Wild Friends

Dear Reader,
I live in a city surrounded by parklands. As I walk through this park I get a sense of being on an island surrounded by swirling traffic. This lovely green island has trees and birds, playing fields, organised gardens, bike tracks and even a restaurant or two. In the section of the parklands that is my regular haunt live many wild ducks. In springtime when they have babies it’s a wonderfully social atmosphere as they huddle together and move on mass.

‘Afternoon Nap’ 23cm x 30cm, oil on canvas

I’ve often helped ducks cross the main road as they continue their wanderings into the city. They are relatively street smart and watch out for cars, stretching their necks out to see what is coming, but they don’t know about traffic lights. Usually car drivers have a caring accommodation for our ducks. I’m telling you about this because I love that these ducks are wild and yet they live with us, amongst us. They have learned to understand something of how this city operates yet they don’t follow the city rules. I’ve seen ducks sitting on the roofs of houses and in trees, surveying the city. I’ve even seen them in the winter months swimming in the pool of the school next door to where I worked. And us humans protect their wildness.

You can approach these ducks if you talk to them softly. They don’t ask you to feed them. Sitting with them and watching allows me to begin to enter another world with other concerns. Concerns that are more immediate like the sun on my back or am I facing the right direction to catch that breeze. Concerns that happen without words, but are more body oriented. I touch my wild immediate self and open to the sun, trees and air. My body responses are immediate and know something more than my conscious thought. For a brief time ‘I’ can get out of the way and body knows. Theses ducks are like a wild sangha that I can sometimes join. A community that holds and fosters my wild being.

The featured painting at the top is about a soft approach. It is called

‘QUACKERS’.

It is 20cm X 25cm and painted in oil on canvas.

It’s available on my website here http://lynnlobo.com/product/quackers/

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