Little Green Things: A Poem

Little green things 

heed the call 

that Death eats Life 

and Life sprouts 

from Death 

in a spiral dance 

of joy and sorrow –

for a long cold winter 

will always become 

a bright spring

This little poem has been adapted from something I wrote a number of years ago, but I thought it apt to share on this last official day of winter.

This winter has not seemed particularly long, though there have been some cold days. What it has lacked is rain. Though spring shoots and blooms regardless, and for this I am grateful. Growth and transformation is on its way, with or without the rain. Let’s welcome it.

Wise Words: The Moon Is Yours (Their Progress Is Not Our Progress)

The moon is yours. And it belongs to the U’wa child and to the Hopi Indians, to the Inuit and to the Mexican woman collecting water and to the monks of Tibet. It belongs to every moth that flies towards it, to every dog who barks for it and to every cat on the hackled prowl for it. Untouched, it is a global commons unparalleled, for it belongs to the minds of millions upon millions of people; an emblem of purity, of women, of imagination or of time itself; a beautiful place of thought which can mean a million different things to a million different minds, all on one night. ‘The moon shines bright. In such a night’ as Shakespeare said, it shone for Dido, for Medea, for Troilus and Cressida all alike. But a few hundred overprivileged white males plan probes and moon maps and say the far side of the moon would be the site for an Observatory. Like an exact parallel with ‘progress’ on earth, it uses all the tools of imperialism – from Observatories, maps, enclosures and sheer political force – to colonize a commons. Their progress is not our progress. To lose the moon and be given instead a petrol station, a Hilton hotel, an industrial estate, a quarry and a nuclear waste deposit is not a good swap but a terrible theft; a theft from the very soul of humanity. And we, the millions who have lost something so infinitely precious, are expected to applaud it?

(Jay Griffiths, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Flamingo: London, 1999, pp. 217–218)

Detail from Memory, by Meinrad Craighead, from her book, The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother (1986)

Winterlight

This week I am resting after being away from home for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would show you some of what I saw in that somewhat different place: the winterlight of afternoon, the intimations of spring as the wattle begins to flower, the small beauties of the bush; and the extraordinary book I have been very slowly rereading, trying to let its wisdom soak into my flesh so that I can begin to awaken to the sensuous world once more.

(Apologies for the quality of some of the photos. I didn’t have my camera with me, so all of these images were taken with my phone.)

The efflorescence of the hairpin banksia, Banksia spinulosa

Prickly Moses or juniper wattle, Acacia ulcifolia

Golden wattle, Acacia longifolia, breaking into bloom

Probably a species of boronia

The dried efflorescence and seed pods of the Old Man Banksia, Banksia serrata