leaving for the bush

first, my oldest brother celebrated his 24th birthday this past week and i completely bungled the whole operation. i'm sorry, matt! happy birthday! hip, hip, hooray! (here, they cheer that more often than the little "and many mooore..." diddy.)

in a few hours, we'll pack up into smaller buses--a small group will go by train--and make our way an hour and a half north, near gosford. it's not far, but it'll be likely far enough away to be right in the middle of nowhere. we'll be there for five days, mostly hiking and learning from oomera, our teacher.

this trip connects directly to the second half of our asc course: indigenous cultures and history. our prof is a very smart aboriginal woman named oomera, who has a very self-controlled way about her and also has that sort of inner calm and wisdom that me feel like she can see straight through me. she's really cool. we took a field trip with her on friday to a park in one of the suburbs. it was awesome. if the area of the park is any sort of indication of what we'll find in "the bush," it's most like the wilderness at home i've seen yet. i'm from the ozarks, and used to hills and trees and water and rocks. that is my nature. the place we visited had all that: hills, trees, birds, rocks, PLUS a particular seed that would lather when water was added and a plant one can "drink" moisture from. party time.
i mean, the outback was cool, don't get me wrong, but all that flatness and red earth isn't really my bag, no matter how pretty the stars are.

so we'll be learning from oomera about aboriginal peoples and how they interacted with the land. they never really subdued it in any sort of way a western culture would. as we're doing all this homework and reading about human's connection with land, i'm thinking about my home, the "my kind of nature" as described above and wondering if i find myself loving it there because of the more comfortable things about it (knowing where everything is, usually i'm not under huge amounts of stress while there) or because there is something comforting about the land itself.

no laptops or internet out there, so i'll be off for a little while. in the meantime, enjoy this video of me singing backup vocals for my friend joel. i'm on the far right, jeans and black jacket looking incredibly awkward. i don't think you can even hear me! this was probably over a month ago, and i'll get to explaining it all soon.



happy week, everyone. see you thursday.