In his essay Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger argues that mortals dwell by safeguarding the fourfold (the belonging-together of earth and sky, divinities and mortals) in its essence:

Mortals dwell in that they save the earth. ... To save properly means to set something free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it .... Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being -their being capable of death as death - into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death.

To free ourselves of the alienating influence of technology and recover our rootedness in the world, Heidegger maintains that we must cultivate a mode of being he calls a "releasement toward things." To be "released" toward a thing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is, rather than as a placeholder for some other thing that would serve the same function....When they are "let be" in this way, Heidegger writes that things "gather world." The idea here is that attending to a thing can illuminate a world, a world, that is, understood not as an object (planet Earth, for instance) but as an arena within which things show up as significant things in the first place.

Can Heidegger's understanding'of a thing's gathering world' be connected to the people living in the Australian desert? Mandy Martin, who painted Puritjarra with aboriginal artists, says:

Puritjarra is a place held in the mind's eye of the artists who know it. Those allowed to paint its stories do so in a way that falls between mimetic and symbolic painting. Literally so, for some of the artists who are virtually blind now or too sick to visit such far away, inaccessible country, even though it is theirs. They create paintings that, as Nicolas Rothwell writes (of another place), 'for all the depiction of tree and earth, are not so much landscapes as memory-scapes-memorials to empty country.'.. Daisy captures in a stylised but dazzling personal language all the bush tucker of the place. Narputta does the same, but peoples the empty place with repeated brown figures standing naked amongst the abundant flowering plants and trees. It is some time since they have physically visited the place.

In order to describe what releasement might involve, Heidegger cites examples of certain practices--pouring wine from a jug, cultivating crops, and so on---which, he holds, can be thought of as the constituents of a way of life he calls "dwelling"....Accordingly, releasement is exemplified not by the environmental philosopher serenely pondering the possibilities of reawakening a respect for things, but by the skilled craftsperson attuned to the materials with which he or she works--the cabinetmaker, for instance, "answering" and "responding" "to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within the wood."...Clearly, when the released individual acts, he or she acts in a certain frame of mind, she might be attentive or appreciative or something of this sort, but releasement itself would not seem to be something exclusively cognitive, it would seem to be a bodily as much as a mental comportment.

Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, Muruntji, Acrylic on canvas,

We do need to turn to eastern philosophy to understand what Hedeigger is saying.