My 20,000 year plan

This morning I sat and watched the leaves marching across the ground. Well being marched, actually.

Yesterday I trimmed some growth from an ironbark tree, and I laid the trimmings on an ant nest. I didn’t want that nest where it was; a couple of metres in diameter, right in the middle of my lawn, and a scary thing for the children. Go anywhere near it and you will be covered with ants, and although their bite is not painful, it’s definitely uncomfortable.

Today the ants are carrying off those ironbark trimmings, leaf by leaf, and when you look at the ground around the nest it looks as if the leaves are moving themselves. Sometimes you can’t even see the ant that is carrying it, the leaf being so much bigger than the ant.

At first glance you don’t see any change in the pile of clippings. But look closer and you will see branches bare of leaves, and then you notice ants demolishing the network of branches. You have to look closely to see any activity, but when you do you can see that the tiny contribution of each of the workers assigned to this task of clearing the trimmings from the nest will result in the disappearance of the trimmings. Possibly, probably, this will take a week or so, but it’s a foregone conclusion, and the ants don’t mind how long it takes.

I have a 20,000 year plan for Erleichda. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll see the plan come to fruition. It just means that I don’t care how long it takes, which removes a lot of the stress involved in achieving it.

I got the idea from some Aboriginal people I know, who live outback a few kilometers downstream from a cotton farm. When that cotton farm pumps water from the river to fill the dams from which they irrigate, the river runs backwards, and the land is being sucked dry by the cotton.

But the people say “Those cotton farmers will leave in forty years at the most, because they will have worn out the land. This is our land, and we have been here 20,000 years. So we can wait forty years, and then fix it.” So they fence off the river, and do their best to feed water back into it. In times of drought, when the river runs low and the waterholes dry up, they shoot the odd huge Murray Cod trapped and dying in the sun, and wait for rain and for the cotton farmers to leave.

A 20,000 year plan can be changed quite readily. It does not consist of a series of five year plans, for example, rather a series of projects which may or may not be completed. You evolve these projects by sitting and listening to the land, and seeing what it wants you to do, and you never know where that’s going to take you. So I don’t know what lies at the end of this plan, only that it will evolve if I keep my eyes and ears open, and listen carefully to what I’m hearing and pay close attention to what I’m seeing.

Sometimes you can be blinded by a plan, and you can tend to forget what your real objective is.

Come to think about it, I’m not even certain where today’s project is headed, so I might just sit here and do a bit more looking and listening.