Lovely Emptiness

waratah, the wollemi

Recently, I went for a long walk in remote parts of the spectacular Wollemi National Park. Often, the terrain was difficult going – trackless, steep, rocky, scratchy thick scrub, deep river gorges, cliffs, rough ground and waterless mountain ridges. At the end of each day, it was enough for us to find water, cook dinner and collapse into bed. 

And then repeat the next day, and the next, and the next. For 12 days.

Luckily, this type of escapade happens to be one of my favourite things to do.

I like this type of thing for the way that it makes me feel after I return from the wilderness and how it continues to make me a more whole and happier person.

One of the most precious things that we can experience in life is to stand alone under a blazing sky of frosty stars, far from the light, noise and mental burden of a town and listen to the echoing emptiness of the night. Breathing in the cool, dark smells of the night bush and seeing the stars wheeling overhead made all those 12 days worth it.

I am forever interested in what happens internally when I, and others, spend time in wilderness.  When I walk in the bush, I like to focus on what my senses bring me – the distant view of the ranges, the sound of my breath as I carry a heavy pack up a mountain, the smell of the peppermint gum underfoot, the sense of cold, granular rock under my finger tips, the rhythmic tread of my boots on the varied ground, the form of the anthers in a flower that I pass by, the sound of black cockatoos softly keening in the swooshing Casuarina overhead.

All this, with no interpretation required, no analysis needed.

American mountaineer, author and all-round awesome guy, John Muir wrote about this emptiness and solitude in 1901 when he said

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer….Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

Being still in nature and letting it do its work, our mind and heart are emptied of daily concerns, and filled instead by elemental emptiness. The sun, the stars, the wind, the sound of a river flowing – they fill us up.

Judith Wright, the Australian poet speaks of a powerful, personal experience in her gorgeous poem, Egrets.

Once I travelled through a quiet evening,

 I saw a pool, jet black and mirror-still.

Beyond, the slender paperbarks stood crowding;

Each on its own white image looked its fill,

And nothing moved but thirty egrets wading –

Thirty egrets in a quiet evening.

Once in a lifetime, lovely past believing,

Your lucky eyes may light upon such a pool.

As though for many years I had been waiting,

I watched in silence, till my heart was full

Of clear dark water, and white trees unmoving,

And, whiter yet, those thirty egrets wading.

Coming to terms with the solitude of the wilderness, the heart becomes filled with perspective and a sense of being intensely alive.

Standing in the Wollemi, looking out on Mt Coricudgy one day I felt this emptiness – the neverending ranges, the blue cloudless sky, the silence of the bush and the breeze slipping past me.

This lovely emptiness leaves me feeling happy and decidedly… unlonely.