A creature of place - asking the sacred questions

How can we stay alive to the magic of our homes?

I’m a creature of place. While some seem truly like global citizens, I’ve always been the opposite - a citizen of specificity. Of place. A citizen of a water catchment, a sheltering mountain, of plant friends and mottled morning magpies on my verandah. I’m a citizen of well trodden wandering trails and a swimming hole and a dusk emerging wombat across the road. I’m a citizen of parsley patches and berry patches and soil that is borne from my garden scraps. I’m a citizen of community, of neighbourly reciprocity and friends’ houses nearby that I make tea and toast in.  

So moving is a big deal. Which is what I’ve just done. Trundled onto the highway with our humble furniture and our three kids and plonked us into a new home, a new community, a new landscape. The last fortnight I’ve been feeling groundless, disorientated, grieving for my old home, and also…. excited.

For there’s a gift that comes with new beginnings. And that is the new eyes that greet it. What are the secrets of my new home? What is the first bird of morning here? The second, the third? Look at those kangaroos! There’s a joey near the trampoline! Is that wombat hole active? I hear a fox! A deer! A tawny frogmouth! Is that a sugar glider yipping in the neighbours yard? And what is THAT sound? This smells amazing, what is it? Pennyroyal. What are the medicinal qualities of it? How can we use it in cooking? Look there’s a huge zucchini growing! And sunflowers! I wonder what edibles we might grow here?

My allurement was piqued when neighbours dropped over with a welcome-to-the-street gift of a 2024 calendar illustrated with nature photos from the street, including a resident platypus and migrating breeding peregrine falcons. Peregrine falcons on our street!
 

Photo by Bill Pheasant

I am waking up to the wildness amongst this riparian acreage that I had not foreseen. It’s enlivening to not know.

It’s the quality of the questions I ask about the land that determines the quality of the conversation I am able to have with it. They’re sacred questions, sacred in the way they connect me to life, sacred in the way they help me belong, and allow me deeper into the beauty that is here. The questions are like tendrils of my longing to belong, that I send out in the desire to know, not just as observer but participant in the dance of this place that I have just entered into.

Familiarity too often breeds complacency. We don’t bother pausing at dusk to watch the birds roost anymore because we know it all. We think we know what is growing in our backyards. And what our neighbours have to say. What we miss in these ruts!

It takes some effort and intention to stay alive to the mystery and magic of a place, just as it does to keep seeing afresh our partner’s beauty day after day, year after year. While I know this precious honeymoon period with the land will fade, I want to put on the lens of newness from time to time, to not assume too much, to continue to open to the beauty, even as my roots grow deep and wide in the soil of this place.

Wildly,

Claire