TULLAMORE ROAD
South of My Days – Judith Wright.
There is a holiness in the ‘Ordinary’.
BEING FROM COUNTRY
Australian Aboriginals know about drawing their being from Country. I can empathise with them to some extent, having spent my childhood and youth on a farm at Narromine NSW. In 6th Class we leaned these poems. I have lived ‘The lustrous purple blackness of the soft Australian night’ and breathed ‘The land of drought and flooding rain’.
TRACKS IN THE DIRT
At home there was a track up to the irrigation pump – a lister diesel. The track was made by sheep beside a row of straight blue gums. Half way up there was an ancient wooden stile, half buried by the silt of frequent floods – made before World War one. I suspect it is still there, a testimony to time and being a stile and a time.
CALVIN DODGE
I walked the track often alone, and sometimes with Calvin Dodge, one of our workers who took me under his wing as we walked rifle in hand in hopes of spotting a fox or rabbit. There were gum leaves on the dirt. Just like on a small track in the ‘walk around the block’ that Elizabeth I do for pleasure and exercise in Ringwood North. We have some bush here. On this small suburban track, I am able to relive the succulent memory of the walk beside the blue gums at Mumble Peg on Macquarie.
I met Calvin Dodge unexpectedly at a church in Mildura in 1989. He is not with us now but with the Lord. There will be a great celebration at the Consummation of all things!
BOGAN LIFE AND TIMES
In my youth we crossed the Bogan river to get to our property on the Tullamore Road. Usually, ‘the river’ was no more than a dry creek. Once we found it several kilometres wide with a man sitting on a drum at the edge of the flood reciting, ‘I love a sunburnt country’. I treasure that scene. You can sup on the Ordinary. Nothing is ordinary living in the Whole of Christ our life. We get to live in life, personally.
WALKING BY FLASHLIGHT
There was a man who had a severe sensitivity to light as a result of an operation on his eyes. So he had to walk when the light was small. One of the results of this walk was the composition of this work. ‘Walking by Flashlight.’ It’s a hymn to life.
IN HIM IS LIFE THAT IS THE LIFE OF ALL
Real life in Christ is more than religion. It’s being one with God and sucking on the essence of life.
We live union with God by doing more than the eucharist as a rite. We live it as our life; as our union with God and all that God has made in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we are united with life of all kinds. In Him we are alive in life.
First we are alive with Father as life Himself. Then with love and the ability to exult in what He has made. We learn to love ourselves as who we are; to forgive ourselves in the person of Jesus and His cross. We come to feast on nature, exult in the creation and rejoice in simple things like leaves on a bush track.
A MEDITATIONS BY RICHARD ROHR
A Place of Contemplation
Author bell hooks (1952–2021) describes how her childhood in the Kentucky hills instructed her in the spiritual lesson of interbeing:
“Growing up in a world where my grandparents did not hold regular jobs but made their living digging and selling fishing worms, growing food, raising chickens, I was ever mindful of an alternative to the capitalist system that destroyed nature’s abundance. In that world I learned experientially the concept of interbeing, which Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about as that recognition of the connectedness of all human life.
CONNECTEDNESS
“That sense of interbeing was once intimately understood by black folks in the agrarian South. Nowadays it is only those who maintain our bonds to the land, to nature, who keep our vows of living in harmony with the environment, who draw spiritual strength from nature…. It is nature that reminds time and time again that “this too will pass.” To look upon a tree, or a hilly waterfall, that has stood the test of time can renew the spirit. To watch plants rise from the earth with no special tending reawakens our sense of awe and wonder. [1]
EARTH AND PLANTS
Writer Felicia Murrell describes her connection with the earth, which began in childhood
“I grew up in the south, in rural North Carolina, in a place that had red dirt…. My mom used to tell stories of me eating the red clay…. I feel the ground very deeply and intimately…. When I get burdened with the cares of the world, I often share those with the earth. One of my practices is to go find green space and kneel on the ground. I think that connection to the earth made me care about it in a very deep way. I care about the water sources. I care about the land. So often we can just think about ourselves as humans and how things serve us, but I think there’s a beautiful invitation in the circle of life to see how we’re all joined together…. When we see, just like with people, the sacred dignity, inherent worth, and beauty of something, we hold it with a lot more care, tenderness, and compassion. [2]
BELONGING TO THE WHOLE IN CHRIST
Hooks names how the practice of noticing brings her hope and peace:
“When I leave my small flat in an urban world where nature has been so relentlessly assaulted that it is easy to forget to look at a tree, a sky, a flower emerging in a sea of trash, and go to the country, I seek renewal. To live in communion with the earth fully acknowledging nature’s power with humility and grace is a practice of spiritual mindfulness that heals and restores. Making peace with the earth we make the world a place where we can be one with nature. We create and sustain environments where we can come back to ourselves, where we can return home, stand on solid ground, and be a true witness.”
Life is in us and all around us in depth and intensity when Christ is our life. Live what you have already been given: Union with God and all of life.
