Fresh morning love

Last night, after a big meal, I tried to write a journal entry using this photo of the ancestral bench’s shadow pointing to the reflected spiral in the water. (In the Peace Garden, the spiral symbolises the future.) This was after receiving an email from a friend who had movingly related the dying of his grandmother,

“a young catholic girl named Herta with a high Nazi uncle who followed her Jewish boyfriend and his family from Austria to Shanghai China, who gave birth to twins, of which only the stronger, my mum, survived and then emigrated to Australia as a post-war refugee to make a new life.”

I wanted to write of the importance of connecting to the stories of our ancestors so that we, in the present, can find some guidance to lead us to the future.

But…. my eyes could not stay open any longer as my mind slowly closed down in rhythm to the last evening light diminishing into darkness. Pillows cushioning my drooping head was a siren’s call impossible to refuse.

This morning, however, for whatever reason, all thoughts of “past” and “future” have been forgotten and I find myself firmly planted in the “present” and firmly caught up in an exuberance of being with “today’s life” as it deliciously falls around me in honeyed waves of pure delight.

These photos, one looking west toward Roaring Beach and the other looking north east out over the Roaring Beach water catchment, convey the morning’s crispness and clarity, but not the full sensual quality of its richness.

Six cockatoos fly squawking into the valley, four surfers are letting out screams of joy while riding the breaking dawn waves and the subtle fragrance of thousands of coastal flowers hang in the air. A chorus of banjo frogs provides light entertainment.

As I hold onto the preciousness of this moment, I also think of the Greenpeace tree sitters in the Styx Valley and my heart flies out to them in a joyous exhalation of praise for their brave work in defending this earth.

Maybe mornings are meant for the living, while evenings are for the living remembering their past.

Maybe this is why we tell stories around a fire under the cloak of night where the physical reality and powerful stimulus of this earth is shut out.