
It’s easy to miss the smallest blessings.
It’s easy to miss the smallest blessings.
This is one of the many strikingly beautiful untamed beaches on the west coast of Tasmania, where tyre tracks intersect the shiny pebbles and sand patterns. Aboriginal middens dotted along these coastlines and those of takayna further north are being damaged and destroyed by 4WD tracks.
Walking along Ocean Beach on this day, as the mild spring sun set over the Southern Ocean, we passed just a few of the 360 pilot whale bodies that had been lying beached since September.
Each room crawls with trinkets and curiosities from another time; cardboard suitcases, leather bound books, wirelesses, prettily decorated crockery, cameras and super 8 video recorders, vinyl, CDs and cassettes, 1950s furniture, obscure garden ornaments, clocks, kitsch pictures in frames and old PlayStation games.
I’m reminded of the scene from Back to the Future II in which Marty is buying the Sports Almanac at Blast from the Past Antique Store, and the saleswoman says “…and if you’re interested in dust, we also have this quaint little piece from the 1980s, it’s called a DustBuster”.
Sometimes it’s the imperfections that add charm and character, a friend reminded me recently.
The seasons are arriving later. Around one month in this case.
Dev/scan Ikigai Camera.
Usually there is a basket or two of laundry asking to be put away at the end of this hallway. Today there was none. For a moment.
The colour of our dog bowl, licked clean. The 1980s 2020 photo album. The striped tea towels hanging unevenly on the oven door. The faded car parked in the neighbours yard. The crumb covered flowers on our placemats. The drooping gladioli on the cold firebox. The faded tin roof of the flat above the cafe on the Main Street. The intermittent sparkle of the red (and green) of my daughter’s Christmas headband left on our bed.
Dev/scan Ikigai Camera.
Milk maids. Big-head rabbit-tobacco. Pink lady fingers. Twining fringe-lily. Scented paperbark. Love creeper. Pig face. Leopard orchid…
…these are some of the plants we encountered on this day, on our walk over Little Badger Head to Copper Cove.
The colour of the morning light as it cuts through the timber cupboards in the kitchen, and across the shiny tiles on the floor. The one time I’m grateful for those black shiny tiles.
Dev/scan Ikigai Camera.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
// Mary Oliver
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
// Pablo Neruda
Dev/scan Ikigai Camera.
From Old Norse stilla. in the senses satisfy, quench, allay from the adjective stille (“still, quiet, calm”).
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
// Mary Oliver