Posted by Since August last year I have been spending time by the Wambool/Macquarie River.
I have been spending time by the river because I am realizing the importance that a connection to country has for me personally and for society generally. As I have been doing this, Uncle Bill Allen and Stan Grant have helped me see that this way of being on country is very much a part of what yindyamarra is (see parts 1 and 2).
The very first day I sat on the bank, with my back against a River Oak, I saw a Platypus. It surfaced, swam around for a moment or two, before diving out of sight. Country was saying hello.
Since then, once or twice a week, I spend about half an hour in the morning before work at the river. It is a time to be and listen, to be and watch. I am with the ducks as they land and swim, chase, then take off; with honeyeaters as they bathe; with fish as they swim into the current searching for food.
In all of this, I am noticing that the nature of country, its being, its life, is having an effect. I enter the day more calmly. There is a peace that grows there that has roots deeper than daily circumstance. This peace is resilience in the truest sense: I don’t create it, it arrives deep in me, and I am learning at the river to be in and with it as gift.
This is communing with country. It is a wondering, an awe-ing that the Christian contemplative tradition teaches can lead into contemplation itself. Contemplation – a ‘co-templing’, a communing with God, a oneing in the heart of divine Love. The difference here, on country, at the river, is that this communing does not happen separate to nature, to creation itself.
Here, contemplation is part of Country, swept up and included in the wonder and awe of communing. Country is revealed as Creation and God is revealed in the heart as already one with Country. And in all this, we discover ourselves, physically and spiritually, as also one with Country.
As we practice this communing, our minds are changed. The realisation that we humans are both one with Country, with Creation, and at once one with the Divine Life in it all, has a psychological effect. Over time, we are hopefully being converted to include this communion with God and Country in our actions and lifestyle.
In short, as more of us practice communing with God and Country there is a greater chance that more Australians, in our own unique ways, will share in the relationship that First Nations peoples have with country. Australia, the land, the country itself, is the great common denominator for both First Nations peoples and those of us arriving post 1788.
Perhaps there will come a day when Country and how we live because of it will be the common ground we share as Australians together. My sense, however, is that a lot has to collapse and pass away before this coming together really happens.
Maybe Wiradyuri would call this coming together the flowering of yindyamarra. I’m not sure. The coming of the kin-dom might be the words used by the disciples of Jesus. What is more important is the way of life (both inner and outer) that these words describe. The commonality is there, a commonality with a foundation in Country (Creation), a Country we are all a part of[1].
[1] See The Reconciling Power of our Common Experience of ‘Mother’ Land for an exploration of this commonality.