This is my last blog post for a long time, maybe forever. I began this site in 2005, with help from my brother. Thanks for all your help Sam. That year I finished writing my PhD. In 2006 I started writing a blog, and for the next six years I regularly contributed images and words about the natural world that had inspired me and whose inspiration I had wanted to share.
Meeting and staying with John Fowles at his home in Dorset in 2002, had, it turns out, been a major influence on the rest of my life. I won’t explain this influence here, but the book I published in 2006, The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles, contains much of my philosophy of life. In 2002 I also spent time on a tall tropical island in the Indian Ocean and while I was there I read Consilience and The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson. These two books and an experience of tropical mountains and deep, cool chasm-like valleys also had a lasting influence on who I was to become. The optimism and curiosity I got from E. O. Wilson, a sense of awe for the Creation, the greater natural world, and my certainty about who I am through many readings in evolution, psychology and history, all combined to create a standpoint which, if not religious, was a strong and serene position.
With this background I wrote and recorded the more than 300 blog posts and radio shows that you can find archived below. Sometimes I was digging into what it meant to belong to this bioregion in south-west Australia, a land of sand, banksia trees, blue skies and Noongar history. For two years I researched and wrote an environmental history of south-west Australia, a manuscript that may be published in 2013, and this process influenced what I wrote about in some blogs. Sometimes I was commenting on a poem by Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver. For a while I travelled around the planet taking photos and discovering other countries. For a time I commented on my experiences working at the Esalen Institute on the Californian coast. For three years I made environmental radio shows in Perth, interviewing people who I felt had some wisdom to share, from Tim Flannery to Michael Archer.
If I have a spiritual core, it has much to do with the embrace of wild and fertile nature, a feeling of belonging with a people and in a place. There there is love and there is affection, there is a bird’s song, and a green shadow strokes my senses. I’m glad I have contributed all that I have over the last ten years. Now I fall quiet. I resettle my perspective amongst the leaves and smile. Thankyou for visiting.