Hello Earth #24

Hello Earth

Here I am, on a morning cold but sunny, about to have a late breakfast. First, of course, coffee. Well, first after looking out the door to see the mountains directly opposite, behind the houses across the street. Today the deep blue is slightly misted. No, I look again and realise it’s not that at all. It is that the clarity is so perfect today that inside that sharp royal blue I am seeing grey-green, individual rocks and trees. Amazing! What a place to live!

Earth, this area of you where I live is always pure joy to contemplate. It feeds my soul. I lived in the city of Melbourne longer than anywhere else (still, although my time here is fast catching up) and in those days it was pleasant living as cities go; the place had its own beauty. But it was still a city ... and now, decades later, is less beautiful and more of a screaming metropolis. (I know; I visit family there sometimes.) 

Leaning in, giving thanks for the unexpected circumstances which brought me to live here twenty-five-and-a-half years ago, I marvel at my good fortune. 

Listing gratitudes, they are: the parents and grandparents who taught me to value and reverence the natural world, it’s beauties and wonders; that natural world itself, and the sheer luck of beginning and ending my life in places rich with such beauty and wonder; trees, rivers, mountains, ocean, clean air, open skies, birds.... From far south, temperate Tasmania to sub-tropical Northern Rivers: rainforest places both, in their different and not-so-different ways. I am blessed and know myself blessed, beyond imagining.

Offering tears of thankfulness and delight, sitting here comfortable in my body, I pause our conversation, Earth, to be resumed next time, and go and get my coffee.

I'm sharing this, nearly two years later, with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #24: Your Landscape. 

The complete 'Hello Earth' series (unillustrated) is available free from Smashwords in epub format: here.