The night sky

The Australian night sky is astonishing, brilliant constellations stretch across the heavens. No lights of distant cities or country towns intrude below the skyline. The Southern Cross hangs, its pointers dangling. I drink in the stars in the silent immensity of the night. Warm night air fans my face. A feeling of slipping back in time, like a ship slipping its moorings and drifting away on an ocean of land. Stars rake, blur, flicker on the long top of reaching sandhills. Dark shapes of night stand separated from each other. I feel the vibrancy of the land beneath my fingers its spirit throb and breathe. I have a sense of belonging, of being a part of this mystical land. I think about the millions of sleepers and my mind tentatively stretches out without fear, explores gently, probing the depth of the night felled into stillness.

It feels as if I have taken up residence in the sky. Lifting my hand it is almost as if I can grab a pocket full of stars. The stars become white fires of other worlds. Do the stars tether us to a purpose? Was there other life looking back as I looked at them? I ask myself these questions. Standing under the star arena I sense their gravity tug, feel their comprehensive muted voices. I become the centre of their wheel, leaping overhead and cascading down and around. A space surfer floating on stars, surrendering to their beauty and power. I want nothing more than to rise into the star studded sky. I feel envious of astronauts who experience their beauty from space. I am drunk with the vastness of space and its immensity. Awestruck, humbled under the heavens, I feel so small.

Waking reality. A magnetic lowness in the air, a cold brooding stillness, the Southern Cross has turned over almost horizontal, the pattern of the nightsky changed. Minute by minute the light changes, a grim faint greyness surging forward into a cool pre-dawn light. Shadows elongate, prow-like. Dreamtime, a time of bewildering consciousness as earth and man stir into life. Another hour and the sky will lighten. First touch of morning along the horizon, faint light breaking over the salt brush plain. Galah and corella pink flush in the east. Morning sun, like an announcing trumpet blast, streams across the plain, etching the distant coolabahs and redgums in pitiless light. The shriek of corellas overhead, the stir of wagtails. Crows and magpies flap about. The land slowly stirs, another day breaks into life. Seated, I gaze out over the low-lit plain day dreaming, stealing a moment of peace. Waking thoughts surge and smash my peace into fragments, leaving them as fibrous dry bark, hot stones, curled dry leaves in an unrelenting sun that passes over the landscape and myself like a cloud shadow.