Bay St. Louis Walkabout: Nature's Gallery

Nature Notes - October 2025

On November 1st, join local artists and creators in celebrating our home in Pass Christian at the Gail-Keenan Gallery from 4 to 6PM. 

“The temple bells stopped ringing, but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.” –Basho    

- Story and photos by James Inabinet

A Walkabout Pilgrimage is underway right now in our home, our community: Bay St. Louis.  Artists are part of it.  Storytellers, poets, and musicians are part of it too.  Some participants are just regular people, with no special skill for expression.  Our walkabout pilgrimage is inspired by the Aboriginal Walkabouts of old that were seminal acts of creation. ​

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The tradition of conducting yearly walkabouts in Australia continues to this day in honor of the primal creation as well as the continual creating that keeps their landscape a spiritual home.  These new walkabouts follow the originary songlines, dreamlines, and mythlines inherited from the Ancestors.

​In so doing, melodic contours are traversed that connect landscape to soundscape through listening, be it howling dingoes and thumping kangaroos as of old or the humming of planes and construction clatter of now.  Dreamscapes are followed too, that connect dreaming to the landscape, constituting lines of swirling “form-making power” that makes a kangaroo into a kangaroo, a snake into a snake, a human into a human being.  Finally, mythlines connect it all, dreaming and singing, being and becoming, the animating breath of life and living, connecting everything; nothing is without relations: trees and bushes, birds and frogs, rivers and mountains, oceans and deserts.  Mythlines connect all into one seamless whole, a spiritual oneness worthy of celebration.

​Those Aboriginal walkabouts, both old and new, are the inspiration for our walkabout pilgrimage.  We too have a longing for spiritual oneness, and to be ensconced within a spiritual home.  Unlike the Aborigine, we have no inheritance to guide us.  No songlines have been passed from generation to generation for us to follow.  There is no one to tell us the locations of old dreamlines that might honor the creative imaginings of old that brought our contemporary world into being.  Finally, no one mapped and recorded the old mythlines that might delineate the originating significance of primal creation.  However, though their locations may be lost, that doesn’t mean they’re not there.  Our task is not so much to follow them as to find them.
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So it is that our walkabout pilgrimage is a seeking the songlines of now: the harmonic soundscape of squawking pelicans, croaking frogs, and the louder-than-it-has-to-be trains that sonically connect us to beings and place.  We seek old and new dreamlines, that can show us where the creative imaginal dreaming hewed cats and pelicans, frogs and squirrels from pure energy–it’s all around us!  We seek mythlines too, that might tease out the coalescing archetypal patterns that animate and inform what we are and how we are–and what we do–that are products of the “activating male principle” passing over the deep waters of the “receptive female principle” both at the beginning and now.

On All Saints Day, November 1, an exhibition of our work will be held at Gail-Keenan Gallery in Pass Christian from 4-6 p.m.  The work we exhibit and talk about, we sincerely hope, can begin to express what it means to embark on such a pilgrimage to ... home.  Our hope is that, by viewing the art, you–the patrons–may begin to get some sense of what it felt like to be home for us in this special way.

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