Rainbows Made From Mud

Beyond the lawn that stretches from our back door, past our clothes line, around the corners of the orchard, there is a darker space.  Keep walking and suddenly the warmth of the sun is gone from your shoulders.  The shadows of the pines, casuarinas, hakeas and eucalypts are dense along the bank of the creek.

You can walk silently, your footfall absorbed by the deep carpet of fallen leaves and needles that is slowly darkening within those deep shadows, becoming one with the soil below.  Where your boot soles bruise the rotting carpet, scents arise to tickle the nose - mold, terpenes, slime and mud all contribute to the bouquet.  Stand quiet for a few minutes and the currents of life that stilled themselves at your intrusion will slowly resume their flow.

Insects will skitter, and skinks rustle among the leaves and fern-fronds.  Perhaps a snake will rasp across the drying leaves in pursuit, the fear inspired by your presence overpowered by its need for prey.  Wrens and finches will flit through the leaves, seeking a safe path between the serpent below the winged raptors above, and perhaps a pair of ducks will push ripples across the surface of the pool, startling the water insects, tadpoles, and minnows.

Stand still, breath slowly - more life will become obvious as you become less so.  Lower your gaze and see the tiny scurryings among the blades of grass, as ants and spiders go about their business.

A place that seemed still and empty is revealed as a thriving market place of living and dying.  Look closely, breath even more slowly - there is another level here, known more in the imagination than by any apparent movement.

Those fragments of plants and animals and fungi now fallen from their places are still busy - dying and decomposing and becoming part of the mud in and beside the creek.  Mud that binds to and is bound by the roots of the trees and shrubs and ferns and rushes and grasses and violets that thrive on its richness.  Below the mulch, the mud is alive, and is sharing its life with the fractal root-web of feeding plants. 

Just there, by the bank - see the smooth grey-green and cream dappled bark of the eucalypt that dominates the head of this pool.  Look inside it - see the miracle.  Somehow that patient, motionless, trunk is busy pumping a vast flow of liquid towards the sky.  From the sodden earth below, the sap carries microscopic fragments of that dark mud, lifting it twenty metres or more to the tiny, solar powered factories we call leaves.

Look up - you can see the undersides of the branches, twigs, and leaves - an airborne net to equal the complexity of the one below the surface.  Yet there is something you cannot see from there.  Back you go, back out into the sunlight, across the lawn, until you are further from the base of the tree than its topmost leaves are.

Look up again, see how the late afternoon sun is playing on the leaves - and something else.  Tiny flecks of white among the green and orange growth - the tree is in blossom.  The final destination of that miraculous flow of dissolved mud, brought all that way via root, trunk, branch, and twig, is that fragrant cluster of creamy reproductive complexity.  In a few months, some of those flowers will have become gumnuts, holding within themselves seeds tiny enough to make acorns look clumsy.

But now, as the blossom basks in the sunlight, another miracle is taking place.  Listen and look - living bells that chime and squawk and flutter and flash in shades of blue, green, yellow, orange and red - the rainbow lorikeets have arrived to feast on the nectar that is the penultimate product of that mighty trunk.  The bees that have had only tiny honey eaters to compete with are now scattered by the chattering, swirling, feathered rainbow of lorikeets, and must circle hopefully, or yield, and return to their hive, and the leaves and petals that fell last year to become mud are once again airborne.

We humans are vain creatures - we long considered ourselves the only animals on the planet who possessed true language, the only tool users, the only artists, and the only truly conscious beings.

It seems likely that some of the other primates and the cetaceans, oh, and some of the birds, at the very least, would disagree with us.

Laurens van der Post and his story of the pact between honey badger, the honey-guide bird, and bushman is an example of communication - stories are told by humans, but how is it that the birds and the badgers also know to take part in the hunt for homey?

We still like to say we are distinguished from all other life on this world by our ability to tell stories - but is that true?  Animals of many sorts have been known to deceive other animals using calls, posture, body language, and pantomime - is that not the telling of stories.

Bees return to hives and convey detailed information to their hive-mates, who in their turn interpret and act upon those stories.

When I was young, the science curriculum was teaching that "lesser" life was a sort of biological clockwork mechanism - all drives and instincts determined by genes.

Now we know how different the characters of members of the same species can be, how they play, form friendships and partnerships

Take the chimps who hunt other monkeys - they are observed having a conference before the hunt, and then splitting into groups, some to drive their pray, and some to lay in ambush.

Our language and story telling abilities are sophisticated, to be sure - but are they really so much more sophisticated that than other species possess, or do we only think that way because we fail to understand the depths and nuances of the communications of those others?

Oh, the Power

What wonderful. god-like powers the writer possesses!  How amazing is it to be able, when some plot point becomes necessary to the continuation of the story, to be able to put it in place and then reach back down the time line of your work and insert the words and sentences that will make that plot point fit seemlessly into the suspended disbelief of the future readers.

The painter will need to paint over existing brush work to add some item or structure to support the new idea, and the sketcher will perhaps combine the eraser with overdrawing - but the underlying original marks are still there for the sharp-eyed. 

The writer can miraculously delete, cut and paste, copy and paste, and insert, at will.  If she is careful, those future readers will never detect even the faintest clue that the author was at any time less than omniscient.  As a child, I took from the instructions of my teachers the idea that somehow the words flowing onto the page had to be the words that would be there for the reader.  It was some time before I understood that was not the case - that I could write what I pleased, and screw it up and use only a few words or sentences from that page to start anew on a clean sheet.

Now I revel in that power - my pen can charge along a line of narrative or conversation as it flows from brain to nerves to fingers to ink, never pausing until it is done.  I can worry about the fine detail, the justifications, the cause and effect, the wit and humour, the pathos and tears, and the believability, later - because I have The Power to Amend, Insert, or Erase, and I'm not afraid to use it.

Lotions and Potions

Just a little piece of doggerel that popped into my mind a few minutes ago - where did it come from, and why?  I don't know - but here it is


Lotions and potions
And tablets and pills
Make you feel better
But don't cure your ills

Happy creating to all of you.