Chirps, Warbles, Tweets, and Gurgles

 I walked the Warrnambool campus this morning, Thursday, July 18 that is.

There was a light rain periodically gracing bright sunshine. (Our fifth rare sunny day in a row.)

Ann was attending a lecture, her first sort of official on-campus event.

There were very few other folks out and about. It felt like I had the grounds to myself, myself and the birds.

With each bush I passed by or tree I passed under there was one welcoming auditory explosion after another. I often could not see from whom these gifts were coming, but they were quite generous.

We had seen a small bright blue bird at the beach again yesterday, in the scrub and dunes along the beach path. It had bright iridescent blue patches. (Should be a photo in a prior post.) The beach side topography is quite reminiscent of Torrey Pines State Beach in southern California, when walking from the beach through the brush, back to one’s car and civilization. When seeing only sky and the windswept coastal vegetation, it is timeless, seemingly as it always was and will be. Interesting how such a changing evolving environment still has a sense of permanence. Yet how threatened and fragile all this is.

Path to beach dunes

The birds today were more numerous and varied than right at the beach. The campus is a bit inland but not much, certainly still a coastal milieu. Riparian environment to be exact, as it is along the Hopkins River, the river that meets the sea at Warrnambool’s easterly edge.

I walked the golf course along the river, with a view to other side of glistening green fields with a windbreak of trees marching with great precision up the hill from the river to crest and beyond.

I kept going in and out of the “I have been here before” syndrome. The Lawrenceville golf course (high school) morphing to walking the river along the backside of Merton College at Oxford (law school), to aforementioned Torrey Pines moment, to Bidwell Park (Chico) and its blending of the natural environment with the human. All this in the blink of an eye, an almost instantaneous teleportation. Once memory reaches a zone, it is off and running in a google search of its own creation.

Across the campus green, along the river

But always coming back to the “hear” and now of birds, the here and knowing of connections running deep, and being present and part of something as much exterior as interior.

It is walks like this that let me spread out and touch the earth as far as I can see, becoming one with it, all the while at the same time undergoing a subconscious exploration of familiar emotions and senses of prior embraces.

What a great way to recharge !