I roll my sleeping mat out across the deck and tuck myself into the cocoon of sheets, trying to cover every inch from the mosquitos that even in this rain will find their way to me. The mist hangs thick in the clearing, as if I could wring it from the air with my hands. The tealights splutter and the words grow damp beneath my fingers before I can turn the page.
Moment by moment, I watch the light dwindle down and greet insomnia with open eyes. I am alone but I am unafraid.
I listen to the timber of the house creak and and the melody of the rain in the downpipe like marimbas. In the darkness the immensity of forest looks like soot black ink that has dripped down the canvas of cloud.
Is that the sound of footfall, or just frog calls?
I touch my palm to my chest and try to remember all that is alive around me. I imagine the boobook owls tucked up in their hollows, the night tigers tightly coiled in their holes, the staghorn ferns appressed to the bark of the trees, the mycelial fingertips threaded through the soil.
I find awe when I suddenly gain a shift in perspective. The drop in the pit of my stomach, the momentary cessation of time, the emotion which drenches my body like being dumped by a wave at the beach. I find awe when looking out across mountains, I can suddenly see the inside of an ancient volcano. When a goanna becomes a dinosaur, when a leaf becomes a solar panel, when I imagine the interwoven networks of mycelium stretching out in all directions under every footstep. A glimpse at the weight of time, or the depth of a feeling, or the intricacy of evolved life, and I am awash.
But somewhere at the edge of this awe is fear. At its core, it’s a fear of mortality, and the depths of the unknown. The abyss, I call it, which is always there at the edge of my peripheral vision but which I seldom turn to look at face to face. It’s the weight of the fact that life is brief, and then life is not. I’ve shed the comfort of belief in reincarnation or afterlife long ago, and all I see are the atoms which comprise my body, hopefully someday to become compost. We all carry the weight of the knowledge that in any moment we may cease to exist, which makes life both so confounding and searingly bright.
Bewildered, I marvel at the vast tapestry of time which has somehow led me to exist here, homo sapiens on planet earth 13.7 billion years since anything began, and then I return to the sounds of forest here in the present.
I blow out the candles and let my eyes adjust to the dead of night, finding my way to sleep nestled safely beneath the cloak of darkness.
May 2022