Learning To Stand

Kaleidoscopic moments / spinning / turning / slotting / shifting again before long / fifth / sixth / where-are-we trimester / of post-partum weaning and my second baby is nearly a child and learning to stand on the soles of his soft / cloud feet. His first footprints press through leather moccasins which I can hold in the middle of the palm of my hand. Small ovals, shining.

Ken, the Noongar1 word to mark the action of taking a step / Ken, the Noongar word to mark the act of walking / Ken, also the word to dance.

Fallow Fields

The land where I walked as a child has soil naturally low in nutrients—chalky, lime-rich and free-draining. From our old family home, the skyline is shaped by an Iron Age hill fort and, before that, a Bronze Age hilltop enclosure. The attic window faces a steep north-facing slope, carved with one of Wiltshire’s oldest white horses, revealing the white chalky bedrock underneath. It was upon these chalky fields that my dad once farmed.

Thousands of hectares in this county undergo fallowing. Fallow field rotation in Wiltshire involves resting workable land for a season to restore soil organic matter, manage weeds, and break disease cycles. This echoes the scriptures I read: God commands His people to work their land for six years, but in the seventh year, they were not allowed to sow seeds / prune vines / or harvest crops for profit. The land was given time to rest, lying naked under the open sky. I couldn’t stop thinking about these exposed and empty fields during my seventh year of living in Australia, just before my second child was born. It was a fallow year—a strange, silent rest defined by stillness / and not necessarily of my own choice. Fallow fields can like foolishness in the short run. I couldn’t see it then, and wouldn’t have wanted to, but now I realize there was an invisible, somewhat risky replenishing happening beneath the soil, with new designs unfolding. If all this sounds mysterious and vague, I can only agree that it was and that the harvest may or may not show in the years to come.

Blue Cornflowers

Looking back further, before the weight of motherhood took root, in one of our neighborhoods in Australia, I remember carrying a posy of my blue and purple cornflowers across the road to a neighbour; one of so many small acts of learning to participate in a community and culture that I wasn’t born into. We grew them from a small patch of soil that had lain empty since we moved into the house. As I carried them across the road in the day’s waning orange light, I heard a whisper on the breeze:

It’s a simple joy to give away the labour of sunlight.

In the fallow fields in ancient Hebrew scriptures, whatever grew without labour was left for the orphans and widows to take: whatever remained was for those who needed it most. Now I look at both my children and wonder what I’m leaving behind for those who need it / colours turning / blue cornflowers / green baby eyes / bronze bushland / sunset here / sunrise there / family here / family there / absence here / loss there / infinite possible combinations / infinite ways to give joy away / infinite ways that sunlight sustains us / but we can only grow cornflowers on less than 8% of the earth’s surface / we must be rooted somewhere / maybe upon a fallow field / in infinite light / it slows / to a still / hues slotting into place / forming a new design.

A Cemetery

Five Days before I became an Australian citizen, and just a few weeks ago, I was crouching in a Tuk-Tuk being driven through a cemetery in Manila. Leaving my camera behind, I watched flashes of tombstones, market fronts, and homes from a window the size of my hand were shifting / and turning / greys / sheeted rooves / pale blues / bold yellows / whitewashed / patterns / spinning / slotting.

This was the first family I had returned to visit in over a decade of work. I was last here eight years ago, when their daughter was still a child.

Those few weeks ago, I saw her. I hugged her. I met her son. She asked why I remembered her. Both of us now mothers.

In a kaleidoscope, a tiny shift in a single bead is multiplied by six or eight, transforming the entire design.

Here we both were, years later, her and I, mothers, turning, together in the same cramped room.

Here in this cemetery, people take their place quietly, and somewhat invisibly, amongst ancestors. Clearing out these cemetery slums are a priority of the government during eviction drives, but many residents rely on jobs inside the graveyards, like stone sweeping, floristry and masonry. Though often controlled by informal syndicates, many of these communities are concealed to the general population. My entry here was concealed. Homes here are defined by change, impermanence and fragility; rotating shapes.

When I had visited last time, a child had drawn a coffin in this house on the boarded stairwell wall in black ink. Now, I saw drawings of playgrounds and swings in coloured crayons. I see the family’s house extension, their pride. I witness her composure, her permanence in this place, even though I ask, “Where will you go?” reaching for a pillar of certainty into her future. I listen as my colleague asks through the archway of the past, “What would you go back and tell your younger self, if you could?” and I hear her reply: “That my little dreams mattered.”

After my visit, a friend asked me, ‘Had anything changed since your last visit?’ and, in the most visible ways, not really. They were still living as ‘squatters’ between tombstones, their toothbrush holder, different now, but still nailed to the same cement wall.

But, in impossibly harder ways to measure, I sensed knowledge, maturity and wisdom. More children ran between the walls; flowers grew between the fractures. Her parents had jobs. The family were healthy. New life had been raised here, grown here, amongst the dead.

