Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are
Living in a Pair o’ Dice
This week Japanese Nashi pears, blood plums and Chinese Grumichama berries are ripe in the orchard and on trees I’ve scattered around this remote little valley. Peaches and mulberries are finishing off, along with the last of the purpleberries (flannel flower berries), tropical apples and mulberries. Passionfruits, feijoas and guavas are ripening alongside native blueberries and indigenous, giant (and potentially lethal) Bunya pinecones and wild Smilex blueberry grapes. The year is a cyclic clock of rainbow flowers, fruits, berries and nuts.
This hermetically sealed hermit dwells in a subtropical paradise, but few could manage to live with themselves or each other in this extraordinary place. Fewer still would live here as I do. Very few do, in fact; less all the time of late. As land costs more and more, different, usually older breeds buy the titular deeds. They seem to have less time, patience and room for experimenters or experimentation in alternative lifestyles. Many want to remake the world into a misconceived vision of the destructive rural yesteryears of their distant childhoods. Despite all apparent recent gains and transformations of global consciousness, few can see the forest for the monetary value of ‘their’ trees.
Most would-be settlers last only a few months, regardless of the quality of their dwelling or quantity of land they inhabit; a couple of years at best. Not many people can live with themselves, it seems.
Maybe it’s the water. The lack of fluoridated town water may be partly responsible; new chums are suddenly bereft of the ubiquitous rat poison tranquiliser that’s inserted into most people’s drinking water and are newly filled with unbridled energy and suddenly unsuppressed sundering passions.
Either way, those who would live in an isolate paradise find we must face all we’ve suppressed for much of our lives, and finally deal with the things we’ve ‘put off until later’. Out here, that ‘later time’ when fears or memories, failures or inadequacies must be faced has finally arrived. You can’t avoid yourself any longer by ploys of endless distraction or blame-making. Life is 24/7 and the human mind is a relentless inquirer.
Tonight a large serpent slumbers an arm’s length above my head while echo-sounding microbats wheel round my bed, emitting charming little clicks as they devour their prey. The rare endangered fliers weave acrobatically, snaffling insects which might otherwise sup on my blood or keep me awake with their buzzing. The tiny endangered bats’ relatively huge ears inhabit the place where eye sockets would be on other mammals, resting just above their furry cheeks where displaced beady eyes glitter in candlelit darkness.
Like all the insect-eating frogs and toads hereabouts, they’re much more convenient to maintain than mosquito nets. Some people actually spray poison on their skins to achieve the same effect, so depleted are their habitats.
The non-venomous python drives poisonous snakes away and eats vermin that crave my food. If you get too drunk in the bush a rat or ratite marsupial might nibble your earlobe or other body parts without waking you; I’ve seen it happen in protest action camps where we blockaded loggers out of the last of the last untouched forests. I try never to get quite that out of it, and usually succeed.
Some dangerous morons poison the entire landscape (and their own food or water and all the pythons, eagles and other scavengers and predators) in a vain attempt to be rid of so-called indigenous vermin. But if you keep food from the wee animals’ reach they’ll generally avoid you like the plague, along with all the animals which doggedly pursue them.
Spiders scuttle through webs that infest the corners of my windows and the cornice of the rooms. They consume flies and other insects more swiftly and surely than electrified bug zappers. Whenever some well-intentioned soul ‘cleans’ them from the windows a dozen huge flies are buzzing about within a few minutes, and it takes months for the webbery to be completely rebuilt and functional again. The spiders around here never bother humans; in these parts they’re only toxic to insects and certain small animals.
On wetter days I’ll often be pulling the black wormlike bodies of leeches from my skin – usually (but not always) before they painlessly pierce the surface and inject blood thinners and cleansers that remove fatty deposits from my veins; they’re not truly parasites, but symbiotes, and they never swim in the pristine river where fish and frogs eagerly devour them.
On drier days I discard the only true local parasites – bloodsucking cattle ticks (actually small bloodsucking arachnids) that attempt to drink my juicy essences. They’re only a problem if you’re so out of it you fail to notice their presence for days; like many insects, they have no way to get rid of their wastes but to regurgitate them – into your bloodstream – and that’s the source and cause of their infamous debilitating poison. I hardly ever see them unless escaped domestic cattle have recently wandered through.
All these animals have lived here for many millions of years; we’re all visiting latecomers in their natural realm. They are the living world while we are their privileged guests. And as a local Aboriginal elder has oft remarked, the bloodsuckers out here are nowhere near as bad as the two legged variety in town.
It’s polite to retain long fingernails out here in the real world; it’s also polite to scratch any itch. Long hair protects you from heat and cold. Most body heat is radiated (and lost) from our great big brains, which can also be broiled by direct summer sunlight. Here in the subtropics mad dogs and Englishmen go out in summer noonday sun; the mild winters are a different story.
Uninspiring Aspiration
Though I aspire and attempt less every week – growing closer to the Tao all the timeless time as I gradually become part of the landscape - I nonetheless continue to achieve and maintain, build and retain the delineaments of a human life with many of its attendant works and chattels.
Yet all one builds or keeps requires more work to maintain, sustain and inevitably elaborate, enslaving all creators to work and their works. This journal is no exception, but it’s easier to maintain than most intellectual pursuits or artistic elaborations.
I care little what the putative morrow may bring. In truth there’s no tomorrow, nor even a yesterday. The passage of time is an illusion engendered in primates evolved to suit a spinning globe and a slow stroboscope of light and dark. In reality there is no yesterday, today or tomorrow. Above and beyond planet Earth there’s no night or day, but light all the time.
The only ‘dangerous wildlife’ out here in the wilds of eastern Oz are introduced runaway dogs, which range in size from terriers to Irish wolfhounds. Animals fear me less all the time; being a vegetarian I don’t reek of rotting corpses and they recognise a fellow harmless beast in me. I talk and listen to them when they reply or make declarations in their usually silent manner. But a pack of ‘domestic’ and/or abandoned dogs on the prowl can tear you to pieces if you can’t escape in time; they’re actually wolves, folks – the selfsame species that interbreeds with each other, themselves - and if you stop feeding ‘man’s best friend’ with the bodies of innocent dead animals they’ll probably eat your babies when your back is turned.
Each week the illusory clock of the year yields different fruits. In most seasons I walk unshod on holy ground so every step is a prayer (as the same Aboriginal elder oft maintains). This is true for a number of reasons, obvious and otherwise.
Living with life is total immersion - the opposite of avoiding real visceral living, hiding from each other behind mazed walls of cities and indoctrinated insectile minds. Paradise is for people who aren’t afraid of themselves; as Frank Herbert said, ‘fear is the mind killer’. If we let fear rule us it also kills body and spirit, and the intricate living body of the planet.
Rejoice! This is the best of all possible worlds and will continue to be so if we can only let it be.
Turn on. TUNE IN. Opt out.
- R. A.
Images - author’s
See Also - Wild Life
(but be aware – this site contains implicit and explicit concepts and imagery)
For further enlightenment see –
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )
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From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
