A Stranger, Passing Through

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold rush of noon.

— Dorothea Mackellar, My Country.

To touch the land. And what to feel from that touch: strangeness or a wonder of place? An earth we only walk upon, or a place of connected sense in which land is a part of that walking self, and that self is equally part of land? But no. Not that. Not for me. I don’t think I was raised to be capable of embracing that connection. I was not raised in that connection. I’m upon this place: touching, taking and full of wonder, but not being of it.

I walk, looking, admiring, breathing quietly, lost in the beauty of place, sitting quietly in cooling sand, bowing in the shade of looming forest, gazing from high peaks at the rippling curves of blue ranges. Sometimes there is something more. I wouldn’t claim to feel a presence, but there’s something there, some glimmer of a subtle sense as I stare across water, down on hazy valleys or into the spaces between the trees.

I’m watching. Looking on. Looking in. And that’s the thing: I can never simply be a part of this. It’s a thought that sucks a little of the life out of me: that once, and still, people lived in this place who were fully here, who saw themselves as integral, without distinction from all the life and soil and rock, water and space that surrounded them. The old people were this place, and this place was them. Think of that. I try. I fail.

I sway a little inside at the realisation that I will always only be a stranger here, someone passing through. Passing through with lightness and respect I hope, but never forming a part of this greater whole. What must that be like? How must it be to see no distinction between the “natural” and the “human” worlds. How must it be to feel intimately connected to place?

I can’t grab it. It’s not in the centuries of separation bred into me, bred into any settler in this place. That has to be true, surely. As enlightenment-formed creatures, we are not culturally wired to be of the world. We are in the world. We see that world before us. Often we consider it a thing created in all its abundance and diversity for our benefit. We watch it. We consider it. We weigh it and seek, sometimes, to understand it. This otherness gives us licence to take from it. Ultimately to destroy it if needs must.

This is the predicament I ponder at as I gaze out on country. And I struggle to get even the merest inkling of belonging – that feeling the old people here must simply have known in a way that’s deeper than apprehension [appreciation?]. That they were here, and here was them, an indivisibility that is the essence of caring. I will always just be me, looking on. Being here, but not being here. I’m awed by the power of that other belonging, of the care it represents, of its mystery to me and its unknowability.

This is an extract from Wood For The Trees, published in the November edition of The Monthly.