writing zen

I'm not giving up

burnt and broken tree 

still standing

This is my best and latest haiku. Some people wonder how to begin to write. Not many ever wonder how to begin to walk. If you combined those two things, and let your writing hand move the way your legs move, you would find it easy. And you would write what you know. If you walked barefoot, you might write about the feel of the grass under your feet. Or, if we were beside the harbour, the smell of salt in the air, seagulls - ferries. You know this because you are right there. This is what I mean by "writing zen". 

 I wrote that haiku at Mt. York, in the Blue Mountains, where the 2013 fires impacted. We were just wandering along, enjoying ourselves. Would you like to  join us for two haiku ginkos (walks), at the WEA , Sydney? - enrolling now. We'll enjoy Sydney's Botanic Gardens. 

https://www.weasydney.com.au/course/HGWZ

HAIKU COURSE AT WEA, SYDNEY

Slow down, observe, write, refresh.......by taking my course JAPANESE POETRY: HAIKU GINKO -  WRITING ZEN
at the WEA Sydney (Bathurst St).

 Beginning Thursday April 7 2016, a 5 week course of writing and walking combined.
See details on:

https://www.weasydney.com.au/…/Arts+and+Humaniti…/Literature

Two ginkos (haiku walks, you write while you walk) in Sydney's beautiful parks.

You could write about fig trees.....egrets.....grass....sunshine.......harbour......cormorants......fish......bridges......ah, now there's a good topic.

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From a recent walk with the barefoot monk, Bhante Jason:

the snake stiffens

seeing me

banded throat retreats

afternoon gully 

and the bush falls silent -

my breath and my steps

From Sand Mines to Good Times

I love this time of the year when the whole country, more or less, knocks off - the holidays. The holy break - rest - interlude. The Japanese have this concept of the yoyoe - it is a break between things, a space of nothing-in-particular. The idea is to space intense activity with  ‘yoyoe time’. In our connected 24 / 7 culture now, doing nothing is seen as a sign that you’re a hopeless incompetent. But I digress.

We went camping, as we often do, at the beach. We took ourselves up north, to a National Park. We set up our campsite in a beautiful spacious area dotted about with Banksia integrifolia. 

B. integ. - stunted headland version - with visitor

In the evening we toured the beach - rough and wild - the carpark - dotted with kangaroos feeding on the grass - and the amenities block.

the moon rising

in a haze of sea-mist

crickets idly zizz

 As this is a National Parks and Wildlife Service camp, there was a large interpretive sign there. I was gobsmacked to see that this place had been a sand-mine until 1982. We had noticed on our way back from the beach that the sand dune vegetation looked rather compromised. Now we knew why. The object of the extractivist enterprise was to gather rutile, which is the raw material for making titanium. I remembered back to the eighties, when I was a volunteer for Greenpeace. At that time environmental activists  were campaigning against the sand-mining - particularly at Middle Head. Names like John Seed, Ian Cohen spring to mind but I’m sure plenty of other people were involved.

The next day a large goanna came out near the middle of the day, to scrounge around for food. 

goanna

shower passes

the trees rustle

their wet feathers

We met one of our camp neighbours who came over to warn us that he would be using a chainsaw to chop up his firewood : “This is one of the few camps you can have a fire in summer!“. He was from Forster, said that he and his mates would remove the invasive bitou bush whenever they got the chance. (He was a nice bloke though why he felt he had to bring a leaf-blower to camp, goodness knows.)

campground neighbours

zip and unzip their zips

laughter far away

pelican

As the days went by, we noticed that birds abounded:  butcher birds, magpies, black cockatoos, olive-backed oriole, black-faced cuckoo shrike, little wattle birds and a fig bird.   The little miner, an invasive native bird, was kept in check by the variety of other birds there. I saw a large soaring white bird of prey land on a dead branch high above the beach - an osprey. Cormorants, oyster catchers, pelicans,  yellow-finned bream, green ants, crazy jumping ants, a resin bee, paper wasps, native bees, little black cicadas and light greeny-yellow ones. 

distant crash of surf

outside my nylon walls

cricket’s lullaby

 Gradually the camp-ground filled up to make a ‘camp village’, especially after Christmas Day. The tone of the village was friendly, most people greeting you as you made your way to and fro the  rough and wild beach. Kids rode their bikes around, or chucked footy balls.

We swam; read; ate Christmas cake; walked; drew; rode boogie boards in the surf; had visitors.

 

surf  drags us

like human tinsel

lightly thrown away

Saw dolphins and when we went kayaking, stingrays. Other people fished, drove their four-wheel drives up the beach, had barbeques, did whatever they did. And were generally quiet and had slightly mad fires. I felt such gratitude for the campaigners who had made all this R and R possible.

Large Tongue Orchid - Cryptostylis subulata 

the southeasterly

blasts the headland -

floral white-caps

 

Christmas bells

 I was telling  a friend who was an environmentalist back in the day, about all this. He said that the bitou bush, which is now one of the worst pest plants up and down the NSW coast, was used to stabilise the dunes after sand-mining. “ That’s what I heard”. It was brought into NSW in 1903 by a ship which dumped its ballast off at Newcastle. Then from 1946 to 1968 it was planted by the Soil Conservation Service of NSW. Perhaps this arm of government served industry in the same way that Forestry Tasmania fell into line over every plan that Gunns, the now disgraced timber company, had.

