quarry

Richard has gone to the first day of the court hearing of Lockyer Quarries and Lockyer Valley Council. The judge came out yesterday to view the site. Shanahan was also present. There were other people in the Land Rover but don't know who they were. So now the judge has seen the site and the hearing starts in earnest. I have tried to keep a serene attitude. What will be will be. We've done what we can and now it is out of our hands (see Tarot card reading in previous post). Still, I know that I am having trouble letting it go. I haven't given up surrounding that hill with protective light, that's a given, but letting my imagination run away with me, that's harder to control. If we lose, then we lose and it begins a new phase in our life. But in a way, it's not even about us anymore. It's about protecting one small pocked of remnant vegetation from the bulldozers. It's not a big pocket in the scale of things but it is rare, dry vine scrub, and getting rarer. We've got to stop chipping away at what wildness is left. I hope the judge sees that. The only bone of contention is the noise. Everyone else mediated their little tails off so that there is nothing left to contest.

I am bewildered because in the first sentence of the appeal it says that Lockyer Quarry wants to quarry the mountain and the Council is refusing permission - and then they go straight to mediation. Once council's solicitors set (and said) "conditions", Game Over. No mediation should ever have been entered into, it should've been no quarry period. But that's done and dusted and it only depresses me to write the above.


Later same day. We lost.

What is it with numbers? Especially number 11 and 22, the numbers I've always thought of as *my* magical numbers. There was even a time many years ago when I thought of changing my name so that it would add up to 11 or 22. I didn't. That I thought seriously of doing so and went through all the permutations and variations to find something similar speaks of how seriously I took numerology. I still take note of dates equalling 11 or 22, license plates and clocks. It's the clocks that speak the most. Almost every day and every night I wake up at a time that equals 11 or 22. This morning, 5:33, last night when I had to get up to go to the loo, 12:08. I realise that numbers may appear to appear more regularly because I take note of them. I would notice a 9:49 more than I would a 9:50 but that can't be said for those times when I open my eyes and the first thing seen is an eleven or twenty-two. It's still synchronicity playing a part in my life.

I miss those days when Everything Spoke to Me. I studied Wicca and Tarot and Numerology and Crystals and read read read, everything from Joseph Campbell to Aleister Crowley. I was firmly convinced of the efficacy of magic and sometimes saw through the Veil of Maya. Now I am older and pragmatic and have lowered the veil of habit and illusion between what appears to be reality and reality itself. Of course I smoked alot of dope back then, not that smoking dope demeans the truth of what I knew. On the contrary I suspect an altered state can serve as an introduction to an different but not necessarily false, reality. We put too much store in facts; in what we can count, see, touch, hear, smell or taste. Although seeing and counting what we've seen appear to have become our primary senses. At any rate, smoking marijuana showed me that there was more to what was there then I had known. Of course I fell into the trap of smoking dope just to smoke dope. Like so many others. But mind altering substances have been used for aeons to explore behind the Veil. The difference is they were used as an adjunct to religious practices while western society just wants to get stoned.

So now I'm sober (save for red wine), don't read Tarot or Crowley any more. I haven't given the books away, I occasionally get the Tarot deck out to admire the art work (Karma Tarot by Birgit Boline Erfurt), the crystals catch the light in the kitchen window and the clocks remind me that there's more life than can be found in any philosophy. If I could read Tarot for myself I probably would. I could read for other people and was sometimes uncannily accurate (predicting a pregnancy and illness for two friends, the first had no intention or desire to get pregnant but did anyway, the second had no idea anything was wrong with her). So that was simultaneously satisfying and a little scary. But read for myself? I couldn't do it. I read but nothing I read made any sense or came true.

While I'm writing this, rather than do a reading for myself I am trying one of those free online Tarot spots. This is what I got: The Lovers for how I feel about myself now. At least I know I'm ultimately on my side. Death, for what I most want at the moment (cataclysmic change). The Tower represents my fears, my world falling apart (the quarry and having to move), Temperance for what I've got going for me, a "way of handling difficult circumstances with calm confidence." The Hanged man for what is going against me, being hung up while others (the lawyers and the Courts) decide my future, and for my personal card, The Fool...nothing more need be said.

Sulawesi Breath

I often listen to a CD of birdsong from Sulawesi while doing yoga. On the last track there is a recording of a bird singing near dusk or night as there is a frog chorus in the background. I suppose you couldn't really call is singing, more of a calling, in a breathy descending minor key, of two and then three notes. It is the loneliest sound I have ever heard. There is no answer to that yearning hello. Just this waiting for a reply that never comes. The bird finally stops, the frogs chirp on but the silence and the infinity of the night is deafening.

I don't know what kind of bird this is and knowing it's name would not make it any dearer to me. It's all tied in with 'if a sparow or a leaf falls, would God know'? This bird symbolizes, for me at leat, all that we've lost, all that we could lose, if we don't clean up our act. What sound did a Dodo make? A Carolina parakeet. It's wretched that we will never know, that those sounds are lost forever. And this bird sings in the wilderness for a mate that never replies. Is that how it feels to know yourself to be finally and forever alone?

While I was meditating today and concentrating on my breath I could hear Tony the budgie talking to himself on the verandah (I love you, The Regurgitator, pretty pretty PRETTY bird). In the poinciana outside this room Felicity was lamenting her (to my mind at least) on off again relationship with Suki. Her calls didn't sound like contact calls but more of a lament. Suki came home yesterday but is gone again today. As I hovered in the indescribably state which may be a percursor to mditating it occurred to me that the breath which was the focus of my concentration and which was starting to define that oceanic feeling I sometimes get while meditating, was the very same breath Tony and Felicity were using. We were united by breath. In and out, no matter the rate, the air flows from one through another.

Listening to Words of Peace the other day, Prem Rawat spoke of how this planet, this Earth, is as far as anybody knows the only place with life on it for millions and billions of miles. He spoke of the miracle of meeting another who is alive and breathing This Day, and how we should greet each other with that shared miracle in mind. No one from 150 years ago is alive. No one today will be alive 150 years hence (barring medical miracles). And this Earth? A teeming, violent, buzzing, symphonic, fragile, resilient, chaotic yet ultimately precious place is the only place like it anywhere. This tiny tiny little light, this soft soft little sound in an infinity of empty space yet we live as though there are billions of Earths just a footstep away.