Wayan the whitefaced heron and kwirlam the purple swamphen on the dry lakebed. Wayan is still, white-faced grey, and silent, watching something in the dry mud, frozen mid-step and ready to strike, spear like. Kwirlam, all dark and colourful purple chested blue, with red nose and beak, comes up behind him, a little off to the side, and adopts the same position for a while, mirroring, mimicking, pausing mid step, and looking over, round as the heron is straight, full as the heron is line-like. The swamphen moves on, into the reeds, where he noisily and colourfully feeds, often on grass stems or seeds. The heron finally shoots out and pounces, something living soon no longer so in its beak. The one bird as if fallen down from the skies, thieving bugs and insects with a flick. The other, as if risen from the earth, like the sound of its guttural cry, as wilful as the heron is awkward and barely descended. The heron, when he does fly, flaps jerking at the air; the swamphen barely makes it off the ground, it’s feet dangling, ready to touchdown again, destined to be the only bird who stays when the lake finally, completely dries.

I’ve been visiting the lake to observe the drying process, and the freeing up of the dying forces. When things dry out, collapse, something else is freed up. The lake was full of water and of life, a real world in miniature, even just a few weeks ago. Now there are seven swans, two Pacific black ducks, a sharp-tailed sandpiper, three stilts, one white-faced heron, a handful of crakes, some moorhens, swamphen regulars, and maybe a rail or two in the rushes and reeds. Green grass is growing on the drying bed. The landcare people are measuring water quality today. I’m not sure they’ve ever been here before. They don’t know the usual water levels, that it dries out most summers. “We looked up the history before we came—this is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Perth. The water levels used to be right up there. The canopy was tuarts and paperbarks.” They get their shoes caught in the waterline mud as they reach for the water with a bottle on a long pole. They scatter swans and ducks, and the sandpiper and stilts move on. They ask if the old fence line was a jetty. I ask them what they’re expecting to find. They talk about heavy metals, the way the tropical fig leaves impact the water quality. I tell them about the figs already cut down for the borers, the paperbarks from before colonisation on the way out. They look surprised. The wind picks up as they try to approach the lake, blows them backwards. They put on Wellington boots. I wish them luck and leave them to it.

There’s a turning inside out that can happen when you look upon a landscape, be it lake or river or land or sea or anything really. Suddenly each part is not separate from the rest, but somehow speaks of the whole of the landscape. The whole lake (or much larger place) in the plant, the tree, the earth, the bird, the flower, the bee. The whole landscape in me. And so in a way it looks back upon itself when I see, when it sees itself reflected in its parts. The parts recognising itself, recognising me.

After two 45-degree days, early bunuru / second summer, waning gibbous moon in the morning western sky, water to a level making it difficult to swim, I notice there are but two ducks left. The blue and musk left when diving was no longer an option, the shelducks went with them, the pink ears flew a few days ago, and yesterday the teals and most of the Pacific black ducks left. Only two Pacific blacks remain, one in the eucalyptus shade on the eastern edge, one under the Moreton bay figs on the southern end. 

With the others went most of the swans, bar two of this season’t cygnets—one in the centre, black-grey feathers in the morning sun, his fearless sibling eating figs, then returning across the water. Otherwise it’s black winged stilts, a white faced heron in the centre, moorhens in the mud, swamphens on the grass, crakes on the drier ground, with a few dotterels and a sandpiper further south, maybe a small raptor, rails in the rushes, and so on. But, mostly, today, the wetter of the water birds have moved on.

Some places tell you what they need. Some places tell you what they are. One lake nearby is a place of initiation. Another a place of gathering and camping. One a place of birthing.

So they say.

I am glad that there still exists unknown things—that there are still mysteries yet to know. Though not so that we should give in and let them be, but continue to strive for what they wish to teach. One came and landed at the lake today. A little white cloud, with a kind of black splotch somewhere—it was pretty far off on the other side. Smaller than a corella, roughly the same as a seagull, but with strangely longer wings when it landed and then took off from its spot on the dry land by the water, before flying even further up the lake. Any other day I might have walked around and tried to follow it, but today was 34 degrees by 8:30, and I was sticking to the shade. Safe in not knowing maybe.