***

I thought of her / three days later when I held a paper certificate / of Australian citizenship / in my hands / wondering what my own little dreams once were / and hearing my own question echo // where will you go // wondering whether I had inherited someone else’s dream / it’s a strange thought I know / but some days / I don’t know how to walk through this bizarre dual inheritance beneath my feet / Ken, the Noongar action of taking a step forward / Ken / between the chalky green hills / of my birth / and the dry sand of my children’s country / between an official certificate of citizenship / between

all the shining / shards / that make us citizens / of earth and of heaven

between displacement / and return / between an abundant harvest / growing from fallow fields / between the tombstones / and the cornflowers / between the first baby steps and the worn out shoes /the colours turning / rolling / shifting / shining / and we sing / as the colours turn / that it is simple enough / to enjoy / the labour / of sunlight.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

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Words I Can’t Stop Thinking About :

• “About ten years ago, I photographed a craftsman who makes sumi ink. I asked him, “What is the most beautiful black?” He paused for a moment, then answered, “The feathers of a crow wet with rain.” I still remember those words.” - , Photographer at Beyond the Frame
  

• “These days, I am trying to see myself and the people around me with tourist’s eyes. I try to remain curious, as if I’ve never seen any of this before.” - , I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him. (CW : suicide, addiction)
  

• “The laws of light shroud those who lurk in the deep.” - , in her recent blog, Only Light at Between Two Seas.
  

All this is impossible to summarise, but…this little Newsletter and Substack Platform has been a space I’ve turned up at in many of those seasons. It’s not been as frequent as I’ve liked but I’ve been there, letting my words fall into sentences and stories and poems. Courage and Consistency. Courage and consistency.

I haven’t strategised my growth. I’ve tried to be honest with my readers and myself. I try to ignore my subscriber count because I don’t want numbers to make me feel brave or complacent or performative.

“The Honeyeater Press” name was a nod to the 300 Regent Honeyeaters left in the wild in Australia, where I now live. As their numbers decline, Regent Honeyeaters are losing their unique melody, trading their ancestral “heart-song” for the borrowed notes of others.

When I started this Substack I wanted to learn to listen again, while also reclaiming and remembering my own voice. I’ve made so much progress with this internally offline and also on here, even if that isn’t evidenced by my post frequency!

✨ To honour five years of this thing and to better fit the present and the future, I’m doing a rebrand and giving “The Honeyeater Press” a new name ✨

Here’s an insight into that process, below, follow along for the name reveal below.

I tested four title options with my family and friends – this was probably the most inspiring and insightful part of the process (thank you dear ones!) but that final click for the exact name change didn’t happen at the start.

So I let the design process and visuals lead the way (surprise surprise).

I landed on ‘The Looking Glass’ to mirror the Seen, Unseen subtitle. I loved that it was whimsical and light-themed, but the surf vibes of the visuals felt a bit too playful for the depth of my content. I loved the bold palette, but decided it was a better fit for my beach bum kid’s clothing line or coastal jewellery collection that I’ll probably never launch.

Back to the drawing board. With every round of design I inched towards clarity. My designer patient and I was having to be patient with my own process too.

In February, some friends and family suggested that ‘The Honeyeater Press’ was most ‘me’ out of all the name options we were testing. I agreed but I wondered if it was most ‘me’ because it’s the title which launched my writing online for the first time. Chicken and Egg. Egg and Chicken. My love and practice of writing came first, then the newsletter Honeyeater, to house that writing. Many people entered my writing through the window of Honeyeater, so perhaps just by association it seemed a good fit?

We played around with some Honeyeater visuals:

I still love the metaphor; a bird’s-eye view and the search of finding sweetness in arid landscapes, but it felt too tied to the Australian-Boorloo land on which I live. So much of my writing explores global events and stories from around the world. 2026 is also the year I’ll become a dual citizen, and we create as citizens, after all. I needed a name that could ‘cross’ borders, find connections, build bridges and map the fractures of the world.

Another hope for the new name was to use it to build a bridge between my short form online content and my book project. I felt that Honeyeater Press didn’t do this well but also maybe I just wanted a change!

I needed a subtitle to ground the title in focus and weight, and to help explain to people what exactly they were reading. This process really helped me clarify the title!

We landed on…..

Indigo Atlas
Field Notes : Following the Fractures to Find the Light

Indigo is where blue fades into violet; a transition shade, or a hue, rather than a primary or secondary colour. So much of my writing is about looking beyond a first glance at something. Indigo represents this second, further look, something you may not see at first, but you might notice again on a second look.

Atlas was in the title of my draft book manuscript some time ago. It’s now not and I was a bit sad to let it go :( but I’ve always had an affection for the power of language to map inner thoughts, to connect cultures, and each other. Physical space and geographical space is a key theme in my writing and the idea of maps or atlases resonates with this really well.

