by Claire Dunn
Claudia walks over and squats next to me.
“You’re trying too hard,” she says. I flinch. “Just feel what your fingers want to do.”
There’s that word again. It’s what Kate told me about fire: “Trying negates the effort.” I try to mirror Claudia’s fingers but the rim blows out again. I cross my arms with a sigh.
“I don’t get it – how do I not try to do it?” I ask.
Claudia takes the pottery from me and holds it silently for a few seconds.
“Look carefully at this bowl,” she says, “and tell me what you see.”
“A big mess?” I say, shrugging my shoulders.
Keeping her gaze on the bowl, Claudia continues as if she didn’t hear me.
“A bowl is a circle, no beginning or end,” she says. “It both receives and offers nourishment. It is empty but pregnant with possibility, like womb of woman. It is the embodiment of the sacred feminine.”
I look up sharply.
“If you are to make this urn, you need to feel that bowl within yourself. The clay will let you shape it, if you let it shape you,” Claudia says, placing the bowl at my feet.
I get up and walk to where the firelight is a pale glow on the white of the scribblies. I look up, the night sky curving over me, smooth and solid, a vast velvety bowl freckled with stars, the moon a stamp of its creator etched on the side. I breathe in and feel myself contained within the sky.
Returning to my mat, I roll my sagging bowl into a sphere, and with a deep breath, dig my fingers deep into its solid centre.
Quiet conversations rise and fall, as does the gentle crackle of the fire. The powerful owl hoots from afar. Dan heads to his shelter, Nik pulling a blanket over her by the fire. Claudia brings over the chocolate tin for the remaining three of us, then bids us goodnight, giving me an encouraging wink as she goes.
“And then there were three,” Chloe smiles, halfway through her best bowl yet.
The clay is so white it’s almost blue in the moonlight. The urn walls have risen strong and supple to their widest point, and I’ve started shortening the coils to rein it in. I’m not doing anything particularly different, but somehow it’s less personal, as if I’m just assisting it to take its natural shape.
The faintest hue of indigo is smudging the eastern sky when Ryan puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece – a hanging lantern, with the face of a man who is a cross between Pan and Mr Potato Head. They grin at each other.
“Looks good,” he says, glancing over to where I sit cradling an urn in my arms. I smooth the surface with a river stone. The clay is cold but I am warm. The yellow robin chirrups its first of the day. Chloe has crashed out. I stretch out next to her, two more clay sculptures nestled by the fire.
*
I wake to the hurried stamp of large feet next to my head.
“Not yoga,” I groan.
“Yoga? No time for that,” Claudia says, bustling about. Stopping abruptly in front of my urn, she turns, flashing me a look of lioness pride.
We light a fire at the base of a large pit, and the pots take their place along an inner ledge to dry. Between kips in the shade we turn them, the sun a welcome helper.
Before the dusk dew descends, we rake the fire out and move the pots onto the warm sand. My heart leaps as Claudia tips my urn on its rim and sits it in the centre. I watch as it disappears under a pile of sawdust, which will allow the heat to diffuse evenly.
“Feels like we’re building a funeral pyre,” Chloe says, as we start building the fire, small sticks first to take the weight of the larger logs on top.
“Hopefully it’s more like a fire birth,” I say anxiously.
“Yeah, and not the big bang,” laughs Dan.
Shaun leans in with a lit twig and hovers low until a glow appears. We can hardly keep our eyelids propped open long enough for the fire to stabilise, before covering it with a couple of sheets of corrugated iron and crawling off to bed.
I jump out of my swag at dawn, yanking on pants and a jumper as I walk. Nikki, Ryan and Claudia are there already, poking sticks into the still-smoking pit.
“What’s your vibe?” Nikki asks, as I approach.
“Quietly confident,” I reply with a smile, before registering the look on her face.
I peek over the edge but know already. Shards. All of it. Smoking, charred shards. I gasp in disbelief and fall to my knees.
