Mountains, Bruce, Mountains

Last week we headed up to the Dandenongs, around the same time the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung used to start moving up there to keep dry over the colder months. In this case though we had a stupidly oversized hire car that got us there in one and half hours driving up the freeway instead of one and a half months walking up the creeks and rivers eating fat eels.

We visited some lovely gardens, and the place we stayed had a view right into the forest. The perfect place to read Dark Ecology and Sandtalk. Finishing one and starting the next in the space of a few days was startling. Dark Ecology wants you to know how hard the author's brain has been working. Sandtalk wants your brain to make new connections. I don't want to be mean about Timothy Morton — Dark Ecology definitely made me think about a lot of stuff and I appreciated it more a few days after I finished reading it — but Sandtalk id definitely having a much more profound effect on me.

I love that Sandtalk isn't about telling a particular Truth or Facts, but rather it's about getting readers to think in certain patterns. Tyson Yunkaporta is an extraordinary communicator. But I've also identified that he's part of a particular ...style? There's an identifiable Aboriginal Australian way of talking or writing: seemingly casual, often disarmingly funny, yet with a deadly serious undertone. It's much, much, more direct that Morton, and I keep fixating on the idea that Tyson Yunkaporta's book is generous. He's generous in sharing this knowledge at all, and generous in the way he shares it. He "cites his sources" but does so like a normal human instead of an insufferable academic. Every chapter is a gift. I feel like my brain has grown 1000 new neural pathways.

I wrote earlier about my trip to Frenchman's Cap all those years ago, and had an interesting conversation with Alissa this week. We talked about spirituality: triggered by my comment that I am totally on board with most of what Yunkaporta writes, but I don't think I'll ever feel some of the more esoteric aspects like when he writes about feeling rocks vibrate with conscious energy, and inanimate objects being alive with memories and spirits. Repressed Catholic upbringings have a lot to answer for. But anyway, where we (or maybe just I) got to was that maybe "spirituality" is simpler than most of us give it credit for. And maybe if I thought of all those walks I did in the Tasmanian wild country in the late 90s/early noughties as "spiritual journeys" rather than "recreational activites" we would all see and feel them differently. Maybe the "awe" we all feel in Big Nature is exactly the same awe we feel in Big Religion. Because every spiritual/religous tradition that is older than agriculture — and many that aren't — privilege that same sorts of places as particularly spiritual: mountains, particularly large and magnificent caves, big river valleys, waterfalls, unexpected caverns and ancient trees.

If you walk up a mountain that takes three days to get to and the only way is on foot, even when you think of it as a fun week away, there's a spiritual aspect to it. It gives you time to think, time to bond with friends or strangers along the way. Your body adjusts to the rhythms of the natural world because you're out in it. You go to bed shortly after the sun sets, because there's only so much power in your batteries and you have a lot of walking to do tomorrow. You wake up with the sun because its streaming through the thin tent walls or the gaps in the timber hut. You wash in cold spring water and eat what you carried in. It's the closest most of us will ever get to the lifestyle humans had for hundreds of millenia before the last twelve.

And what happens at the end (or the middle, if you have to walk out again)? You reach your destination, and you feel awe. And then you feel ...humbled that you get to be part of ~sweeping motion~ ALL OF THIS. And this makes sense. That's what spirituality is. It's feeling that your part of ALL OF THIS, and that you're lucky to be part of it.

This is not really where I expected to go with this note, but it will suffice for now. I've got two more chapters of Sandtalk to go, and it's a certainty I'll write more about it. It's probably changed my life.

=> Why awesome natural beauty drops the jaw and lifts the spirit | Dandenongs | Sandtalk