Bloomin' interesting

Huh. I saw that image and wrote that title with SOMETHING in my mind... but who knows what it was? It's fled.

Like my focus.

OK. What has been interesting lately? Reading Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk? Yeah... ish. Listening to David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo? That is fabulous. He is a superb writer. And what research! Plus I have laughed out loud at various points.

But, no: that wasn't it. Maybe Freya Mathews on Living One talking about liyan. What is liyan? Freya says:

[A] hint is provided by Frans Hoogland, associate of another Senior Lawman, Paddy Roe.  In the Kimberley, in the far north-west of Australia, as Hoogland explains, there is a term for such a faculty of sensitivity to the communicativity of country: liyan. Liyan signifies a visceral way of knowing that is shared not only by people but by all beings and by land itself. Frans, in dialogue with Paddy Roe, explains liyan as follows. 

“In order to experience [this feeling], we have to walk the land. At a certain time for everybody, the land will take over. The land will take that person. You think you’re following something, but the land is actually pulling you. When the land starts pulling you, you’re not even aware you’re walking – you’re off, you’re gone. When you experience this, it’s like a shift of your reality. You start seeing things you never seen before. I mean, you’re trained one way or other and you actually look through that upbringing at the land.….And all of a sudden, it doesn’t fit anything. Then something comes out of the land, guides you. It can be a tree, a rock, a face in the sand, a bird…..Then another thing might grab your attention, and before you know it there’s a path created that is connected to you. It belongs to you, and that is the way you start to communicate with the land, through your path experiences. And that path brings you right back to yourself. You become very aware about yourself. You start to tune finer and finer. Then you become aware that when you’re walking the path, it’s coming out of you – you are connected to it….[When this happens] we get a shift in mind that drops down to a feeling. Then we wake up to feeling, what we call le-an [liyan] here, and we become more alive, we start feeling, we become more sensitive. You start to read the country.……Then you wake up,….and the country starts living for you. Everything is based on that feeling le-an [liyan], seeing through that feeling.” (Sinatra and Murphy 1999) 

If I understand Hoogland aright, liyan is a faculty of cognitive feeling that allows one to sense the world as subtly opening or closing, according to circumstances, as one walks the land. This sensitivity is a matter of feeling, not only inasmuch as it is guided by visceral, intuitive, body-based awareness but also in a more affective sense: one leans into the openings or, in face of resistances, steps back and adjusts one’s behaviour, simply because it feels right, affectively speaking, to do so. It feels right to find oneself in a groove – to find oneself slipping into a yielding flow of circumstances.

This is how I feel when I go on a wonder-wander.

Everything seems to shimmer with meaning. The sick sycamores...

...the agricultural wasteland...

...the exotic species making a living in the troubled wood...

...other exotics who are welcomed with delight rather than dismay...

...and, of course, the oaks.