Wine was made from water
Gallons, litres, what measurement
Counts miracle wine?

Taste it!
Swirl and catch the light
Swish it around your mouth
Suck in air, breath through its quality
Drink deep his glory,
The Uncountable Word

Alpha and Omega
Was and With Of God
Lamb for Sin
life for a friend
silence for an answer
emptiness for a grave
Son for a world

An Hour is coming, and is Now
The Word whispers to a thirsty woman

Numbers counted for nothing
Until they counted for grace
In that moment,
At that extent, Behold!
All things, every numbered one
New.
All became gratuitous
Enumerating praise

In that Day
As love conquers war
Quantity has a quality
All its own.

For Evie, when she holds my hand.

Arriving, we expand from the car.
And I wait while you collect your stuff, the unfathomable bits of personified fluff that you have trapped in your orbit: 
Soft toys; knitted ropes; lipper; crumpled notes. 
The accretion disk of your formation.
I, your natural philosopher. 
You, the copper star.

I walk beside you with my hand trailing.
Not reaching for yours but not buried in a pocket. 
Not clenched but terrifyingly open to the vacuum of your space.
Wandering. If your small hand will…

Empiricism, prayer, both wait upon results
With a heart flutter of longing,
Addressing ourselves to God in hypothesis, experiment,
And fear of failing.

Unconscious as breath, your hand whispers into mine.

This constellation of love I call daughter,
Having astrological power,
To turn man—not into wolf—into a gambolling puppy;
A great blazing spiritual comet tail wagging behind me.
To turn the matter of man into this father. 
Your innocent gravity’s happiest prisoner.
Your celestial mechanic.
Your Dad.

Remember who loves you today.
This my child’s blessing for my child’s blessing.

For Nat. 11 Years.

I.

Walk the trail ahead of me into the wild country at the southern end of Namadgi. An unprepossessing trail head — the first sign of beauty is the alpine swamp — but the light of the late mid-winter afternoon is already turning the moments golden. The snow grass lies crushed and witnessed by the white and grey piety of the snow gums. And we will sleep among them.

I carry the pack with the tent and food and nearly everything. Your bag has only your sleeping bag and mat. I feel the weight on the steeper sections and you dance ahead. Everywhere you look for sleeping places, any clear bit of grass. You have no sense of the journey — its duration or its destination. I promise that we will come back to these places if there isn’t something better ahead. I know there is.

The trail rises and becomes more and more stoney. The trees reduce in size but gain in stature. Hundreds of years old. Years of frost and fire. Buried for seasons under snow. Burning in a fierce day. The slow, slow growth of endurance then the twisting, cracking, inferno and a slow, standing death. In these mountains there are hundreds of square kilometres of bleached, charred, reaching timber. Two catastrophic fires, both in my time, ravaged the mountain forests. After the 2003 fires, the dead trees were like a white rind on the hills. I used to wonder if they would ever grow back. But slowly, slowly, season by season, there is more green below the white, dead branches.

As the trail rises above the snow line, between the trees grow the plants of the alpine heath, until as the track starts to level and the western sun is pouring over the crest at us, the trees hold their places and leave the heath to stand open to the sky. We come to the trig station at the top of the mountain. You place your stone on the cairn and we walk on.

Abraham, my father, who took your beloved son Isaac and walked with him into the wilderness, who built with him the cairn of stone and gathered the timber from long enduring trees for burning, I did not think of you while we walked over our hill. I delighted in the sun touched grass and the sun touched hair of my boy. I delighted in his delight in the mountains. Although the far range was darkly blued with snowclouds and as we stood on the granite tors drinking in the view of the wild valley below, snow flew from the storm into the sun, so that wind, snow, sun, the ascription of forest, the whirling blue, and smell of rocks cold and sphagnum, and the stinging, livening flakes, gold and grey dark, passed by us proclaiming something of glory. No doom hung over us. No great deed. No test. No righteous-making faith. No trust that I would be given him back alive even while hand raised to take. We dwell in a momentous fullness of provision that means this mountain can be just a mountain and the just be only a Dad and his boy.

II.

We pitched our tent under the lee of a rock on a ledge looking over the valley and sat while the light faded watching the snow fall on the mountain opposite. When you crawled into your sleeping bag, the tent spilled light out over the rock ledge and the lee. I sat in the twilight and drank in the view. And when in the night the wind came roaring up the side of the valley and around the rock, beating the tent even snug in the lee, I changed positions while you slept and lay against the wall of the tent so that its flapping wouldn’t bother you.

