Listening to the valley
It began with listening to the birds, and now it’s become listening to the valley.
I noticed how easy it was to walk right on past. Maybe I paused here and there, when something startling stops me in my tracks. The wrens strident in the early morning. Magpies at mid-morning, caroling. But in the normal flow of life, the busy-ness of the day carried me on. I walked past the life of the valley.
What a relief to I stop and listen, to stand stock still, at the edge of the road on my morning walk. The Grey Shrike is calling back and forth, on a mild morning when all creation is happy that the weather is warming up at last. Or sitting under the carport in the Thyme Terrace, watching the rain fall, the water dropping from the gutter to the drainage point, the currawongs echoing along the valley.
Listening not just to the birds, but to the valley, to the birds in their place. Never individual voices. The currawong calls to currawong, which replies, and the calls float along the valley, clinging to the damp, and another call, and again, the response, the calls layered up the valley, then falling away, leaving just the frogs and the sound of soft rain.
It’s a practice, listening to the birds, a practice of place I’m discovering as I slow down to the the pace of the natural world. I have to I let myself be interrupted and give up what I was heading out to do. Stop and listen.
An interruption. But now I find myself heading out to that comfy chair, with a glass of something good, as the light falls to evening in the manna gum of the creekline. To listen to the birds. I’m giving over to doing the things I’ve been wanting to do ‘someday’. Someday is today.
I like it when people staying at the Studio take the time to sit and listen to the valley, like Kylie this weekend, who was out on the deck early in the morning, by herself. Child and husband still in bed.
That is what the place is for - for slowing down the pace of life. Taking time out to sit in the early morning, not quite knowing what to expect and gradually finding sounds, songs, talking, in the valley.
Here are six places listen to the birds at Riddells Creek Studio.
1. Sitting on the deck. Listen to the valley wake up in the early light, or in the mid morning, when the birds have settled down. Or in the afternoon as the bird life shuts up shop and the cockatoos head home, high above the valley.
2. Walking by the creek.
3. Over by the pines, at the end of the creek flat, when the kookaburras or black cockatoos are visiting, the former gathering for a chorus or two, and the cockatoos clattering through the top of the stand of pines, cracking open the pine cones.
4. Across the road, just inside Barrm Birrm, shielded from the road by the cassinia, sitting on a log, the morning sun warming the trees and the Grey Shrike Thrushes setting about their conversation, call and response back and forth, the call varying for reasons I can’t fatthom.
5. Circumnavigating the sheds is another place to encounter the birds, because the magpies sometimes perch in the dead trees across the road, chatting to each other. Wait and one may push off and descend in one shallow straight flight deep into the paddock, to feed. That is something to witness.
6. Out to the road.
If you’re in the mood, a walk up the road a km or so will take you past three magpie families. And saunter on and maybe 1.6 kms up there’s a family that sing their hearts out.
7. In bed in the Studio, the sliding door open, the sun up, is the best place really to hear the Grey Shrike. I hear them from my kitchen window, which faces the road, and they have a preference for the treed area across the road from the house and sheds. Lie there and listen to their deep ringing song.
Bliss!
So, that’s six plus one.
For more, try this podcast on listening.
Or this from Hafiz ….
