[Vilturj] if I could go back in time, you know I wouldn't change a thing.

[moonvoice]

I survived the heat yesterday.

This a time of year where it's almost impossible to recharge your energy in Perth, because the land holds onto it with all its might, and will even try and suck it back from you in the form of sweats, salts and invisible vampiric negotiations that end up with all parties drained.

Everything dies, is dying, or is struggling to live. Even the native plants, not all of them thrive in levels of heat this high, especially with the ground water tables being depleted like they have been.

The spirits in our local bushland do not come to life during the Summer. No, most of them hibernate, like animals elsewhere might during Winter. The greater, reptilian gods and spirits come to life, certainly, but the others go back into the ground and rocks and wait for cooler times. Sleeping through the worst of the heat. Reaching energy tendrils out over the coast to caress the rain clouds and remember the kiss of it on their sandy flesh.

When a thunderstorm rocks close by, we all awaken, and we reach up and out and suck that energy down into our bodies and forms. The consequences of that is that sometimes too much comes down and obliterates a tree, or person, or landscape with lightning. But the sacrifices are worth it. The energy is needed. This time, is also a storm time, when we wait impatiently and sleepily for weather events that present charged energy; because there is so little in the drying, dying land.

We live and die every year. We grow our leaves and branches, and then drop and shed them as the Summer comes each year. Sometimes one of us might drop too many leaves and branches, and the heat does us in. We can't all withstand a bushfire. We can't all withstand a Summer's scathing breath. But we are stuck in this cycle and so we are a part of it. We dance with it, more slowly than usual, with sleepy eyes, burning in the heat.

On the air if you raise your nose in the middle of the day, you can smell the young eucalyptus leaves burning, even as the air is hot with the chlorophyll of the older ones. And if you walk the land, you can smell the firey decay of flesh, the participation of maggots dancing over the bodies of young birds that dehydrated too soon.

As our energy lays dormant, we watch, with tired eyes, those spirits that do okay during this weather. The great 'mythological' serpents that rise and slither over the landscape, leaving a feeling of hunger and wisdom in their wake. The greater beings that hug the granite outcrops, rise up and out, reaching hundreds of arms into the sky and the ground, pulling minerals to themselves, protecting their physical bodies. And of course, the ubidjidup who discovered me when I was a child, racing across the landscape in their night time incarnations of black spirit-bodies and gaping black eyes, who delighted in the thrill of the run through night skies.

The ubidjidup (these do not come from a specific 'culture' to my knowledge, and are rather something I have experienced through childhood... and who, belatedly, I learnt others experienced too) seem to be specific to certain landscapes, and they are greatly inhibited by roads and civilisation. They can jump roads if needed, but the greater the civilisation, the smaller they are, as though the pockets of bushland remaining are just not enough to sustain them.

I feel them in Koondoola, small and restricted but still there. They race and run and delight, and during the day they sink like tears back into the sand and wait again for another night where they can run for the sheer joy of running. Racing the winds, caring not at all for people or even other animals. They are union with the night sky and the stars, they are the joy of the wind (hot or cold) in your hair and whistling in your ears.

They have let me run and race with them. And sometimes I am transported from my dreams, to the Koondoola landscape, to run with them. There is a fierceness about them of the kind which makes you grateful that they have no interest in people. Not enough sentience to care for revenging that which has taken their size and land away.

And now I feel the moisture on my skin, the humidity that comes with cloud cover and no storms. My spirit reaches up with the spirits of the land to pull at available energy.

But we - together - are aware that it is simply the drying and dying time. Some of us will make it, and some of us will not.

Those of us who do will live to see the jewel beetles again, we will walk with the conostylis and the menzies banksia, and we will celebrate with the calls of the pied butcherbird and the gentler, knowing spirit of the blackpaws (brush wallaby).

In the meantime our spirits will sleep, and wait.