SONATA IN D FOR WINDSOCK AND VOICE

1st Movement

Having reached its zenith, even the sun seemed to find the day too hot to keep moving, for it loitered long, glaring indecently through the sparse foliage.

What had appeared from a distance to be promising relief for a solitary bushwalker, turned out to be meanly deceptive as he searched for an adequate patch of shade. The trees had learned to minimise their exposure to the sun by turning the edges of their leaves towards it, thus rendering the shade they cast most ineffective when it was most needed.

Propped up against a tree trunk the exhausted wanderer made a couple of limp attempts to use his map as a fan. But it wasn’t worth the effort. He stared into infinity across a landscape so still that the motion of his breath captured his full attention. Emptied of thought his mind dissolved into the landscape and all sense of distinction between himself and his surroundings vanished. In this state of inner silence even the pain of the mid day heat “disappeared” – transformed from a cause of discontent into a fact to be “appreciated”.

In that moment the sun became part of the landscape that now embodied his mind, and he knew that he could summon the breeze. The tall grass in the distance nodded in his direction, and in a few moments he felt the moving air caressing his tortured face. He gasped in surprise.
He had been daydreaming, of course, he insisted to himself, dismissing out of hand the possibility of having caused the breeze. Nevertheless, he marvelled at such remarkable synchronicity of thought and event, and even relished the thought that while day dreaming his senses, thus freed of habitual limitations, had recognised the subtle signs of the gathering event and triggered in him the illusion of causation.

He closed his eyes to savour the moment and was drenched with joy, so vast that it could not be explained by the faint relief of so slight a breeze. It gradually dawned on him that the earlier fading of distinction between himself and his surroundings had recurred, but subtly changed: that consciousness had focused in the tree he was leaning against; that though he and the tree were different forms, they participated in the same being; and that the surge in his body echoed the sap rising in the tree as it transformed the soil, water and air of the landscape into its own form. The tree – indeed, the landscape in which it was rooted – had become aware of itself through the reflective consciousness supplied to their shared being by his own form.

When he opened his eyes again it wasn’t rocks and grass and trees that he saw but myriad relatives. He gasped a second time, but in awe rather than surprise, for he knew that through his eyes the landscape was responding to its own breath taking beauty.

Bliss might have kept him motionless until he turned back into dust. But he decided to move on and struggled to his feet. He hugged the tree, then turned and followed his shadow, for he know that it would lead him to the river whence he came.

The heat of the day had gone, but it would return, and from now on he would have to choose between his habit of grumbling about the hot season or celebrating it: between focusing on his own discomfort or recognising it as the opportunity to reinstate the experience of being in an extended body – the landscape transforming itself into life – and appreciating the wonder of its Summer Dreaming.

600 words

2nd Movement

Smiley found himself in a most unexpected situation: waiting in a line of neophytes for an audience with the Zen Master. He alone of the two dozen or so hopefuls had not attended the Sesshin, yet he was about to be tested for enlightenment. All before him were asked the same question: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Each in turn, seated in the lotus position, leaned forward and whispered an answer, and each was ordered by the poker faced Roshi to proceed to the Great Hall where the next phase of their initiation into the art of cosmic consciousness would begin.

Smiley stole a sideways glance at his immediate senior and saw to his surprise that it was Jason, a former Australian surf circuiteer whom he’d met some time ago in Kathmandu. With a sly grin Jason asked, out of the side of his mouth: “Want a clue?”
“Strewth yes,” begged Smiley.
“What is the length of a piece of string?”
Smiley baulked. He’d used a lot of string in his life, but he’d never bothered to measure any. “It could be anything,” he hissed, annoyed at what seemed like a bit of a leg pull.
“There you go,” replied the surfie.

Smiley drooped momentarily, regretting his suspicion of what turned out to be an astute mediation. He regained his posture when he felt a whack across his back. “Could it be that easy?” he wondered. “The sound of one hand clapping could be anything?”

His whole attention focused upon those words, and as he repeated them to himself they began to resonate with a variety of meanings for which he had no other words, but which allowed him a glimpse of a single field of meaning in which words and the things they represent merge and emerge as epiphanies of the whole.

In no time he was seated before the Zen Master whose question took him by surprise. “What is the difference between a duck?” Smiley’s eyes widened. His face burst with laughter and he felt as though he was swimming in the surf. He knew he had to catch the next wave, but he’d never surfed in his life. He yelled to the other surfers, “What do I do?” it was Jason who turned to him and said,” Wait till you’re about half way up, then kick like hell!”

The water lifted him, and, at just the right moment, Smiley thrashed out and instantly became The Wave. He travelled for light years exploring the universe, and broke back into space-time in a curve of foam breaking on a sand bar. He ran through the undertow to the beach, and when he sat down to catch his breath, the Zen Master came back into focus. “One of its legs is both the same,” said Smiley.