The morning was freezing. Wind like a knife. We pulled down the tent and lit a fire in the crevice behind the rock. I exploded two tins of spaghetti and realised I’d failed to bring any cutlery. So we cooked cheese kranskys and ate them with a pocket knife and a folding plastic fork from a cup of instant noodles. I made tea in the tea tins — I’d also forgotten cups — that was half water and half sweetened condensed milk. It was sweet even for me.

III.

Layers matter when walking in winter in the High Country. Something soft and breathable nearest your skin: an open weave cotten singlet. Next a moisture absorbing or wicking layer: a good old flannelette shirt works well. Then thin, fine-knit wool. The layers shouldn’t be more than a total half-centimeter in thickness. And light, not retricting movement. Over this goes a weatherproof shell. You can get by with something cheap as long as its windproof and waterproof.

You can buy thermals, moisture wicking shirts, ultra fine merino, bespoke combinations of elastane and so called “technical fabrics”. Garments sown up with intellectual property and status signalling. I own a few of these things and as much as I’d like to deny it, they are comfortable. At their best, technical fabrics breathe better than basics. This means that water tends to evaporate through the material rather than building up as sweat or condensation on the inside of layers. This is particularly useful for the skin-nearest layer and the outer shell. It makes you feel more comfortable whilst you’re moving. It might also save you from bad windchill if you need to take off the outer layer. But technical fabrics aren’t necessary, layering is what matters. The right kind of layers. Knowing how to wear them. Knowing what they are for.

Watch out for obsession with gear. Gear attempts to make skill and wisdom obsolete. At its best, gear displays the skill of its designer. And the best of us are tempted by gear when it shows us a new way to solve a problem — when it is clever. At its worst, gear is something placed upon the body or overlaid on the world that trades on the beauty of skill to enmesh us in social signalling. Gear insulates us against the lessons that the world might teach. It builds a buffer between us and our mistakes. It makes patience and curiosity surplus. It overpowers rather than works through. It quietens the speech of the world and makes louder our self-consciousness. It enmeshes us more in our social frame.

Instead, pay attention to the world: the quietly held formations of causation and probability that are willing to train the hands and feet of the curious; the quietly held practices of the wise shown while stooping by the shoulder of the young. There is self-forgetfulness in this attention to our teachers. And self-forgetfulness in exercising what we have learned. And yet, we are somehow becoming more securely ourselves in this attentive reception — in receiving what the world gives. Wisdom is marked by joy in finding the way. Certain ways are made known to those who can listen to the speech of the world.

The challenge of wisdom in this age is to live with layers beyond the social frame — to live in an expansive conversation with the world and with God. Skill in living grows out of the conversation between ourselves and the world. Meaning in living grows out of the conversation between ourselves and God. Have both.

It’s ok to have gear but let it be for walking, sleeping, exploring the country, layering effectively, writing well — try to hold it within this stance toward the world.

Also, I’ve never regretted taking along a piece of wire.

A pigeon bobs between the table legs with a shawl about its neck like oil while dogs gaze with an entirety of purpose, the sharp lines of their bodies—noses, ears—converging on a human, its figure or absence. Looking at the doorway of the cafe where the owner has gone to order or up at the face reading body language. Seeking to decode the intense web of human social communication and meaning into which the dog is admitted, bred for, depends but floats beneath. Its most perfect yet uncomprehending student. Catching fragments of language, intuiting actions from context and expressions, even bringing foreign knowledge and capability to bear on the problem—smelling the health or mood of the moment. Always a stranger in tongues on his first day in an ancient city. Experiencing that submersion of consciousness in first-hand experience that affects even human minds when we try to build models of new cultures. Dog is always unreflectively present but straining towards mind, model, language, abstraction, theory, understanding, the Spirit. Dog is hovering on the edge of knowing us, desperate but unable. Not our friend but a perpetual Offer of Friendship.

If dog self-consciousness were to emerge, would the new risen thinkers survive the sudden crushing home-sickness that must be accumulating relentlessly?

For Evie

When you see what I have seen
And see it better
When you love what I love, and better,
Then let my hand slip from yours
Do not grasp
And let me fall behind you on the strand
And pass
Let me see one last thing you have not seen or loved
You in your flower
And I will be well.

For Nat, in his 9th year.

Follow Rossi Street to its terminus and you’ll find an unexpected fold in the land. It marks one possible end of the town of Yass. A geological circumstance—a fault—swallows the river and on either side the lolloping hills of the Southern Tablelands become momentarily strenuous. Precipitous slopes with rocky striations like ribs on an indrawn breath.

Remember when we walked here? You, your sister and me.

