NATURAL OCCURRENCES....

I will say up front I love a bit of nature. Am happy to spend time watching birds and animals...have been known to stop the car to watch an echidna scramble up a bank, to help a blue tongue cross the road, to stand in awe as the wedge tailed eagles soar over the house.

I'm captivated by spiderwebs glistening with dew; the silhouette of birds nests in winter's trees; enjoy the scrape of beak on palm as I hand feed the king parrots. But I can never capture the experience on paper.


I'm forever with a camera in my hand. Trying to get a glimpse of what lies before me. For that frame to share the smallest part of what I have seen. It rarely works.

But that is nothing to the frustration I feel when I try to capture some natural occurrence. The words become thick with clunky cliches, purple prose trips off my tongue....and I am left with a pile of nothing.

And yet I keep trying.

Inspired by poets such as Anthony Lawrence ( I fell in awe of his poetry many years back)
'I'd like to think that a couple of my poems achieve this tricky balance: landscape veined with humanity, flora, fauna, what's imagined and what's experienced....I write about nature to define my life.' Anthony Lawrence, in an interview with John Kinsella,  Thylazine.

That is what I would love to be able to do....'landscape veined with humanity'.  But  I can not sketch the landscape. That is the frustration. What I put down on paper resembles nothing of what I have seen, or more importantly what I have felt.

So I will keep taking photographs...keep trying to grab that image. That moment of time. The experience.




And I will keep on trying to find words...the right words.....

Got to love a girl for trying.


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