Tag: nature

Freedom Creek

Running fast along the creek gave me freedom from everyone and everything; school, boredom, teachers, schoolkids, brothers, parents, the lot. I could smell the sweet privet flowers and hear the quiet stream flowing along beside me. In anticipation, I’d run for the next turn, and leap the rocky creek bed into the old man’s orchard. Checking for shiny ripe fruit, I’d dance past before following the next bend in the creek. As the body moved along, the mind would slough everything behind and I’d slip smoothly into my own inner world. Entering this realm is a comfort like the first warming droplets of a hot shower soaking into a cooled neck and back.

I felt freedom because this is where I am free. I say ‘am free’ as I still often feel this kind of frizzy feeling when I’m moving through the bush with no one but me.

As I ran, the sun back-lit through green leaves of overgrown bush and the pretty weeds soothed me. I felt in control and powerful. No one was there to tell me what to do or what clothes to wear. I hated the rigidity of the tartan school uniform and choking tie, so I’d wear half of it down the creek in rebellion. It felt good. Outside of school, were not permitted to wear jumpers unless they were covered with heavy blazers. Eating in public was also banned.

Eventually I’d amble slowly back home feeling relaxed and soothed, ready for the rhythms of household living and the next days ahead of mundane school lessons and the usual chaos of people pressures.

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Other similar ‘Various’ life writing stories of mine you can read are Pink, Synaesthesia,Minimal Me

You can read other stories in a series of how I Source Strength The Summit Run and The Summit Run, Closing the Loop.

You can read more stories in my series about Encounters with Wild Animals such as a Great White Shark, horsessnakeswhalesrock possumsbull buffalo and spiders

If you’d like to have my next post sent directly to you, just pop your email address into the subscription box.

Feel free to comment too…

 

Minimal Me – 2 min read

Bluebell and I at Maitland Bay

I am a young girl, around 15 years old, standing high up on the top of a huge sheer cliff with a scalloped bay in the background named Maitland Bay (after a shipwreck).

This cliff is within a national park and instead of me standing there as a typical visitor in hiking clothes, hat and boots with a bunch of other like walkers, I’m dressed in a sexy high cut swimming costume, two bare feet and my blue heeler, Bluebell.

This is typical of me as a teenager. The minimalist. Tearing off what’s not necessary to leave the bare bones and nothing extra. Bare feet, so I can extract maximum immersion from my exploration of the bush or rocks or sand or whatever the substrate I’m travelling over.

The muddy clay squelching between toes, after walking across a long spread of jagged and sharp rocky ground, I particularly savor and relish. That’s like the ecstasy of finally gorging on two tall glasses of water after riding your pushbike for miles without a drop of water down the throat.

I love that. To really feel the texture of the ground, gives me a more in-depth knowledge and a kind of intimate understanding of the terrain. Then it’s mine, that land.

You know I even get jealous of places. I am quite possessive of that track I’m standing on. Little beach to Putty Beach. That’s my track. Too many strangers I see on it now. It’s not theirs this place.

They don’t know it like I do.

They don’t know the legless lizard that leisurely suns herself on the southern sandy section of steps that rise up after the rocky gulch of caves bay. Nor do they know the dark diminutive swamp wallaby that forages behind the big set of wooden stairs at the northern end of Killcare beach. They also wouldn’t have met the echidna that loves to break up the ants nests for a feed just before Caves Bay.

Those cream flannel flowers that sweep round the bend in the track near the Maitland Bay turnoff seem to be in bloom longer than anywhere else. That’s the bend where the white tsunami sand rests high over the bay below. This particular soft bend connected me and held me tight to the land when I grew older and became a woman in my twenties. I lived away, three thousand kilometres away in fact in Darwin, and I’d see flashbacks anytime anywhere of that particular bend of heathy, low bush.

After flying home and re-visiting my bush, these flashbacks would disappear until I’d been away again too long and they’d reappear to remind me of my land.

Today, I continue to ground myself along this piece of coastline. I ground myself by the physical and psychee connection to this, my favourite stretch of the world, by feeling my feet touching the terrain, the roots, the rocks, the clay and the sands during my one and a half hour circular run I regularly do.

I often see my animal ‘friends’ on the track and I note whose flowering or fruiting. Sometimes, Ill slow enough to touch a slender flannel flower with the tip of a finger. No Bluebell now, but like as a young girl, there is no extraneous clutter on me. No water bottles, camel packs, not even a hat.

Only the bare bones to run.

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Various‘ life writing stories of mine you can read are Pink, Synaesthesia, Minimal Me, Freedom Creek

You can read other stories in a series of how I Source Strength The Summit Run and The Summit Run, Closing the Loop.

You can read more stories in my series about Encounters with Wild Animals such as a Great White Shark, horsessnakeswhalesrock possumsbull buffalo and spiders

If you’d like to have my next post sent directly to you, just pop your email address into the subscription box.

Feel free to comment too…