Your walks down the memory lane Vs the present are so addictive, Dave. And what beautiful things you have to say - a hand you could hold. Just marvelous!
As you know, I spent some years living and working in remote Aboriginal/First Nation communities. I was made welcome and offered friendship and knowledge.
Back then, some of those friends had been born and grown up to adulthood as nomadic people, living deep in the desert.
The handprint in that cave will be at least 180 years old, and it could be many hundreds - even thousands. We are all people though. The differences are simply cultural and technological. There is much in Aboriginal culture - I should say cultures in the plural - which my own culture could learn from, to the benefit of all.
I love these photo essays, Dave. Where you started, where you ended up, how you got there. The finest moment for me was you walking through someone's house, the handprint on the stone, a hand that you could hold. (!!) Very, very fine.
Hey my friend. Thank you. Having lived with Australian Aboriginal people in our desert lands, I'm acutely aware that their history here is so unfathomably deep. 60,000 years or more. So when I walk through the forests - now empty of people - I know that what I see is really someone's home. Coming across cave art, or stone tools, or the grooves where stone axes have been sharpened... just makes it feel more immediate.
Meg says hi! She has been offline due to a technical issue. Our Government has required all social media to require age identification and restrict access to people aged over 16. It's an attempt to reduce some of the harmful effects and dangers of social media access for children.
Substack temporarily blocked M's access until she can prove she is over 16 :)
The reflections on life resonated with me today. Perhaps it was something I needed when I was in my head.
"if you return to that loss again and again you will see that the sunlight and the rain, unimpeded now, allow new things to grow."
So, thank you. You probably never meant it as consolation but sometimes writing can touch a person's heart in unexpected ways.
I also feel the way you have a deep sense of respect towards nature which I admire in your writing. Nature as not something to "explore" but as a "home" to some.
I have deep love for the natural world and I am learning - over time - to see it more deeply, and to recognise the wider patterns of which we ourselves are just a tiny element. We tend to see “wild” places as the exception - but they are in fact the normal state of the world, or they were until very recently. An eye blink in geological terms.
In fact if we include the whole biosphere - oceans as well - “wild environments” are still the normal state of the world, even though we are impacting them badly, everywhere.
My thoughts and comments on grief and loss are, in fact, meant as consolation. We all experience it - if we are around long enough - and I think of this often. If my words have touched your heart, I am truly glad. This world needs more kindness from us all…. and I hope to add what I can.
Hi Dave, your brilliant post inspired my first ever Haiki. Paul Wittenberger threw the gauntlet down to me earlier to try one. Hope you don't mind what began as erasure poetry mixed with a Basho inspired post mixed with a me (!) I'm not sure of all the rules, if a question is even allowed or a stray from nature at all, or if I've set the scene as Haiki, but it's a first roll of the dice in your honour. Every 3 lines is separate.
---
O art kneeled in prayer
earthen mother majesty
is wild wind waiting
---
well worn paths grow down
need no order to guide roots
straight wilds don’t exist
---
each tree a bare friend
stripped bare roots hand words from sky
talking gods that hold us
---
textured moss softens
the surface sandstone boulder–
clings to ripple mind
---
a sensuous braille
the river inscribed by it
trees loom above me
---
fragments are skyloft
kaleidoscope of dead leaves
enwrapped by forest
---
of the land of layers
speak the beauty that you know
the way that you want it
----
regeneration
no easy way through it all
chaos of new life
----
Finally my 9 year old son joined me at the end of this exercise, he wrote this one from some words he reworked.
----
enwrapped by forest
the price of living in trees
blood pain thick dead weeds
-----
Anyway, thanks for the gift of your piece, this is my recycled gift back to you. Hope you don't mind ....
I really am lost for words, in a way that I am never lost - when in a forest.
This is a deeply wonderful compliment far beyond anything I expected. The end of the year now gone, and the beginning of this one, have been difficult. I would like to start writing an extended prose work but I cannot find the space or confidence in my head to do so.
