Leaving
Many times I’ve stayed in places, jobs or relationships for longer than my body told me was healthy, right or good. Sometimes knowing when to leave just arrives as a full body, heart, soul, brain YES. Other times it’s a slow painful burning, a tug of war, not wanting to let go, and then sometimes it’s a run for survival. If we’ve lived long enough we might have done all three.
But sometimes the bravest thing to do is walk away without a plan B. Having to move my tiny home without knowing where it was going, leaving behind the only land I knew, the only home I had, I felt like a snail without its shell, soft body exposed, vulnerable to imminent squishing.
As writer Elizabeth Gilbert says about walking away from your dreams…“All you know is that some deep life force within you is saying, ‘NOT THIS’, and it won’t be silenced. Your body is saying: ‘NOT THIS.’ Your heart is saying: ‘NOT THIS.’ Your soul is saying: ‘NOT THIS.’ But your brain can’t bring itself to say ‘NOT THIS’, because that would cause a serious problem. …But still, beating like a quiet drum, your body and your heart and your soul keep saying: NOT THIS.”
This is my story of saying goodbye to my homeland, a place I love and never wanted to leave.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?Widening,
The Uses of Sorrow
She stands on the brow of the hill and looks out to the folding emerald valleys. One after the other disappearing into the horizon of hills beyond. Few signs of humans in the landscape: the majestic Tallowwood and burnished Silky Oaks stand sentinel at the edge of the grassy slope, dignified elders of the forest.. A gateway to the wild that she has wandered these past 7 years.
It’s the sensual wandering and weaving through the forest she’ll miss the most; the startle and thump of swamp wallabies, the fretting and creaking of tree branches in the wind, and the silent, ripe rich scent of wood fungus on rotting logs, ripple through her body like a primal orchestra. At the top of the hill at dusk, pausing to catch breath in the fading light, she’s awestruck by flickering fireflies spilling out all around her like a pocket full of stars.
Over creeks, scrambling up steep embankments, swimming in waterholes, she’s climbed and explored much of this valley’s crevices. Always looking for the track to follow and disappear into the bush, returning heart open, joyful and renewed, boundaries between self and other blurred, inseparable.
The two white sit stones below the Piggabeen palms where once at dusk, no twice, she sat breath suspended whilst an echidna snuffled in the rich loamy soil beneath her folded feet.
Behind her, an ancient avocado tree invited her to climb higher, offering up its glossy fruit freely and where once she hid high in the branches, a birds eye view of her neighbor below.
Oh to be a bird diving and soaring skyward, starbound knowing airborne freedom. But instead she has rescued two, and buried many more, mostly crows that have fallen backwards off the edge of the pool into infinity, the sounds of their mourning companions deafening, blackening and swooping the sky. A tawny frogmouth entrapped in vines, released to live again. Another inexplicably dead on her neighbors property. She weaves wands of their feathers in gratitude for their living and gives them as gifts.
How to live again after this land has spoken to her…”you will live and die here”?”. Her body turns trembling to face the finger of forest on her right where she has spent the most time, where tree ferns tucked inside its lush cool contours enjoy the moist uprising of the little spring that flows to the dam below. She knows now that the only thing to do is to surrender to the sorrow; just as she has learnt to give the natives more space to breathe, she too must make space to breathe and mourn.
To leave the understory undisturbed laden with fallen logs and coarse debris and allow the forest to know itself again, to know death. To witness and be named; Davidson Plum, Illawarra flame, Lemon myrtle, Blueberry ash, White cedar, Sandpaper fig aren’t trying to be or do anything they just are. You’ve been here, exchanged in breath for outbreath, regenerated the land and been regenerated in return, composted your DNA back to the soil. Isn’t that all a human being should do in a lifetime? Be alive to beauty and leave little trace?
We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweet Grass
But this question of death? To die to this land, to leave it and leave the spirits of her father in the paperbark, her sister in the flame tree, her mother in the jacaranda, leaves a hole in her heart deep and dark as an ancient forest. Her mind and body turn homeward to the little house perched on the terrace above the forest, nestled into the Pink Euodia tree, her home for this past year.
She holds a perfect, well-defined vision that came in a dream; to live simply, sparingly, surrounded by that which is essentially beautiful. It’s complex, and as she has found, not easy. Now she belongs first to herself and then her community of wild things, her family and her friends. The price is high, the rewards are great. This is what fills the black hole that begins its bloom back to emerald, the colour of nature, a heart made for deep listening and reciprocity.
Her mind creates a vision for the future and her soul leans in, tracing a path like a feather softly brushing over skin. From the shelter of the trees, she gazes out over the flowers, the community garden bed draped in netting like gauzy wedding skirts. Beds of perennials provide nourishment year long. On the edge, a syntropic garden of fruit trees: papaya, banana, cherry guavas, mulberry, tamarillo and brazilian cherry and beyond that the bush extending up to the ridge.
This is a place of soul nourishment. There is order, wildness and perfection in the placement of her Tiny Home, protected by trees from the fierce sun. For her heart to unfold, she needs sanctuary, safety and divinely inspired order and beauty to be present. She knows that she will walk to the End of the Earth to demonstrate this joyous, conscious life only to arrive back where she started. Simply to be that for others is enough.
She is the first to come, more will follow when they see her vision made a reality. Cooperation and companionship is what drives her to cultivate a community of others who hold a healing space for all to flourish. And beyond the forest, the river beckons and breathes the words…”rest here, drop like a stone and let me flow over you, everything goes in the end and we take nothing with us except the beauty and memory of what once was.”
By giving all this up she is making space for something new. She turns and walks up the hill and out of her old life.
“When you do something you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”
Shunryu Suzuki
