Some days it feels as though we are wired to follow paths - roads and highways, corridors and alleyways, tunnels and trails and stairways.

We seek order in everything and, where we see none, we try to impose our own.

The natural world however has its own and far more complex, natural order, which isn’t linear at all.

So this is where I came on the last day of the last week of the final month of the year - to a place where the term “New Year’s Eve” was as marvellously meaningless as my own presence there would be.

It was nothing at all to do with me and, therefore, it was everything I could possibly need.

To get there I did have to drive - though not terribly far - accepting the modern paradox of following a road purely in order to escape from them. These are the compromises we live within and I contemplated that as I drove along, remembering some of the many other times I had been this way, and whom I had travelled with and why, and what had happened on each of those days.

I could not recall them all because I have been here often - but the last time was over a decade ago so part of my wondering was tinged with that fear we have for favourite places last visited long ago - that they might have changed as we have, and not for the better.

At the end of the final unpaved road, as the dust settled, I could see that all looked much the same as it had eleven years ago. A place to park. A picnic table. A marked walking track for visitors to reach the waterfall….

As a child I had visited that waterfall with my parents. Back then this road did not exist at all. The way to the falls was a faint and indeterminate trail starting much further down the valley from a different road altogether, which ended at the edge of the forest. It had been quite an adventure for a small child - to a place known only to a few - but years later a new road was built, deeper into the valley, and facilities for visitors and signs. Finally a properly constructed walking track was carved out of the bush, leading into the gorge to the base of the falls where the water showers down over an amphitheatre of rock from the overhanging rainforest above.

It is still a beautiful place and I am glad that many more people can go there and love it, but by becoming easy it has also become a different place to the place that I once knew.

So on this last day of the year I turned aside from the well worn path and into the trackless forest, where there are no steps and no signs, but where each tree feels like a friend. It was a lot like writing Poetry.

Of course, that is also an illusion. The trees exist here in complex relationship with each other and with the earth, and with everything that lives in and upon the earth and the other plants around them - all of it mediated by access to nutrients, water and sunlight. At best I am just another animal wandering through, but I do feel the affinity of one living thing for another.

Everything here is texture. Moss softens the surface of a sandstone boulder - clinging to ripples that remember the river which formed them 230 million years ago. Tilted up now by tectonic forces and set inside a rainforest, it looms above me as a monolith inscribed by water. I pause here, closing my eyes and letting my fingertips feel the undulations, a sensuous Braille of time.

With no formed track the way forward is no single way. Straight lines do not exist here. Sometimes “forward” is sideways - left or right and back again. Sometimes it is up and over. Sometimes it is sliding under, or going backwards and around. The delight - and art - of off track walking is to see and sense the warp and weft of the forest and of the land and to insinuate yourself through it by sidestepping and stooping, climbing and bending, the way the plants themselves find a way in which to grow - like this serpentine liana vine, thicker than my arm.

In places, where a storm has felled one of the forest giants, there is only the chaos of death and regeneration and no easy way through - just like life.

As with grief you consider what has gone, and what is left. You sense the vast gap in the canopy of life and the enormity of what has been lost, but if you return to that loss again and again you will see that the sunlight and the rain, unimpeded now, allow new things to grow.

Death and renewal - both are essential features of the forest of life we all walk within.

I should mention that I do not have a map, because this place long ago mapped itself indelibly on my mind, visit after visit - each time finding something new. Besides, the valley walls themselves set natural limits here - a narrowing V shape with the bed of the river notched down the middle. There is upstream and downstream. There are side stream tributaries flowing in, briefly breaching the two valley walls, and there is the shifting kaleidoscope of leaves and fragments of sky, fluttering above.

You don’t have to know exactly where you are, to avoid being lost, you only need to know which way you need to go.

Living, too, is just like this.

In a wild river valley the river bed itself is often the best route to follow but the river here is descending through massive boulders - delicious to clamber over and under but slow. Besides, there is a special feature I have come here to see and I know that to reach it I have to head up high above the water - scrambling now on steep slopes of loose earth and the deep mulch of fallen leaves, grabbing tree roots for handholds to avoid sliding backwards until I reach the base of the cliffs which flank the gorge. I traverse below the sheer wall until I reach a side gully which cleaves through, allowing me to climb to the crest of the wall where - just a short way back along the cliff top, I reach the perfect natural arch I first stumbled upon with some friends some 44 years ago.

