Longshanks and I went for a hike through the natural flora that’s is hidden away like a lost world from a children’s fantasy story just a couple of hundred metres from where we live.
It takes a bit a little while to get away from the feel of clustered shuttered households. Not that they pose a threat, they just are too much a reminder of what we were escaping from.
Children’s playground equipment is cordoned off with tape like a crime scene. It looks forlorn, lonely, and neglected.
A monument to the small, quiet death of children’s laughter.
We keep walking and happen upon a stretch of swampy wetland, greeted by the first sounds of nature. The chirruping and clucking quacking of ducks and waterfowl just going about their business, hidden there among the tufts and eruptions of reeds.
Not too many people about… Someone flys by on a bike now and then with the tinkling of a warning bell. I feel like I am beginning to breathe for the first time in a long time.
Soon we get less travelled tracks. We twist and turn through the styles and stumble along until we could stand there in solitude.
There beneath a faultless blue sky, empty of everything but the Brilliant white diamond sun and three-quarters of a pale and ghostly moon.
There’s nobody except Joey and me, I pull down my mask and greedily inhale the damp musty scents and fragrances of nature, like a starving man seated before a banquet.
The sunlight and shadows illuminate and conceal the various shades of greenery.
Dead bleached gum trees stand like defiant sentinels among the verdant rambling of shrubs and vines. Wattle explodes into puffs of yellow. Suddenly I remember what it feels like to be truly alive.
It is so easy to forget the power of nature. Sometimes it is still and simply slumbering.
Some times wild and free. But it is that from which we sprung. It is vital and thriving, harsh, and austere but it is essential in always.
