DINGO DREAMING

The young dingo mum drops me by the water-pool remaining after summer rains near Granite Downs, and the hawk transports me to an old barren dingo couple with a different trajectory.  They sell me to the scalpers who keep me as a pet.  The emu waits for my return and I find her eggs in the grass by the boulders near Mimili. She shows me that the desert has survived and is still alive if you know how to look at it.  The hawk forever watches on, accompanying me when I travel, directing my journeys when I move across the land.

The message stick says:  LIGHTEN UP

Lighten up with Bright light, Kodak yellow light or Fuji blue light

Lighten up by emptying the pockets of rocks emptying the head of crocs.

Lighten up so you can fly.

Emus are flightless birds.  They can run real fast, and flap about, but they just can’t take off.

I’ve taken off so many times, but I just cannot stay in the air for long.  The heart is too heavy – sitting above a gutful of memories remembered but not recalled.

The core is hidden but the thick trunk remains visible.

The hollow fills with rocks that weigh me down, and water in which to drown.

When the umbilical cord was cut, so was my place with my ancestral roots and my genetic history – separated from my mother forever; it was everyone’s intention that I never see her again.

Except mine.  The little baby hiding in the dark centre remains waiting for her mother to return bringing the continuity of life learned in the womb to the strangeness of the outside world.  Without her care life for me remains strange, a stranger in a strange land.  Nine months in the womb beneath her heartbeat did not prepare me for bonding to the stranger – to someone else not her.

Outside the trunk I have friends of course, but stolen babies remain walled-in – strangers to ourselves and each other.

Lightening up is going out with friends even when the day is cold and wet and you have to rug up.

Lightening up means looking at the shadow and deciding if it is pulling me forwards or blocking my pathway of progress.

Lightening up means stepping out of the circle of stones and building mandalas with the rocks.

The ancestors have gathered around in the light of dawn to gather the power of the centre, and create the energy to draw me forwards.

Lightening up means looking at the dingo, the bird, the emu and the tortoise from my dingo dreaming story.

The flight of the bird that took me from one dingo family to another, and left me with the family of the flightless bird that ran and flapped around and just did not know how to get off the ground.  But the sun shines down upon its back and powers those strong leathery feet.  The feet that will travel the journey back to the heights of the hawk.

The dingo foot is stamped in my hand

My hands move the rocks and the mandala is formed