“To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.”
Henry David Thoreau

Some of you may or may not know that I am in Australia at the moment visiting my smum. She had a hip replacement operation recently and I’ve been looking after a little as best I can. While I’ve been here, several times an incident has gone through my mind. It seemed insignificant at the time but since I’ve been here has gained momentum.

While we were in Forlimpopoli last summer, Du had an interview with an Italian documentary maker. He was filming an Aboriginal group’s tour throughout Europe and asked Du’s opinion of them, what made him start playing the didgeridoo, etc. Then Du turned the tables (as he usually does :)) and started asking the documentary maker questions. One question went along the lines of “why did you start making this documentary?” He explained that he had visited Australia and discovered nature there. He said that he felt that nature had never existed in Italy. Du made no comment to this reply and went on asking him other questions.

After the interview, we discussed what had happened and Du commented on the what the documentary maker had said about nature never existing in Italy and having to discover it in Australia. “We are all of us nature”, Du said. “Every blade of grass is nature, we ourselves are nature.” I then said how I had never discovered nature in Australia, rather, when I went to Croatia and went mountain climbing with my husband.

And I have thought about this incident more and more since I have been here. And I have come to the conclusion that to discover nature one has to be open, conscious, awake. You can be in a forest with thousand year old sequoias and not appreciate their magnificence. Or you can look at a blade of grass covered in dew and marvel at it. It is up to you. You only have to push aside the curtain.