I sing for and learn from the... Astronomer, Anthropologist, Futurist, Humanist, Philosopher, Politician, Realist, Romantic, Scientist, Secularist, Spiritualist, Talker, Thinker, Wanderer, Wonderer.
Please... Listen, Enjoy.

Zero More +Or- Less - Out Now

Listen to the new album by AmurRayz with these streaming services below.

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Youtube Music
• Amazon Music

See + Hear Amurrayz

DISCOGRAPHY

See the AmurRayz releases below along with a free MP3 song download from each album and lyric booklet

Zero More +Or- Less
2024

Listen to this album on Spotify or get your complimentary download of 'Unseen Pulses' below.

• Free Song Download

• View Lyric Booklet

• Listen On Spotify

Wandering The Foothills
2023

Listen to this album on Spotify or get your complimentary download of 'It Is Evening' below.

• Free Song Download

• View Lyric Booklet

• Listen On Spotify

Far & Near
2022

Listen to this album on Spotify or get your complimentary download of 'Traces' below.

• Free Song Download

• View Lyric Booklet

• Listen On Spotify

Surfacing
2020

Listen to this album on Spotify or get your complimentary download of 'Noise of War' below.

• Free Song Download

• View Lyric Booklet

• Listen On Spotify

'Light' - Chapter One

Taken from the book 'MOUNTAIN - a view from the south'

