tom m wilson

“I could have told much by the way

But having reached this quiet place can say

Only that old joy and pain mean less

Than these green buds

The wind stirs gently.”

Time goes on and on and in spite of all the things I feel like I need to do this coming year, nature reminds me to forget New Year Resolutions and to return to the present.  Read, or listen to, the rest of this poem by the English poet Kathleen Raine here.

I wrote the following article in response to seeing a series of photos by my Indonesian friend Pila.

The title of the above photo (which is available for sale I believe) is ‘act 05 of Hello And Goodbye series’
size: 60x100cm
2007

A neat, Asian girl is standing on the flat and dry expanse of the Western Australian wheat belt. Her clothes are contained and respectful. The nape of her neck, the intimate place only a lover would kiss, is all you can see of her skin as she turns to face the silver desolation of a salt lake. The land does not embrace her. It gives no gentle reciprocity to the newcomer. The sun light scours the horizon, showing no relief or refuge. The land has not received human love here, and it stares back at the visitor from under a layer of white scum. The anonymity of the earth’s face carries menace. The salty expanse holds no cherished niche or well known outlook. The only human stories to have past by here were those sealed behind the door of a moving ute. Once this land was briefly wheat for dollars. Now it is only erasure.

The girl cannot feel at home here. She comes from a land just across the narrow sea to the north. Seen from outer space the verdant greens of Indonesia’s mountains and islands create a vivid contrast with the ochre to scarlet reds of Western Australia. Now she stands here on the land down under and sees the flat line of the horizon. Before this moment lines meant only the vertical shapes of rising mahogany and teak. Now the line that rings the sky has been stripped of mountains and forests and is there before her.

Her name is Prilla Tania, or Pila for short. I visited her in the small farming town of Kellerberrin in south-western Australia, a few hundred kms from the coast, one Friday afternoon in dry December. I was there for the opening of an exhibition of photographs she had taken. In a series of six very large colour prints, the photos show her entering the hurt landscape and trying to feel at home. She steps over a doormat which sits at the bottom of each of the frames, picks up an English tea cup and drinks, standing in the living room of big sky and brown wheat. Her photos are a cycle that witness the degradation of the land. They start with the image of her stepping over the threshold into the original woodland of the area. Soon she is standing in a razed field, then in a field of wheat, and then, in one of her most powerful images, she is turning to confront the white plain of a salt lake. The inadequate tea cup of British settlement comes up again and again.

As I had made the three hour drive out into the area from the port city of Fremantle I had felt my mood sink a little. My eyes had searched for the biological wonders of diverse plant and animal life that have evolved to fit this arid corner of the planet, and come up with only horizon after horizon of ‘productive’ brown fields and the odd apologetic copse of trees. Now I had seen Pila’s photos I felt even more acutely the lack of welcome that this part of Australia held out to the visitor.

Even if white folk hadn’t knocked down the open woodland of this low rainfall country to make way for crops and sheep, the land still wouldn’t have been an easy one for most humans to embrace. This place was never lush or soft like the island of Britain or the rainforests of Pila’s home to the north. However in the past a fierce sun would have shone down on the lopsided antics of little Thorny Devils, the dark feathered flight of Black Cockatoos, the freckled trunks of Powderbark Wandoos, and the symmetrical crowns of gorgeous Salmon Gums. Now, with the clearing of millions of hectares of trees for agriculture the deep roots of the trees that kept the water table low have been replaced by the shallow roots of annual crops. The water table has risen, and millions of tons of salt in the soil has come to the surface, killing most things in its wake. With rising temperatures the future of this part of the world is looking even more squeezed.

After the exhibition was over we went back to the room next door to the gallery where Pila was staying. Me and another friend who had come along for the journey wanted to see some stars now that we were out of the city, so we walked down one of the few streets in the town. In two minutes we had left the lights of the suburban looking houses behind us and come to an old, wire fence. Beyond the fence lay a field. We climbed the old wire fence and walked forward into the night, hearing the crackle of our feet in the dry stubble. Darkness muffled the edge between the bright pattern of the milky way above and the emptiness of the field stretching out under our feet. Dark night and a cool wind blowing through the stubble of the wheat made me relax.

We paused and stood in silence. I squatted down and felt the blanket of rural darkness cover me. It was a comfort, and for the moment I felt an intimacy with this place. The endless blanks drawn by the sun were replaced with the smudged shapes of shadow and dark suggestion.

Now only night can bandage the wound.

I offer the following poem by Emily Bronte to all of you who have ever felt discouraged by all the ugliness and destruction in the world…

Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall Nature cease to bow?

Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving
Come back and dwell with me.

I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will.

When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
Ive seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolatry.

Ive watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway,
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away.

Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet none would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.

Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me.

by Emily Jane Bronte

I wrote the following short story while I was musing on the erotic in nature late last year. 

In the stone heart of an old city an elegant restaurant goes about its nightly buisiness. A couple are sitting down for dinner at a starched linen table cloth. Outside the windows of the sparesly adorned interior the street is mostly dark, apart from the lights of intermittently passing cars. The entree and the main course pass, and the candle light flickers forgivingly over the faces of the two lovers. That slice of papaya now on the woman’s perfectly white desert plate encases small, dark life forces. Weeks ago in a humid African orchard those glistening black ovaries were fertilzed by pollen. Now the woman’s tongue slides up against the sweet body of tropical nights. Her nourishment carries the sperm of aching trees. But in the dimness of the evening the woman does not remember.

The abiding taste of papaya is good. Ahh, yes, good. Her eyes meet those of the man across the table. For a moment their pupils dilate in collusion. The woman pauses, feeling a seed on her tongue. She moves it over her tongue and plays with it on her lips. While bringing the sweetness of promise across their tongues the lovers are intent on the beauty of dark eyes across the table. They smile to each other. Outside the old city walls a breeze glances through leaves in a grove of trees.

It is a few days later, in the country. A small forest of trees borders an enclosed space of lawn. The young woman walks, alone, into the middle of the sheltered scene. Civilization fits tightly. She undoes its clutching grasp, and lets it fall softly from her body. She lies down on a rug, there in the middle of the lawn. Leaning low she feels the warmth of the sun on her brown, now naked skin. The roughness of the grass through the rug under her thighs. She savours the sensation of the warm air caressing her free breasts. Time passes. A bird calls out. Green shadows shift and fall languidly over the grass.

Looking sideways into the trees the woman notices a seed case hanging from a bough. What is this shape? Slowly, she gets to her feet and walks over to the hanging seed case. The outer skin has already started to come off, making the object look naked, even brazen. She peels the casing further back and slips her whole hand around the large, heavy seeds within. She hefts their uneven texture, sensing a dense, weighted content.

The roundness of promise lies there in her hand. Her eyes see clearly in the day’s brilliant sunlight. Within an arch of wood seeds are gestating the future. All the trees seem to lean in from the edge of the garden around her. Stroking the pendant ovals with her fingers, she looks, and remembers all the love in the world.

Last night I and a select group of acolytes gathered for a film night at my place.  This wasn’t any old film screening, this was a journey into light, accompanied by a mix of ambient acoustics that I’d put together.  While we soared over the peaks of the Himalayas the sounds of Aeroc pulsed through us, as flowers in the high mountains opened Triola came through the big sound system, and as we ventured into the dark caves of Borneo the echo of Bill Laswell’s dubs opened before us.  Many of the world’s best nature photographer’s were involved in the making of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (2006), and their superb work needs this kind of soundtrack, not the BBC intonations that the film was released with.  (Sadly the photographer’s involved are not even listed on the sleeve of the DVD, only ‘David Attenborough’ is mentioned.  And of course David didn’t do any of the photography that makes this film so sublime.  Come on BBC!)

That’s my friend Chris having a peaceful inhalation of his cinnamon hookah.  The tethers have now been cut.

White Australia was born with the sweat and blood of poor British men and women dripping off it. 736 convicts came out on the First Fleet. The ‘First Fleet’ consisted of eleven ships full of people forced into exile from their homeland by a legal system that looked after the rich. The oldest female convict was Dorothy Handland, a dealer in rags and old clothes. She was 82. She had been given seven years for perjury, and in 1789 she hanged herself, in a fit of befuddled despair, from a gum tree at Sydney Cove. She became Australia’s first recorded suicide.

For me nature is a lifeline. My sense of my self as part of the natural world buffers me against depression. But when Dorothy’s body swung from the limb of a gum tree, like the one above, she clearly had no understanding of the lines of nature as lifelines.

Did the Aboriginal people ever record a suicide? I don’t know. As Australia Day approaches this year I’ll be looking back with sympathy not only on the Aboriginal people who suffered the invasion of their homeland, but also on those thousands of men and women who were slaves of the British Empire two hundred years ago.