“Oh my godfather!” says Dan on arrival, covering his mouth with his hand and sucking in a loud breath through his fingers.
“I don’t understand,” Claudia says, shaking her head. “This has never happened before.”
“Ha!” is all Shaun offers, with a lopsided smirk. I scan the pit for remnants of my urn, my cooking pot, my beautiful bowl. Bleary-eyed Chloe almost stumbles into the pit before realising. She bursts into tears and collapses next to Dan.
With a jumper pulled over his hands, Ryan sifts through the remains.
“Look, a survivor,” he says, pulling out half of his lantern, Mr Potato Head’s smile now a broken grimace.
“What did we do wrong? Was the fire too hot? Were there air bubbles?” Nikki asks, pressing Claudia for answers. Claudia, saying nothing, gets up and walks away, her back to us as she stops in front of a tree and places two hands on the trunk, leaning in until her forehead rests between them.
Eventually she returns, lowering herself onto a stump seat with a sigh.
“When we leave the city and enter the woods, we must give up control or have it wrenched from us. This I know.”
Nikki and Ryan exchange a worried glance.
“Nature, she will take you, work you like clay in the riverbed, wear you down and sift out impurities, until only essence remains.”
She suddenly looks old, her grey hairs catching the early morning sun.
“Yah … the pots maybe were not enough warm … But in my book there are no chances, and no failures. There are only lessons for the learning. Maybe this fire asks – how deeply have you learnt to let go?”
I think back to my intentions for the year. How much control do I really have and how much am I a servant to some greater hand, something that cannot be forced into shape anymore than my urn?
Just as the fire worked the clay, so is the land working us, exposing our sharp edges, shattering the fixed ideas we held about ourselves: Nikki’s neck forcing her to stop; the messiness of intimacy threatening to undo Ryan’s cool detachment. For Shaun, being with a group that accepts him for who he is, and opening his closed heart to us, is cracking all the hard surfaces. Chloe is painfully aware that her resistance to being here mirrors her history of not finishing things, and for Dan, just being part of a group is enough of an edge to rub him raw.
“Garlic bowl going to the highest bidder,” Ryan says, holding up some of the larger shards.
“I’ll take it!” I say, suddenly hit by the ridiculous poetry of it. I begin to laugh. Chloe joins in, and before long we envelop Claudia in a guffawing bear hug.
I walk down my trail without an urn on my head, but with a bowl inside, a vessel brimming with a sweet yearning to dwell within this space and cradle all that arises.
5.
I pad naked across the sand to squat at the water’s edge. Light filters like pencil shavings through the leaves of the giant swamp turpentine, fine and curled, falling in shimmering arcs across the still surface, across my skin. I turn my head to look back at the tree, or “the keeper”, as I’ve come to call it. It feels as if this tree maintains some kind of order down here: the benevolent boss of the billabong. Usually I run my fingers across its flaky trunk in greeting when I arrive, but after my recent discovery, I’m a bit reluctant to touch it.
Niko had instructed us to find anything a bird could snack on within a small area. While the others got down on hands and kn
ees, I peeled back the bark of a tree, screaming when a writhing reptile sprang out at me.
“Small-eyed snake,” Niko laughed. “A feast for a kookaburra. But poisonous, so be careful, especially at night when they’re hunting.”
“Do they hunt on the ground?” I asked warily, thinking of my preference for walking barefoot without a torch.
“Check it out for yourself,” Niko threw back at me. He noted my frustration.
“Don’t wish for answers, wish for more questions. The more you ask, the more you see. The number-one enemy of awareness is boredom. And boredom is just a failure to ask questions. When you find yourself without a question, look down to find the rut you’re standing in.”
That night with the help of a torch, I asked the question and found not one but two small-eyed snakes on the trail near the creek. Since then I’ve been reluctantly flashing a light in front of me every ten steps or so. What a killjoy. Maybe some questions are better left hanging.
