Magic follows the wanderer

How can we tune our nervous systems to the hum of timeless wandering day-to-day?

Last week, I spent a week in a place I count amongst my home country, near where my family holidays near Myall Lakes National Park. As soon as I arrive, my heart and hands rise to meet the screech of the little lorikeets, the sturdy blackbutt trees, majestic paperbarks behind the dunes, the spring dollar birds, the migratory whales, the skittling bug-eyed hermit crabs, the sacred headland. All the creatures. All my relations. I greet the place with the knowing that they know me, at least a little.

It is a place of family gatherings, but also of solitude. This is where I came to write much of My Year Without Matches. It was at times harrowing, definitely arduous and occasionally ecstatic. I wrestled my way through narrative blocks and the fierce voice of self-doubt by thrashing in the waves and exhausting myself by long walks up the top of the headland. These places know me. In all weathers. They are in the pages of this book, written in invisible ink.

This visit I came not alone but with my family including two step-kids and baby River. I imagined myself out on the land reacquainting myself with my kin. I’m still learning what it means to be a mother; still reconciling the enormous shift in my lifestyle from abundant solo wandering time, to almost none.

Motherhood asks for extreme flexibility. If it can’t be alone, then we’re all going, I decide. Call it a wander, not a bushwalk, and magic can happen. It’s late afternoon. The five of us have been out for a couple of hours already, absorbed in hermit crab hunts, muddy ankled-wetland bird watching, low tide quicksand adventures, and now singing in the sunset from the top of a sand dune. We walk back in the near dark, River giggling in the backpack carrier at the sight of his siblings splashing in the shallows, their pockets jangling with shells and grit. I’m amazed to feel the same deeply nourished and numinous sense in my body as with my old solo wandering time.

It was these afternoon expeditions, far from phones, clocks, walls and trails, that created the warm glow of connection between us that remains days after our return to school schedules and chore nagging. In those timeless meanders, alive with curiosity and exploration, it felt like our nervous systems started humming the same tune together, perhaps one ancient and familiar. We felt like a family.

How can this be more of a daily hum than a holiday highlight? Meandering down to our sit spot area this week, with baby strapped to my front and 8 year old Nadia by my side, we stop to paint our lips red with pollen from the flowing waratahs, put daisies in our hair. And, mystery of mysteries, find one of River’s blue play blocks in the bower bird’s bower. We shriek with delight and surprise. Magic follows the wanderer.

Wildly,

Claire