The Daily Blog - Arriving at the Origins Centre

Happening

I’m sitting in the room at the Origins Centre in Balingup. It’s quiet: late afternoon. Birdsong is the only sound I can hear apart from my own tapping on the keypad. Small birds: I can hear twitters and short whistles rather than the caws and squawks of parrots, cockatoos or magpies. I’ve seen a few miners (natives, not Indians) but apart form that I’ll have to sit outside for longer, and pay attention.

There's a huge tree with a big swing in it just the other side of the main building (kitchen, common room, showers). It's some kind of fine-leaved eucalypt - a big mother tree hanging over the building, ball-shaped like a burst of fireworks.

The room is a small simple box about three metres square. One window faces north, which is up (or into) the hill. The sun is shining golden light on the sides of the trees. There’s a double bed, a small set of shelves which act as a bedside table, a lamp, matts on the floor and a row of pegs on the wall. Apart form the EVACUATION PLAN and the BEFORE YOU LEAVE notices, there’s nothing on the walls. The door looks like the door to a barn. Except for the floor mats, everything is creamy white. It’s a place to be quiet and have a quiet mind.

Lily is having a shower, testing out another new element of our living situation. We may be here for a while – thinking that it may be nearly two months – so for me it was very exciting just to come into the room and see a power point. A power point means I can recharge the laptop, which means I can write.

Observing

I've just moved outside: sitting on a plastic chair on an area of brick paving under the corrugated iron awning, looking down the hill and out towards the south-west.

To get up to our room one has to ascend a small fight of stone steps. Solid stone blocks three feet long, a foot wide and about eight inches thick make both the steps and the retaining wall on each side. On the right as I look down the steps from my seat near the top is a freshly painted bright blue handrail.  On the eft, near the top, is a small sculpture of a long-necked tortoise. Sculpture may be too strong a word, because it's the kind of thing you would buy from a garden store, not a gallery. So perhaps it's more of a figurine, or a tortoise-gnome, but it reminds me of the real thing.

When Grant and I were paddling up the Denmark River the other day I saw a dead tortoise floating in the water. The shell was perfectly intact, with no sign of mould or algae or anything else that to me would suggest that the creature that feed on dead things had started their work. It was dark grey and still clearly divided into small irregular plates. It was those plates, and the smooth dome shape floating in the water, that changed the grey blob from a rock into something to notice into the shell of a tortoise - which of course I had to investigate, and share with Grant. I paddled over to it, reached out with my paddle and picked it up, more than half hoping that it would wriggle off my blade and swim away. But it hung heavy on the blade and it's long neck stretched limp over the edge and down towards the water. I didn't look too closely, really. My efforts to observe closely were pushed aside by that weird feeling of wanting to respect the dead and put it back in its place. We paddled on, but I the weight of it on my paddle sticks with me now. I bet it's heavier than the concrete model looking around and up at me from its perch near the top of the Origin Centre stairs.

Things I'm grateful for

Good conversation in the van on the drive up from Denmark to Balingup.

The hospitality and warmth of all the people at Living Waters. Specifically – hugs. From Jeremy, Sarah, Claire, Annie and even Dave. (Eddie had hurt his back and was on the floor with pillows under his legs, but still shared his warmth even from on the floor.)

Watching Claire take a few sneaky photos of me as I said good-bye was nice – a quiet way to acknowledge the time we’ve spent together over the last three months.

Quiet, and power.

The sun is down. Darkness comes quickly. In the distance I hear a parrot squawk. A kookaburra warms up then lets out a laugh that bounces around the hill and is quickly answered by three or four others.