I love that the circle logo looks like a porthole or telescope monocle, a planet and a marble. I love that the wiggle shapes across the circle look like a fingerprint, rivers, contours on a map, wood grain, cracks and fractures. The designer aced it.

I chose the chunky letters as I liked the bold visual, like a headline. ( I was found it hard to choose between option #1 and option #4 with the text).

By this point, I felt that I’d bothered the designer enough so we wrapped up the project, as I knew only a few minor tweaks are needed to the colour palette for the final final version. Then, I’ll replace the old thumbnail and title in the next week or so.

TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Indigo Atlas
Field Notes : Following the Fractures to Find the Light

It’s who I am, it’s who I’ll be, it’s what I do. Let’s go!

Let me tell you: I’m glad I’m not an astronaut. I have claustrophobia and the thought of being propelled into space with four other people inside a capsule the size of a parking lot gives me palpitations. But, over the last few days, when I have carried the weight of my sleeping sons across my shoulders from the car to our front door under the wash of the moon, I’ve looked up and thought: Where are they now and what can they see?

Which side of the earth is Artemis II orbiting right now? What does the little ‘glass marble’ of our planet look like today while they eat their breakfast? How do stars burn when there is no atmosphere to make them flicker? Craving the celestial silence of space for a few minutes, I wipe down the highchair of a weaning baby and blow-up balloons for our four-year-olds birthday. In the background, I play “Moon” by Sleeping At Last—the song my husband and I walked down the aisle to. Our wedding fell just one week after the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. If you listen closely to the track, you can hear the flickers of NASA audio clips—the launch, landing, and the long journey home—scattered through the melody. The composer wrote the piece by imagining what the music for such an adventure might sound like. For us, marriage was that “great adventure,” our own voyage into the unknown. It has been years since I really listened, but this week, I keep returning to it.

I am pulled toward these reflections because astronauts occupy a vantage point I will never reach. They see what I cannot; perhaps they even feel things I never will. As a visual storyteller and photojournalist, I spend my life thinking about the relationship between the seen and the unseen. But it goes deeper than my job. It’s my faith—a belief in an invisible God made visible through a human who walked, breathed, and suffered among us. What is mysterious that has been made known? What is far that has come close? What is abstract that has become personal? (Also, maybe it’s because, I’m glad it’s not me up there, my hair floating wildly around my face without a scrunchie.)

From that small, distant vessel, we have heard words spoken from the depths of the human heart. We’ve witnessed the Commander’s grief for his late wife: “It’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.” We’ve heard Victor Glover remind us that we aren’t here by chance: “In all of this emptiness... you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist—together.” We’ve been reminded that from 250,000 miles away, Earth doesn’t look like a map of countries defined by borders; it looks like home. One world. One story.

We’ve also seen a microphone floating around in silence, possibly in response to some remarks by a certain contraversial leader. More floating microphones please.

I’ve loved these dispatches. But one specific part of their journey haunts me: the moment the spacecraft moves behind the Moon. Radio contact vanishes. A moment of intense, unprecedented isolation begins. The mission disappears. The tether is cut. Forty minutes of complete invisibility. A communications blackout. Silence from the far side of the moon.

These scientific facts settle into my bones as feelings. I think of those 2,400 seconds of silence. I have had my share of them: those dark pauses, the lost contact, the days of hiding or sorrow. The “middle” days—between the struggle and the solution, the question and the answer. The days when God is on mute and there is nothing to do but wait. I know them well—those “Silent Saturdays” between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, when everyone else seems to have a testimony and I have only the void.

I once wrote about Ray Parkin, who, while a Prisoner of War, painted a watercolor of a Lantern Bug. It was his own season of lost contact, a “night of the soul” set against the horror of the Death Railway. I am still figuring out why that drawing holds such power over me. Partly, it is a testament to resilience—the way a tiny, colorful creature allowed Ray to reclaim his humanity in a place where men were treated like animals.

His painting is a reminder that we live within a juxtaposition of scales: colorful insects and global wars; tsunamis and wasp stings; a tiny capsule housing four heartbeats and the fractured, vast cratered shadow of the moon. Ray’s beetle has become a symbol for me. It reminds me that I can be simultaneously out of control—helpless, limited, and unremarkable—while remaining full of specificity, color, and purpose.

Small, specific, touchable, sparks of life. They are what we need to see outside of us. They are what we need to feel within us.

Maybe not that strange then, that I’ve started caring more about the vast expanse above my head now that four humans are reporting from there; in expertise, in grief, in discovery, poetry and wonder.

And, while I’m not sure my own stomach would have held it, I find it comforting knowing the astronauts were apparently eating maple creams during those forty minutes of silence on the far side of the moon; a little taste of home and a reminder of who they are on the other side.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

I return my focus to the ground
beneath my feet,
the texture of my palms,
the curls and swirls of my fingerprints and
in this moment, I am safe.

I trust in the quiet,
unseen weavers of Good
who are working alongside me
in every corner of the earth.

