Finding One’s ‘Place’

Finding One’s ‘Place’

If one were to consider the Barzakh a place other than the traditional no-place place of Sufism, then this place for me is the Coorong in South Australia (the setting of Colin Thiele’s ‘Storm Boy’). This is the place where my spirit was made flesh, and my flesh was (to become) spiritualised. Although 45 years have passed since my first sighting of this beautiful part of the world its impact is still as strong, just as my proximity to it is a kind of necessity (and one that drew us back here in retirement). As the crow flies, it is just a handful of kilometres to its soaring dunes with their vistas out across the mighty Southern Ocean, and closer still to the quite backwaters and lagoons that collect the freshwater that makes it a haven for birdlife and those in search of solitude. It was here that I first learned what physical freedom was, where one could stretch-out on the bare earth and reach one’s hands up as if one could pluck the very stars themselves, so alive in the blackness of space, and be lulled to sleep by the sounds of the waves on the shoreline as they made landfall after their long, lonely journey from Antarctica to this great Southland. Here, too, I owe the growing depth of understanding that such places offer us; that all is – in reality – connected. But for those pounding waves, breaking up the bedrock into smaller and smaller pieces there would be no sand; without the winds and the tides no dunes would form; without the dunes there could be no backwater, no lagoons, no barrier to separate the ‘fresh’ from the ‘salt’ (although these days this ‘fresh’ is very much more saline than of old). The rotation of the planet too, along with the other gravitational effects, coalesce in turn to keep the whole moving, alive. And, finally, the migratory birds themselves which hone-in on this special place from wherever they come from, to winter/summer here, following the star patterns, or who knows what, making this place the place of ‘Dreaming.’ It’s a place where ancient shell middens also speak of the history of the local indigenous people whose activities, over millennia, also helped shape the place through hunting, fire, and footstep.

It took several handfuls of years for me to revise or extend, through visits, dream, and insight all, my own understanding that freedom is not a fortuitous admixture of the external world, but something much deeper, something much more akin to Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “freedom from the known.” It produced in me a kind of deep awakening to all of this, and more besides, and thus became the place of my own dreaming/experience, ‘The Castle in the Desert,’ graced as it was by the ‘Man of the Fish,’ Dhul Nun (see my previous blog on this). This is the same Dhul Nun al Misri (the Nubian/Egyptian often spoken of as the first Sufi) of whom no less a figure than Ibn al Arabi wrote, ‘…He was one of those rare beings who knows the dignity of the heavens and the earth. He rejoices in the natural world and sees in it a testimony to the Unity of God.’

A publication in the papers of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society by Cecilia Twinch: ‘Created for Compassion: Ibn Arabi’s work on Dhul Nun’).

Thus it is, this reverence for place, for the dignity of form, when mixed in the right proportions, may bring us to recognise our own place in all of this. Neither dependent nor yet freed of place, we combine, within ourselves, a state of being which may recognise all of this, and more yet.