub format: here.

Of Country

Poetry Month, day 20

The prompt today at "imaginary garden with real toads" is Say the Names of the Places You Love.

Of Country

Murwillumbah in the Northern Rivers,

under the mountain known as Wollumbin

(which Captain Cook christened Mt Warning)

is a home which I came to late in life.

Seers, oracles and guides all told me

I belonged far north of where I was. Then Fate 

and the Universe took a hand, offering a house 

for rent, all the way up here, in Pumpenbil

out past Tyalgum, at the end of a dirt road

nearly to the top of the hill. The name our landlady

gave that place was Djieriong, a Bundjalung word

meaning "Freedom of the Heart". 

And we found that here. Though we didn't

find any of the "many possums" we were told that

Murwillumbah was the "place of" – and as for

the mountain, there are those who say

white settlers misunderstood. That name,

they say, belonged originally to a different mountain

further along the range. Be that as it may, 

it seems to me they are all good names 

to use in this rainforest land, this sacred earth,

this mountain-ringed, vast valley of many rivers,

this huge Caldera around its crystal-full peak.

Do I say this is now my place? That idea of land 

as possession, as property, is a notion brought 

by invaders. The original people say, I believe, 

that they belong to the land; custodians, caretakers. 

And more than that, deeper than that: the land that bore them 

is their spirit home. They are always connected 

to that country. One time, for reasons, I and some others 

were given the freedom of this land here, for life, 

by one who could – a Githabul elder 

from out Kyogle way. So yes, I do belong.

Note: Shae Brown, the above-mentioned "landlady" became a very dear friend as well. She comments elsewhere, on this poem:
"So beautiful Rosemary, it is always a delicate balance being non-Indigenous and being sensitive to knowledge as well. I connected with a Bundjalung Elder when I first moved here, to introduce myself and to respectfully ask permission to be here, which he gave...and then gave me the word to represent my relationship with Country."