I sat and had a yarn with K yesterday about our experiences of being with country on the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail. The thing that stuck me most about our time together was the sense that we were invoking the energy/feeling/space of Trail by talking about it. This reconnection with what is maybe the essence of the experience (for each of us) made me realise that although I may not always be walking country, there is a connection that I can be present to and call forth into being.
K talked a lot about being present on Trail, not just as a destination or something to aim for, but a process and way of being… a pathway to connection perhaps? A few days ago I was going through Otto Scharmer’s book ‘Theory U’ at my bush camp and came back to reading about presencing (as distinct from being present). Scharmer (2009: 163) describes presencing as shifting our place of perception ‘to a future possibility that is seeking to emerge.’ It seems apt to come back to this concept/practice now that I am clearer on the focus of my research – questioning, what kind of place-making is emerging out of the collective action of people walking and protecting the Lurujarri Songline together? Can people sense a future possibility that is seeking to emerge here on the Songline? Is this what we feel on Trail?
On Trail this year R spoke a lot about reading the country. I had fallen into the trap of interpreting this to mean literally seeing what was around me – seeing the signs in the bush and sea to understand the story that was being told/performed by place. Then I asked R how reading the country and le-an related… he said that le-an is reading the country, it is reading the country through feeling. Goolarabooloo and other Indigenous people up here talk a lot about le-an, as did Paddy Roe. Making sense of le-an for myself is another story. Listening to feelings that come when I’m being with country… subtle feelings that can easily be dismissed… sometimes not so subtle. F often speaks about ‘waking up’ to feeling/le-an, that walking the songline can be a big part of that ‘waking up’ and (re-)connecting.
Going back to the other day’s reading though, I read Scharmer’s ideas with a new awareness and started to see a whole lot of connections and associations that I hadn’t previously. Presencing and reading the country through our le-an, could they be the same thing, just expressed differently?
Scharmer, O. (2009). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.: San Francisco
Being with Country 
It's interesting to find this hint of the teleological coming into your reading and thinking .. of something in the future working in the present. It could be a concept to play with for a while. Can 'being with' country ever be independent of the future? Or the past?
I like your concluding questions Anthea. They eluded to the question of time and its relationship to the metaphysical. I want to challenge myself in how I understand time in relation to being with people-place. Goolarabooloo people share through stories knowledge/truth about Bugarragarra (dreaming) and that this is ever present, challenging a linear construct of time. So, in response to your questions, maybe being with is a totality and encompasses past, present and future… then I come back to the questions, what is being with and for whom?