Foundation

At first, I thought this poem ended at the single line stanza, “Of me”. I even recorded a reading of it which, after a few attempts, was complete and ready to publish.

I’d been listening for a turnaround, but it never came.

Until it came. Right after I pushed the microphone away.

The photograph of a small rock Islet in the vast grey calmness of Lake Superior is something like the “void featureless plain” of the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime creation story. There are many variations on this story, but the way I remember first learning it, when I was travelling in Australia for much of 1994 and 1995, it went something like this, stripped to the barest of bones:

In the beginning, all of existence was a void, flat, featureless grey plain, until the ancestors awoke. When they awoke, they rose up out of the plain. And as they rose, they began to take form. And as they took form, they began to sing. As as they sang, they began to walk. Their song became the land under their feet. The valleys, the mountains, the rivers and lakes, the plains, the forest and spinifex. The ancestors themselves took many forms, all the forms of the creatures who would populate the land. So there is a Kangaroo songline, and an Emu songline, a Kookaburra songline and a Koala songline. All the ancestors walked until they’d criss-crossed the plain and sung all the land into being.

That’s the image that popped up in my mind when the final two stanzas came to me as the turnaround. I’ve been really out of sorts these past few months, very disconnected. And I understand full well that it’s going to take a deep dive into my psyche to raise me out of the featureless gray plain of funk I’m in. But it really leaves the purpose of taking the dive incomplete without the hope or possibility of what the insight gained by it can provide. I think the idea of walking (and singing) myself back into being like an Ancestor singing Australia into being is a potent hope to begin the dive with.

Please note that I can’t claim my memory of the Songline creation myth is factual. And even if it were, there is certainly much more to the the mythology and its cultural significance for Aboriginals, right up to the present, than I can convey in even a few paragraphs.  In fact, the most beautiful and moving aspects of the story require quite a bit more exploration than I can write here. If you’re interested, there are many resources online. There is also Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book, “The Songlines,” which introduced me to the Songlines durin my own journey way back in ’94.