Our Shelter from the Stormy Blast

Tonight the State Emergency Services came. All it took was an emergency...but I transgress.
Above is part of the beautiful Christ Church Grammar School straddling the rather neglected and prosaic Fawkner Park in South Yarra, which park is, here and there, getting some long-needed attention.

 I'll avoid showing you the park as much of it really is....soccer fields, tedious avenues of some sort of leafless elm-like tree, or other avenues of unloved Moreton Bay figs, promenades built for promenading Victorians, inadequate mulching, soggy fields where careless photographers step...

...oh yes, tonight's emergency:  a windstorm tonight  ( 100 km per hour plus ) hit home, in a quick, short series of thunder-like thuds, and my favourite, and most stately Eucalypt came crashing down onto the roof overhead, just as I was eating a bowl of soup. Bits of plaster fell before me and into my remaining soup, a stump of tree projecting savagely through the wall. Zara, exemplar canine companion, was the hero of the night, having agitated at least an hour before impact for some sort of affirmative action. I too felt something was going to happen, but prayer protects... PS: this is not my home, illustrated above, however much I'd like it to be, but Christ Church again. What a very confusing post.

This, then, was what thudded through the roof/wall, a fist of a branch, strapped by electricity cabling -

- I was sitting just a little to the right of the centre of the underneath of this image, spoon in hand...

It's all gone now. SES ( State Emergency Services ) have packed their truck up, leaving us with half a toppled Eucalypt sprawled across the roof, having to be removed tomorrow. They, the SES, were splendid, arriving minutes after they were called, sure in all they did, as if scripted, no ego. What I was hoping to make some sort of point about, however, having ambled into Fawkner Park yesterday, a park without much horticultural distinction, on my way to a semi-serious visit to the Alfred Hospital, which visit proved to be good news entirely, is that trees enliven otherwise static environments...

...as do Aloes, or any other plant life, especially in what is meant to be winter, when a bit of sudden colour enlivens a grey, desultory, looming kind of day.

For those without any acquaintance of the park, it lies just south-east of the CBD and is flanked by one of Melbourne's major boulevards, the formerly glorious St Kilda Road, once - as I can still remember - home to glorious mansions, few of which remain, now a thoroughfare dragged down by unnecessarily ill-fitting sky-scrapers, ennobled by rows of Plane trees. Adjacent also is some rather expensive housing. Here somebody seems to know what they're doing with what they've got.

As they do here. I'm sure no Eucalypt fell on this roof tonight, cresting as it does above the mortal world, apparently.

I look at the tree and I look at the building and I believe they compliment one another. Sometimes the built world lends a backdrop to nature.

A Rainbow Lorikeet ( Trichoglossus haematodus ), one of thousands, takes its late lunch as I make my way to overworked hospital staff, to a waiting room, with my bits of paper. I don't want to know I have anything wrong. I don't want to know the park's not being properly cared for. I don't want to know all the beauty that's been more or less made will vanish out of carelessness.

This is my favourite house/garden  in the vicinity, a rarity, knuckled down between high Victorian splendour and the vacuous aggression of corporate non-architecture.

This is what I've been getting at, despite tonight's drama: nature civilizes humankind. It's not we who civilize nature.

Back at Christ Church again. The melanoma proved to be nothing at all - not that I purportedly believed it would have mattered anyway - and I'm grateful to be somewhere momentarily quiet. I wouldn't really recommend Fawkner Park to a visitor to Melbourne, but what experience tells me is that wherever you walk, you're bound to find something behind or within or underneath appearances. All you need is faith.

Much of Melbourne's beauty's been mitigated by greed, as I'm sure it's been in some other places. There are quarters, though, where someone walking without any apparent hope or intention may be able to see a little further than the prospect has devised. I have a strong feeling to reconnect with my church, but that might take a bit more walking.
In our world as it is the past is so often becoming now something to be ditched, as if it didn't matter, as if no sky were falling. Perhaps it is not; perhaps we can build a pretend sky, lit with enough twinkling to dazzle us.

But all I want is a bit of quiet, a bit of a refuge, a bit of space, some green around me, and some blue up above.