15) Blue Bell Blues

Bitterness boils beneath the surface, despite the beauty. Australia is a land of contrasts. Difficult to be integrative when angry, was the concept of what's meant by all-accepting, until realizing, or made clearly aware, that integration itself is the very inclusion of anger. Natural to be annoyed. Frustrated. Natural to feel traduced, abused, calumniated. Who would not when finding no way to express oneself in the barrage of blue-bell blues being bruited so uncompromisingly undermining the potential in one's own voice? Is that why Mike feels such forceful f-words toward the blue-bell birds? A constant chatter over every matter is so persistent that it drowns out chances for any other birds to be heard? But to be seen! To look for one takes some sort of moment that I have not really yet realized. Like seeing an Avatar in Australia! It would be good to look into such an one's soul, and there to quiet the sea of troubles by not opposing them, but saving them. That a blue-bird might get off its perch and allow some other voice to be heard, some other story to unfold. But even in paradise, the sound of it is so distinctive, so disruptive, that it allows but little opportunity for other birds to express themselves. It truly robs richness. Mike is right, there are jokes about killing owls and frogs and crocodiles, but in the authenticity of being oneself it needs for the integration of other's opportunities to be their authentic selves too. So mankind takes the floor and he builds his buildings, bulldozers the council's oppositions, clarifies or consciously obfuscates where necessary, but gets himself heard, his constructions collaborated in collusions across a crowded table, overrides council, and ultimately creates what he has right to perceive as his own magic, the expression of his own sound. Right Rob? To silence the blue-bells! But this writing is certainly no clandestine attack. It is an attempt at being inclusive, absorptive, aware, assimilative, and accepting; in other words, integrative. The test is in the very moment, moment for moment, of synthesis, such that the twelve year old may have his realization, that the sixty year old may have his realization too, and that Justin, Queens, (no, not Steve McQueen), stock car drivers (Speedy Gonzales or even Sternly Moss), and barristers, baristas, and blue-birds too may come with clarity to see that we each and everyone might indeed be allowed just to be. But we impede the progress and potential of mankind with our pecking order, with our judgements and proclamations and persnickety propensity for clarifications that so calamitously creates a climate of ruining the magic that one simply wants, as Mike likes to say, to stuff it. No, not the owl. No, not the frog. No, not the crocodile. No, not the cheque that is in the male (a sic. joke to be sure, spelling intended), but the blue-bell blues that is so pervasive as to want one to wheel out of the wonder and the wander and simply to go one's own way. ... And no, not Rob's way. That would rub him out; make him a robber! Elise, Mercia, Karl, Rudi, grin. Yes, I talk of a real bird. Mike points them out as we drive the country roads in his '68 v8, a Mustang thoroughbred (or was that a '67?) Poetry! Thing is, lest the uninitiated take this esoteric essay as any sleight against Mike, who appears to be the main man of my meanings, it is in no way pitched as a problem with his grace and generosity; it is actually about the kookaburra, and the old bulls, the pride of place, and the providing of lessons for the young. Man culls the perception of problem-pieces in the jigsaw of nature, and rubs them out! Robs the run of blue-bells for ever. But is that integrative?