We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

16.6.20

Hello Earth #14

Hello Earth

Here I am, coughing with chronic sinusitis, and because the mould in my house is bad again. I’m grateful it’s not a COVID-19 cough and hope no-one will think it is. (Not that I am going out just yet – but will need to tomorrow, briefly.)

Earth, I miss the going out into the beauty of this area I live in ... and I’m grateful anyway to have lived most of my life surrounded by trees, mountains and water. I remember some fool years ago, who thought she knew me, saying confidently, ‘You’re a city girl’ (perhaps because I was living in Melbourne at the time). No I’m not!

Leaning into that old memory, I acknowledge I did enjoy Melbourne for a long time, and I’m grateful for all it gave me. And I lived all over it at different times. But mostly I lived near trees and the ocean, even there. I’m grateful that I was able to.

Listing gratitudes, my lasting ones are to do with being a child of nature. I remember long walks in the bush when I lived in Launceston, when the house I grew up in and the one we moved to later were both close to areas of bush land. I’m grateful for an era and locality where I could do that alone as a youngster, and then as a teenage girl, safely. I’m grateful it was a safety we could take for granted back then.

Offering you, Earth, my gratitude for all your nurturing beauty, I look back and see that I grew up with, in some ways, precious freedom. I give heartfelt thanks for that, too.



















Tasmanian bushwalk. Image available under Creative Commons attribution 3.0 from this site.

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