Though I wonder still what it could have been. At first I thought an albino pidgeon or dove maybe. But its wings seemed too long. Beyond that I would really just be guessing. A ground-landing bird by the lake’s edge, white with black splotch somewhere, solitary, heading north maybe, not scattering any other birds. This is all I know.

It was a bird that I have seen, but I could only be slightly more specific than that. A mystery in the landscape of the lake. I have seen what I have seen, but maybe also I’ve seen the limits to my concepts. The shoreline of ideas. I’ve seen the thing in front of me, but can’t see the concept or idea of it, or link them in my thinking. Or at least not yet.

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.”

I found myself driving today through a less-visited (by me) landscape to get to another lake. I’d been there before, but maybe not at this time of day, this day of the week, this week of the year. Two days after so-called ‘Australia Day’, warm but not hot, a Sunday morning, and hundreds, thousands of walkers striding along the limestone beachside clifftop, ouring one way and the other. The road busy too. Houses on the other side, a cafe or two, very few trees. A south westerly breeze already sliding in. I kept going past suburbs also mostly treeless, pockets of bushland, rooftop tiles lining the horizon. I moved onto larger roads, drove over a freeway, detouring big box stores to come at the lake from the eastern edge, trying to drive its shoreline, but finding more houses, fenced off areas, though there were spots here and there for walkers and bikers. I emerged from a series of cul-de-sacs and took a busy road around, by the edge of another busy road, circling the lake’s northern edge, then coming down it’s western side, more open grassland and trees, into the edge of a small city, through more houses, and eventually a kind of park on its western edge. I had been there before a couple of times. I parked and walked to a little jetty and looked out at the water, the sea breeze stronger now, the water cleaner than the lakes I usually visit, able to see the sandy floor. I watched a coot go down and rise up. A swan swam underneath me. A loud ‘poing’ of a dark-coloured musk duck came from a large group of about 15, circling and sometimes flapping together, mostly males with their large flaps under their beaks, sitting low on the water with tales like platupi; a dozen other males here or there. Some crested grebes sat upright with lighter feathers, their heads a mix of regality and ruffled-ness. Some other grebes with Pacific black ducks—almost archetypal ducks. Some pelicans further away. Wood ducks on the bank behind the paperbarks. I chatted with a man and his wife, talking about the lake, the ducks, his experience swimming iat the ocean nearby when a bird came up next to him. “Cormorant?” “Could’ve been.” They moved off and I turned my attention back to the lake. 

And then I was suddenly struck by a deeper level of that place, faint at first, like an initial trickling line, speaking at a deeper level in me. I tried to listen. It rose and thickened like the rising of the lake after first rains, filling out, filling up. The spirit of this place. I  listened and let it in, silencing all else, giving it my lowest levels of attending. It was like a kind of breathing on another level. And I kind of let go an inner sigh. The hour long drive had been worth it. The place opened itself up, spread itself out like the lake that it was. The largest lake around. And I went with it, trying to stay awake. It seemed in that moment somewhat feminine in quality. Unlike the lake I visit most often. Though maybe not related so much to birthing of things, like other lakes I’ve been. Though still a kind of femininity to the essence of this place. I know a small part of the stories, and the imagination of its name. And these stories seemed to ring true enough this day—in what the lake was saying, in what I was able to hear. And I was grateful.

I walked away from the water, along its bank towards a trail sign, then up the hill to a statue of a woman, which seemed in place, right enough, and true. 

And I reflected that my experience of the journey this day told enough the journey we make each and every day towards truth. We venture off towards a goal we feel somehow called to, but maybe not quite sure we’ll make, nor whether it might be worth it—after all, there are so many other things to do. But despite all this we go anyway, maybe not yet knowing even why, and pass through certain places we might not feel at home; slightly unfamiliar or uncomfortable places, upon which we might throw all sorts of judgments and opinions. But all of this is merely preparation. Preparation for a getting closer. For a kind of letting go. Maybe we realise we’d even been to this place before, but hadn’t necessarily seen it in this way. The smallest door. The smallest resigntion. And a whole river of water can come flooding in. Opinions and judgements left behind. We wake up inside the essence of something—the truth of the matter—and find that essence inside. We find ourselves also in such moments. And find ourselves forever changed. And I think the same is true of the place, of the essence or the truth we discover—also changed—in those times, on those days

The path to reality passes through personal judgement and opinion, but on arriving there, those things do not matter. Reality matters. We find it in ourselves, and we find ourselves in it. This is the real striving behind science. Though we are much more involved and essential to the process than we often admit.