The afternoon light was beginning to pick the colours and patterns from the river stones as we jumped from rock to rock across the stream. The murmur of the river on its bars. The tiny finches in stop-motion animation through the tea-trees. The smell of tumbling water and settling mud—for me the smell of youth.

We met a holy Fool astride a rock in the flow. You’ll not remember this because you ignored him, busy with exploration. I talked with him a while, while you yelled periodically to ‘come and look’.

Drunk and drug addicted, he’d fallen many years past and damaged his brain. A photographer, he waited in the river for the sun to set so he could take the river’s portrait in the dark. He pointed out the composition. It made sense to both of us. He told me about the time he photographed the face of God in the clouds above the Catholic church in Yass. Afraid to look, he pointed the camera with his face averted. A Moses for our times.

Eventually your insistence drew me from him and we skipped across the water, finding our path from rock to rock. Leaping and clinging. A complex of thrilling moments: the moment when I conceive of myself transferred from this place to that, conceiving of where my foot must fall and the trajectory my weight must follow so that I land securely. And then my body realises my imagination of itself. The moment when my mass passes the point at which I can change its course and I am leaping, wilfully abandoning my island refuge. Suspended in the air between certainty and uncertainty. And then the moment when my foot kisses the next rock, a lightening quick set of subtle adjustments as muscles absorb and distribute forces. The body rejoicing in capacity. The thrill of faith accomplished. And all of it drenched in river noise, blanketing out the world and making the inner life more present to mind.

In your imagination you are an explorer trailblazing. You take pride in showing me where to jump. You boast of your skill in path-finding. As did I. We make a picnic beside a deeper water hole. I talk about Banjo Patterson, a native son of these hills. I sing Waltzing Matilda and you both sit and listen. As always, I choke up a bit on the final verse. Australia’s version of ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ but about a sheep. The anthem of a quieter, probably more profound, revolution. I can’t sing it without hearing and repeating the invitation to become a pilgrim in search of that promised land: to come waltzing matilda until we find each man under his olive tree and vine, or coolibah tree and billy. The great blessing of this land is to make sojourners of us all.

We pick our way across the river one last time and then make our way across the top of the cliff back towards the car. The little girl has fallen in the river. Not every leap lands. She wails and decries this as the worst day of her life. I’m pretty sure that isn’t true. Notice: suffering robs us of perspective and destroys all memory of blessedness.

And then we come to a place where you and I have a disagreement about how to proceed. You are adamant that if we walk a little further up the hill we will intersect with the original trail we followed down. I am perfectly sure that we need to continue further along the side of the hill. We argue about it.

Your moment is frustrating: a stage of social development in which you are increasingly conscious of your own capacity but constantly thwarted in its execution. You are a pathfinder. You are full of theories about the world. You have desires and projects but so often you do not have the autonomy to pursue them. You are dependent on my final assent or my provision of resources. It’s often unfair but, on balance, it probably keeps you alive. As we argue, we are in one of those moments.

I am very confident that you are wrong. I could simply override your will and coerce you to walk my path. In many of these circumstances I would do that. I’m still far better at calculating all the externalities of decisions. Even if you never see it, even if all you remember is the frustration and bitterness at me, those moments of imposition are still frequently better than not.

But on this occasion, God be praised, I decided to wager with you instead. We are both confident in our assessments. So let’s price that confidence. We will go your path, but if you are wrong you will give me $10 and vice versa. How great is your confidence? How much do you value your decision? I have given you a signal of how confident I am in my rightness. I watch you calculate and then accept. I am still sure that you are wrong.

It is only another 20 or 30 metres through the tall grass, over the curve of the hill, and we are back on the track from where we had started. You are the rightest little matey in Australia. You seek my face with a grin but also some trepidation. You’re not sure how I will react to being so publically wrong. Honestly, most of the time I’d have been humilitated and sulked. But with a roar of laughter and a shout of praise that came from a full heart, I called to you. “Well done son!” And I caught you up in a hug. “You backed yourself even when I leaned on you, you stuck to what you knew was right. I’m so proud of you.” And from you the full smile breaks out. You are proved to be a pathfinder.

It’s not often that I am conclusively proved wrong when I’m convinced I’m right. When it happens, it’s usually painful. I experience it as diminishment—a little mini-death—because my life is heavily invested in knowledge and cultural capital. I experience it as shame, because I do not want the stain of death and frailty to appear on me. Mortal foolishness, how I long to be freed from these patterns of thought, and by God’s grace, one day I will.

The memory stays with me because on that hill above the river, the glory of God passed me by—just the outskirts of his ways, mind you. But he was there as you gave me a taste of joyful wrongness.

