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.
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