Dear Earth,
It is hard to write to you. Each time I turn to meet your gaze my heart rate quickens and my throat constricts. It’s fear, it’s remorse and it’s grief, culminating deep in my chest.
Yet somehow it doesn’t feel like the right time for an apology. I’m working hard for a world in which I hope I can say that to you properly. That means forging space to let remorse rise up and out. Welcoming the grief – and here beginning the search for remedy. If grief truly is the price we pay for love, then let this be a love letter.
To me you were, at first, red bottle-brush teasing the corner of my childhood window, the waking morn held in kookaburra laughter and lyrebird song, the stinging of that first bee thumbed in curiosity; tiny, spiky blades of grass on which I learned to walk and the grounds of a garden I later learned to nurture. And that just a fraction from the small corner where I originated. This all a love for an earth that offers herself up to my imagination and to my nourishment, body and soul.
What blossomed was an awareness of not just diversity of landscapes, but of life itself.
Diversity so rich it’s staggering – and equally mournful to think that the world my parents were born into was doubly so.
If we are to curve this path, we must remember our place in this all.
Not other, but akin. Unified. A part of you, too.
I work each day so that remembrance comes soon.
All my love,
Ella