Ah, to be in the bush!

Stepping from the noise of my vehicle and the Creedence Clearwater Revival tune that had been playing, I am greeted by the noisy quiet of the bush; by birdsong and the sound of the breeze as it plays through the shrubs and graceful eucalypts.

I marvel that even though so many things are in motion – seed heads on the grasses wobbling back and forth, fronds of the man-ferns dancing as they are tickled by the breeze – and yet there is a perfect stillness.

And the river, the marvelous river! Always in motion in its relentless search for the sea, it puckers and ripples as it sweeps along carrying the flotsam of life – fallen blossoms, twigs dislodged by the activity of birds or animals, leaves yellowed and useless. Tiny fishes occasionally break the surface, leaving a small, circular wake behind them. Giant man-ferns gracefully adorn the banks of the river. Trees embedded within the rocky cliff stretch so tall that they seem to create a fortress of green with which to protect and guard the river the cliff watches over.

Rumpling a now-empty paper bag, the noise I create feels like an act of treachery; an affront to the orchestrated beauty of the sounds of nature. Close by me, two male blue wrens have a brief territorial dispute before going their separate ways, and I watch in delight as one of them hops about only a few feet from where I sit. How precious to sit and be counted as part of nature; to feel the vitality of life burgeoning all around me and know that I belong here, even though this is not my home. To hear the symphony of birdsong that plays, it seems, just for me. Such a peace that brings within one; such fulfilment, such completeness. Being entertained by the daring flight of a swallow, or enthralled at the sighting of a shy platypus; how can a person that sits in such contentment ever want for more?

The trade-off

Yet how quickly do we surrender that contentment in the pursuit of stuff? Got to do more! Got to be more! How is it we become driven by the fear that there might be something better; as though God were holding back something from us? Something that might provide only a temporary sensual thrill. Something that might make us feel bigger than we are. Something we can feel empowered by as we take what we believe is our rightful place as Masters of our Universe. How cheaply have we come to value that which was provided so richly to us without any cost to ourselves? And how foolish can we be to believe we could truly possess anything other than ourselves!

Have we deluded ourselves into believing that because we can discover how things work that it somehow means we should be master over them? Science may be able to explain to us in minute detail the development of a child before it is born, but it still cannot answer why. It can artificially provoke cells to reproduce, but it cannot create a cell. Science has become the wool pulled over our eyes to keep us from seeing the utter wonder of what God created. Evolution is a theory that itself must keep on evolving in its vain attempt to explain the inexplicable; to continually proffer more theories. The story of creation has not changed…..

The laugh of a kookaburra punctuates my thoughts, and it seems like a comment on the folly of man. It is laughable, our vanity and our foolishness. There is not one single thing in nature that we can create of our own accord; and yet we kid ourselves that we are somehow greater than it. We may even delude ourselves into believing that we are greater than the force that created it. Science may be driven to apprehend that force, but God cannot be contained. Science created the atom bomb, but it was God that made the atom.

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