Most Meaningful Takeaway Meal

“He holds thus, on a loose thread, the whole circle of shabby-looking trees, the bushes with their hidden life, the infinitesimal coming and going among grassroots or on ant-trails between stones, the minds of small native creatures that come creeping to the edge of the scene and look in at is from their other lives.”

This single statement is one that stood out to me astoundingly. Within this text, all the focus is on the unsung relationship between the author and other man, however this sentence shifts the focus, just long enough to emphasize the eerie silence, as the man stops to recognize the amazement surrounding him, all connected to the Aboriginal man. This chilling imagery sent me back to Australia for a moment – something I wish I could do much more. I reminisce about the silence as a group with nothing needed to be said. This situation offered the silence, but a completely different tone.

In my days of camping in the Australian outback, there many times daily where everything would stop and I could take a moment to appreciate the beauty that girthed me (classic Australian anthem reference there), but the author provides a twist. He mentions the nature, but the notion that the man holds this nature “on a loose thread” delineates his natural-born connection to the land, found only through a historical relationship between man and the land, highlighting the influence of culture on others’ views of you.

The author demonstrates an amazing contradictoriness in that there is a dead silence but concurrently he is able to bring too it so much life. There truly is a sense of restlessness in the outback of Australia, and the power of language is demonstrated through the author’s ability to bring this to life and to create resonation between myself and a land that I may not have a historically deep-rooted connection with, but have adopted as my own.