Return to The Rainforest - My Story

Other stories:
From dark virgin jungle to sensory wonderment

Emerging from my personal journey to the underworld, I began to collect other peoples’ stories of their connection with nature, including the images and metaphors which they used to describe the rainforests.⁸ Physical qualities of the rainforests are perceived through these ‘lenses’ or ‘filters’ which are created by our childhood memories, cultural heritage, and through the understandings we are continually absorbing from contemporary society. As you will see in the following stories, it is through these cultural ‘lenses’ that people have developed their own sense of place, their own special relationship with this part of the Australian landscape. The views are clearly different for each of us. There are, however, some essential teachings and healing qualities of the Australian rainforest which emerge. No matter what images and metaphors are used, it is clear that rainforest touches people deeply and teaches lessons particularly valuable in this time of global ecological crisis.

The rainforest inspires us to experience nature as valuable, sacred, and special in some hard-to-describe way. The rainforest teaches humility, through experiences of awe and the grandeur of nature. It helps us value the unknown, untouchable, mysterious ‘other’. The rainforest provides a spectacular example of complexity, cycles, and interconnectedness, helping us to understand living systems. It reminds us of our destructive capabilities and separation from natural processes. The rainforest also bestows healing through experiences of mystery and awe, love and caring, and aesthetic pleasure. It helps us to expand our usual sense of ‘self’.

I interviewed over forty people but have chosen a selection of stories, each one exemplifying a particular image or metaphor through which these teachings were communicated.


Dark Virgin Jungle

The rainforest was often described as mysterious, uncomfortable and inaccessible.

“virgin rainforest”

So many people used this phrase! They were talking about it being untouched and whole, with an inference that it should not be touched. The word ‘virgin’ in this context did not refer to any sort of naivete or innocence, as it often does in a social context, but to being complete and whole-in-itself. This image of virginity was more like that of the ‘black madonna’ or ‘pregnant virgin’, a powerful feminine archtype not dissimilar to my own Goddess of the rainforest.⁹ Interestingly, although people rarely referred to the gender of the rainforest, it was consistently feminine. Men were frequently cast as the violators of virgin nature.

“Rainforest is just a jungle, where no man’s had a chance to reek havoc on it.”

I was talking with Jeff over a beer. We were in his lounge-room in the warm sunshine of early evening after he had knocked off work as a mechanic in Cairns. He had been reminiscing about adventures he had as a younger man with his mates through Cape Tribulation to Cape York. Rather than using the word ‘virgin’ to describe the mysterious impenetrable nature of the rainforest, he called it a ‘jungle’ - conjuring up images of a place for masculine adventures of the Tarzan variety, or of the great white hunter conquering the wilderness! He was deeply concerned about the development encroaching on the forests of Far North Queensland, and the destructive nature of our contemporary patriarchal system.

“In the pioneering days you were a real man if you could create something out of a rainforest. Nowadays it’s just big men with a lot of money, big machines, come through and they wreck for nothing!”


Christian Paradise Lost

A lone weather-board house sat amidst the dark red furrows of ready-to-be-planted cane fields. Judy, in her blue floral dress, invited me inside the cool darkness of the kitchen. She dreamily described rainforests as a kind of Paradise Lost.

“They are so fertile. Everything seems to be so perfect or balanced. You’re talking about the Garden of Eden. A rainforest envisages what paradise is, or would have been.”

Judy continued, more distressed than dreamy

“But then again, the damage that can be done in a rainforest if those trees are destroyed, the sun comes through... You know? The whole balance is destroyed then!”

An underlying message of Judy’s was that rainforest is not really a ‘garden’ at all. It is not to be inhabited or manipulated by human beings. Many people described it as a “cathedral” - a sacred place, a place of spiritual beauty, awe and worship. The rainforest as paradise is pure, unspoiled and to be protected. It is God’s gift. As Gordon, a retired tobacco farmer, said

“Nature is what the good Lord gave us in the first instance, and asked us to protect it as much as possible, and not to destroy it willy nilly.”


European Faerie-Tales and Folk Traditions

Jenny smiled impishly over her cup of peppermint tea and told me about her childhood experiences in the forest.

“I think it was just like being a faerie or something.”

As a child she read a lot of Enid Blyton and romantic English literature, including ‘The Secret Garden’, which fired her imagination. She lived in dry eucalypt forest, close to rainforest, but ‘made believe’ that she lived in a European forest.

“ I actually didn’t like the bush here, I thought it wasn’t real bush. I wanted REAL trees - the big oaks, the ones that grow far away from people. I would go out and pretend that it was a place it wasn’t.”

Looking back though, she realised that it was through these European images and myths which she developed such a deep relationship with the forest.

“One of the things about coming back here, to the place where I grew up, is that I really DO FEEL a spiritual connection. I go to where I’ve played as a kid, and I can really feel the faeries and ghosts and things that haunted me then.”

In a similar way, other people’s European cultural heritage was in sharp contrast with their Australian ‘reality’ of the tropical rainforest, but at the same time had strengthened their relationship with it. Frank, a retired journalist and plumber who had migrated from Yugoslavia over thirty years ago, confirmed this for me. Meeting him at his yellow-brick flat, one in a row of twelve, he enthusiastically showed me his two tiny gardens, one growing beautiful roses and the other an impressive array of vegetables. Like other older people who I talked with from middle European countries, he gifted me with nostalgic memories of the forests “back home”. With twinkling eyes and expressive hands, he described an idyllic forest festival in his village which was linked with its harvesting and replanting.