All is well
within my little world.

I am a soft place
for the world’s sharp
stories to land,
yet they do not all need to stay
with me.

It is possible for me to be a
calm presence during
global uncertainty.

I believe in a justice
that is sometimes invisible,
and mysterious, but certain.

I will not apologise
for feeling overwhelmed.

I will notice colour and detail
in the small things
when the big things feel uncertain.1

I will find purpose in my rage
and redirect it in productive ways,
to overcome evil instead of adding to it.

I give myself permission to look away
knowing this doesn’t mean
that I don’t care but allows me to be present
to the people and places before me.

I will release the weight of things I cannot touch
and pour my attention into what I can.

Even when the news is loud
and information is fractured
I will feel the rhythm of grace
steady in my own heartbeat.

I am grateful
for what is ordinary - just a simple, unremarkable day.

“Mercy, healing and redemption, are God’s great labours”.2

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The breeze conducts the ocean like a million orchestras. My skin submerges to its beat.

The sand stretches beyond my eye-line. The Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, The Bay of Biscay then the English Channel; I know the way home from here. Then again, home ripples like a mirage above me.

The song of an ancient king hums inside my thoughts, “Your thoughts, O God, are precious and uncountable, like grains of sand.” We cannot sift them through our fingertips. We cannot see them with our eyes. Maybe we are not supposed to try.

Today, the forests are on fire and the headlines hold bullet holes. I try not to count all the reasons to be afraid and angry, but instead scatter them against the infinite depths of Goodness, Love, Kindness, Mercy. Beneath me, the sprawling ocean floor is clicking and scratching and bustling in these soft tunes.

Less than twenty percent of the seafloor has been mapped by modern technology. We have only seen a fraction of the visible. My gaze cannot stretch to the depths. Is it supposed to? Am I content to live with mystery?

Much-Afraid (in the allegorical tale, Hind’s Feet on High Places) asks her companion about the hidden mysteries of earth,

“Sometimes I have wondered about the wildflowers,” she says to the Shepherd. “It seems strange that they should grow in places like this where the goats and cattle walk all over them. They have so much beauty and sweetness to give, and hardly anyone sees them.”

The look the Shepherd turned on her was very beautiful. “Nothing that My Father and I have made is ever wasted,” He said quietly, “and the wildflowers have a wonderful lesson to teach. Many people live a quiet, ordinary life…Some of My servants have won great respect from other people…but always their greatest victories are like the wildflowers, those which no one knows about….”

Again, am I content to live with mystery? One of my morning readings last week was titled ‘an invitation to irrelevance’ and I caught my breath a little when I read the title because no one wants to be irrelevant, really. I don’t want to. But the Christ that I follow in the scriptures that I read, reversed human standards of importance and visibility. Hidden acts of service are blessed, He said. People invisible to society are welcomed into the Kingdom of God. Humanity looks at the visible body, God looks at the invisible heart.

I hear my pulse more clearly underwater.

A shoal of silvery, blue fish swim close, almost touchable, and expect them to dart timidly away from me. I am surprised that neither I, nor they, flinch. Our bones are held buoyant by the oxygen visiting our lungs; each breath keeps us close to the sun.

I feel a little lighter – a single breath more weightless – at the fact that we have not displaced each other. No one saw but us.

And while the orchestra played, we were unafraid.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

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Pantone’s Colour of the Year 2026 was announced five days ago. A few days before that, writer and literary agent Anna Sproul-Latimer predicted, “Even if I’m wrong, whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll speak to our collective longing for revelation in nature.” As per Latimer’s predictions, this year’s chosen colour was revealed to be a shade of off-white, a balance between warm and cool tones, like the clouds. Simple. Yet, not that simple, it turns out.

After the announcement there was a frenzy of online discussion around the colour choice. Each year, Pantone relies on a global team of colour specialists to choose the shade, drawing on influences from fashion, television, design, art and sporting events. This year, the colour was been called ‘tone deaf’ during an increasing time of white nationalism and supremacy, ‘disconnected’ from creative practice, ‘unimaginative and boring’ and ‘dystopian’ by analysts, trend forecasters, some news outlets and commentators.

Eyes down, between nappy changes and folding the pram, lifting and aching under the clouds dancing, I found the online debate both laughable and sad.

Cloud Dancer: the colour of a blank page, icy magnetic poles bookending our planet, a cloud before the storms roll in, milk which nourishes the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us, summer lightning refracting energy and power, light — the sun, which rises on us all each day (though we probably don’t deserve it). She mentions all of these in some way. Nature. Longing. Collective.

How fractured we are, our human race, to take a colour — not created by us but merely found and named by us — and weaponize it, dissect it and debate it, rather than simply delight in it. How fractured we are to begin with categorisation instead of curiosity and to wield power instead of giving it away, surrendered. Forget the debate about Cloud Dancer signalling nationalism - isn’t this how racism starts?