The man curved in on himself can only experience wrongness as a threat. He lives lonely in his will-to-power. But breeze-brushed, sun tousled, in the success of the children we love, the heart is caressed and gently pried open to love beyond itself. When we love beyond ourselves, the success of those we love—even at our own expense—is not diminishment but satisfaction. The consciousness of my finitude and mortality does not sting with shame when I taste it while drinking in the knowledge of your growth and flourishing. When you are right, I am well.

Here, then, is a first sip of the draught that we will drink on the day we face our Lord’s judgement. On that day, rightness will belong to Him alone. Learn this, son: if you can only experience being wrong as diminishment of your life, then that Day will be your true death. But if you have learned the secret of loving beyond yourself—of loving him beyond yourself—then there will be no shame in being wrong, no fatal diminishment. That sour will be so mingled with the sweet that it will only enhance the taste of his vindication. Only the roar of laughter, only the shout of praise: “You are our pathfinder!” I gladly repent me of my doubts and my foolish certainties. I am so joyfully, gratefully, wrong.

Before the day starts, in the small hours when waking means lying awake, you came to me with a pain in your leg. The pain of growing. Your bones and ligaments, muscles adjusting to each other. A dull aching that never achieves sharpness but whose intensity—lying awake—rises and rises until unbearable. I remember it.

The night’s pains are the day’s unmasked. The stimulus of a day—its sounds, sights, intentions, interaction with other people—will crowd out dull pains. But in the darkness, like a faithless lover, attention frustrated of action gives itself to the body and its appendage, soul. Not an amorous sporting, desperate self-gratification, rough and cold. An old couple, she knows where it hurts. The dull pain was there before. With attention, it now cannot be borne.

I remember it.

You creep to me for comfort—the warm body and warm smell of a father. And I love to comfort you. But the pain grows. So I take you into the kitchen to give you some paracetamol. Half a tab, for an eight year old. But you have had paracetamol once before, perhaps a year ago? And the bitterness burnt your tongue. And in the harsh fluorescent light of a kitchen at 4am, you fall to the floor pleading no. You cringe away. The fear grips you and your mind dissolves in front of me. The blind, downstairs brain taking over completely. And the combination of you fighting me away, and your fear, and your piteous cries for help… like an acid burning my heart.

I want to help you. But its 4am. I try to hug and hold you to help you settle, but you are gone. I am angry, frustrated, I tell you I have no other help and send you back to bed still crying. Both helpless. And now we lie awake in our own beds, each with our own ache.

Later I realise where love failed. I offered help but couldn’t abide its refusal. Helplessness—too feared—so I sent you away to save myself. Not staying and suffering with you — suffering my own suffering to stay with you in yours. A broken image of a Father, I am.

So pray for this:
That we creep us together
Into the bed of Him who suffers to stay;
And there find comfort for our growing pains.

for Nat, turning seven

The tacit knowledge of a stride begins in the thigh, the four muscles of the quadriceps gathering, calling to the bend of the knee, tendons tightening, outstretching the calf, the ankle stiffening to encounter the unknown, fine bones of the foot splaying as they receive the shock of the ground’s kiss; the final lingering toe. The whole leaps and lands. Never thinking that perhaps the foot will this time miss and tumble its passenger into the earth’s embrace. And every time it does not so, in every place, finding something indescribably new. Every footfall, the first time this step has been taken, this risk wagered and won. This, the stride, is what adventures are made of.

The length of my stride is 75 centimetres, give or take. Over broken ground it’s less. But when I take this same armature of movement and exert it upon the peddle of a bicycle, the stride mounts up upon the soul of the world and finds its own lover. On a bike, a step can take you metres. If you’re well positioned at the top of a favourable incline it might take you thousands of times that far. It will take you thoroughly away, and then, tired and sated, it may bring you home.

I love riding with you down the big hill on the way home from school. The anticipation of gathering speed, daring ourselves not to brake too soon. Heart and guts leaping. The sounds of the wind, buzz of the freewheel, rubber snicking the road. Relaxing our grip on the brakes is the release for you from the strictures of school; for me, of the performance of too many roles. It’s inconceivable not to whoop and holler. Then intimacy of inertia giving the tightest of embraces as we swerve around the bend at the bottom. I hope that one day you’ll feel that hug and think of your Father.

At first the bicycle appears a trick: something for nothing—that for less effort you can go further and faster. But it isn’t a trick. It’s the deep rules of the universe.

Not the rules of Newton though. His physics will tell you that everything is constrained by the law that nothing is lost and nothing gained. The bicycle works by the application of leverage and force, the management of friction, redistribution of energies across a simple system. Look! It can be written in symbols. But watch out, my son, for mathematical representation! It always stands at a level of abstraction, a model that is as blind as it is revelatory.

