Friday, August 16, 2013

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.

18 comments:

  1. Must be cool to live in a church. Your girafe Zara must appreciate the high ceiling.

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    1. It would be cool, I guess Roger, to live in a church. I'm not sure if zoologists would consider Zara to be a giraffe, but then heck, why not? Any bloody thing happens these days.

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    1. The HOUSE. Who cares about the house? Let it bloody fall Matthew! It's me and Zara who need cossetting...

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  3. This post touches me in the deep places beyond words, I love the thought that nature civilizes. Your photographs illustrate your point well that trees enliven static environments....I hope architects and planners are reading this ! May God continue to richly bless us with nature.

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    1. Paul, hi. You and I are touched in similar ways.
      Somehow it's come about that Man has civilized the world. By and large, however, I witness that Man would not be himself without nature supporting him.
      Thanks for such a supportive comment. I would find it impossible to live here without Nature. I know it's supposed to be disposable, but Nature is within us, as much as it's all around us so how can we dispose of it without disposing of ourselves?

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  4. Your post took me in a couple (few) different directions, and yet like any good story each path ended in, at least approximately the same place. It sounds as if you have had a couple of tense moments this week. I hope your home repairs are taken care of in a timely fashion. And, I am very happy healthwise everything is okay. Nature does indeed enrich our lives, and like with our bodies, we must be good shepherds and take care of the gifts given. Bonnie

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    1. Yes, Bonnie, this little shepherd has had a few stray sheep lately! I'm glad you think I may have written a good story - it's been a challenge to get my head around it all! My best to you. Faisal.

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  5. I want to agree, and I do agree, but after what we've done to it I think nature will want to do little more than just civilise us in return.

    Thanks for visiting mine, I've had no connection with Australia and your gardening thoughts and experiences are very new to me but interestingly put together

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    1. Yes, Jane, I agree, nature has serious reason to want to call the whole thing off with humanity. Your blog is marvelous, by the way. I've had a brief look at your latest post and am waiting till I get enough time to sit down and do it justice.

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  6. dear faisal, I'm relieved you're OK healthwise, and that you survived the gum tree fall on the house. I love the line that nature civilizes us, and that whatever happens is grist for an interesting meditative thoughtful post. A few years ago, before I started blogging, I was in hospital for open heart surgery. It was the night before the operation, stormy. An oak tree in the street fell on our house. Ron woke up, the rain was coming in through the hole in the roof and there were bricks on my pillow. I still don't know what to make of it.

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  7. Sue, I reckon your misadventure was more extreme than mine! All I can make out, with the world seeming to be going in one direction and me in the other, is that this sort of experience - and it's difficult to put the perception into words - is a sort of stripping back before renewal, a challenge to what it is you trust in, a storm before a calm and some sort of almost revelation that your life is precious and - given that you survived and I seem to have survived - an indication that the world we ordinarily live in is transitory and not to be taken as all there is. That's a longwinded way of putting it! For me, I've felt faith is a key issue, and in an odd way, that the experience is a blessing.

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    1. I think that's why I love reading stories about alternative worlds and different realities, where you go through a wormhole, or a door and everything's subtly or unsubtly changed.

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    2. Me too. It's different LIVING it - for me, certainly, my courage's been tested. I feel I've lived through a book, if that makes sense.

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  8. In 2000 when I had breast cancer there were wild fires raging all around Cape Town. But still, we survive. And Zara did try to tell you run, run for your life!

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  9. It's funny Diana that sometimes everything comes at once, like there's been a rip in the fabric of normality. It must have felt for you there was a war raging within and without.
    Yes, Zara sensed the impending incident, and that was enough for me to know chances were she was right. I value her even more highly now.

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  10. wow. that's about all i can say, except i'm GLAD you're fine. but...zara and you...wow.

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  11. Thanks Velma. I'll be listening to Zara very carefully...

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