Cicadas sing ecstatic, mysterious years spent underground then they burrow up and find a spot in which to chorus in their thousands, their millions. The sound fills the air, it’s inescapable and exotic. A few weeks of life and they’re gone.
Meanwhile, standing like spears, chest high, purple mauve Iris, and amidst them and to my delighted surprise a butter-yellow Iris flowers. I’ve no memory of planting it. Within weeks those blooms will fade and be replaced by the already crouching and springing orange Tiger lilies.
Daffodils, Snowdrops, Hyacinth, Tulips, Primula and Polyanthus have come and gone, will come again - each a delight.
Perhaps this doesn’t mean much unless you’re a gardener with powers of visualisation.
It’s been a constant joy to work, for the best part of thirty years, within a garden – large enough to have nooks and crannies, a small country to me, once a bush block now home to three score and more slow growing TreeFerns beneath which this colourful garden changes.
These majestic creatures are ancient in lineage and, peculiar to this variety, each has the remarkable ability to withstand being cut off at the base and being successfully transplanted elsewhere. Not only does the transplant grow but from the base of the TreeFern other TreeFerns will usually arise. Each TreeFern has a root-ball but the trunk itself also acts as a root. I don’t know of another tree with this ability.
They don’t need my happy, focussed attention but accept it. Given the right conditions a tall solitary Fern will produce smaller Ferns along its trunk, much like a mother with children hanging off hip and shoulder. Graceful fronds kiss my shoulder as I give each a light haircut which gives free rein, uninterrupted, to their yearly and slowly unfurling crown of fronds. Emerald green is the colour of the soft new fronds.
A garden is a love affair. ‘Welcome to country’ as Aboriginal Australia say.
Ten, twenty thirty, fifty and more thousands of years have witnessed continuous Aboriginal life here. A continuity which, if accepted as true, reveals the present preoccupation of the Western world with an ‘ancient’ Abrahamic religious history as relatively new – not ancient at all.
Spiritual life, spiritual reality didn’t start with those religions, the vastness of whatever ‘God’ may or may not be didn’t leave mankind without a soul, without connection.
The following can only be offered as ‘a take it or leave it’ proposition.
As a human being I couldn’t be more ordinary. Yes I’ve had adventures but as far as talents go – nothing extraordinary and even with the adventures I often had to be pushed.
Yet, decades ago, I had an experience, unexpected and unasked for and entirely due to a tribal elder, which was so extraordinary that when dimensions moved, my soul stirred. It’s the one and only time in my life in which this is not a poetic expression. In that fleeting moment and before the experience, the perceptions arise, perhaps simultaneously, that the soul really exists and that if I have one then so does every human. Quick realisation, the soul is not there to sit in judgement, to praise or condemn, it’s not even there to stir, it’s there to experience every moment in which we live and it records the totality of every moment – your perceptions and mine. There is no need for a book of judgement, everything is writ, in every aspect, with transparent honesty upon the soul.
The Aboriginal experience was so profound that briefly my soul – startled, stirred – before resuming its quiet self. My gratitude to Aboriginal Australia doesn’t require that I tell that story, it’s the reality of the soul, the totality of the moment recorded, which prompts this writing.
If it’s true for me then it’s true for all of us.