My day in the rainforest was an attempt to find both and I was doubting whether I could express it in a way accessible or meaningful to other people. As a fine writer yourself, I'm sure you know the feeling.
Your gorgeous Haiku - and your Son's! They speak back to me, both echoing and adding to my experience of that day. It is as if I revisited the place, with you and your Son there as company.
Thank you!!
Sincere and profound best wishes to you both. If you ever come to Australia, I can show you this place in person. It would be an honour.
l read this response to Liam this morning at breakfast. He loved it! As do I. Thanks Dave. Your original prose so beautiful, I encourage you to write more in this form, couldn't help but to sift for the poetry in the lines.
Wouldn't have written these without your piece. I love the simplicity of haiku but couldn't seem to try. (Maybe I can take off the stabilisers now!) Look at both of us experimenting with form.
I'd love to take up that hike offer, my husband's sister lives there absolutely we will go again sometime. One of my best year's ever was my gap year there at 25. Would say the same if you ever come to Dublin.
Up with this positive, encouraging community at a time of such upheaval in the world. These things, they sustain us.
Yes, this little part of Substack, at least, is a place of community and genuine care for others. I sometimes wonder how long that will last, but I I enjoy it while it does.
Wonderful storytelling and photographs David. It carried me along. My imagination was filling in the touch of rocks and moss and different smells. Maybe I heard a Pilotbird too (which I’ve never seen).
You are welcome, dear Ryder. I needed a break from Poetry, and indeed from humanity - for a day, at least. Wild places have always been my refuge and returning to this one was a delight...
I hope your New Year has started well, and gets better.
It a process… I have faith, but it ended and began with two deaths. One young, one old, one accidentally, one through illness. It’s all in the great plan of things, but it is when I escape to my wild places, too.
Drawn deeply into this natural world and how you turned away from the well worn path to bring us this account.
After we have all gone, the place will continue to live and breathe without us. Here you can feel very much beyond news cycles, modernity, all our machinations. It feels like a sanctuary going deep into the future.
'The trees exist here in complex relationship with each other and with the earth ... At best I am another animal wandering through ...' Brilliant juxtaposition.
Thanks, mate, for sharing this with us. I feel the heat and the heart of the place. - as ever, richard
Ah, thank you for sharing this beautiful and precious place through your photos and wonderful descriptions. I can feel how sacred this forest and river are and how it holds stories of long ago woven with your experience of now. I love how you reflect on the intrinsic changes of life, and also how the essence of the sacred earth remains.
Hi David, you are so welcome. I carry a few of these sacred places in my heart and know what a treasure it is to revisit them. Thank you for sharing one of yours.
Another David story through what to me is a foreign land, but one that sounds familiar, comforting and nostalgic for you. I think I’d be terrified of walking trackless through a rainforest ! But I felt safe following you through your story and photos. And what a wonderful metaphor for life too.
Thank you my friend. It is a mostly safe place - snakes and falling off something being the only real risk. As it happens, on my way back a loose rock rolled from under my foot on a steep slope and I did fall sideways, whacking my head on a tree. It was the kind of lesson you get sometimes - a warning against complacency.
What wisdom in this piece, so much to learn from Her. Your writing so evocative, thought provoking and wise, Dave. A spiritual home.
When we feel like life is making no sense, this is exactly the guidance we need, the invisible hand we can hold. Beautiful!
Thank you, dear Síodhna.
Such lovely things to say...
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Your walks down the memory lane Vs the present are so addictive, Dave. And what beautiful things you have to say - a hand you could hold. Just marvelous!
Thank you, may friend.....
As you know, I spent some years living and working in remote Aboriginal/First Nation communities. I was made welcome and offered friendship and knowledge.
Back then, some of those friends had been born and grown up to adulthood as nomadic people, living deep in the desert.
