Never Never Land

The cicadas have begun singing, at a pitch so high you can hear almost nothing else.

Up in the tree-tops where the bark is peeling, the cicadas sing. It was 35 degrees Celsius in Melbourne today, an early start to to the coming summer.

I've just read this, "The Runaway," a children's book, by Ruth Morris, published in 1961. In it, the heroine, disconnected from family, makes her way with horse, cart and dog across the many empty miles of southern Queensland. She'd felt she had nowhere to go but away. In the end, of course, she finds a home away from home.

Place, the place we're born and raised in, is supposed to play a significant part in the creation of our character. I have been raised in a dry, open country, where the birds spin like flashlights and anywhere you take the time to look, there are sanctuaries.

Above, an unfinished ringtailed possum's nest, dislodged, unfortunately, by a neighbour. This photo doesn't suggest well enough the perfect globe shape within.

I found this blurred photo of a ringtail in an vintage book about the Melbourne Zoo. But a blurred picture might be the best you will get, being, as they are, shy creatures of the night.

I've noticed that many native animals orient towards native plants, whatever has been planted in what had been their habitat. Eucalypts are favoured... when they peel, they reveal an Impressionist's palette.

Or warts, rivers, footprints, time itself.

From the same book, again blurred, as life itself can so often be, a finished ringtailed possum's nest. We are all interpreters of needs and feelings and directions.

Now, among others things, I am reading this. In it the author traverses an Australia way out beyond the cities, where my heart wants to go.  ( Traveller's Tracks, by George Farwell, published by Melbourne University Press, 1949. )

Until that day I sing with my brothers and sisters the trees, or rather, hear their singing. Don't fence me in, let me flow, let my flowing go onwards, and do not let me halt, but let all the rain and all the rivers of life run.

 I am getting crookeder now, with bones and flesh needing to take their time to recover. Old and new: we are both at once, are we not?

I was trying to commemorate, today, the life of the bark of the trees of the world as I know them. To commemorate means to care and to go onwards.

Above is not a post-Expressionist work. The planet has been doing post-Expressionist a long time before we copied the idea.
Now I realise I've brought up both Impressionism and post-Expressionism. The world, however, is an artwork that can't be categorised...in all of its gestures it signifies a never-ending alive-ness.