It was time to move on from Sydney's western suburbs. I wanted a better life for my old dogs Binda and Kindi and for myself. I remembered being happy in Darwin, in Australia's Top End, and I had made plans to go up there with the intention of starting a small spiritual health retreat for writers and artists.
The day before I was to leave for Darwin, I was lying on a three seater lounge at my mother's place in Bingara Road, Macquarie Fields, with a small bottle of The Star of Bethleham flower essence and a well worn copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy balanced on my chest. My grandfather was sitting across the room from me in his favourite chair. My mother had been taking care of him after he had suffered a stroke several years before. The house was quiet and I was on a downer after having completed the trilogy for the second time. My mother walked past me on her way through to the bathroom and I thought to myself, I am not going to make it to Darwin. Then what appeared to be an inner dialogue (from a consciousness within, but unrelated to my own) spoke back to me, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. At that moment the window next to the lounge was struck by a bolt of lightning.
All I could do was watch in stunned silence as the double window lit up with pink and white electricity that covered the glass, as if it was trying to get in. My grandfather had sat watching it all in silence. While the window glass hadn't broken, the strike had blown out my mother's microwave in the kitchen and she was unable to get it to work again. After the incident my mother, who had been in the bathroom, came back into the loungeroom. I said, "Lightning just struck at me through the window. Did you see anything?" She said that she hadn't, but that she had heard it, like a loud crackling sound. We both went outside to check if any powerlines were down.
There were storms in the general area around Macquarie Fields, but they were on the outskirts covering the horizon on all sides. The sky around and above the house was patchy but still blue. I knew that there was something "odd" about what had happened. Later my mother's live-in partner, John, explained to me, that "the claws of the lightning are called 'feelers' and that the lightning was trying to earth itself to something." I said, "Then why didn't it go for the tallest thing like the roof, the cars, or all the trees outside surrounding the loungeroom window?" I then added, "That lightning was trying to 'earth itself' onto me!" The timing of it in conjunction with my thoughts had been uncanny.
Whatever 'it' was that had caused this to occur seemed to want me to get to Darwin. It felt like I was on the verge of knowing something miraculous, but that my rational mind had ended the journey before it had begun. I thought, I can't deal with this. I tended to do this a lot and so did my mother, who clearly and visibly dissociated from anything anomalous, only to have her own unusual experiences come up in her mind, often several years later, which she would then cautiously relay back to me.
I loaded everything I had into the 4WD. My two old dogs Binda and Kindi were lifted into the back seat onto a mattress. I drove from Sydney to Darwin in late February in 2003 equipped with a satellite phone and CB radio. Possessions were tied to the roofrack. I was also towing a trailer with a full load that I referred to as 'The Eiffel Tower'. When I pulled into a petrol station in Bathurst a surprised Italian attendant said, " How far do you have to go with that load?" He was expecting me to say to the next town, perhaps Orange or Dubbo. "Darwin," I said.
His eyes widened while he began looking for my non-existent male partner, seeing, instead, two anxious old dogs propped up on my belongings with mattress and pillows inside the vehicle. He shook his head. "You're going alone?"
"Yeah."
"Good luck."
I was used to doing big drives on my own, but the dogs were a lot older now and, with the trailer and roof rack packed so high, it meant that I would have to take it easy and one day at a time, with plenty of rest and early nights for the three of us. Nevertheless, I always felt at home along the huge stretches and the vast horizons of the country's inland roads and highways.