The handprint in that cave will be at least 180 years old, and it could be many hundreds - even thousands. We are all people though. The differences are simply cultural and technological. There is much in Aboriginal culture - I should say cultures in the plural - which my own culture could learn from, to the benefit of all.
Best Wishes - Dave
I love these photo essays, Dave. Where you started, where you ended up, how you got there. The finest moment for me was you walking through someone's house, the handprint on the stone, a hand that you could hold. (!!) Very, very fine.
How the heck is Meg?
Hey my friend. Thank you. Having lived with Australian Aboriginal people in our desert lands, I'm acutely aware that their history here is so unfathomably deep. 60,000 years or more. So when I walk through the forests - now empty of people - I know that what I see is really someone's home. Coming across cave art, or stone tools, or the grooves where stone axes have been sharpened... just makes it feel more immediate.
Meg says hi! She has been offline due to a technical issue. Our Government has required all social media to require age identification and restrict access to people aged over 16. It's an attempt to reduce some of the harmful effects and dangers of social media access for children.
Substack temporarily blocked M's access until she can prove she is over 16 :)
D
Dave,
The reflections on life resonated with me today. Perhaps it was something I needed when I was in my head.
"if you return to that loss again and again you will see that the sunlight and the rain, unimpeded now, allow new things to grow."
So, thank you. You probably never meant it as consolation but sometimes writing can touch a person's heart in unexpected ways.
I also feel the way you have a deep sense of respect towards nature which I admire in your writing. Nature as not something to "explore" but as a "home" to some.
Thank you, dear Mai.
I have deep love for the natural world and I am learning - over time - to see it more deeply, and to recognise the wider patterns of which we ourselves are just a tiny element. We tend to see “wild” places as the exception - but they are in fact the normal state of the world, or they were until very recently. An eye blink in geological terms.
In fact if we include the whole biosphere - oceans as well - “wild environments” are still the normal state of the world, even though we are impacting them badly, everywhere.
My thoughts and comments on grief and loss are, in fact, meant as consolation. We all experience it - if we are around long enough - and I think of this often. If my words have touched your heart, I am truly glad. This world needs more kindness from us all…. and I hope to add what I can.
Very best wishes
Dave
Hi Dave, your brilliant post inspired my first ever Haiki. Paul Wittenberger threw the gauntlet down to me earlier to try one. Hope you don't mind what began as erasure poetry mixed with a Basho inspired post mixed with a me (!) I'm not sure of all the rules, if a question is even allowed or a stray from nature at all, or if I've set the scene as Haiki, but it's a first roll of the dice in your honour. Every 3 lines is separate.
---
O art kneeled in prayer
earthen mother majesty
is wild wind waiting
---
well worn paths grow down
need no order to guide roots
straight wilds don’t exist
---
each tree a bare friend
stripped bare roots hand words from sky
talking gods that hold us
---
textured moss softens
the surface sandstone boulder–
clings to ripple mind
---
a sensuous braille
the river inscribed by it
trees loom above me
---
fragments are skyloft
kaleidoscope of dead leaves
enwrapped by forest
---
of the land of layers
speak the beauty that you know
the way that you want it
----
regeneration
no easy way through it all
chaos of new life
----
Finally my 9 year old son joined me at the end of this exercise, he wrote this one from some words he reworked.
----
enwrapped by forest
the price of living in trees
blood pain thick dead weeds
-----
Anyway, thanks for the gift of your piece, this is my recycled gift back to you. Hope you don't mind ....
Dear Síodhna
I really am lost for words, in a way that I am never lost - when in a forest.
This is a deeply wonderful compliment far beyond anything I expected. The end of the year now gone, and the beginning of this one, have been difficult. I would like to start writing an extended prose work but I cannot find the space or confidence in my head to do so.
My day in the rainforest was an attempt to find both and I was doubting whether I could express it in a way accessible or meaningful to other people. As a fine writer yourself, I'm sure you know the feeling.
Your gorgeous Haiku - and your Son's! They speak back to me, both echoing and adding to my experience of that day. It is as if I revisited the place, with you and your Son there as company.
