The Sound of Winter

I’ve always chosen winter in the desert. There have been gaps in my life that it was not an option. But the years that I have gone walkabout in the outback desert are the most impressed on my soul.

My childhood winters were spent in blizzards. Snow higher than the car. When we drove across the icy flat snow ploughed prairie road it became a tunnel through the banked-up snow. It bespoke of winter when the ritual of hibernation was more than a ritual. It was the instinctive memory of my ancestors written epigenetically in ancient code. Codes possibly written during the Ice Age that nudged my being to remote insular places with the smell of wood burning under a dark cold sky when winter was endless.

My ancestors have coded me during many past lives, and the desert is surely one of them. It feels like home. My theme song became “A Horse With No Name.”

I rode through the desert on a horse with no name

It felt good to be out of the rain.

In the desert you can’t remember your name

Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain

la da de dah ta dah de dah….

The first year I discovered the desert I was 20 years old and I had never experienced the ocean. Or the desert. It was clearly the year I also became a traveller cherishing the winter walkabout in some form every year..

When winter is coming things have changed around me no matter where I have lived. My nomadic nature inspires me to follow the migration pattern that the sky-high V line of geese feel deep in their bones. Or the Bogong moths sensing the shift in circadian rhythms use star map navigation for their seasonal flight path from the cool caves high on the Snowy Alps where they have napped all summer back to their birthplace to lay their eggs under the winter soil.

The First Nations people joined this cycle by following the moths honouring the spirit journey of their Dreamtime animal ancestors between summer and winter. They listened to the Earth generated Songlines that summoned them to their Bogong moth migration.

It was the time between times these ritual walkabouts, not quite summer, not quite winter. Some may name this season autumn, but for me this time between times has many different seasons before winter is sets in and summer ceases.

This time becomes a meditation of tarot card number 9 The Hermit. The being inside this card is always in that time of winter coming. The character is being guided to somewhere along a path lit by a lantern they hold. Everything about the image depicts solitude, stillness, silence and an inner journey in a quest for wisdom. It is said that we become wise Elders in the Winter of our lives.

As living creatures we may sleep through winter. Curled up inside a womb like space waiting for the season to pass. Some of us living creatures fly walk swim crawl hop to another environment for winter. Perhaps even seeking an endless summer. Choosing the realm of winter depends on the nature of the creature.

This walkabout I took at 20 was a time between times. A time of awakening to the awareness of Hermit wisdom. In the desert the sky was vast and limitless. I took rides where and when I could get them on the way to the western winter ocean. I felt my loneliness become solitude and stillness as the outer great quiet space engulfed me. I became part of the moon cycles again as I had been as a child.

It became an annual touchdown point.

Many seasons including winters have passed since then but the winter brings a unique restlessness. I bring my trekking backpack from its storage space, and it seems to sigh with pleasure as I take the shift toward a simpler lifestyle. The choices I make every day are driven by what is in my pack. It’s a unique kind of hibernation where I follow the shorter daylight and longer nights going to sleep at dark and rising at daybreak.

I walk. I eat. I fill my hydration pack. I set up camp. There is one set of clothes to wear when it is cold or wet or even hot under the sun. The desert is a place of extremes. Here I must pay attention to my body setting up a dialogue of listen and respond. Perhaps a dialogue that has become muted over the time between winters.

How much food do I have? Is there water nearby? Do I stay here or do I walk? It is a sifting of the important and the non-important that the clutter of my other life distorts.

Where am I going? The desert is full of dynamic rock sculptures and surprising wildflowers. There are waterholes and long stretches of spiny circles of spinifex. Wedge tailed eagles that almost look you in the eye standing that feel my presence not as human predator but human traveller an equal in the vast expanse of life and death stay with talons on their prey to gaze at me. Dingoes circle me from nowhere and then disappear into the haze only to call me at the end and at the beginning of the day. We share this space. Sometimes one will sit at the edge of the camp and observe this strange lone human that smells like sand and sunshine and air.

Where I am going is walkabout. It is not my culture as I am not born of country but it is my genetic code. I honour it when it calls. Those around me no longer question it. Where will you go? When will you return? Will you be safe? Traditionally walkabout is a textbook definition of an adolescent rite of passage. As human beings we are more like moons transiting from one cycle to another going through super moon, dark moon, eclipsed moon phases. Adolescence to adulthood as one rite of passage seems like an ill-defined pair of human phases.

First adolescence- a collection of years from 11 or so to 18 or 21. Then we have adulthood. A collection of phases from 18 or 21 to death which could occur any time but may stretch over 80 years or more. That is many moons. That becomes many phases throughout our time on the planet not simply a rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood.

I’ve come to use the word as an annual rite of passage. A winter rite of passage defined by the Earth’s seasonal change of temperature and angle of light that pauses my habitual orbit inside my personal galaxy. A shift in my personal awareness that whispers “It’s time.”

The walkabout is not totally unplanned. There are food drops to be negotiated. Water stations to be planned on the trek. A drop off and pick up point. Emergency satellite communication to be organised. The pack is packed and unpacked. Taken for walks before the time arrives. All of the potential contents spread out for viewing. Reorganised. Added to. Discarded and added to again. Every year it changes because I am inside a different skin.

Has it been a year of super moons or partial eclipses? Has been a normal year of 4 phases over and over again? More often than not I don’t really begin to unpack those months until about day 11 on the track. But the preparation to walk is the ever-changing ritual that stays familiar but never the same. There is that moment when the pack says ”Enough. I am ready. Are you?”

There is no answer to that part of the ritual. It is the answer that comes during the time spent in the desert. It is the answer that comes in the first few weeks of settling back into orbit as winter fades and the days become longer the nights shorter. Life stays simple within the clutter. For a time. The Hermit returns to another place inside the deck but remains witness to the season ahead waiting to be summoned.

In the immense quiet of the Dreamtime desert the sky speaks. Under it there is The Sound. Everyone who has walked there speaks of it…once they get to know you. Once they realize that like them you are not crazy but have experienced that deep vibrational note hidden within the Tower of Babel noise that human communities create that walkabout reveals.

It is the sound that calls me back to the desert every winter.