Pausing amongst trees …

Sharing a morning walk -18 February 2021

Yesterday, I wandered with my camera, and came across a number of sights I felt to be worth sharing, some old, some new. Come with me amongst the trees, along paths we have created through these trees, in a forested wild garden for which we have the privilege of being curators.

• 

• 

• 

I do appreciate the awe and wonder I feel, as I encounter each new rainforest seedling, each fruiting tree, sunlight on each set of new leaves, each vista through the trees. And I experience all this with a sense of freshness, as if for the first time.
Seedlings:

• 

• 

• 

• 

Fruits and seeds:

• 

• 

• 

New leaves:

• 

• 

• 

• 

I also feel a sense of pride and privilege that we have nurtured this space, kept weeds more or less under control and enjoyed watching it grow, very much as a forest in transformation. How wonderful it is to have such a community of living things to enclose the space in which we live.
Vistas:

• 

• 

• 

Today, I recall that as well as providing us with a living landscape and an ongoing encounter with local wildlife, these trees are absorbing the Carbon Dioxide which we return to the atmosphere with each breath we take, incorporating our carbon atoms into their cell structure. We are, in fact, within them. I ponder on this. We will leave them behind, actually, literally, when we depart. So any thought that we take them with us, as I have said we do, as we take them within as part of our consciousness, part of our being, as we practice ‘Dadirri’ (that Aboriginal word meaning ‘inner deep listening and quiet still awareness and waiting’,) and as we pause amongst them, we will also leave behind the Carbon atoms that we have shared with them. I like that balance. I like that as much as I love the way they entertain us with their wind dance, the ballet the gums do for us when the NE wind blows on a summer day, or the salsa they do when a southerly change arrives to provide relief at the end of a hot hot day.

I reflect how wonderful it is that these are our trees. However, I have an equal sense of wonder as I remember that they are not really ours. I had responded days earlier to a Facebook post by a friend which listed a number of things trees do. I wrote, as a comment, “Ours (not really “ours”, since we are “theirs”) also dance in the wind, provide branches for those five kookaburras who regularly greet us with their song, delight us with the colour they add to our landscape, be it with their new leaves, their blossoms, their fruit or their seeds, and absorb our carbon dioxide/capture our carbon. They add so much value to our days”.

They do indeed, add so much value to our days, and to our lives.

I like it that I can potentially add value to others’ days by sharing these thoughts and pictures.