We owe a great debt to these warriors for the environment. Lest we forget. Isn’t it time that the extractivists were paid off, written down, written out, seen off, given their marching orders, divested from, chewed up and spat out?

grey sky and rough sea

a plucky boat makes

a white line outwards

2016 - relax, write haiku

moi - early summer, near Dalpura ridge

 Recent haiku: - 

water smash-up

rocks are responsible

tawny pool down below

Edenderry Falls, Govett's creek

soft warm red fruit

flies in my face as I pick

MY plums, you birds

In the midst of the Christmas pandemonium - I am running some 'quiet time' courses in 2016. 

RELAXATION & MEDITATION  - U3A Penrith

Fridays 10 - 12 noon Springwood, starting Feb.

 Registration is on Monday 18th January @ Penrith U3A headquarters, and Wednesday 20th January @ Springwood Sports Club. Details not up on their website yet. http://www.u3apenrith.org.au/. Free for U3A members. 

HAIKU GINKO: WRITING ZEN - WEA Sydney

Beginning Thursday April 7 2016, a 5-week course of writing and walking combined. See 

https://www.weasydney.com.au/courses/Arts+and+Humanities/Literature

for a full description, and details of times, cost and venues ( Sydney parks!)

And if it is all getting too much right now, you can always put in your "To Do" list:

walk silently, by myself

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Kanangra - the view from the top

Moi on the plateau

the sky speaking

through a muffler of clouds

something about rain

I’ve just come back from another ‘book’ trip  -

to Kanangra with Dave Noble. Our timing was good - just before the thunderstorms took hold of the Sydney region. 

a photo stop

the flies gather round Dave

for a possible bite

 Here are some of his (extraordinary) and my (ordinary) photographs.

the coal seam cave

 So many things to see! Caves! orchids! flowers! waterfalls! water pooling in rock hollows! native bees! stone! distant valleys and mountains! 

striated rock orchid - Dockrillia striolata

bothered

the falcon shifts his stance

soars away

Peregrine falcon

And to hear - many different birds! lyrebird, bowerbird, whipbird, white-throated treecreeper, currawong, honeyeaters....thunder....waterfalls.....rain.....fire...and flies, always the flies. 

Stypandra glauca

All the flutterbies were out. There was a beautiful green-striped one - green for "Go!". This one, on the pea flowers,  was less fluttery.

Cox's river

who is more frightened

the brown snake

or me

Ten years ago I walked down Cox’s river with ecologist Clive Heywood Barker and I wrote about it for my book “Into the Blue”. Last week I did the walk again as a leader for  the Conservation Society Saturday walkers. It was a hot day and I planned to get to the junction with Little river. The walk touched on the nineteenth-century history of contact between the original Gundungurra inhabitants and the new settlers. We stopped at the O'Reillys’ shack at Cullenbenbong. What is left is the kitchen, which was built separately in case there was a fire. This was a common practise for settlers.

Bernard O’Reilly’s reminiscence of his childhood in “Cullenbenbong”  included memories of the Lynches, indigenous people who had to surf the massive changes brought about by white settlement. Next we drove to the traditional campground on the Cox's river, where their family (Lynches) bought a selection in the 1880’s. Our walk started here. 

After crossing the river, we walked downstream. We came across quite a few other walkers, and a father and son fishing. The Dad was frustrated by the number of European carp swarming the river (Warwick had seen them at the crossing). No trout, he said. 

By contrast there were quite a few snakes. They've come out of torpor and are a bit sluggish, so we were on the lookout for non-sticks that might resent being trodden on. 

We didn't quite make it to Little river junction. It was a hot day, so ambling along, first in the shade of Casuarina cunninghamiana (river oak) trees, and then along the granite banks, was perfectly fine. On the way back Harold and I took a swim in a large pool - deliciously cool, and in places there was sand underfoot for a massage. 

Thanks to Bob and Harold for some of the photos. 

 

Sprinter

Acacia brownei

It is sprinter! That is, a season half-way between winter and spring. Most of the wattle is flowering magnificently, and especially at the margins of roads and tracks. The heart lifts away from …all of that difficult stuff, in the yellow of it all.  Here’s a haiku from my book, which I hope makes sense, out of context. It quotes the Paul Kelly song about Vincent Lingiari, who led the walk-off at Wave Hill station in 1966, to protest working conditions for aboriginal people.

Acacia terminalis

“From little things

big things grow”

bright wattle flowers

Acacia ulicifolia, Prickly Moses, is already browning. But the Hardenbergia violacea, Happy wanderer, is the opposite of wattle. It is close to the ground, rambling over everything, and if you didn’t stop and look, you might not fully appreciate its beauty. Is that like the little niggling voice in the heart that urges you to do the right thing?

holding spring

in violet fists,

Hardenbergia

Happy wanderer

I was so glad I listened to it yesterday. And that I wandered happily on Saturday, and saw the vine rambling at the old Cox’s road, near Hartley.

Convict stonework on Cox's road