The Smallness of Being

The sun rises earlier as spring ages into yellow summer. I wake with the birds. I may not always get up. We've had noisy fast moving storms over the past few days. After the last storm cell strode across the sky to the east, herding deserter clouds before it, it was desert weather. Crystalline skies, no summer haze, no, thank god, smoke haze. Cold. Coming outside this morning in shorts, as a tribute to spring, and a padded jack, from necessity. Sun hadn't touched the mountain yet. Silver dew on the grass. Horses, kept in overnight, erupted through the gate and galloped across the paddock, even Drifter, who gallops less and less these days. Finished the chores and tacked up the whippets for their morning constitutional. Like a brace of chariot horses they tugged me along the drive. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Part call of nature, after all they must hold their bowels and bladder from 9:30pm until the following morning, part the dog's natural enthusiasm for everything that doesn't involve vets. Sometimes, not often enough, I am struck anew by the beauty of the country. Not any country, but *this* country. Australia, yes. Queensland, yes. And this little dead end dirt road that follows the long narrowing valley into Paradise. Sometimes I can make myself see familiar things with new eyes, sometimes, with more joy, the newness is impressed upon me from without. This was one of those mornings. The dogs know I will walk as far as Bird Hill, a natural rise with trees on both sides of the road that is a bird corridor between the mountain and the juncture of two creeks below. There we stop, look and listen. All three of us. At first I am trying to identify bird calls; dollar bird, grey butcherbird, fig bird, black butcherbird (beautiful!), crow, double bar finch and then I stop. There is too much carolling, piping, squeaking, yodelling. It is just sound, a symphony of sound. All those dark shiny eyes, those quivering throats giving a voice to what it is to be alive. The very air vibrates with it. I vibrate with it. My heart seems to burst and for a moment, just a moment, I leave behind the minutiae of being and just Be. Then the moment passes and I shoulder the shell of Me-ness, the thoughts, the lists, the naming, the continuous internal dialogue returns and I and the dogs return with it, to home and breakfast and chores and the smallness of being.