'In the right light, at the right
time, everything is extraordinary...'
[Aaron Rose]
I captured the image above a little while ago whilst driving home from an afternoon playing in the sun at Brampston Beach. It was one of those rare moments when the clouds over Mount Bartle Frere had parted enough to reveal the silhouette of the summit, but here it was not the mountain which caught my eye - rather the firery beauty of a line of sugarcane in flower, so strikingly illuminated by the sunlight.
Looking at this picture I find myself reflecting on how it is that I have come to live not so much close to - as enveloped, by sugarcane. This is a barren crop that offers little to the native fauna of the Far North and that has given rise to some of our nations greatest environmental catastrophes - the cane toad was first released just meters from my current home. The cane dominates all low lying areas between the mountains - thick with world heritage rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef - but the land that lies between [which should be pandanus and paperbark swamplands] has been mercilessly cleared and replaced with this sweet stable monocrop that stretches its way along the coast to Cape Tribulation.
I have spent many hours lamenting the loss of the paperbark and pandanus and many more hours daydreaming about how this landscape would appear had these wetlands continued to thrive. Lately though I have resolved to take a different approach - a partial resignation/acceptance, if you will, of that which I cannot change - to attempt to find the beauty in what is here, rather than fighting against it ...
Yesterday whist on a morning run [pushing Rumi and Dante in the double pram], my journey was halted for some fifteen minutes by cane trains blocking the road as they shunted a long line of carriages laden with freshly cut cane. Rather than striving to find the beauty - the beauty found me...
intersection
were it not for the sugar train
cutting my track
eye would not have seen
a merry finch
weave through the cane
his crimson song
...
- and so it was that I found myself happily awakened from the ordinary into the extraordinary...
“It never
failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day
could be catapulted into the
extraordinary
in the blink of an eye.”
[Jodi Picoult]
[text & images copyright Bek Misic 2012 - unless otherwise attributed...]
