Old Woman Island and other things
This autumn and winter we are spending a lot of time on Gubbi Gubbi country. We had only been in Mudjimba a week or so before the anchoring effect of Mudjimba/Old Woman Island, which sits about two kilometres directly off the coast, started affecting me. We’ve been here in the past and the ‘island off the coast’ was just that. But being in its waters every morning and feeling the land in my body, I have surprised myself with how accustomed I have become to its presence. It is ridiculous to say this after just two weeks of being here, but I think I will miss it when I’m back in familiar waters. Yes, my journey over recent times has included a greater openness to indigenous ways of knowing and alongside that a personal commitment to live more in my body (rather than just my head) and to acknowledge how much my life and living is part of a much greater whole. But sensing the ‘life’ of an island is not something I have construed to fit an ideology. It has happened within me involuntarily.
