Finding Spirit in Australia

Brian Doyle has been the editor of the University of Portland in Oregan USA, renowned Portland Magazine since 1991. On a recent visit to Australia he penned a cycle of poems in which he captured his experiences of the spirit here. He is author and editor and prominent figure in US Religious circles.

On Manly Beach

Once I was on a beach in Sydney

And there was a dad and two kids

Next to me and the dad goes to get

Food for the kids and says to them

You can ramble on the beach but do

Not put even a hint of a toe in the sea

So they rustle and tumble and the boy

Who’s maybe five years old and itchy

Says to his sister who is maybe eight

I can so beat you running and she says

No waaay and off they go and I notice

Her easing up just enough at the finish

So he wins it by lunging over the line

And he goes shouting to meet the dad

And she turns with that tiny half-smile

That girls wear, you know what I mean?

It was just a glancing moment among so

Many millions of others, and I bet even

The boy doesn’t remember the race now,

By now he’s caught up to his sister lots,

And there’s no reason for me to recall it

With such clarity either, it was just kids

On the beach doing what all children do,

But that whisper of a smile stays with me.

Such a very small story, one among many,

The sort of thing you see ten times a day,

But more and more these days I conclude

That there’s no such thing as a small story,

Or a thing that doesn’t matter enormously

In ways most of the time we have no idea

How at all but we know deep down it does.

I think you know exactly what I mean.

                                                -- Brian Doyle

The Gospel of the Acacia leprosa (Scarlet blaze)

Reading our Sacred Continent, Our Sacred Mandala

By Terry Monagle

Transformation from the ordinary to the extroardinary

Aspects of nature have always taken on sacred spiritual power. Caves, rivers, mountains, deserts, oasis. Can we find a similar affinity between our land and our white dreaming? To become native it is essential to spiritually engage with this sacred mandala of a continent. When we do we find, aplenty its spiritual language and dimensions.

A good example is the Acacia leprosa. Worldwide there are about 1200 acacia species, of which 950 are in Australia. Acacia leprosa is regarded as a particularly hardy, pretty ordinary, large shrub or small tree with a weeping, slender habit. It can grow throughout much of Australia, flowering in August and September, and is an ideal home garden plant.

However a two walkers in the bush in north east Victoria in 1995 were stunned to come across what looked like a ordinary wattle but in fact was startingly red. They took cuttings to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. The Garden's horticultural staff successfully propagated the extraordinary hybrid from cuttings rather than seed in order to preserve the unusual blood-red colouring. When grown from seed, the red colouring reverts to the more traditional yellow flower.

 Literally millions of wattles grow in the Australian bush and in parks and gardens across the country, but without exception they exhibit only yellow or cream flowers. The original tree from which the scarlet blaze is propagated in the bush has long since died.

The scarlet blaze a thing of great beauty, it is a rarity, flukish, a treasure. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it in the National Botanical Gardens. For me the lemon variety has come to mean each of us in our struggling humanity, and the scarlet blaze as us transformed, as us incarnated with the blood of Christ. That we humans are fulfilled in our ordinariness, but transformed by incarnation. That Christ entered humanity as the scarlet entered that acacia out in the bush.

I take spiritual meaning, comfort and strength from the great aquifers beneath our arid lands, graces aplenty if managed correctly. The ascetics of the fire farming of those sufferings and grievings which bring us new growth and nutrition, the intermittent rivers which we long to see gurgling, and which give life to the miraculous platypi.

Our continent, pictured from space, approximates to a mandala shape. It has a centre, it has a periphery, it is circular, there are a myriad of wonders on the tracks and lines from the Centre to the coast, and return. I can be lost in the infinities of swales of red sand at our centre and azur waves of sea on our peripheries. I can be lost in the endless flowing of the waves towards our shores, to the timelessness of the Rock at the centre of our Mandala. I can find God in the talons of the raptors, in the stoical minimalism of the spinifex which holds our mandala together. We can be the sheer blades of windfarms we are turned by Spirit breath and feed the grids of grace. Beneath the porous steep hill of the traditions we place our mouths and suck up sweet water, purified by the layers of sand. We puzzle over the cryptic messages on the scribbly gum. In our variable seasons, when the rains don’t come, and the land is parched we yearn and live the providence of the creator, who tends, somehow, his creations. Love, at high pressure, sluices the hill sides to find the nuggets exposed.