May Musings

The view from the hospital window was speckled with the tiny fires of deciduous trees

Yuma friend,

We made it to May, you and I. I know you are bombarded with information, and it means the world to me that you include this little newsletter among the media that bombards you.

I am writing this with a tiny little girl on my chest. She is grizzling about yesterday's vaccinations. Despite her protestations, she is also slowly dropping off to sleep. Eyes closed, heavy. I wish some grounding love for you too, to hold you through to the solstice.

Want me to read you a bedtime story? Here is for the audio version of this newsletter.

What I am wild harvesting right now: autumn leaves/ les feuilles mortes

I trace their veins, tiny hairs, sunspots. How alike we are to these other vascular beings...

When you were born, my Ember, the view from the hospital window was speckled with the tiny fires of deciduous trees. We knew that every year on your birthday we would be able to say "look, the hills are going ember for you".

The crepuscular hours of Ngunnawal Country are increasingly partial to frosts. The world is entering a time of blazing tones. The yellow of early wattle. The amber of late afternoon walks. The oranges, reds, and browns of spent leaves.

Lucy Jones writes about matrescence: the neurobiological transition into motherhood (paturescence being its gender-neutral analogue). There is a death in this transition: the death of the parent's former life. Jones describes picking up spent seedcases in the months after her daughter was born, how she identified with those husks.

I too feel shed. Altered. In the mirror, my clothes, hair, mannerisms, all subtly wrong. Our home in Wamboin, my favourite place in the world, no longer my nest. My former workplace, the reason I returned to Australia, a distant, unpleasant planet. My life sloughs off. I cut off all my hair. My thick waves sit, the size of a dog, inert on the salon floor. They are swept away. It is the season for sweeping. Hair. Leaves.

I am shedding. I am watching the world shed. As I settle into my new home, I walk the hills behind it. Different hills to the evergreen of Wamboin. Here in Chapman, fields of invasive plants are going fallow. Acres of caramel-coloured empty stalks. European trees dropping honeyed leaves. The world is the rich, homey, smell of carbon rot.

I pick crimson leaves off trees for you. Press then between the pages of books. Under the macro, I trace their veins, tiny hairs, sunspots. How alike we are to these other vascular beings, these light eaters.

Piles of autumn leaves break down into a home for new life. Create the compost for the spring bulbs to grow from. All the details of my life, when shed, make space for a tiny girl. A tiny girl who stares at me, watches me smile like she will be graded on it: blue eyes crossed in concentration.

I think that the smell of leaf litter is healing: that sacred space where rot becomes freshness. I could smell it all day, softening into its fecundity. And that is, perhaps, all we need to do. If your world is also shedding exponentially like mine, become humus. Or rather, accept the inevitability of becoming humus. Breathe with leaf litter.

Rug up, and sit in a park or your garden, next to a fresh mulch pile. Inhale, exhale. Notice the sharpness of the leaf litter, the richness. What other notes does the smell have? Is it sweet? Rotting? How does your body feel when it communes with leaf litter? I feel a loosening, a lightening. There is more space in my lungs, chest, mind.