Black Mother Gully

At 07:07 I am here on an overcast morning. The ducks are on their breakfast patrol. The birdsong is delicate and multilayered with a close raucous call I cannot identify. A Crow is crying tenderly. 

I feel a sense of inquiry “What do you want?” and I say I want a message. The 7 duck patrol walks by. The mother duck eyes me, just because I am here. 

I am listening to Robert McFarlane’s Underland at the moment. He writes, in part, of the Wood Wide Web – of how a forest is a single organism united by a web of roots and fungi. The park and the gully are knitted together in a yin/yang dynamic. It’s a left brain shearing and framing of what was once a vibrant and complex unity. A family of galahs has arrived. 

Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a deep look at how we humans have fenced off our own mental turf and then tried to stuff the world into it. 

We are ineluctably woven into a binary engine of reality. The one is two, and this is true of each of the two, ad infinitum.  When we inhabit one, we must allow that it is always two – and always the greater leaks through and beyond our mental fences. Two crows arrive nearby, on my right. A solitary butcher bird comes to a tree on my left. 

The Black Mother gully is abutted by the left brain mowed park. Simplicity v complexity. Managed v natural. Peopled v untrodden (I have never seen a human in the gully). European v indigenous. 

Crows and magpies are debating. All black v black and white. Crows sharp caw v magpies’ warm mellifluous song. 

And yet it is all bound together, united beyond our careless binary and divided gaze. 

Then a thought “Is this the message you are seeking?” And I say, “Thank you.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *