My favourite movies as a young child in the 80’s was the Disney collection.  Dwarfs, fairies, mermaids, talking animals, and magic made me believe that there was more to this place than meets the eye.  Grandad told me that Walt Disney was spiritual, and he created movies because he believed and saw such things in this realm.  If this statement was true, I do not know.  The truth is the memories of these movies stain my thoughts with colour and magic.

My partner and I built a cabin on my parent’s lifestyle block and have embraced a new lifestyle.  When the heat of the summer browns the paddocks and the pond dries up, I wonder how I am out of harmony with nature and what it is I can do to help all be as colourful and magical as my childhood movies.

Sitting on a log by the stream, I asked the land to guide and show me how I can heal her.  We are grateful to call this place our home and I offered my service to her.  I walked away feeling that it would come to me when the time was right. 

I felt drawn to talk with mother nature after the previous lambing season pulled at my heartstrings.  Every other year, there are problems, and the process is riddled with death.  The lambs do not survive because of one reason or another shortly after being born or within a year.

The next morning on my walk to the wool shed that is about 20 meters from our cabin, I reached the bottom of the stairs and notice cicada wings on the ground.  I look behind me and there are more.  I trace my steps back to the stye that borders our area and I see that they are along our path to the woolshed, yet not either side of the path.  Over the stye, they continue around our cabin to our front door.  There are no bodies, just wings and hundreds of them.

I recall that season there were many, possibly hundreds of cicadas on the poplar trees behind our cabin, they weren’t there for long, they sang and drowned the airwaves with their song, then a few weeks later they were gone.

My partner came out to see the wings on the ground and shortly afterwards I called my mother.  Mum was down in a flash.  After looking at the path of wings, she went into the pens, right beside the woolshed and she is looking down at the ground frantically saying, ‘there in here also, look there in here too, and over here, there everywhere’. 

After thorough expectation, they were inside the pens, which are approximately 60 square meters, divided into 3 sections and along the path from our cabin to the woolshed.  It was not a sprinkling of them, the grass was covered in them, thousands, and thousands of them.  We checked outside of the pens and some of the surrounding paddock and nothing. 

Ask and you shall receive. 

Since then, my parents had decided to cease lambing and the ewes and wethers will enjoy the pastures until their time has come.  I know in my heart the land is healed in this area where death outweighed birth.  Physical evidence is cherished.  What a colourful and magical realm we live in.