Signing Up

It looks like I'm going to be doing volunteer work now, for a major heritage organisation.

Having been intermittently unemployed over the last several years, I've had to ask myself if my job - bookselling - or, if any job, were worth the dedication I've put into mine. 
I'm feeling that most of us spend the best part of our life locked into a routine that becomes increasingly meaningless. Too late, we find ourselves taking a short trip to a tropical isle before we face the remainder of our finity girdled by high blood pressure and cardiac malaise.

However poor I'm going to be, I would sooner be living until I can be quietly transubstantuated, rather than be dying by a force I hadn't reckoned with. It's not OK giving all of my life to an employer or an employment role and then finding myself cast aside with questions unanswered.
The signs are out there, as these were, along my bus trip. I am viable. I am not owned by anybody. It might look like I'm copping out, but by letting go of the notion of being a worldly success, I'm voluntarily accepting a destiny that will connect me to a greater purpose, beyond the moment. Fame, power and position aren't part of that.
I prefer to be finding the beautiful in the mundane. I prefer to belong to another world, not this here and now thing. I prefer up to down. And I prefer to believe I'm being guided, not that I'm being abused.

Simply

 

This garden isn't a showpiece. And I am only the tenant.

I was going to write about The Art of Gardening, using my formerly lumpen, now shapely compost heap as an illustration of how anything rudimentary can be made beautiful.

But it's too hard to think about. It's easier for me to show you these Eucalypts rising out from beside the shapely, formerly lumpen compost heap.

This is why I garden, and why for me it's an art. I like to continue the continuity of life, or to be part of that continuation.

It's nearly spring here. The birds and the buds are leaping. These Freesias came from my grandmother's garden in Adelaide. They smell like a heavenly fruit salad.

I am weak, often, in spring: weak with the labour. I don't mind going slower, finding myself more diligent. Besides, I too, what with my feelings of liberty, feel spring's vigour.

I make gardens to make a space wherein apparent timelessness is allowed. Work, yes, but it's honourable and simple.

What we all need: a flag and a staff

There is in Melbourne, a comparatively new city, a sense of ongoing expansion. It would be a graceless expansion if that expansion obliterated the existing beauty from out of which it, that expansion, expands.

Street-life, cities, the movement of people...these all need to work circumspectly, and together.

I was off to the Flagstaff Gardens in William Street, West Melbourne, on the edge of the city. But there was plenty to see in the built world, before I got to the unbuilt.

There's so much to be fond of, in Melbourne. Of course, you'll need to do some hunting, get on a bike or a tram. This part of Melbourne, not yet subsumed by development, has some of its oldest remnants.

This is St James Old Cathedral, the oldest church in Melbourne, as seen from the Flagstaff Gardens, doing its best to wave its flag in a sea of not altogether congruous newness.  

The oldest park in Melbourne - established 1835 - these 18 acres of - 'reality', I want to say, but OK then - 'free space' - allow the wandering city worker to get a glimpse of what life was like here before money and careers and even time perhaps were invented.

As much as there's nothing like strolling through perfect grounds, I like to be able to see what's happening, here in a space still elemental.

There ARE some garden beds, a little disparate, semi-tendered, but comforting anyway.

And memorials. This memorial above was erected in 1871, "In the memory of some of the earliest of the Pioneers of this Colony whose remains were interred near this spot". The Flagstaff Gardens have long since welcomed those needing some shelter.

The former Royal Mint, nearby, a stone's throw away, has new tenants.

Many of them may have only been represented. Though temporarily closed for renovations, The Mint had not long ago "An exhibition celebrating the lives of those who came to Australia during the period of mass assisted migration post 1952". 

I'd hope that all the money that had churned through this city, leaving a multitude of questionable developments, had allowed for more to be opened for a bright future

and for a remembrance. Without means, we may as well all be statuary. But it is with a staff of some kind that we can move forward 

and stop sometimes.

hortinterior

fruits and circles, binding ties

the shock of encounter

ways of approach

value, merit and gift

response and repletion

destiny captured; sustenance

a new view

An Other Self

In our life, alot of it's unknown to others.

Here for only a brief interlude, I dragged my friend from Den Haag to Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, where we did a circuit of Guilfoyle's Volcano. Everything you see can be different every time you see it.

I have to admit I like a grandness, but I also go for rustic, roughness and suddenness.

This is one of a handful of pavilions in the Gardens. It is odd, is it not, this dream that has been made real?

Glory be to both the constructed and to the evolving, the man-made and the organic. It's OK to say that, isn't it, in this world of ours that's become so hurt?

If we're dumb enough to obliterate nature, then we might as well obliterate all meaningful connection. How can anybody be wanting to shoot anything when the origin and reality of shooting is an expression and affirmation of life? Plants shoot up into the sky...but we're so stupid we shoot each other. Myself, I don't get that. Love and life are not about collapse. They are about renewal.

The swans are quite possibly wiser than many of the tourists who snap pictures of them. They just get on with their life, however peculiar humans have become...

Sometimes you take a different path to the one you might be expected to take. It can be startling, getting to  be an other self.

But it is known that comfort is available. In the Mauritshuis, Gerrit Dou's doggy is replete. I caught him napping. It's not like life is some kind of alienating experiment. It's a gift.

Scene through a Window

Most of these photos come from the inside of a train window as I traversed Melbourne today.

It's not infrequently said that train travel quietens the mind and lets a deeper and more receptive state to be felt.

It's the rhythm, some say, the rocking and the rolling -

even now, when trains shoot and glide and jolt without apparent rhythm -

or else there's a feeling of being safely encapsulated, of being transported.

From a train we see others' backyards and may take comfort that not everything around us is front.

We're going somewhere, and in going to that somewhere, we can go as we are.

A train view affords a wider, more encompassing, less judgmental perspective.

Train travel isn't simply hypnotic and lulling; sometimes it's bold and dramatic. There's alot more out there than our non-traveling lives allow us.

It's not only the inconvenient and neglected we get to see from the train, but very often the grand or the subtle and the stretch of history that lets us feel we belong.

This isn't much of a shot, I guess, but it's here because it's near where I grew up, right next to the station I went to school from. So the past is reassuringly present.

This final shot is somewhere I walk now and then, as I did today, and does not come from a train. But it could easily be a train-view, unexpectedly and humbly elegant as it is.