With the annual whale migration in full swing here on the New South Wales South Coast, I’m reflecting again on my own movement or lack thereof.
We have been fortunate these last few weeks with stunning, sun-filled, blue-skied Winter’s days. Theres been more Humpbacks closer to shore than any other season I've known. Our resident White Bellied Sea Eagles have been competing with the visiting hang gliders for ariel shows, winning every time. Yesterday, a little further South on another coastal ramble we were entertained by a seal close to shore ambling in the waves. My love of these coastal landscapes continues to grow, my brain brimming with creative ideas, plans and projects related to these nature observations. I hasten to add, however, that those ideas are now firmly filed into the procrastination folder.
Said folder is more like an overflowing cupboard, stuffed to the gills with collections of references and ideas, ready to be acted upon. When I attempt to access the cupboard it's as though all the papers and files come crashing out, demanding to be actioned. I’ll pick up some ideas, skimming notebooks, flicking through files, sketches, and scribbles and carefully place them back into the cupboard, closing the door firmly, but leaving just enough room for some more.
I console myself with the idea that my dithering is related to seasonal change. Winter, after all, is for hibernation, rest and solitude. Hence, my absence from Substack of late. No use berating myself for lack of creative output. The ideas can ferment, I tell myself. All the while, I look at images on social media of friends at home enjoying the Summer in Europe. It seems everyone is enjoying the Summer in Europe this year! This brings with it the familiar pang of homesickness, and let's face it, envy.
With every passing year in Australia, I gain more understanding of the place, the people and the landscape. Simultaneously I miss the people, place and landscape of my other home. I think of the incredible distance between here and there, a chasm, so inaccessible. When I see these great big whales in the sea I think about the vastness of their migratory paths from the Antarctic to the Subtropics and back again. There is constant movement and flux, rest and return, pause and pace. In ways, I wish I could navigate between my little island and this great big one.
Last week I spoke with another migrant. We compared notes on our lives here in Australia. He asked me why I was going to a park in his taxi. I told him I was facilitating a nature-connection workshop, and he enquired if it was similar to meditation or yoga. It is similar in ways, I explained. We spoke about the nuances of my training, why people feel disconnected from nature, and how they want to slow down and reconnect to the natural world. He told me had slowed down himself. He left a secure job at a multinational for that very reason. His blood pressure had increased and being his own boss, driving a taxi was a much more restful and rewarding job. He and his wife had migrated from India some thirty years ago, and he admitted that he was no longer nostalgic about India and his former life there. He beamed with pride when he told me about his two children and their success in their careers, “we made a good life here”, he said.
The conversation and the sandalwood oil that filled the cab were grounding. I'd had a rushed morning with a missed train connection and ended up jumping in his cab, not quite the slow life I was espousing! We wished each other well. Both delighted with the shared sentiments of the benefits of a slower, more meaningful life and rich conversations with strangers. It got me thinking. I don’t want to lose the connection to my home, family, friends and culture. I don’t want to lose that longing, painful as it is. I don’t want to get to that stage where movement ceases and slows to a complete and infinite pause. The notion of picking one place over the other seems too difficult.
As I watched a whale a mere hundred metres or so off the shore of my local beach recently, I thought there was no way I could live away from the possibility and proximity of these incredible creatures and the multitude of vibrant wildlife and plantlife I have access to here. Then, I watch the videos streaming through the little screen on my phone, great stretches of ancient stone in the Burren, plants and creatures that I’ve yet to see in person in my own home country, my favourite Dublin vistas captured by my dearest people and I think there is no real comparison. There is no one place, comparison is futile, they are so remarkably different in so many ways. The grass seems greener (it probably is in Ireland, quite literally), though it is not necessarily so. I often wonder if comparison is a primal instinct to discern a set of circumstances, weighing the practical benefits of one life-changing decision over another, when it meant survival. Perhaps the tendency to compare a malignancy of modernity. A symptom of the overwhelming abundance of choice. "It has us ruined”, as we’d say in Ireland.
I keep coming back to these giants of the sea, the beautiful humpbacks. Content in their movement over enormous distances, seemingly at home wherever they go, resilient in their ritual relocation. I realise I’m not bound by borders, mercifully, not moving out of fear or hunger. I have become a migratory being by choice or fate, experiencing a life rich in a spectrum of colour, vitality and extremes this country offers. I am, in ways, like the many millions of my people who have left our little island, not always by choice but in search of something else. We are curious and creative people in our essence. A reassuring quality of our culture that I can lean on when I feel that immense distance. I can go to my cupboard of ideas and review my mental meanderings and find solace in ideas, notions and reflections. Whether I move, figuratively in my creative pursuits or literally over land and sea, there is no shortage of inspiration in nature. That is the most precious certainty. I don't want to lose the bittersweet longing, the wistfulness of separation, it tells me there is something to return to. Belonging.
Natures notes is proudly written on and inspired by Dharawal Country. I recognise the Dharawal & Wodi Wodi custodians and ancestors who have an enduring connection to land, water and skies.
Always Was and Always Will be Aboriginal Land.