Travelling an alternative route
Living in a place where we can still look in wonder on the milky jewelled way, I ask our students to shift perspective, imagine the milky way as Mother Cosmos, looking down upon our bus as we travel for yet another “Geography on the Road” trip.
A lot has happened since she last checked in, fish have gone ashore exchanging gills for lungs, algae grew forests, and mammals nourish their young on milk as Mother Cosmos has always done.
There are worrying sights too, change that occurs in the blink of a cosmic eye….monotonous fields of food crops that rely on the poisoning of air, water and soil, the rupturing of Mother Earth’s skin to fuel a way of life for one species that blindfolds itself from its relationships with all the other life forms and lifeways.
Back on the bus, we have a choice to stay on the main route or take an alternative. We choose the latter: We pass through a pop-up village of birds, the most recent homecoming of songbirds to much feasting, flirting and dancing. On the fringes, Casuarina trees are generous hosts to Black Cockatoo ancestors.
Eyes in the ribboning river cast a line to the movement of our bus on its strange dry-river trail. There is mutual recognition of kinship, a conversation starter, Where you from? Who’s your mob? Where and when were you and me, “we”. Salted breath drifts in with treasures of ocean news. The turtles are nesting on islands to the north, whales are calving, plankton are weaving carbon into breath. Ocean is wombing.
The grandmother is nest for mother and grandchild. The earth is nested in its solar system which is nested in the spiral galaxy of the milky way. Humans talk about going into space when they already are cosmic/space beings…..”still a lot to learn then”, Mother Cosmos sighs with a half-smile as the sun raises his brow over the eastern horizon.
We are reweaving our relationship with water, land, community, expanding the collective heart.
