How I learned to love the ocean

For each of us, there are places in nature that make us feel good. They calm the senses and charge us with life. For me it is mountains and wild mountain streams. They never fail to make me feel whole, happy and about 9 years old. I come from the mountains and think about home always being a place in the mountains.

I adore any wild place in nature and have fallen in love with deserts, tropical rainforest, grassy fields, snowy valleys and lazy rivers. However, the Ocean has always been an enigma to me.

My beach trips as a child were mostly noisy, holiday visits with family to city beaches like Bondi. These were great times, but in my mind the beach was a place of sun burn, stinging eyes, car parks, dirty sand and chiko roll wrappers.

I have been lucky since then to see some spectacularly beautiful and famous beaches and coasts across Australia and the world. I've explored them by diving, paddling, swimming, walking, running, fishing, boarding and sailing. I've partied on them, played on them, had moonlit picnics on them and gotten windswept and interesting on them.

But I have never been able to understand the ocean. Have not felt the magnetic tug to be near or in the ocean. Maybe to me it is too big a thing for my mind to take in. So much sand, so much water, so much sky. Lurid in its vastness.

But now the ocean has won me over. I’ve spent the last seven months leading multi-day walks in two incredibly beautiful coastal areas of eastern Tasmania; the Bay of Fires and Maria Island. Pretty convincing parts of the coast...

What has changed for me is now I really see the ocean as a place of life. I have learnt about many shellfish who have complex lives and finely etched designs. Rockpools full of blooming blood red anemones, sea dragons with their frilly beauty. And the birds! Sea birds are in their own league when it comes to quirky and beautiful; oystercatchers, terns, gulls, tiny hooded plovers, eagles, turnstones, cormorants and gannets. All who make the beach their home for a time, or a lifetime.

Aboriginal life on the coast is so keenly felt from the vast number of living places along the coast here. Huge mounds of shells, eaten over thousands of years of harvesting from the ever abundant ocean. 

The turn of the seasons is so tangible on the beach; the migration of grand humpback whales down to their summer grounds in the southern waters, the frolicking of a seal, coming in close to the bay on his way up to the breeding grounds in bass strait, the shorttailed shearwaters and albatross on their worldwide tours, fairy penguins with their silver-blue feathers and their unending toil in tending to their chicks until they are old enough to try and attempt a life at sea. 

I have been blessed to see enough perfect sunrises, sunsets and night skies over the ocean to last me a lifetime. The smell, the air and the wind have worked their magic. The wave worn pebbles and the ancient boulders have made the difference. The sea has made me feel at home with its colours and moods and tides.

I love the ocean! 

Monaro Light

I was there 
in the moment that 
the soot-black birds 
streaked out 
against the bruised and stormy sky 
and the world blazed 
and the plains turned golden 
in the clear light. 

Monaro Plains: Barbara Bryan

A journey of 360 000 steps

A few weeks ago, I walked the 223km Larapinta trail which snakes along the backbone of the Western MacDonald ranges. Reaching west from Alice Springs to Mt Sonder, the Larapinta was a journey of immersion in a spectacular, remote, and alive part of Central Australia. 

A 16 day journey of the heart ... and feet...

Ahhhh that feeling when you finally drop out of mobile service and disappear into the rhythm of a long distance journey. 

Following a mountain range in a consistent direction, the Larapinta is unique in that you can see both a long way into the future and past directions of your journey. A distant quartzite ridge, red with iron oxide staining shimmering in the far, far west which grows larger and larger with the walking. Three days later, and I am standing under a lone silvery cypress pine on its jagged back. Three more days and it is disappearing into the east becoming a reminder of the time and distance that has passed underfoot. 

Wonderful friends who made me laugh till I couldn't stand up and because of their unique experiences, gave mine so much more.

High mountain camps with views that went on and on and sitting taking it in while we drank another chai and listened to the dingoes howl while another amazing meal was prepared.

Spinifex, ruby red gorges, ancient cycads, glittery rocks, Euros, Dingos, Peregrine falcons and a landscape that went on and on and on as far as you can see. 

And the silence. 

But mostly the skies. Sunrises that touched ridges and valleys and ranges with a burning orange. Soft sunrises which painted the world alive. The full moon over Mt Sonder as we climbed through the clouds and into the clear night sky above and further up into the blazing dawn. Sleeping under the stars each night and trying to find a wish to match every shooting star I saw. 

A few meandering words for my meandering journey. More stories to come.

Right here right now

“Yes… but why?”

It was a conversation between myself and another walker, the kind of meandering, exchange that happens over a course of many hours, or days, between breathless hill climbs, camp going-ons, foot strapping and general bushwalking life.

He was talking about the 45km Inca Trail into the sacred and spectacular Inca site of Machu Picchu, from Cusco. Arriving there after four days of hard walking and sleepless nights, he was watching tourists alight from the narrow gauge train that had pulled in from Cusco – a mere four hour trainride away. 

A year later, he asked me the same question he asked himself that day. "Which would I prefer, the cushy four hour train ride, or the four day mountain trek in". He already knew my answer, which was the same as his. So, when I said “the walk in, of course”, he asked “yes… but why?”.

What he was asking was why there should be any greater, or longer-lasting satisfaction in reaching somewhere using your own limbs.

Well firstly, I thought that a walk sounded more like it had more of a chance of adventure and unique experiences. There would be more unknowns on a four day walk – people, sights, sounds, feelings and beauty. In the words of Napolean; Chance is the providence of adventurers.

And then there’s the release of endorphins that we get from any exercise, endorphins being neurotransmitters produced in the brain that reduce pain and make us feel awesome. Not a brain chemistry event that you get from sitting on a train, no matter how comfortable the seats.

But is there something intrinsically worthwhile about being connected physically to the earth on a journey? Creating your own individual path to a place, using your muscles, nerves and heart.

I once went on a bike tour, mostly off road, for a distance of almost 2000km. More than a decade later, I can vividly recall most details of the trip such as the colour and shape of a clump of paper daisies I sat next to at a rest stop; the golden hazy dust on a mountain road; or how cold the ground was that I camped on and the lace-like patterns of frost on my tent; conversations I had with others on the road; the crack! of a snapped derailleur; or how far apart the reflector posts were when battling an intense freezing headwind. These precious memories stay with me always. 

I remember these details because of how much my focus at the time was on the immediate present. The past and future were not required to be held in the mind.

When we walk/ride/climb/swim/sail/crawl/paddle/ski/dance/run/meander or otherwise self-propel through life, we are forever in the moment as this is what is required of us to keep on moving. We are really in the landscape in an immediate sense, rather that passing through the landscape.

So, for me, and for my friend, this is the reason we walk the mountain rather than catch the train, because its about feeling truly alive in the moment. Living the very life of life.

Look to this day! 
For it is life, the very life of life. 
For yesterday is but a dream 
And tomorrow is only a vision 
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness 
And tomorrow a vision of hope. 
Look well, therefore, to this day! 
Such is the salutation of the dawn.  
Kalidasa

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.

Being alone

What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone is. 

Ellen Burstyn