I place my backpack in the middle to show the scale and I take this photo. Somewhere, I have a photo of my gorgeous children sitting on the same spot, eating lunch, on a happy Summer’s day, and on another day my love - Meg - with her Brother’s children and their friends.

Like the leaves on the forest floor, there are layers and layers.

The arch was not always here. Once - long and long ago, it was part of a block of solid stone. Then it was the lip of an overhang, until the roof of that cave crumbled leaving only the lip freestanding. Someday - who knows when - that too will fall.

I think of another - far larger natural arch - that I also found with friends in a remote valley of the Wollemi wilderness when I was just 16 or 17. It was a span of around 30 metres and eye poppingly scary to walk across. I did find an old and slightly blurry photo of it recently. That’s me 3rd from the left in the blue T Shirt trying to look cool.

It looks improbable but we had lunch sitting there too, and a few years later I took my parents and my Sister and Brother to see it. Fast forward to 1998 and I was planning to take my children to visit that one as well - as soon as I felt that they were big enough and strong enough for the long and rather difficult journey to get there.

Then I heard that it had collapsed, and that now there is nothing left but rubble.

I have never gone back to see.

I sit and have lunch on this one anyway because, well …. life. We need to hold tight to it while we can, precarious though it may feel, like this Native Fig that I found laced tight to the block of sandstone it grows upon.

It is afternoon now with the unseen sun slipping westward so I head on up the valley, picking my way carefully along the cliff top to where it merges with the mountainside deep under the trees. Below the dense canopy of the rainforest the air is still and warm and rich with the scent of earth and of growing things. Tall eucalypts are interspersed with some of the largest palm trees I have seen - native Bangalow and Cabbage Palms. Their much smaller offspring cluster around them where their seeds have fallen - sharp black spines on the edge of the Cabbage Palms making me wary of where I walk, but there are are other hazards too - like the thorny Lawyer Vines (Smilax Australis) which form prickly loops and trip wires laced amongst the undergrowth, equally good at snagging skin or clothing. My bare legs are looking a little ragged and bloodied by now.

This too is the price of living in the forest - both the actual and the metaphorical. Caution helps, but some blood and pain are inevitable in life and if we try to avoid them entirely we will miss something vital about the joy of living, and we will end up failing in the attempt anyway. Some pain, you need to embrace.

Now upstream of the falls I descend the slope to the stream itself where it trickles over sandstone slabs into a rocky pool with the sound of clear liquid dropping into a deep cistern. I record a brief video there for you to listen….

This narrow gorge with permanent water and a rainforest rich with life is a haven. To a visitor like me it is a wild place to experience briefly before returning to my home.

But…. what if this place was - itself - home? How would it seem to me then?

On a terrace above the water, nestled amongst the trees, an overhang beneath a massive boulder forms a natural shelter.

On the back wall, deep in the shadow, there are two images.

To the Awabakal First Nation Aboriginal people who lived in these mountains for time out of mind this cave beneath a boulder was a bedroom. This terrace outside was a living room and a kitchen. This stream and the forest around it were the water and the food which sustain all life. This trackless forest was always full of footprints.

I am not exploring a wilderness.

I am walking through someone’s home - their handprint outlined in red ochre on the wall, the stencil of their throwing stick beside it. It is a hand I could have held.

The Awabakal people maintain their connection with these lands and I visit always with that thought in mind. This continent I live upon seems like a very large island and at one time that is what it was but, now, with so many more of us, it is clear that we all live on what is, really, quite a small and vulnerable little world.

I follow the stream deeper into the hills, revisiting the places which sustained the Awabakal and which now sustain my soul, if not my body. Hours pass in which nothing, and everything, happens. Trees and water, stone….

A step.

A breath. A splash.

The texture of the leaves.

Eventually, I know I have to turn, finding my way back down the valley, through the forest, following the water, climbing around the canyons.

As I do so I weave through the trees and through my own thoughts and memories.

Both are trackless, yet both have an order - the way one thing links to another in nature, organically. An epiphytic fern clings to a tree, accumulating fallen leaves within which insect larvae live - themselves food for frogs and lizards. The bright red seeds of a Bangalow Palm gift a meal for the Green and Crimson King Parrots which flit through the treetops, catching glints of sun.

I think of my children, eating lunch and laughing on a fragile bridge of stone poised above the gorge where Awabakal children once played and hunted in their wondrous forest living room and I know that - if it still stands and if I still stand - I will bring my Grandchildren here as well.

Then one day too I myself will be gone,

but I hope that the forest will remain.

Trackless….