On Healing
“ Over time, my central nervous system would start to chill, a kind of spaciousness would gradually unfold, and I would recognise that recovery had begun.”
In 2016 my partner and I bought a wooden cottage on 10 acres of land, on an ecotone where the woodlands meet the foothills of the mountains. The area had been logged relentlessly in the 1950s. One by one, the tall trees of the old growth cedar forest fell, and with each removal, another layer of camouflage was added to a way of life that the ancestors of this country had nurtured for thousands of years.
In place of the old cedars stands a 35-year-old mixed forest of early adult grey gums, bunyas, bloodwoods, stringybark, lemon scented eucalypts, wattle, native grasses, lilypillies and tallowwoods, alongside weeds – mother-in-law’s tongue, canna lillies and lantana – all underneath a revered and healthy canopy. A sadness lingers with the loss of the old trees and with them the old knowledges; simultaneously, the young forest testifies that from brokenness comes deep transformation. And just as the bush here is in deep multiplicity of recovery and loss, so are we.
When we