Thank you!!
Sincere and profound best wishes to you both. If you ever come to Australia, I can show you this place in person. It would be an honour.
Dave :)
l read this response to Liam this morning at breakfast. He loved it! As do I. Thanks Dave. Your original prose so beautiful, I encourage you to write more in this form, couldn't help but to sift for the poetry in the lines.
Wouldn't have written these without your piece. I love the simplicity of haiku but couldn't seem to try. (Maybe I can take off the stabilisers now!) Look at both of us experimenting with form.
I'd love to take up that hike offer, my husband's sister lives there absolutely we will go again sometime. One of my best year's ever was my gap year there at 25. Would say the same if you ever come to Dublin.
Up with this positive, encouraging community at a time of such upheaval in the world. These things, they sustain us.
Yes, this little part of Substack, at least, is a place of community and genuine care for others. I sometimes wonder how long that will last, but I I enjoy it while it does.
Best Wishes to you both - Dave :)
Wonderful storytelling and photographs David. It carried me along. My imagination was filling in the touch of rocks and moss and different smells. Maybe I heard a Pilotbird too (which I’ve never seen).
Thanks Damian! Not sure if there are Pilotbirds in that forest - but it seems likely. I startled one Lyrebird....
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Thank you for the lovely walk. It was just beautiful-- visually, metaphorically, and in it's writing.
You are welcome, dear Ryder. I needed a break from Poetry, and indeed from humanity - for a day, at least. Wild places have always been my refuge and returning to this one was a delight...
I hope your New Year has started well, and gets better.
Best wishes
Dave :)
It a process… I have faith, but it ended and began with two deaths. One young, one old, one accidentally, one through illness. It’s all in the great plan of things, but it is when I escape to my wild places, too.
Drawn deeply into this natural world and how you turned away from the well worn path to bring us this account.
After we have all gone, the place will continue to live and breathe without us. Here you can feel very much beyond news cycles, modernity, all our machinations. It feels like a sanctuary going deep into the future.
'The trees exist here in complex relationship with each other and with the earth ... At best I am another animal wandering through ...' Brilliant juxtaposition.
Thanks, mate, for sharing this with us. I feel the heat and the heart of the place. - as ever, richard
Hey Richard
Thank you my friend.
Under the trees, time does feel irrelevant. It's good to leave the madness of our world behind...
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Thank you for taking us with you!
Good morning Karen.
You are more than welcome. I hope the New Year has started well for you.
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Beautiful, David, "the sensuous Braille of time," indeed!
Ah, thank you for sharing this beautiful and precious place through your photos and wonderful descriptions. I can feel how sacred this forest and river are and how it holds stories of long ago woven with your experience of now. I love how you reflect on the intrinsic changes of life, and also how the essence of the sacred earth remains.
Dear Laura
That is such a kind and thoughtful comment. It is a sacred forest, and a deeply peaceful place, with so many stories....
I add my own, and if it is meaningful for you I am content.
Very best wishes. I hope the New Year is treating you well.
Dave
Hi David, you are so welcome. I carry a few of these sacred places in my heart and know what a treasure it is to revisit them. Thank you for sharing one of yours.
Many blessings for a bright New Year! 🙏🏼💫🌿
Another David story through what to me is a foreign land, but one that sounds familiar, comforting and nostalgic for you. I think I’d be terrified of walking trackless through a rainforest ! But I felt safe following you through your story and photos. And what a wonderful metaphor for life too.
Thank you my friend. It is a mostly safe place - snakes and falling off something being the only real risk. As it happens, on my way back a loose rock rolled from under my foot on a steep slope and I did fall sideways, whacking my head on a tree. It was the kind of lesson you get sometimes - a warning against complacency.
It was still a wonderful day...
Best Wishes
Dave :)
Oh dear. At least you didn’t break something but you might have got a concussion!
That might have improved my Poetry....
D :)