A rufous fantail flutters in to perch on a melaleuca, its tail feathers a deep warm rust, darkening at the tips like a bushfire sunset. He spreads his feathers wide and prances from side to side piping a high, fluting melody. Flirt, I think, grinning. I’ve fallen hard for rufous. It is not so common as to be ubiquitous but appears regularly enough to form an acquaintance, and each of my sightings is sweetened with the knowledge that any day now rufous might leave for the tropics. Lately I’ve been thinking I see it, doing a double take and realising that it’s actually just a leaf fluttering. This experience is not just restricted to rufous. I’ll catch a flash of bird in my peripheral vision and swing my binos up to find that, more often than not, what I’ve spied is a bird shape in a bunch of leaves, a feather in the texture of bark or the hook of a spinebill’s beak in a curved stick.
It’s similar to when I was shelter building and the perfect straight sapling or the smoothest paperbark would jump out at me. They still do. It’s like those books where the 3D images emerge from the flat picture, except in this case, what appears from the myriad of possibilities is what I’ve been paying most attention to – birds and building materials. There must be some tipping point, where after a certain amount of focus on something, the mind switches to autopilot and unconsciously tracks for it. Questions must work in the same way, as spotlights sweeping the land for possible patterns. Maybe it’s like Niko said: a question will open the neural gate to allow one to see what couldn’t be seen before. In this way everything could be a pattern – an emotion, an intention, a thought – and the more energy I invest in looking for it, the more likely it will manifest.
Looking down I realise I’m squatting next to a bunch of dog prints. My fingers move to trace their outline in the air. Jeez, they’re big. Two, maybe three dogs, at least. I wonder how big these fellas’ home range is? And if my shelter is within it? Maybe that’s another question I’d rather not know the answer to.
I think back to my dreams last night – children kidnapped or abandoned, my holding five deadly tiger snakes in the palm of my hand.
What questions am I really asking? What am I seeing and what remains invisible? What am I tracking, and what is tracking me?
*
I tie a sarong loosely around my neck and head back up the main trail, still dripping, stopping often to add to my armful of kindling. With the chill of winter palpable in the evenings, I’ve started seriously thinking about firewood. I have no idea how much I’ll need, but if I’m having two fires a day, that’s a lot of fuel. I should also stockpile it in case of weeks of rain. It’s not good survival practice to collect directly from around your shelter; leave the easy stuff for if you’re sick or injured. “Stocking the larder,” Kate calls it. Without a chainsaw I can only burn what I can collect and split with my hand axe.
Fire making has also ramped up in urgency since Kate initiated a ban on matches and lighters for the next month. I pushed for the rest of the year but the boys whinged and asserted their personal rights to the Bic. Why are the the ones who can most easily pump out a coal using lighters? But we all agreed that for the next four weeks at least, it’s sticks or nothing. If I was having dinners at my shelter I would be doubly nervous about it, but I’m still stuck at the kitchen in Camp Crusty. Well, “stuck” by my own inertia.
Turning into my trail, I pause to admire my shelter, to which I attached the last grass bundle a fortnight ago. It sits perfectly poised and empty, like a medieval museum piece. I sat inside it the other day. It was unearthly quiet and kind of sad. I’m annoyed with myself for not moving in but keep making excuses for why I can’t yet. As much as I want to be alone, I don’t seem to be willing to make the break away from the tribe. What am I avoiding?
Today, though, I’m getting the hell out of Dodge. It’s autumn equinox and the gals are celebrating.
“Have you been waiting long?” I ask the other two, who are skimming stones at Snake Creek.
Group gatherings without clocks have been a little frustrating. We probably all have a watch (or a phone) stashed somewhere, but we’ve been experimenting with “pre-programming” our body clocks to go off at meeting times, much like waking right before the alarm. A more esoteric exercise has been listening for when Kate silently calls us in. “Couldn’t you hear me yelling?” she asks good-naturedly when we wander in an hour late. A chain of cooees is the fallback when telepathy fails.
“Nah, not long,” Nikki says, chewing the base of a blade of grass.
“Got water?”
