There is a man under the picnic bench structure as you enter the lake from the east—he’s been there a while now, a couple of months at least. He’s been joined by a woman on some days, always by his old dog. He arrived with longer hair, now clean cut. He’s educating the locals about homelessness, and maybe something else. He has a shopping trolley with esky, a mat and blanket, a dog bowl and dog mat, a high-vis jacket and folding chair. It must be getting cold now in the evening air, in this the driest of summers for 150 years. He moves the chair as the sun moves. This morning he seems to have just come back from the nearby toilets or showers, or somewhere else nearby because it looks like he carries a newspaper. The dog is happy to see him arrive. I now remember him—or the woman—being on their phones from time to time. I say hi whenever I walk past and he’s looking my way. He always has a greeting, and a few words to say. Sometimes I see him talking to morning walkers. They seem to be listening. Last weekend the runners took back the picnic table for their event. Yesterday the lawn mower with leaf blower was right up against him. But today he is back in place again.

I’ve been spending some time at the lake these last days and weeks, feeling like a kind of (death) doula as it dries out. This is the first time it’s dried in three years, after a couple of wet winters. The water recedes, the soft mud dries under the sun and then begins to crack. Footprints left by swamp hens, turtles, foxes, humans go from soft to baked in as they shift from wetter spots to more dry, disappearing as they walk to ground that’s higher/dryer. Most of the stalks retreat to deeper waters, the dotterels and sandpipers move on. Until almost all the birds are left in the final southern-ended deeper-water pond. A handful of swans, some pacific black ducks, stilts, dotterels, coots and moorhens, one spoonbill, a couple of wood-ducks and pink ears, a buff-banded rail or two, a few spotted crakes and some warblers in the reeds. But this is a low they haven’t seen in years. Each day it shrinks a little further, higher land exposed, the water creeping in from the edges, tracks left underneath and then in its wake. Ducks stick to the morning shade when available, the crows or wagtails descend down to the edges, the corellas land on logs amongst ducks for drinks. A sudden shower might boost the coffers for some days, a week maybe, but the overall trend leads towards drying out, leads inevitably towards death—when I know it’ll mostly only be the swamp hens that are left. 

I’ve seen it dry, I’ve seen it fill. I’ve seen it hover in between. But this day it makes me reflect on larger drying outs, larger shutting downs, larger deaths. Makes me think of things past middle age. Makes me think of plants that whither, and end-of-day sunsets. Makes me think of our world today, knowing that we may get a chance showering of rain, or see things more life-filled and younger for a day. But that the overall trend now is one just past middle age, tending as it must towards death. Which is not to say that things are too late, or that things must be given up. Any more than it is correct to lament the setting of the sun, the shift into older age, the drying of the lake. All things come with time, and bring their next-step gifts. The seasons come and go, and we find ourselves within them. So yes, there are cycles, but there is direction too. The seasons are but part of the larger seasons of the earth. Of the earth, of sun and stars and moon. There are rhythms and patterns, things follow a breathing, but a forward momentum too. The rain will return to this lake, the sun will rise again tomorrow, the plant will die and new seeds will grow anew. But it is not some endlessly recurring loop. Something larger is at play. Something longer at work. The overall trend of the earth is one, we must say, that has shifted past its middle age. 

And so we must ask ourselves what we find in the closing of the day, in the withering of the plant, in the older years of age; in the rising of the moon, in the waters that recede and mud that cracks. We find nothing but a receding of the physical life, but also a kind of liberation. As the forces of life wane, so the death forces are released. Liberated. Not in a destructive way, but in a potentially fruitful way. The night is liberated. Given freedom. Given free reign. What do we find in darkness? What do we find in death? We find somethign that lives on, immaterial, unphsyical though it may be. Consciousness. Who we are continues between falling asleep and waking up from rest. Otherwise we wouldn’t know who or where we were each and every morning. Something of us continues, even, beyond the reach of the moment of death. 

And so the lake continues. And so the day continues. And so the plant continues. And so our sleeping and dying selves continue. Not to the same beginnings, but to the next step on our evolving paths. So the earth continues. So society continues. To its next beginnings. To its next stepping offs. 

How to work, though, with that which stretches across? That which works and weaves throughout the night. That which works and weaves beyond death, beyond Thomas’ “dying of the light.” I dare not rage against, but find the new light within the darkness, an inverted inner light, and build with that the next steps. Lakes. Plants. Days. Lives. Societies. Planets. 

And so it is a choice we face. Going down with the dying day and plant and life. Or going with this, going through, through and with the night, through and with the death. Finding somethign there to build up with; to consciously build the next.