How fractured we are, that racism even exists.

The irony isn’t lost on me that the frenetic online debate contradicts Pantone’s desire for the colour to reflect simplicity and quietness amid hyperactivity; stillness for a world on the move; peace when countries are at war.

The backlash alone highlights how a neutral colour can become politically charged because of our current cultural climate. I don’t deny the significance of this. But doesn’t it also speak to other kinds of reactions that sit within us too? Perhaps Cloud Dancer is a prompt to lift our eyes higher than ourselves, maybe even, higher than the earth we stand on.

Interestingly, one 2020 study1 found that almost half of the 4,500 people surveyed from 30 different countries*, associated the colour white with relief. Are we that hesitant to look away from our screens, walk outside, raise our gaze and surrender?

Eyes lifted: white, in many cultures outside of our Euro-centric ones, symbolises the presence of God – holiness stooping to humanity, heaven bending to earth, love and power entering our aching world. In some Amazonian cultures, white is made from natural materials like grey clays and crushed shells and symbolises purity and spiritual power. In ancient Rome, Romans wore white togas as symbols of citizenship; it meant they belonged to a collective bigger than themselves. In many cultures, white symbolises purity, a value that our culture cannot quite seem to articulate anymore.

Language is shaped by what we see, and our language also determines how we see. In 2006, a remote people group from Namibia called the Himba were asked about the colour green2 During the research, a group of Himba people were shown a collection of twelve green tiles. Eleven were the same colour and one was a different shade of green. They were asked to choose the tile that looked different to the others. I looked at the tiles and I didn’t immediately see a tile that stood out. The Himba found it immediately. Their language has multiple words to describe the colour green. When the group was shown another set of 12 tiles, with 11 green and one blue, they were unable to pick out the single blue tile. In their language, shades of green and blue all fall under the one word. The research concluded that language undeniably affects the way we see — or don’t see — colour. Himba eyes can see a shade of green that I can’t. I can see a shade of blue that Himba eyes can’t pick out. If our language shapes what colours we notice, perhaps our culture shapes what colours we resist? Would someone who is Himba or Berinmo or Burmese object quite as much to Cloud Dancer white as our own cultural critics have?

Eyes lifted : we see the clouds that give us rain to water our crops which feed us. We cannot control them. We cannot touch them, unlike the devices we hold every day. Surely any colour is inadequate to express the ache and longing of our human hearts or our daily existence on earth. Maybe we need to remember that a single colour cannot feed the hungry or stop a war, and surely — if anything — colour should make us feel more human and more connected to each other?

Scientifically, white isn’t a single wavelength: It’s a perception of all light, or a mix of colours; white is the presence of all colours. Talk about metaphor.

A scripture from my faith tradition about seeing generously comes to mind: ‘If you live with stingy, ungiving eyes your body is as dark as a dug-out, white-washed tombstone, but if you open your eyes in wonder, your body fills with light.’3 What is on the inside of us needs more attention, more love, more gentleness, Christ is saying.

In the online articles about Pantone’s Colour of the Year, most of the people opining or offering critique and those quoted are in positions of pay, power or influence, and most are speaking from Euro-centric or English-speaking cultures. But what about those who aren’t interviewed? I think about Princess, a girl who lives between tombstones in a large slum in Manila. Meeting her challenged many prejudices I held about people living in poverty, or people facing hunger, or people who are illiterate. One was that people living between tombstones wouldn’t take pride in something so small or basic as having a clean T-shirt. Yet, Princesses’ clean, bright T-shirt billowed the colour of Cloud Dancer.

In my subtitle, I quote Laurie Pressman, Vice-President of Pantone, who responds to critics of the colour choices’ racial undertones, explaining:

“Skin tones did not factor into this at all. With Peach Fuzz and Mocha Mousse, people were asking if this was about skin tones. And I think we were going, ‘Wow, really?’ Because, for us, it’s about, at such a basic level, what are people looking for that colour can hope to answer?”

The question circles me these past few days.

Caitlin Napier from Marie-Claire Australia ends her article, Unpacking the Controversy Around Pantone’s 2026 Colour of the Year by asking,

“…in the current political climate, where race, identity, and nationalism are such charged issues, can a colour so intertwined with historical and social significance truly offer the reprieve Pantone envisions?”

We all need reprieve. We all need relief.

Maybe Cloud Dancer reveals the rest that we didn’t know we needed.

“…The voice of God does not pander,

offers no five year plan, no long-term

solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.”

The Voice of God, Mary Kerr

The Butterfly

My twin sister recently had to return to a place that held difficult memories for her. She was leading a school trip with her students and she called me before the trip voicing how anxious she felt having to revisit that place. During her visit, and on a day-long walk, a butterfly came to rest on the shoulder and then the lapel of her jacket. She called me, showing me. Of all the places and all the times. In high gusts and across open plains, this butterfly clung to her for hours; an unexpected companion. At the end of the hike she had to gently lift the butterfly off her jacket and set it down in long grass.