“Check,” I reply.
“Got tarot?” I direct to Chloe.
“Check,” she says, pushing back the rim of her hat.
A few years ago I gave Chloe a set of tarot for her birthday. We really got into it for a while, dressing in sparkly scarves and sitting cross-legged on the floor with the spread between us. “The cards are talking today,” we’d say. It’ll be good to shuffle the pack again with her, if only for old times’ sake.
“Alright, let’s get out of here,” Nik says.
I rock-hop across the creek to join them on the trail heading south-west, the new firesticks I found on the heath clicking together out the top of my daypack. The sun, between shadows, makes my skin tingle. The track grows grassier as it meanders through private land, before ending at a rundown fence, the border to the trackless expanse of national park. I’ve made it here before but baulked at entering the boulder-strewn hills beyond, for fear of getting lost.
Nikki consults the compass around her neck.
“This is where we’re shooting for,” she says. Chloe and I crane over her shoulder to watch her position the edge of the compass on the topographical map towards our destination, a patch of tight concentric rings levelling out in a flattened hillock.
“Uh huh,” I nod. I pretty much understand what she’s doing but wouldn’t trust myself to do it yet. To get lost amongst the endless sandstone cliffs and ridges is a survival test I’m not ready for.
Nikki takes the lead, weaving us around families of tall grasstrees and hedgerows of thick wattle. The huge sandstone boulders we rub shoulders with could be marbles nudged over the ridge by giants playing games. Chloe poses two hands against one as if holding it up. I laugh and pretend to take a photo.
“Ohh,” Chloe says, with a loud sigh. “It’s so good to be off The Block!”
“Tell me about it,” I say. I’ve just been thinking how much lighter I feel, as if I’m rising above the knot of camp politics with every upwards step.
“Still The Block, hey?” Nik says, shaking her head with a grin. As much as we’d tried to christen it with a more sophisticated name, none of them stuck. The Block it remains.
“What day is it?” I ask, realising I have no idea.
“Wednesday … or Thursday?” Nik offers tentatively. “Does it matter?”
“No,” I say, smiling. “It doesn’t.” I picture what my friends woul
d be doing right now, mid-week and mid-afternoon, what I might still be doing if I wasn’t up here on the side of a mountain.
Turning our noses to the sun, we begin a steep ascent, the forest thinning out to open grasslands dotted with grey gums and casuarinas. Blackbutt buttresses spill over rock ledges like candle wax.
“This is it,” Nikki says cheerfully as we finally crest the ridge. A rocky outcrop offers a spectacular view of a woodland valley stretching to a horizon of sheer cliffs, a mirror image of its eastern counterpart, which we stand on.
With only a handspan of daylight left, we start setting up camp, Chloe collecting kindling, Nikki foraging for a tinder bundle, while I carve a new notch.
As the sun flushes its last rays onto our cheeks, we gather around the fire-board, holding it silently in thanks before beginning to spin. My arms move easily and rhythmically back and forth without strain, as I’m comforted in the knowledge that there’s back-up.
“Last one,” I say, Chloe taking over. The board issues a thick plume of smoke from the new energy. I breathe in the pungent scent of fire beckoning. I’ve forgotten how magical the hand-drill is. It’s become a chore trying and failing on my own day after day. I gladly accept the invitation from the others to bed the coal in the nest woven with stringybark, banksia stamens and lichen, wrap my hands around it and breathe it slowly into flames.
We sit silently watching as the fire finds life within the monkey bars of kindling. It sways and dances to a breeze undetectable on my skin, the flames flickering like fairy lights from yellow to orange, to blue, green and white. A hand seeks mine and I turn my palm upwards to link in. Chloe does the same, our circle a tight ring around the circle of fire. I think back to summer, the days I could barely stand for the heaviness of the heat.
“We give thanks for the long days and light of summer, the strength of the sun from the north,” I say, looking out to the smudge of red on the western cliffs. “May we now welcome in the coming winter, the cold and dark from the south.”