Mount Anne Circuit
There are two ways to sustain life.
One is by mobilising skills and resources from places of abundance to places of scarcity.
The other is by migrating from places of scarcity to places of abundance.
Mobilisation creates the problem of supply chain and logistics.
Migration creates the problem of constant change and adaptation.
The two are friends – mobilisation and migration.
The human story is ever fluctuating – Emperors rule the land and Empires are built to tame the environment and delay change, almost freeze time as they try to grow without depleting all the available resources.
A nomad or a tribe, however, is ruled by the land, they move with changing conditions, allowing the country that nourished them to recover while exploring other ways to survive and flourish.
Great builders, mobilisers, courageous explorers and groups seeking self determination fill the pages of the history books.
The two friends, mobilisation and migration.
The emperor and the nomad.
The emperor is the younger. She is standing on the shoulders of giant nomads who came to the land on which she now reigns.
Which are we?
How long can we stay in one place?
Is home a place or a feeling?
On the slopes of breathtaking ridges of wild beauty, where time stopped but also exists in a state of violent change with every gust of westerly wind, I could not bring myself to sing.
Every song I tried to hum faded away in the vastness of the valleys.
Anne was kind to us, so did Eliza, Sarah-Jane and Lot’s wife. When the winds forget, beautiful silence echos in the cliffs, sprinkled with tickle, trickle of small streams.
I want this place to be my home, but all the signs advise me against it. “Life threatening, severe hazards” declares the warning sign at the start of the hike.
I walked here as a nomad and then I was the temporary emperor of polymeric flexi textile, nano-fibres, ultralights and sexy tights.
My temporary empire, my safety, my shelter, on the edge of the cliff or the shore of the lake, is a plastic sheet stretched on metal bars made abroad.
I’m wrapped in a vortex of Goretex, traversing the landscape in search for place of peace and rest for the body, a refuge of safety where the empire of my soul can expand and concur the fears and the peaks.
A place of resting where there is an exposed black bucket with a lid where I can do a poo and look at the view.
I am a toilet dwelling emperor, responsible for not shitting where the drinking water comes from.
How long can I sustain my empire?
Be a plastic emperor?
Is home a place or a feeling?
lutruwita / Tasmania
December 2021
Long live the Toilet Emperor
Looks lovely Oren! I missed you when I was down in January. Will be down again shortly I hope!