Adrift in an open field
I took my heart for a walk.
Passing sandstone alters
and temples of sun-picked bones,
evidence of a life lived above the cloud line,
a life who moves along gracelines,
songlines,
who knows how to pause,
until moved,
by something greater.

Pockets filled with flowers, stones and seeds,
here we met a grandmother tree.
She is guardian to a cathedral of honey-toned rock.
She speaks in silence.
A thousand years of witnessing.
In this place of prayer I find myself tethered
to nothing
but my fierce devotion to the wild
and a sense of sovereignty that comes from living under big skies.

Here there is a tranquillity born of sheer immensity;
it calms with its very magnitude.
We are settled by this big sky hypnosis,
and its hushing of human tumult,
as sweet dusk announces her arrival with a softness on the skin.
That moment,
right before night steps in
when the living landscape is visible only as darkness and lighter darkness,
you feel the world around you more than you see it.
Here, drifting lullabies of scent all night
the bed of buchu calls us home.