Learning To Fly at Five Years Old
The View from the Edge of the Cliff
Today is my Birthday. I am 60. I was born and spent the first seven years of my life, down the road from here. A coastal wild creature, leaping rock pools and sandstone cliffs.
When I was about four or five, my Dad, a surf lifesaver, would stand right on the edge of a cliff, at Coogee (our home), waiting in great presence and great silence for me to join him. His own edge of aliveness matching the expanse of sea and cliff-air ribbon. He never beckoned me with gesture or words. But the invitation, the daring to step to the leading edge of myself and to joy, were palpable and irresistible.
One day, I did step to the edge.
The view was breathtaking. The expanse filled my whole chest with joy and breathed in the living potential of my Life: creation itself. I looked at him. He nodded and smiled.
Five and a half decades later I remind him of this, ask him if he recalls it. I tell him my experience of bursting joy and the whole potential of my life blooming out to the luminous horizon of sea-sky. At 84, his eyes tear. He nods. He tells me “I’m glad you got that”.
What was he teaching me? How to fly.
He rang me this morning, wishing me a happy 60th. He calls me “Sweetheart” and “little girl”. These are not patriarchal infantilising names to me. They are words of the deepest and most tender acknowledgment of our humanity and of a father with his daughter, giving her flying lessons, showing her that she was The World.
He named me. My name, “Narelle”, means “Woman of the Sea”.
My Mum died eight years ago. Where was she in this particular Story? Further back from the cliff edge. Yeah, with caution and fear (five year olds don’t usually step to the edge of a cliff). But I know, she was also holding space. As she watched her wild young daughter tread a path she herself was nervous to go. It was Mum who insisted I learnt to swim before I was allowed to learn to dance, at age four. It was Mum, as she encouraged me to embody the fluid field of “swim”, who really taught me to walk on water. Without which, I could not dance.
Narelle Carter-Quinlan is a Walker of Saltwater Songlines. She travels the coasts of the world making images, because apparently, this is how she breathes. She listens to the Spirits of Place, and raises the camera when she is told; “now”. She makes most of her images without her glasses on, because it helps her to see better and listen deeper.