I then drove the freeway back through the city, the lake and country with me, still having to return home. I sat on cruise control watching the other cars, the large trees by the side of the road, a raptor—harrier maybe—gliding between the rooftops of big box stores, the roadworks resting there this day, the lane lines constantly changing with the widening of the freeway. I wound slowly through the city, still with the lake and country, along the windswept river by the side of the road, refuelling on the edge of the highway, taking a straghtline home.

Today at the lake I watch the ever shrinking high-water mark—birak summertime heading towards later summer boonaroo and autumn. The swamphens are walking the northern end of the remaining main-water pool, the moorhens are stalking the line on the easter side, pecking away as their tails flick. The stilts are in the slightly deeper water, their long legs like sticks. A couple of coots are slightly further south, beyond a reed bed, working the shoreline there. Pacific black ducks, pink ears, wood ducks and maybe a couple of teals are out in the slightly deeper water that’s left, where they can paddle still. A lone seagull sits and watches a black duck pass by. A couple of crakes are up on the dryer ground with some buff-banded rails nearby. Three pairs of swans sit in place in shallower areas, or move slowly through a deeper water place. Correllas stick to the dryer shore to the south end, or in the trees above, noisy as usual. Behind, there are white tailed black cockatoos in the trees. 

And suddenly, as I’m watching this calm Thursday morning, cool-day almost full-moon scene, the swaphens in one cloud start flap-running their way east into the nearby rushes and reeds; the crakes and rails go with them, disappearing between the separate branches in the shadows and shade; the stilts hop-fly into the centre of the lake; the moorhens and coots step off the shoreline edges and shift to deeper waters; the ducks in a couple of species-clouds do the same; the seagull has vanished; the corellas lift off into clouds and circle around the trees to the south; and in all the visial whirling I hear the yapping little bark of the stilts, the gutteral-turned-higher pitch craw of the hen, the short quacks of the ducks, the slightly higher screech of the coot and moorhens. And all the while I’m moving out from under the paperbark and eucalyptus limbs where I’ve been standing, sheltering from the cooler wind and morning sun. I’m moving slightly south, and looking up, but seeing nothing. The birds keep on moving in the shoreline scene below me. I walk out further, opening up the sky, and wait. And then, before much longer: the stretched, circling wingspan lengths, all brown and orange, of a swamp harrier gliding overhead. He makes a turn, wheeling around, barely needing to flap. I look out again as he circles back behind the tree. The birds left in the centre of the lake are still, and watching intently. The disappeared ones in the reeds are disappeared still. The swans have stopped their preening, watching, but haven’t yet moved. Nor has a white Ibis I now see on the shoreline. And nor has a white faced herron now moving obviously on grey branch towards the centre of the lake. The whole scene seems to pause a little longer, the harrier comes around again. Nobody moves, except the screeching swirling corellas further south. And then…gradually…he seems to have gone. The whole frozen moment eventually, slowly, slipping into movement again. 

The birds in the centre begin to spread out again, the stitls pick up their legs and begin to walk away. The ducks start to paddle apart, each their own species way. The swans resume their preening pruning. The moorhens and coots slowly spread back towards the muddy high-water mark. The corellas screech a little less, and start to settle back upon the ground. The heron resumes his stillness, the ibis moves a little, the swamphens return from the reads and begin to spread, while the rails and crakes take a little longer.

And I’m struck by the directions of it. The way so many that just a moment ago were on the shoreline—on the high water line—shifted quickly either to centre or periphery. That is where the life went: to the shallows or the depths. Nothing stayed on the shoreline (except the bigger  ibis). Life contracted or expanded: moved to the middle, or to the edges went. Life moved away from the shoreline, from where a moment before it was feeding—it moved away from this. Life moved away from the shoreline, because here and now, the shoreline, even at this life-filled lake, meant death.