After a decade or more of living here, I’ve been thinking about the differences between city and country, urban and rural. And I think this is no artificial division. But please forgive the stereotypes for the sake of the argument.

There is a slower pace of life here, more filled with the natural world. Those visitors new from the city show a little fear: are there snakes here, how can you live with all those ants, but it’s so quiet... Our world is full of the non-human: the land breathes into our life, small creatures share our house willingly, the climate and the daylight matters, weeds and ‘useful’ plants intertwine both in our gardens and in our minds. And it is noisy: frogs, whip birds, crickets, trucks, chainsaws, woodworking machines, pumps, chooks, possums, cows, amidst the moments of perfect silence. After ten years of planting more rainforest and orchard trees, we have noticed a lot more small birds. It has become a great pleasure to sit on the deck in the evening, glass of wine in hand; if we sit motionless, these small birds come to inspect us, welcome us, follow the insects attracted to our warmth. And later, in the darkness, micro bats circle our house clearing out the mosquitos as antechinuses perform similar services at floor level. We are simply a part of this great ecology, a microsecond of activity over the lifetime of the crows ash. We hope we are occasionally noticed by the mountain that sits in our daily view.

In the city life we led, the workplace dominated. We were much more focused on appearance – new black clothes, new haircuts, new houses, new upgrades,. and if we were still there, new faces and new bodies, perhaps? We were focused on the doing, on achievement, on succeeding in our endeavours. Every moment (light or dark) should be used productively, every resource (global or distant) should assist us in accumulation, every nation and every individual should become capable of acquiring bigger and better assets. But such a paradigm is the cause of inevitable environmental destruction. That type of city life is not sustainable (luckily other forms of city living persist, to be revived in transition).

Perhaps we should take another look at the idle poor, or at indigenous indigence - perhaps we need an un-labelling of those colonised, a revaluing of poverty (poverty that makes us live in the local, that reduces, reuses, recycles, mends and makes-do), a reverence for stillness, for quietness, for un-busyness, and for purposelessness?

Perhaps this is what the country might teach us: to live with the other nations of this place – those of stone, of wood, of land, of water, of animal, or plant. To see the vibrancy of matter, the activity of landscape. To live a little more reconciled to their time and place, to see our participation in this more-than-human world as contribution rather than competition. To value the richness of the natural world without aspiring to a more narrow human wealth. To be still.

I don’t think we have learnt this lesson of the country yet, but we have begun to hear its voice. We have tried for conversations with timber and paper, we have begun to talk to snakes and small marsupials, to listen to trees and stones. Our language is limited and there is no dictionary of easy translation, but we see there is value in this slow learning, wisdom to be drawn from this deep knowing. We hope for conversations with these embodiments of land, with bunyips and other monsters. We invite others, of both the human and non-human variety, to participate in these conversations and to translate this place’s wordlessness through art, craft, and music. We hope we can succeed, or at the very least, we hope we might learn the value of tranquillity. We are learning the value of a sparser living, of more careful choices, along with the growing of trees, the moonlit celebrations of the seasons, and the encouragement of site-specific arts and crafts. Perhaps in this process we have learnt a few words of nature’s language – the language of leaves and the tongues of basalt, along with the scent of the rain and the call of the swallow. We hope for a conversation, but it is a slow process that requires a country patience. This is living at nature’s pace in nature’s place.