I was drawn to revisit Mt Baw Baw, near the source of Birrarung, while preparing for this exhibition. I came across this large and magnificent snow gum, and discovered, cut into the bark, these symbols.
The day before I had sketched that very pattern of a diagonal cross bisecting a circle. I was creating a symbol for my quest of living mindfully, a mnemonic (memory aid) to increase my mindfulness of the relationships between place, body, elements, directions. The patterning was personal, pertaining to living here in the valley. Yet such a process is ancient, an instinct humans have to create cosmologies, to join microcosm and macrocosm, to honour self in starstuff, starstuff in self.
Yet could the simplification of a cosmology also do damage by cutting me off from the real, unfathomably complex, utterly irreducible, right here?
Like cutting into a tree?
The tree can withstand the damage, and there, beside the symbol, a heart. Living is damage, living is loving, living is seeking to match and mirror the beauty of this world, trying and failing, trying and meeting.
I could try, and I would fail, with a thousand words, to tell all that I feel.
And then there is the picture.