It can be exhausting and unnecessary finding meaning in everything and I don’t think we’re supposed to live like that. We are finite creatures with limited time and our interpretations can be mistaken. While I won’t be looking for the Grand Canyon in a piece of toast* (as Andy Squyres beautifully, humorously puts it) there are details and memories and colours that I cannot escape; things that hold meaning or significance that found me when I wasn’t searching for them. Glimpses of God, present. Glimpses of God, good. Glimpses of God, interested and involved in our lives. Glimpses of a Creator who has intricately designed a world that we won’t always understand. Intricacies, beating with life, can find us while we traverse blustery plains. Unexpected companions can meet us in painful places.

The Geese

My sister and I both read a poem a few years ago about not looking for meaning in your coffee or in the flight of the wild geese. It’s a wonderful poem. It talks about the importance of having a hot bath or eating a sandwich, which, if you know my sister or I, is our cure for almost everything:

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you

could be cured with a hot bath,

says God from the bowels of the subway.

but we want magic, to win

the lottery we never bought a ticket for.

(Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace

the suffering.) The voice of God does not pander,

offers no five year plan, no long-term

solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.

Don’t look for your initials in the geese

honking overhead or to see thru the glass even

darkly. It says the most obvious crap—

put down that gun, you need a sandwich.

Brilliant. Anyways, in the middle of our phone conversation about this very poem I looked down and saw the shape of a wild goose flying west in my coffee. I gasped. I only drink (decaf) coffee five times a year. A little spooked, we laughed and laughed and laughed.

Our childhood home sits under the flight path of the Canada geese and their formations flyover twice a year, marking a change in seasons.

When I had my heart broken by someone I loved many years ago, I sat with my parents talking and praying and a flock of the geese flew overhead as we prayed. It makes sense; they’re the Holy Spirit Geese, my Dad said at the time seriously.

The night that my husband and I married, our friend was driving us through the southwest countryside in England. In the jet-black darkness, a flock of white geese waddled slowly across the road, making us almost slow to a stop and wait. I can’t remember a time when this had happened before; it was as if time stood still for a few seconds, while we waited, hand in hand, before our next chapter began.

They have been our temporary companions during critical moments of our lives and maybe it’s just a coincidence or maybe it is, like my Dad once said, a sign of the Holy Spirit. Almost definitely they are a reminder that we need to eat a sandwich.

The Backpacker

Four days after our second son was born in June this year, a German backpacker went missing in the Australian bush a few hours’ drive from our home after parking her car and leaving it behind – something advised against in these parts. In her case, her car had become bogged and mechanically unsound after she became disoriented, and she left the vehicle to seek help.

I couldn’t tell you at the time why I became somewhat obsessed with this news story, but we waited for one day, then a few more, then one week, and then another, holding our breath, wondering if she would be found.

Will she have enough resources to survive? Will she find help? Who will save her? The questions I wondered about this German backpacker, I also wondered about myself, as I juggled recovering from childbirth, and we learned to manage the urgent needs of a newborn and the very different needs of a toddler.

The backpacker used the sun to navigate, heading west. She survived for nearly two weeks drinking from puddles and rainwater and sleeping in caves and other shelters and eventually found on a bush track by a member of the public after walking around twenty-four kilometres.

Guided by the sun’s light, she knew the rough direction she needed to head in. Her rescuer was a local farmer who had been driving her vehicle and trailer along a remote road who said it could have been a number of days before someone was to drive that same road again.

“Miracle is a word that gets bandied about a lot, but to survive 12 days and cross-country — she went cross country to come to my road,” the farmer said.

After she was found, the police posted a statement which she wrote online,

“The thought of all the people who believed in me, searched for me, and kept hoping for me gave me the strength to carry on during my darkest moments,”

and I nod, knowing that these words are also for me too.

Last week I was describing to someone having two homes on different sides of the planet; two places I love, two places I feel caught between, two places which have shaped me, two countries I belong to in some way.

“What is your North Star then?” he asked me. My answer was one word and came instinctively, quick as a heartbeat.

Since then, I keep thinking about all the other ways I might have answered. I also keep thinking about the backpacker following the rising sun — her only reliable compass, and a farmer who believes in miracles and all the others who were out looking for her to make sure she came home.

_____

Who have your unexpected or surprising companions been in difficult moments? I’d love to hear about them! Please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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Frost

I’m convinced that a layer of frost covers the grass one morning in late July. My husband says it’s just the grass clippings from mowing the lawn the day before. I kneel so close to the lawn in dawn light to take a closer look that I wonder what the neighbours must think. Mild winters are common here in the metro area of West Australia; frost is rare. “Yeah, Mumma! It’s silver!” shouts our oldest son with exuberant certainty across the still crisp morning air, also sticking his nose to the grass.

