I was a bit out of sorts at the lake today. Might also have something to do with two forty-plus degree days. I was finding it hard to really see it. Feel it. Hear it. My head was awake, maybe too awake, all nerves firing. The heat was almost stifling. 34 degrees, 8:30am in the shade. I drank a juice and the usual chai. Pacific black ducks sat motionless in the eucalyptus shade. I did the same and tried to dodge any rays that shot through. Quenda was there, a few of them, that old southern brown bandicoot. Cooli the buff banded rail. Quite a few little dotterels combed the dryer shoreline on the sun-filled eastern side not too far from what was left of the water. Seven swans in the centre. A handful of crakes on the other side of the reeds, still on dryer land. Nolyang the moorhen almost getting stuck in the wetter waterline mud. The Eurasian coot sometimes with him. No more yadjingoorong the red necked avocet. Black winged stilts remained though, letting out the odd little high pitched bark. Some teals amongst the Pacific black ducks further out maybe. Correllas in a slow moving, slightly less raucous cloud to the south—one even tried to come in and land on a stilt, before the stilt moved and the corella flopped down on the water, the first time I’d seen that. Wagtails and wattlebirds flapped around me. Wardong the crow played with something in the green groundcover below. No reed warblers seen today. No more Western spoonbill wading. Further down, a single sharp-tailed sandpiper with back feathers twitching, playing. Even a mystery white-feathered long-winged bird with black splotch I at first thought was an albino pidgeon or dove, landing on and departing from the far-off other side. In short, a slow-moving hot morning with not too many changes to the last few days. 

But there’s always something changing. I tried to observe it all, even if it was hard to currently feel it, hot as it was, as detached and hovering as everything seemed to be—like the essence of the place floated just above everything I could see, the way Wadjemup Rottnest sometimes sits doubled up on itself on the Western shoreline edges. I found it hard to climb that far, or bring it back down. Maybe I was hovering up there with it. 

In any case, I stayed, and even sat a little in the chair beneath the shade—something I so seldom do, harder as it is to get the better, longer, deeper shoreline view. But I did, and looked at what I could see, knowing that the rest was there too, including a couple of swaphens a little further to the right, partially in, partially out of viewing lines. And then I closed my eyes. And I heard the koolbardie magpie off behind me to the right, the squwaking of the corellas to the far left, a karak red-tailed black cockatoo somewhere to the east in their favourite trees currently out of sight. The more melodious of wagtail whistles, a slow wardong moan, the cluck of the crakes, the guttural crowl of kwirlam the swampy hen further to the right. I looked again, then closed my eyes some more. I heard a rustling by my side and saw a rail had come up the bank nearby. One or two people walked slowly past in the ever-growing light. 

I let the sounds and images go. And made space for the lake as a whole. And slowly, gradually it came trickling in. The essence of the thing. That familar thing. Maybe made more obvious today by the distance which I had at first felt myself away. I had to really earn it today, work for it. It came in gently, but the force of it is always strong—filling not just open eyes, and open ears and hearts, but open hands too. My nerves had lined up with it, the feelings fell in step, and now the will put itself in service of it too. I always feel changed in such a moment, a slightly different human being. But I often wonder how such an experience changes that which is perceived. We go with things in such moments—nature and human beings. And I had the feeling that on the deepest level this is what caring means. 

And then today I decided to go a little further, and asked if there was anything in particular that the lake itself might need. And this is what it said, though not in words, but still as a kind of speaking, in me: “The figs can go. Maybe a paperbark or two. The main thing is you, human beings. I need you to walk me, see me truly, sing me if you can. Do not completely fence me. I am not a zoo. Maybe a bit of burning round the edges. But again: The main thing is you. I am a place of transformation.”