A tangled forest in the foothills of Cradle Mountain, Tasmania
Today I carried a piece of shattered hope. Green glass. Cobwebbed with fracture lines. I hold this broken piece of glass in my hands and wonder if there is still a way of melding it back into something beautiful. But perhaps only a river or the sea could give it a different kind of usefulness and beauty, rubbing away its sharp edges with time and tide and countless grains of swirling sand.
Can I let go of the need for it to be whole?
I wonder if there are rituals for laying down a particular piece of hope that’s lost its substance, its chance of ever becoming real. I’m sitting with Thomas Merton’s words: “Do not depend on the hope of results.” (From his letter to Jim Forest, 21 February 1966.)
Travelling today by car from Port Arthur through Hobart and into the high tablelands of sheep-grazing land. Then along the winding edges of Great Lake, an inland sea, into alpine country, crocheted with temporary blankets of late snow.
Lush green hills and wallabies. Higher slopes at altitude, the bare white stag horns of dead gumtrees and low salty scrub across stony ground. Cradle Mountain, here I come.
Earth holds me close, no matter how far I wander, no matter how lost I become. Earth humbles me and calls me back to recognise my own muddy roots, my utter dependence upon the integrity and wellbeing of the living web.
My core gift is helping others shine golden in the tapestry of being. Sometimes we are the threads that throw other threads into contrast, illuminating the gifts that others bring. How might this element of earth enable me to walk forward more bravely in the world, to share those textured embroideries that matter to me, even when they are not seen or appreciated by others?
I am earth, a tiny, tiny thread in a wild, entangled tapestry of beauty, grief, hope and emptiness.
How to thread myself through the luminous weave without making holes that others might fall into, without making shapes that appear more real or important, knowing this can only ever be temporary?
And yet everything to come depends upon what went before.