For me, frost’s presence, or dew (we’ll take either at this point) where the warmth of the day and the cold of the night collide is a shimmer of beauty and intricate design, a vital dose of hope to my wintering body.

I love collecting the phrases that writers use to describe these transient glimpses of beauty. Lamott describes them as ‘a sigh’ of God’s presence, ‘a visible sign of an invisible grace’ and poet John Donahue calls them ‘little contours’ you can glance sideways at in bleakness. Greig in his book ‘Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer’ calls them ‘a wealth of little epiphanies glimmering in the puddles at our feet,’ that are much harder to see if we ‘rage against the heavens, remain[ing] impoverished in our pain.’ Signposts, presence, design – I need them now – and yet don’t we always need them?

They can’t be marred by bad news. Our eyes cannot see them all; they exist without always being seen. Our hands cannot hold them all; perhaps too far to be touchable or too near to be holdable. They exist without demands or agendas or fanfare. Their patterns tell stories that we don’t always understand.

Late to the party, I’m reading Katherine May’s Wintering. I laughed my way through her chapter on visiting Stonehenge during Winter Solstice, knowing only too well the rhythms of the year around these stones and all the quirky, unapologetic rituals associated with them, having attended primary school on the edge of a Neolithic stone circle. I keep thinking about her words, during my own wintering of my fourth trimester,

“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”

In these post-partum months, my bones feel bare, like a delicate skeleton of frost branching across a blade of grass, slowly thawing. In time, the morning light brings gentle relief and beauty.

Overheard

I was feeding our six-week-old in the lobby of a church building which has a neighbouring café in the throes of sleep deprivation and six women were sitting close by in pink and grey hijabs. I come to this café almost weekly and have never seen this group of women before. I laid my baby across my lap as I held the nursing cloth over my shoulder and tied it around my neck and prepared to feed him. I was sharing the only sofa with two of the ladies and couldn’t avoid over-hearing their conversation. They swapped stories about their husbands, laughing heartily “I can see him sitting in his driveway on his phone. Then he comes inside the house and needs to use the toilet and spends another twenty minutes there!” The women chat about their weekly grocery budget and what time of day they pack their kid’s lunchboxes and whether they let the watch TV before or after school or before or after homework and I recognise the delight found in these little moments of motherhood.

A lady who isn’t a Muslim sits with them and one of the ladies quietly shares with her “Did you know that in the Quran we have a verse that says that motherhood is ‘hardship upon hardship? It also translates as motherhood is weakness upon weakness. Much like how Allah is described as ‘Noorun ala Noor’ (light upon light), we say things twice to emphasise them, she says. The depth and breadth of motherhood, of God, can’t be underestimated.

I know a scripture which says that there is a power for this weakness that is not my own, a power that perfects itself in vulnerability and I rest here, inside the freedom and acceptance of these words. I can lean on others and I don’t have to think I can do it all. I’m given grace for each day.

I turn a little away from them on the sofa, wipe my tears with the cotton nursing cloth and let out a little sigh, grateful for another little miracle, grateful to be understood.

Iridescent Eyes

In an afternoon haze, my newborn eyes seem to hold rainbows. I don’t understand what I’m seeing and wonder if my post-partum hormones are making me a little delusional, so I turn my head and look from different angles and turn his head gently to get a better look. In light, I can’t see the colours. In shadows and darker rooms, I can see them more clearly.

I read that this film of colour across the eye, like when fuel and water mix, is a layer of lipid oil on the surface of the eye, preventing the watery, thin part of the tears from evaporating too quickly. This layer of thin oil keeps the baby healthy and stabilizes the surface of the eye.

There is an impossibility to documenting these tiny rainbows with my camera; I’ve tried. I don’t that it’s a coincidence that I can’t freeze this moment in time. I can’t hold the fluidity of the colours within a still frame, much like motherhood, much like these post-partum days.

I tell my sister on the phone ‘I can see rainbows in his eyes’, and she thinks I’ve lost it this time. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks, and we laugh without drawing much breath for a few minutes.

Later, I research newborn tears. I watch a video of a father looking at his child’s tears under a microscope.and learn that tears under a microscope reveal delicate crystals that are formed by salts, antibodies, and other proteins as the water evaporates.

I look at the work of photographer Rose Lynn Fisher and her project ‘The Topography of Tears’ which she began during a period of personal grief. Over eight years and using a 1960s Zeiss camera, she photographed the range of her emotional tears by shedding them onto glass slides and putting them under the microscope. She found that the visual appearance of each tear was unique, like a fingerprint. Tears from the same emotion, or even the same moment, looked different from one another and couldn't be sorted into categories, “my tears revealed to me momentary landscapes…an ephemeral atlas,” Fisher said.

For babies, these completely one-off patterns are much more fragile and sensitive to humidity than the cell structure of adult tears and their formation is a sign that the tears can protect the baby's eyes from infection.

Their power is in their fragility.

