Blog Template- Essay

There is a stretch of creek on Mununjali Country that I have come to know the way you know a face. Not its name, which is not mine to give, but its temper — where it runs fast in April, where it pools and waits, the one stone that is always warm by ten. I went down to it again this morning, before the light had decided what kind of day it would be.

The walk down

It is not far from the pod, and the path makes you slow before the water does. Wet grass, then the change in the air that means you are close — cooler, greener, a little older. The bush does not perform for you here. It simply continues, and you are welcome to continue alongside it.

I have learned to leave the phone behind. Not as a rule, but because the creek is better company, and because the things worth keeping from a morning like this do not photograph well.

Getting in

The cold is honest. It does not ease you in. There is the gasp, and the brief conviction that this was a mistake, and then — quite suddenly — there is not. The body stops arguing. The mind, which had been somewhere else entirely, arrives.

This is the part I cannot explain to people who have not done it. You go to the water carrying a week, a list, a low hum of things undone, and the water takes all of it for as long as you are in. It gives some of it back when you climb out. But not all. That is what the creek keeps.

You go carrying a week. The water
takes it for as long as you are in —
and gives some, not all, of it back.

— Cass, founder

After

I sat on the warm stone until I was dry, which is the correct and only way to end a swim. A grey shrike-thrush worked the far bank. The light made up its mind — soft, clear, the kind that makes you forgive the early start.

Back at the pod the fire was still in last night’s coals, and a stone bath ran warm while the kettle came up. Two hours, start to finish. I have spent whole holidays that gave me less.

The pod this morning began from:

Where you would stay

A pod within reach of all
of this.

Architect-designed, off-grid, solar-powered. Ten dollars of
every booking supports Bush Heritage Australia. Stay a few
nights and let the days lengthen.

The journal →