The light shone around the mountain’s rim. Clouds moved through the sky, carried by a brisk wind. Trees clambered down the side of the mountain, and the further down they reached, the higher up they reared. Shadows were bunched among and over the trees. The shadows altered with the constant movement of the wind. Rocks were visible among the trees and shadows, and a dull sheen of light varnished their sides. The clefts in the rock harboured water and shadow to make a place for moss, and the moss spread steadily from these nurturing sources.As the sun rose, layers appeared in the canopies of trees. The branches that formed the trees became apparent. The leaves that spread from the branches took their place in lines and clumps. These formations could transform into limbs and wings as they made movements that reached and swept from tree to tree.On its journey to the ground, light from the sun was buffeted by the wind. The wind carried low running clouds over the terrain. Some clouds had brought rain and now others brought shade. The clouds brushed the mountain and, as the wind swept them along, they were shredded by the plants and rocks that coated the mountainsides. After the clouds were shredded, the forest alchemised the cloud remnants into waterdrops that coalesced into trickles that drained along leaf and bark, before descending the trunks to the ground, there to be soaked into the earth. The sunlight made clear some of this activity as it intermittently penetrated the penumbras of the forest.
The light’s journey continued along as well as down. The light spread across as well as along. As it spread, the trees in all directions became clearer, more intense, and more dimensional. They became deep as well as tall, they became layered as well as wide; and it became clear that many other plants were massed about them.The light seemed to add a lustre to each plant as it grew into the space around it. It was like spring, when each species of plant is more noticeable because it is in flower. So it was now, except that now, instead of colour and flower, it was sunlight and leaf that created the tincture that brought out the presence of each plant, individually and by variety. And the highlighting occurred in moments not days. And it occurred most intensely in this the season of winter.Winter, the season known for its ferocity. Winter, the season known for its cold. Winter, the season known for its bleakness. Yet here on the mountain chilled air became a cauldron for light and moisture. The cauldron set the forest ablaze with mists and rain. And the mists were like flames of moisture sweeping through the forest, setting trees and shrubs alight, as they caroused the enlightening scene.The mountain was part of and reared over an iridescent scene on this day. It had done so for a long time. Some would calculate this time in millions of years; others would refer to this time as something that began in the dreaming; and for others again, it was a mountain born in the making of a continent; and born again in the severing of a continent. Whatever its beginning, since then it was always slowly changing. Those clouds that today were shredded by the mountain had been preceded by others that had poured rain on the mountain, others that spilled ice on the mountain, and others that encircled and draped mists over the mountain. All played their role in making the mountain weatherworn.Every drop had taken with it an infinitesimal piece of rock and carried it down the mountain slope, into the crevices, and along the streams. The streams that ran over the valley floor carried the mountain down upon itself, spreading the mountain in a carpet across the plain. A carpet laid in such a way that the mountain itself seemed to be inexorably soaking into the land around it. The mountain was being laid to rest along its own foothills. And as it descended to the plain the clouds, maintaining their height, would pass by more frequently, as the mountain would no longer reach high enough to halt them on their journey.The wind too worked its ways upon the mountain. Often it drifted breezily over the rocks and plants blowing itself in various directions, neither cooling nor warming the air. It buffeted and brushed the rock. It rustled leaves and swayed branches. The wind came and went in many directions. It could be changeable, and seasonable.In the summer when the wind came from the north, it transported the heat that built up over the deserts of the interior. A heat that was stoked over immense swathes of wattle, spinifex, rock, and sand. Wattle that spread its gnarly arms to the sky and harboured trickles of shade below. Trickles that frayed in the hot winds, hot winds that agitated red sands around dry trunks and over burning rocks. Spinifex that held the merest of green encased under the protection of waxy grey tapered leaves, leaves that stored enough energy to create seed balls that blew in skewed directions amid the whirl of the wind.Wind gathered heat about itself as it formed huge anti-cyclones that drew up torrents of dry air from the desert, and poured them onto the summer bare grain fields that paved their way to the desert fringes. As the searing wind spread and swept over the grain fields it drew out and dispersed all vestiges of moisture. It sucked out the scent of the grain stubble. And at the same time it continued to store and disseminate heat as it swarmed down from the interior. The sun and wind drenched the land in dryness as they pushed their tireless way west and south.Near the coast, the wind swarmed upon the woodlands and forests, drying them out leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and tree by tree. It dried them so much that the first spark could, and all-to-often did, ignite heat’s great spectacle and great menace – flames. The flames built into walls of fire that would light up kilometre upon kilometre of forest as the fire spread through the southwest of the continent. The fire roved in a gorging fury. Wherever the wind advanced, there went the legions of flame. The hot dust-laden air turned into a parched smoke-suffused atmosphere. The pall deepened as the advance guards of flames fed on the oil rich leaves of Eucalyptus trees and crackled them into a charred outline of themselves. Legions of leaves, freshly alight were taken on the swirling currents of air aloft into the maelstroms of wind, to form the nest phalanx of fiery arrows that would be shot into the arid azure sky. Once alight, trees and bushes blazed to climaxes alone and together until they were outwardly spent; and the fire left them with only their innermost reserves – new life nodes protected by the gnarly charred bark that was all that stood between survival and demise.Once spent the fires left behind tens of thousands of blackened and scarified trees and shrubs. As is often the case, succumbing to natural forces was followed by regeneration through natural forces. In the branches and trunks the nodes would soon send out salmon-pink shoots that would metamorphose into lime green, and then into leathery olive. Under the trunks were the lignotubers, now hungry to push through the greyed-out bed of ash and into the light of late summer. And in the ash were the seeds of plants that had learned to tolerate this massive incursion by one of nature’s insatiable armies. And also in the ash were the roots of plants that could withstand total rollover. These survivors would await rain. And the rain would most often come in the autumn.In the autumn, a calm often pervaded the mountain. Cool mornings led into shady days and the shadow of the mountain often moved undisturbed on its passage from west to east. Afternoons during the autumn seemed to distil the presence most