The physics of grace is more true, more obvious, and less often seen by your friends. The universe contains an infinite amount of More. Always it waits for the hand outstretched to receive, the foot descending to discover. From nothing we came, and now we drink the strong, clear, free, water of life. We knew nothing, and God has given us words. All your life you have experienced this abundance. Always he gives us what we did not earn. He laid the foundations of the world on the beams of his grace. So, when you push upon the door, it opens to reveal more than you could possibly imagine. When you push upon the pedals, it carries you further than you deserve.

The gracefulness of a bicycle belongs to a world only penultimately ruled by entropy—where the wheel turns to resurrections. Be generous, boy. There is no need to be afraid of scarcity when there are bicycles.

For Nat, beginning School

Ride the wind with me. To ride the wind – in any form – to fly a kite, loft a balloon in the gloaming, hear the snap of a sail, or glide on feckless membranes over a salt white deathful-playful roil – to be grasped by the wind is to find your heart and fling it outward.

The wind never takes gently the kite from your fingers. It plucks like a fish sucking a bait, then strikes and runs.

The implausibly green grass behind the cliff-drop is sacred, infinitely more space than the ten metres, to those who stand fizzing with the hot-cold anticipation of crossing. Then walk, run, leap, ask, into aether, find me.

I do not know if a sail catches or is caught by the wind. The fierce joy of waiting to find out is beating my heart. Do men chase after the wind, or are they chased? And by eternity? Fling it outward. Yah breathed his breath into my nostrils, and its exhalation is this longing. The chasing of eternity.

One of the great lies you will learn at school is that the world is a place for your choosing. A void that you speak into and create. You will learn that the most important words are ‘Let there be…’ That there is a fullness within you – a place full of dreams and desires, futures comprehended and waiting for articulation. You will be proferred the insipid orange cordial of expressive individualism. The canteen will daily retail the empty carbohydrates of pre-digested existentialism and anti-realism. You will be told that the world is nothing in itself, it is only what you make it. That the world is formless in itself, until you give it shape. That the world is meaningless in itself, until your choices give it meaning. All this is vanity. Pay it little attention.

At school they will try to teach you to chase dreams and desires. What they mean by this is make yourself useful. Be needed, loved, respected, then you will be safe enough. You will learn that lesson deeply before you can begin to unlearn it. So every day I whisper to you the question that unlocks the deeper knowledge. Remember who loves you. School yourself in its answer.

I will show you the elevation of kites. The patience-rising-rush of a sail. The world will be our teacher. There is a fullness to be discovered in it. Words were already spoken, “Let there be”. Listen. When you match your works to its forms, then you can fly.

Many will call to you to chase this or that: mostly it’s vapour.

As your father I say, chase the wind.

It has always been chasing you.

The Macquarie University train station took my breath away the first time I slipped below the surface of Herring Road: the long gliding descent into a cavern shaped like a monster’s egg laid in the crust of a world—vanished leaving only its negative space. I was entranced. But, now I ride up and down the escalators without giving much wonder.

Much of living is inattentiveness. One of the most significant tasks we perform with our highly developed brains is to not pay attention to things. We are constantly pinged with sensations: noise, smell, touch, visual stimulation, most of which is irrelevant to the things we want to do right now and so our brains quietly tune it out, relegate it to the vague background. If we were unable to do this we would be constantly overwhelmed by the world, endlessly distracted, incapable of a sense of self, lost and unable to act. But sometimes we deploy this extraordinary ability to filter reality in sadder ways.

A few weeks past, I rode the escalator down to the platform of the Macquarie University train station and landed standing next to someone who I thought I recognised. He thought he recognised me too. So we blinked at each other a few times and awkwardly smiled, waiting to see if the other would smile back. He did, I did. We said ‘hello’. He used to live with us at RMC. I asked where he was living now. He told me. I asked him how it was. Not so good, terrible really… He pursues a goal—a dream of competing for an athletic prize in figure skating that leads him to constant training. With his attention fixed on that goal—early mornings on the ice, back again in the afternoons, competing, studying, working—for him friendship has become impossible. I’d barely ever had a conversation with him before but on the platform his heart was breaking in front of me. Humans wither without being known by others.

I put my hand on his arm and told him I was sorry, so sorry that he seemed so alone in it all. As the train arrived, he laid his hand along my cheek, left it there for a moment, looked at me wet-eyed, then turned away without saying anything else and walked quickly away to board the train on a different carriage: ashamed that I had seen his tears.

I rode the train that day in silence, sadness, and prayer.