Threads from a Season

near the forest approaching Mount Blackwood
overlooking Lerderderg Gorge (Victoria)

A season slowly threads
through sinews of time
As lives through the tapestry are spread.
Such
The living quilt does grow,
Nurtured by easy love
Woven throughout a forest rainbow.

As each visit passes through seasons
Chequered souls are knit
Into the colour fabric for many reasons,
And
Passing all too swift upon embroidered hearts is faith -
the laughter of reckless youth
the forgiving cascades into middle age

Never this quilt completes.
For within the evolving season's twine
Is ever stitched another thread of patient time.



Mount Blackwood is a 736 metre/2,415 feet high extinct lava dome volcano in the Great Dividing Range 80 kilometres/50 miles to the north-west of Melbourne. The mountain overlooks the rugged and ancient Lerderderg Gorge with its verdant Eucalypt forests.

On my walk towards Mount Blackwood along a quiet, winter sodden backroad I came across this ramshackle gate and remnant of a fence in rustic decline. It had been some time since I had returned to the forest hereabouts and today was a brief sojourn to reacquaint myself with this place I feel at ease within and essential to remit some bush verve. I was thrilled to see the flora sated by the full winter rains, readying for the spring outbreak. Too, the canopy was alive with the sounds and colours of Birds. Along the ground in the rich volcanic soils all manner of insects and grubs were scurrying. There was the odd wombat and echidna and the rustle of an august wind too.

It felt marvellous, my body tingled with rapture, (though now a tad sore and roughshod in that happy contented way) being amidst these wonderful Australians. I ended up completing a brisk 15 kilometre walk that skirted the mountain and dipped into the Gorge, dodging a few belts of hailstone laden storms in the process. I was 'home' at last, spiritually. I have been away too long.