Juniper Tree Gathering

Meeting a new season of the earth with tea

Juniper tree and a gathering of monkey folk and no, I don’t know who it is by but look! Down there by the monkey on the right. Is that writing? Now that could be a clue…

A new season of the earth. Elementals. Tui Shou. Just a few of the ideas strolling mind paths between my ears as I admired pale milk green lichen curving along an old branch. The tree and her bark, the lichen’s group hug of algae and fungi; they’d obviously known each other for some time. There’s something about staring at a gracefully grown juniper that’s a real zen bath. Here I was, exploring a home for the new Heart & Place workshops (Heart & Place: The Deepening) with my friend, Frances. Was this the third time we’d just paused, and then kept pausing, at some particular junction amongst the wandering paths? The sun, autumn soft and warm. A tiny blue dragonfly. Water singing quietly over rocks.

Frances had gotten lost and flustered getting here, and now there was some serious de-flustering going on. Ideas were sprouting. Enthusiasm was making the rounds. Our lovely guide, Kay, pointed out a man staring meaningfully at hedges, branches, squinting ever so slightly. “That’s Ken Lamb,” she said. “He designed the gardens.” When the city of Edogawa in Japan offered to pay for these gardens as a gift, the government called for a tender. Landscape architecture was still a growing thing for specialties. Japanese Garden designers in Australia? Tumbleweeds. Crickets. Ken, though, had lived in Japan for 20 years and had a keen interest in these sanctuaries, along with art, calligraphy, philosophy. Why not landscape design? His friends urged him onto a little destiny stone path beside a waterfall of possibility. So he stepped onto the path, started walking

It’s his twice-a-year visit. Big pruning is going on. Men in blue work clothes walk past us with scraggly hedge plants in buckets, apologising for the inconvenience, smiling at us with the joy of important garden work on an autumn day.

This is why I’m here. To step back into my path. That’s an easy sentence to write, but through the Black Summer fires and covid and the dark landscape of pretty serious emotional stress - not alone in this - it’s been something of a long road. At about the same time our physical bookshop closed I also let go of writing workshops that had been my heart for nigh on 20 years. And it was because the world had not just changed, but traumatically transformed. And it was an alteration in motion. You know the stuff besieging the world. The workshops, I felt, had not kept up. The times called for a new engagement with language and action. This was a new season of the earth. While Heart & Place had been a journey of deep ecology and family, a new work had to step into the sunshine and roots of the frontline of working on behalf of wild beautiful possibility. Elemental. And, at the same time, communal. So I stepped away and set my subconscious to a kind of listening. To the forest. To the spirit of the land. To other people treading similar paths and what wisdom they might offer. For the longest time there seemed to be nothing, and then for the next longest time a lot of messy writing in notebooks, and reading.

So. Scary, unfinished, it begins with morning tea.

If you live here on the Central Coast of NSW, in Australia, on Darkinjung land, then hopefully I’ve found your details in my disorganisation of lists and notes, and sent you a personal invitation to tea and bickies here in the gardens, this Friday the 2nd of June, where we’ll talk about writing, about the world’s needs, test ideas, catch up.

If not, if you’re one of the first few amazing subscribing creative clan of The Nest, you are invited in spirit. And I’ll report back. I’ll be asking for wisdom and feedback from those who are here, in this garden, but also from you. I don’t know what you’ll be up to on the day, and I don’t know you very well. But already we’re connected, already the mycelial network is reaching out between us, beneath the roots of things.

Language is there, breathing a green breath. The spirit of the Juniper Tree is holding firm like a soft rock spiralling through space. “Heaven is where you are standing,” said Morihei Ueshiba. “And that is the place to train.”