Real environmentalism isn’t just about acknowledgment of the problems of this world and the struggle to right them, it is also a regular, lived appreciation of nature. Try and live the first without doses of the second of these things and you’ll find it a rough path. People whose contact with ‘environmentalism’ goes only so far as a Greenpeace banner, or a newspaper headline, are understandably turned off by the whole movement. The other day I was running on the beach.  Afterwards I jumped in the waves and the warm water, played around, smiled and goofed off. It was like washing all the artifice of modern life off. Unclogging the arteries of my day from duty and chore and other heavy metals. We go to the ocean in Australia to wash off the urban. And we renew our selves. Surfers are more realistic than environmentalists in this respect in that they always balance the bad news of the day with real and regular experiences in the more than human world. Sitting in the city as the weeks and months go by and reading about the ills the natural world suffers again and again gives one a distorted picture of reality. Reality contains ugly destruction, but there is so much more beauty and extant landscape to enrich your days out there. Surfers know this as they don’t forget to pay regular visits to the swelling and swaying landscape of H20 that rings this country. I felt my body and soul profit from my afternoon flop, flail and foam-slide in the surf.

A participatory experience of cosmically generated aquatic waves makes you feel good. Let’s talk about health for a minute. Most of the time in the West doctors use a deficit model of health: that is, if you’re not sick, then you are healthy. But what if we had a more positive conception of human health?

My cousin, Tim Baker, is a freelance writer who lives in northern NSW and does plenty of surfing. He’s just published a book of interviews with surfers, High Surf, and flicking through it the other day I came across the words of Dorian Paskowitz:

‘When you come out of surfing, there is this euphoria, which is part of an actual physical sense of well-being. It’s not that you suddenly hear angels, its that you feel physically remade. You’re not only remade, but remade with refinement, exactness, so that things feel inside you to be gearing and meshing effortlessly. You feel lighter, you feel that you move with more agility. You have more positive feelings, you talk faster. How much more this is than not being sick; how much more this is than just being normal.’ (p.125)

I then read a comment by a surfer in Byron Bay, Rusty Miller:

‘When the surf is good in Byron Bay and a lot of people get a lot of surf, the vibe in the town is actually elevated by the spirit of what you bring in from the water.’ (p.220)

Moving through space in an unpredictable environment and reacting spontaneously to changes in that environment is what our bodies were evolved to do in the Pleistocene environment of our long-gone ancestors in Africa. It seems to me that catching waves triggers all the responses our body was evolved for. No wonder the activity can make you feel so good. Perhaps we should all be praying to liquid drainpipes.

The act that founded the city of Perth, Western Australia, for white folks in 1829 was the cutting down of a tree on Mt. Eliza in today’s Kings Park, and the firing off of a volley of shots. Since then the transplanted British and their progeny have not done the best job of living well with nature around here.  Perth has a long way to go when it comes to cultivating the presence of wild nonhuman life within its suburbs.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Sydney and on Friday I’m flying to San Francisco. I’m going to be a work-study scholar at the Esalen Institute, studying massage for ten weeks there. The feeling of anticipation is building. I do like the landscape of Western Australia, but it is very flat here, and it is going to be a real pleasure to see some big hills in Big Sur, northern California. I’m not going to Esalen only to study massage, I’m also going to spend some time under a big starry sky, by the cold Pacific, far away from city life. Living in the suburbs dulls one’s perceptions to some degree, and I’m hoping that these coming few weeks will sharpen my senses and my appreciation of the natural world.

This morning I and my friend Yvonne went down to Bather’s Beach in Fremantle for a swim.  This is my last dip into the warm blue Indian Ocean before heading into the northern hemisphere winter.  As we swam two dolphins, a mother and her young one, came and played with us.  I and Yvonne gasped with surprise as the glistening fins surfaced a few metres away from us.  They circled around us, and I ducked under the water and swam alongside the large grey shape of the mother.  I couldn’t believe that just five minutes bike ride from my house I was playing around with a couple of huge, intelligent wild beings in the warm shallows of the sea.  They were so much larger than us, and so lithe in their liquid space.  What a benediction to receive just before I leave Australia.

I didn’t have my camera handy when the dolphins turned up, but this is where we met the strangers from the blue.  Look at the colours of the ocean today (and thanks for the photo Yve).

There is still wildness to be found in the city.

The longest Friday in my entire life started with walking through Surrey Hills in the morning in Sydney, and finished at midnight, tapping alone at my laptop, in Fairfax, a suburb of San Francisco. I left Friday afternoon and arrived Friday morning. While Australia had already moved into celebrating Australia Day I was still treading water back in Friday. In the Australian afternoon, as the plane moved out over Botany Bay I looked back and saw the white sandstone cliffs of NSW recede. A hot, dry land, yes, but at least a place where you can feel the sun on your skin. Thirteen hours later as I came into San Fran the turbulence of strong winds and heavy rains knocked the aircraft around. Upon emerging out of the car park with a debilitating mixture of nausea and sleep deprivation I found endless gray water sheeting the Californian sky. I’ve left summer and come to winter.