It was now the Zen Master who laughed. The power and rhythm of their mutual delight triggered the genesis of a new galaxy, and Smiley woke from the dream that changed his life. Smiley didn’t know anyone called Jason. He’d never been to Kathmandu. And because of a stainless steel pin in his ankle – a legacy of the Asian War (Yes, he did come home, by the way) he couldn’t sit in the lotus position. But Smiley became a poet that day when he woke to his everyday dreaming as an epiphany of The Dreaming Cosmos.

564 words

3rd Movement

It was that moment of the day when reptiles and nocturnal mammals are about to change the guard, so to speak, and the landscape’s potential for igniting the unexpected can be felt in the air. Fatima, a child of no more than seven or eight, gazed purposefully up at a mango whose changing colour had, for several days, stoked her desire. But a sudden flapping of wings and clumsy crash landing that unfolded as a flying fox, hanging upside down beside her prize, regarding it with its own anticipation, shot bolts of outrage through the cheated child.

“No!” she shouted. “Go away!”
“What you mad about, girl?” The voice came from behind.
She spun around and saw an old woman holding a rifle. “Oh please!” she begged. “Shoot that flying fox. It’s about to eat my mango!”
“Can’t help you girl,” replied the dark stranger. “I’m Kambi. Flying fox my Dreaming.”
“What do you mean?”
“It would be like killing myself. Everyone who come from here got their Dreaming. Some like me are Flying Fox. Others Fresh Water Cray. Everyone something. Our Dreaming tell us who we are.”
Fatima tidied her hijab and asked, “What’s my dreaming?”
“You come from here?”
“My parents brought me from Lebanon. But I come from here now.”
“Maybe you got Mango Dreaming.”
“What do mangoes dream about?”
“Their Dreaming ... a Journey. Also ... finding roots. They from somewhere else... but now, like they always been here.”
“Does that mean I shouldn’t eat them?”
“Can’t say. You find out.”
“But how?”
“You look out!” shouted the old woman, waving her rifle at the high in the air.

The startled child turned to see the flying fox flapping away – and the mango falling!
Gasping with surprise she leaped forward with cupped hands focusing for what seemed like eternity as the mango tumbled. She manoeuvred to catch it, feeling as though she was guiding it to her hands. Though she had neither the time nor words to think about it, she felt as though the mango had awoken from its dreaming, challenging her to know it with an intimacy she would never otherwise have guessed possible, and, thereby, to know herself in a way that she could never have organised by choice. Though, at first, these two aspects seemed vague and separate, she felt their interdependence grow as the mango came closer. When it reached her fingers she felt her identity with it and the tree it had fallen from; with the soil it was rooted in, and the water that fed it; with the air it exchanged gasses with, and the sun that drove its chemistry – indeed, with the very universe itself.

She bellowed with the power of recognition, and then, trembling with astonishment, she held the mango out in front of her, and gasped in awe: “This is my body!”

Fatima turned to share the moment with the old woman who had said that she was Kambi. But she was nowhere to be seen. She caught sight of the flying fox, far away but circling back, and said: “You! You are Kambi, aren’t you!” The flying fox replied by spreading its wings so wide that it became the night, and Fatima, the refugee, grew into a mango tree with roots deep in the earth where she had become a mango by entering the Dreaming.

560 words

4th Movement

Like Wandjina dreaming, cyclones erupt in space-time, wander erratically, wreaking havoc, and vanish, as unpredictably as they appear, leaving a legacy of abundance: the rain that nurtures our prosperity.

In eras long gone we sought refuge in the hope of divine intervention from the uncertainty and fear of cyclones and the slow pitiful tragedy of drought. In these less poetic times we face the fury and the pity alone, stripped, by a storm of our own making, of any sense of relationship with, or responsibility for, the Earth and the Cosmos beyond.

Like the paradoxical legacy of cyclones, however, the meteoric turbulence and aftermath of scientific discovery, that shattered and scattered the sacral habits of tens of thousands of years, is a new era of sustainable prosperity reflecting the recovery of our sense of relationship within the Cosmos, and a new sense of Mystery – the latter mediated by mathematics, but possessing the qualities of poetry.

We are not, it seems, mere objects in the Universe, but unique personal manifestations of the One, undivided yet infinitely diverse, Whole. The dancing Brolga and the flowering Kapoc are indeed our relatives, and our consciousness is intimately implicated, not only in their destiny and that of the Earth, but also in the very way that the planet – indeed, the Universe itself – exists.

What, then, are we to make of the efforts of those who danced the rain in dry season? Did they know, by the power of poetry, how to live in a mutually co-operative relationship with the elements? Is that relationship still accessible by the same means? What might be swept away, should we discover, by the fusion of poetry and mathematics, that the relationship between cyclones and the El Nino (the bringer of drought) is not a one way street, and that we have the power to influence it?

Dare we hope for Cyclone Dreaming to keep our relatives prosperous?

318 words
Total word count 2042