Tom M. Wilson

In case you’re interested, I’ve recently added short, paragraph-long reviews of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, of Lester R. Brown’s Plan B 3.0 and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to the page on this website entitled ‘Wisdom’ (my suggested reading list).  It isn’t often that reading a book influences my view of the world.  All three of these books have managed to do just that.

This morning I was at Leighton for some clean, two foot barrels, all to myself.  I caught myself enjoying the moments on the face, and then being a word-hoarder, I wanted to verbalize why I like this experience. Read on…

Forward comes the scintillating bank of green water. You paddle and then, you are:

Free. Freed from the contraints of being a slow, land-dwelling mammal. Liquid. All motion buffered by gentle and forgiving silk. Effortless. Pollution-free, you float along the edge of one of nature’s rhythms. Moving. Hericlitus was right to say that stasis is death. Absorbed in the Now. Rousseau’s Noble Savages play on the Australian littoral. Out-racing the breaking lip. Tim Winton was pleased to see men do something pointless and elegant.

What have you accomplished?

Freedom-drenched liquid under the sun.

[For those not from Western Australia, the Swan River is a broad and slow flowing river which winds through Perth and out to the sea at Fremantle.]

A SILENCE UNHEARD ON YOUR FURROWED CHANNELS

I throw down my bike, and I’m here.

The flowing Swan, soothing broth for my head.
Drinking in the cooler shadows, I look down on my pass, never fled.
High above the water, amongst the needles of the trees.
I pause for a moment and sigh, not being charged any fees.

Anger at Four Wheel Drivers slips out in a rasp.
Blood moves through me, the currents of flow yet out of my grasp.
Casuarina trees mat my ground with their flax,
This pause elongates, then disbands incremental emotional tax.

Nothing is demanded by the dimensions of my local river bank,
The palimpsest of the Paper-bark has only a history of evolution in its tussled flank.
The waving Zamia palm’s government is the risen sun,
The only land-lord of this Marri is the afternoon wind and its sometimes squalling run.

The slope of this sandy earth was not a grandstand in 1829,
And you can hear no querulous Wattlebird report upon those whose questing navy was of Lime.
Prior events were more cyclic, a thousand years contained the morning’s news.
The khaki colour of my sentinel’s leaves, a leached detail any day would not fear to lose.

The morning of this quiet, greener millennia is here.
I look around this river bank, now my Today has dispensed with fear.
I stand upon the grassy river’s edge and am complete,
Let us pray for others yet to rise to their feet.