“You know, this is for ALL people. And you gotta piano accordians, you got everything, you got DANCING, and girls and young boys, going chasing each other, picking up flowers. BEAUTIFUL EH? Beautiful to SEE, you know?”

Frank was quite insensed by the lack of sound forest management in Australia, knowing the hard lessons that had been learned in European forests, and how cultural activities and celebrations could be used for effective environmental conservation. Almost pleadingly, he said to me

“I LOVE nature you know. I DO honest, uh. It’s a BEAUTIFUL, you know, if you go through and you see birds singing and, you know, flowering a blossom. ... If you look after, nature can give you BEAUTIFUL life, you know.”


Spiritual Oneness, Awesome Experience

I sat with Rosey, a young mother of three, amidst her half-built home in the rainforest. Gazing across the small creek, dappled in sunshine, she described how she usually feels here.

“Very small. Very small and yet very expansive. Very insignificant and yet in touch with everything. ... I feel like my SPIRIT can SPREAD amongst the trees.”

Eleanor, a school teacher and environmental activist, explained a similar experience in a different way.

“I feel as though I am allowing the outside into me, rather than trying to preserve my space for myself.”

People can experience a blurring of the boundaries between their usual ‘self’ and the environment around them. They feel like they expand outwards into the rainforest, and it moves into them. They develop a kind of ‘ecological self’.¹⁰ Some described it as a “spiritual” experience and others as feeling “at one” with the forest. The awe inherent in this type of experience was well expressed by John, a very active environmentalist. On the sunny verandah of a suburban Queenslander, overlooking his Permaculture garden, he excitedly told me about how he feels in rainforests.

“It’s a HUMBLING thing too... there’s a lot of diversity and you can feel things buzzing around you. That’s a humbling thing because you can sit down and NOTHING cares less whether you’re there or not. But you feel part of it. ... It’s sort of INVIGORATING because - oh, how to explain it - you feel like a real concentration of life.”

He struggled to use ‘ordinary’ biological language to express a ‘spiritual’ experience of the rainforest.


Animistic Ecology of Gaia.

Other people expressed their feelings about the rainforest using rich, emotive language to describe the attributes and functions of the ecosystem. The idea that the whole Earth is a living system, and that rainforests are a prime example of such a living system and a vital part of Gaia, really fired people’s imaginations. The rainforests were often referred to as a “living entity” and sometimes as a “creature”. As Linda, an environmental activist, told me

“It has a wholeness which if you leave it alone is totally in balance ... it’s the LUNGS OF THE EARTH, the other half of our lungs.”

Joan, overlooking her dairy farm, explained that

“rainforests are the land’s natural nursery - everything grows and nourishes and is nurtured by nature”

Trevor, in his engineer’s workshop in Cairns, described the cycles of the rainforest.

“Birth, growth and death. The birth comes back out of the degeneration of the dead trees or animals ... that’s where it gets its growth from.”

Rainforests clearly show people the power of life, its diversity and its cycles, and sometimes this is celebrated. Amy, amidst the mess of her suburban lounge-room, marvelled at the living system of the rainforest.

"How would it have started? A bird bringing a seed, and then the seed growing and then dropping more seeds and the animals carrying them. The little things that live in there, and.... Lots of things. LOTS of things. The mosses that grow in the moisture and the water that FEEDS them and.... Mmmm.”

She then realised how much she has taken this for granted.

You don't really stop and think. It just IS. Especially when you're a CHILD, when you're in these sorts of things. It's just THERE. It's not until you get older, that you sort of, begin to appreciate nature and how MARVELLOUS it is."


Sensory Wonderment

Amy’s sense of wonder was repeated by many other people, and it did not depend on any particular knowledge of how the ecosystem functioned or any spiritual belief system. It was often wonderment and joy in pure experience. Susan, across a basket of laundry, described the rainforest in the following way.

"Fresh. Full of life.
Ticks, lice, leeches and wait-a-while.
Red clay, mud.
Beautiful, beautiful creeks and water, clear running water.
Closed in amongst it all."

Tanya, in her faerie-like way, painted a picture of simple sensory ecstasy, aesthetic pleasure and love of place.

"Miraculous. ... Well, I LOVE it. I love being IN it. I love it when.. you know we've had HUNDREDS of butterflies through these trees out here.. they were just flitting.. you ever see birdwings, lacewings.. just hundreds of them.. after the rain, wow. Those sort of things are things that make you think "WOW! What a place to be living!"

Linda, in her house crammed with recyclables, reminded me of the simplicity of this kind of re-enchantment with nature.

“It’s just a matter of relaxing enough and getting in touch ... or tuning your vibrations to whatever is out there. ... You don’t have to go through any rigmarole. It’s very much to do with the situation you’re in yourself, you know. If you’re in peace and harmony yourself, then you’re quite open to relating to what’s outside yourself, and if you’re NOT then you find it difficult to make a connection.”

This sat in sharp contrast to my own very intense and shadowy emergence into the rainforest, experiencing the very depths of my soul at the same time as the spirit of the forest. Linda continued with a sigh

"So if I'm at peace and I'm feeling happy ... the experience of a butterfly and a flower, it's just a MAGNIFICENT thing in itself. You can almost FEEL what the butterfly feels, you can feel what the flower feels."

Continue to Return to the Sea