often felt at the mountain’s base, at the road’s end. From here the peak rose away to the west, then careered to a pass, before it straightened and diminished into a cone, a lumpy cone that gave an impression that it was difficult to climb. Its lumpiness was caused by layers of rocks, rocks that held seams and crevices at intervals that seemed to loom repeatedly, just a little over the height of a person’s reach. Rocks that now formed into spires were once part of a seabed. Throughout the mountain range you could find rocks that still held the rippled impression of the floor of that seabed that had now been raised into a mountain. It was as if rocks formed by water had followed the rain that had transmogrified them into their rocky existence. They were like inanimate turtles on a migration over millions of years; though wingless and mute, still they migrated upward carrying their memories of the past as they fulfilled their mute pilgrimage.Southern storms made their way to these mountains at all times of the year. In the winter and the spring they reached their deepest intensity. These mountains reached over a thousand metres into the sky, well within sight of the south coast of the continent. Their height and proximity to the ocean made the mountains irresistible to low pressure, cyclonic storms that had careered uninterrupted over thousands of kilometres of the southern seas. The only impediment, a frequent one, was the high-pressure systems that built their anti-cyclonic winds over similarly uninterrupted expanses of land that made up the interior of Australia.In winter, the globe’s movements created an ally for the storms, as the land cooled and the earth seemed to roll down under the jet streams of the roaring forties. Strengthening storms breached the invisible but weakening anti-cyclonic walls. Once the storms gained an ascendency, they brought terrific turbulence that raged over the mountain with building intensity as winter progressed. Storm by storm they brought rain, hail, and at their most intense, snow. The first milder storms brought blustery showers nestled in cold fronts that bustled along the coast. Soon thunderstorms would be embedded in the intensifying cold fronts that were attached like trawling hooks to the advancing temperate cyclones. Ultimately the air was cold enough to incubate needlepoints of freezing rain that drenched the mountain slopes, building up in the forks of the trees to form an opaque rime along the branches. The wind would accelerate up the mountain and its force would be funnelled ferociously as it roared over the pass. The freezing rain was like a staccato of needles drumming leather, and it would silence in an instant as the ice drops turned to snow crystals. Phalanx upon phalanx of white would swirl over and through the forest. Armies of white flecks like down would career wildly, and lurch to a stop before wending off on their en masse drunken lurching once more. On such occasions the wary walker would press against a tree trunk under the canopy of trees, and stand transfixed as the maelstrom careened through the range, before pressing north disseminating itself over the expanses of ripening grain fields, finally collapsing on the fringes of the deserts of the interior. The storms coursed through the mountains enough times to bring the rains that would be harnessed into one of the world’s outstanding floral displays in the following spring.Spring brought more flowers than any other season. Flowers were a feature at all times, in all weathers. Perennial everlastings tucked their root runs under the rocky ground and sent strawberry and cream flower heads into the cool sunshade of the upper slopes. They scented the air with a dry papery sweetness that rustled its way into your senses. The smell made you linger and take deep breaths. It was a smell that seemed to freshen your lungs. Even on rainy days, and even though the flower heads were closed tightly shut against the rain, the smell made your lungs feel like they had been aired out. Hundred of kilometres distant in the aridlands, everlastings grew in carpets that covered slabs of earth and created lakes of colour; here they grew in clusters that strung out in pools and rivulets along the foottrails, around the rocks, and through the forest.Other flowers made their presence felt. Dryandras with golden blooms about the size of an adult’s fist spread stamens out and up in rows from the flower’s base, arranged in the form of an hourglass. The gold emanated more subtly, depending on the deepness of the shade of the trees, or the thickness of clouds on the day. Orchids grew in a style of time lapse. First they were noticeable as a few leaves pressed upon the ground. These flattened clumps of green then sent a single stem up to ankle height. At this level in that space the flowers sprouted. Their names reflected the diverse ways they metaphorically caught the imagination with titles such as Donkey orchid, China orchid, and Spider orchid. On a literal level, not far from here could be found an Underground orchid.The mountain exists in an area that is renowned for its flora. Millions of years of isolation, a drying climate, and weathered sands, have forced nature’s hand and resulted in flowers appearing in many forms at all times of the year. The mountain’s elevation has furthered this diversity, with the cool of the peak and the crevices of the sides providing a range of micro-climates where plants could respond over generations to the conditions that altered hardly noticeably, yet the change was enough to warrant adaptation.Change seems to be perennial. Change seems to be slow. It seems to be inevitable. It can be dramatic. It occurs in huge vistas and with rapid alteration.
And no doubt change comes in infinitesimal amounts and at miniscule speeds. It seems strange, and breathtaking, to think that the rocks at the mountain peak were once on the floor of a sea. It made one think of the cycles of time that revolved relentlessly. And the cycles were outlined in waves. Some waves were like the ripples on a lakeside of one of the many lakes to be found around the mountain’s base. Some waves were like the massive swells that brewed in storms and travelled the southern seas, and as they travelled they grew to immense proportions. Or like waves that carried light or sound, unnoticed as waves but pervasive in our senses of vision and hearing. A mountain was like a wave seemingly stopped in its formation, yet it cascaded down its own face in an interminable breaking along its own foothills.Throughout the long cycles and waves of time the mountain bore the elements of weather. The mountain helped create the elements of weather. The mountain was part of the response to weather. It is rock. It is wind. It is water. It is the wind and the water that transform the rock into soil. It is soil weathered from the rock. It is the plants that grow in the soil. It is the flowers that grow from the plants. It is the plants creating seed. It is the insects and birds that take the pollen from flower to flower. It is the animals that carry the seeds to other parts of the mountain. It is the animals that roam among the plants as they move in their various ways on the ground, through the forest and under the light, seeking their food, seeking each other. It is the cold of winter. It is the cold being ousted by the warmth. It is the heat following the warmth. It is the fire that fans into life from an invisible hearth; the fire that impels more adaptation, more transformation, and more migration. It is the regeneration that will adapt to all conditions. And it is a wave that breaks along a shoreline of time.So this goes on. And to it comes a man. And this man is a father.