The feeling of having left the warm web of human associations back in Australia hit me about then and I felt sad on top of it all.  But don’t worry, after some sleep and food and drink I’ve revivified and today and feel ok again.

I’m an Australian in America.  I’ve come ambling out of the red centre…  A real man of the Australian wild doesn’t look like Crocodile Dundee, he looks like Jimmy Pike, brilliant Aboriginal hunter and tracker, pictured here with a Bilby (photo from Hunters and Trackers of the Australian Desert by Pat Lowe).

No, I’m clearly not a true Man of the Wild.

This isn’t me.  I’m more at home with the button on my Nikon, than the grip of a throwing spear, and the sound of a trumpet being blown at a party, than the sound of a dingo howling after dark.  But I am more in touch with the natural world than most people.

So when I arrived here in San Fran the first thing I wanted to do was see what the land looked like beyond the built walls of civilization.  It is green and wet, so different to the arid land and blasting sun of south-western Australia I’ve just come from.   The experience of coming from one season and land to another season and land in such a short time is jarring at first, but I’m already adjusting to a winter key.

Moss and lichen coat the stones, and the waving arms of the oak trees in the valley.

The rain that fell yesterday and last night has created torrents where before there were just dribbles.

This cataract, and former dribble, is in Fairfax, a small town about 45 minutes drive from the centre of San Francisco.  We’ve had some very serious rain here, with potential for dangerous flooding in the area.

This little house I noticed on my way out to this waterfall, on the side of the road in Fairfax.  The flag tells the true story as I see it.  I am an Australian entering American territory, but more importantly, I’m a human being entering another bioregion within the global biosphere.  This land is part of the common treasure and heritage that is the biosphere.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Esalen, Big Sur, to start my work-study program there.

To all my friends, I miss you!

Arrival…

No, it hasn’t been that dramatic a crash. But I’m going to be honest about my experiences here, and you’ll see that it isn’t all flowing smoothly.
Esalen is a kind of retreat centre, which offers week long courses in yoga, meditation, photography, amongst other things. There are about three hundred people on this cliff-side property on the steep sides of Big Sur, central coast California. Some of the people are staff, and some of the staff are ‘work-study scholars’, that is people who pay less money to live and study here for a longer period, as well as who work for some of their week. I am one of these people. I’m staying on the main property, quite close to the lodge (the dining hall) which is the centre of activity here. I’m sharing a room with a Korean guy, an English guy, and a very young American guy. They are all nice, low key people. However the English guy is on the bunk bed below me and he snores and even with ear plugs it disrupts my sleep. Hopefully tonight the white noise machine somebody left in the room will help. However not having a private space to retreat to from all the people – and the experience of being at Esalen is of being thrown into a sea of talking heads – gets me down a bit.

In the dining hall one eats at a buffet, and the food here is so various and gourmet in a very healthy sense that I am eating the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

Here is the kitchen. This is where I work six hours a day, five days a week. I am washing dishes or pots or chopping vegetables or taking salads out to the salad bar in the dining hall. I work quickly to alleviate the monotony of the jobs, and today I had the pleasure of having my iPod played on the stereo as the chef for the day didn’t have any music on him. What with work during the day and the two and a half hours of classes in the evenings I’m finding myself feeling overly controlled by outside forces (what with the additional factor of not having a private space of my own to retreat to after work or class).

But I want to give a balanced view of my experience here, so now it is time to turn to some of the positives of being at Esalen. At Esalen thermal hot springs are channeled into hot bathes which are perched on the edge of the cliffs. I generally try and have two trips down the hill each day to soak in the tubs. With sore muscles from scrubbing pots or running around the kitchen, it is just what one’s body needs.

I have yet to actually take my camera into the tubs – people are generally naked so they might not appreciate it if I did – but here is where I stand on the stones above the freezing cold Pacific ocean and have a hot shower before entering the baths.

Yesterday I had a rare moment of solitude in the bathes before lunch, and as I rolled around in the water I watched an otter rolling around in the much colder water below me on his back. A pleasing analogue in recreation between me and the ocean swimmer. Lying in the hot tubs is clearly one of the best things about this place.

I have to go to bed now as I’m exhausted, but I’ll continue this blog about Esalen tomorrow.