Another contour, another sigh, another atlas, another reason to keep believing: the crystals inside baby tears look like the frosted miracle of another new day.

THREE // Your First Solo Swimming Class

Was it only yesterday
your baby-sky-eyes watched wagtails
from the stroller
and today you run
to the car, goggles in hand,
chattering and chirping,
ready for your first solo swimming class.

SEE YOUR PRETTY? and
THERE’S YOUR BEAUTIFUL
you call at blooming bougainvillea
and flashes of purple phlox,
as if you think all this
beauty belongs to me.

At a red light, poems pool
in the corners of my eyes
and drip down my chin
and I cannot stop them.

I must learn to let you enter the water,
body from my body, skin
from my skin. You will learn
to breathe, exhaling bubbles
beneath the surface and
I must breathe
new lessons too.

You name the water fountains,
water mountains — as if water could hold
its own shape,
as if years could hold
their own shape,
as if you could hold
mountains between your fingers
and you still
believe you can.

You slide into the pool alone.

I drift,
lingering on the edge, my toes
immersed,
same ocean
no tide
just a moment
longer please
while the mountains glisten beside us.

When class has finished you climb,
drenched, out of infinity
and onto my lap
soaking my clothes,
clinging,
close,
still
and the instructor smiles
and says,

Now
is the moment
when love is simply
love.

ONE YEAR WITHOUT YOU // A Displaced Bouquet

Displaced beauty laid

with devotion—

severed.

Grief has bordered

me between

the shoreline

between solid

and liquid, land

and river, touch

and memory.

We are uprooted

between

soil and sea.

Can Eden grow

from saltwater?

Can love grow

from loss?

Can someone else’s

grief

become my own?

Is it possible we love you

more now

than we ever did?

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections below. It’s been a slower season than normal for my writing as we’re expecting a baby in July. Please know I’m so grateful for every person who has subscribed recently. I look forward to bringing you more polaroids and essays soon.

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A few things I’ve enjoyed listening to, reading or thinking about lately:

• Writing as an Act of Love - The Writer’s Circle Podcast by : An Interview with Andy Crouch
  Andy Crouch helps writers reframe their work with one big reminder: your readers are image-bearers.
  

• For the Advice Cards at Baby Showers - A Poem by Kate Baer
  

• This quote from :
  "To write is to gather shimmering pictures, holding them up to the light as they ripple and glow, turning them over in your mind like shards of iridescent shell picked up on the beach and rolled between your fingers.”
  

• Re-Enchanting The Life We Have - Re-enchanting Podcast hosted by Belle Tindall and Justin Brierly : An Interview with about the burden of geographical and cultural disorientation, living with ADHD, the power of poetry and the transforming love of God.
  
  Oh, and if you didn’t catch it…
  
  Here’s an interview I did with the brilliant over at :

  Things I Wrote Down

  The photos you're brave enough to take - 10 Qs with Ella Tan

  Ella Tan has travelled to some of the most vulnerable populations on earth to capture important moments. Guess what she found? Dignity. Imagination. Even when it scared her…

  Read more

  a year ago · 3 likes · Andrew Kooman

My husband and I left the gate half-open exchanging fiery words on a searing summer’s day. We were late for church and hurrying. Sand filled my sandals as I clipped our toddler into his car seat, then again as I climbed into the car. I muttered something about the heat turning the driveway into a desert at this time of year.

When we arrived, my son and husband peeled off to the children’s area. Alone, I eyed the chair nearest the door on the edge of the congregation and was motioned to sit down by Ron, his white hair a little shorter since I last saw him, trimmed behind his hearing aids. His hands echoed silent words as he motioned me to sit down.

Out of his shirt chest pocket, he pulled a palm-sized tattered notebook. DIRECT THE BUS TO STOP was scrawled over one page. He flicked over a page, CLICK THE LID. POUR THE JUG. WATER WILL FLOW. He flicked another page. His sentences were simple. His lettering clumsy and child-like. His notes were urgent and spectacular — far from the confusing and conflicting messages contained and shared on the devices we carry in our palms.

THEY SLEPT WHEN HE NEEDED THEM, he wrote of the disciples in Gethsemane, as the preacher stood a few metres away from us, reminding us of how utterly human we all are.

I felt my fists open. Each message was like a feather landing in the centre of my tight palm. On Ron’s pages, capital letters and lowercase letters mixed. Ruled lines weren’t followed. Some pages held two or three messages squeezed onto the page. Some notes trailed off, between pages and between lines.

Then, our preacher talked of the woman caught in adultery and thrown by a mob before the feet of Jesus.

Ron wrote : THE SINLESS AMONG YOU: THROW THE FIRST STONE.

Each note was an arrow piercing my pride. Then, in our preacher’s story, an ancient preacher stooped to the ground and scrawled his own urgent and spectacular message into the sand filling the sandals of the people with fiery hearts.

Symbols. Letters. Signs. Fists turned to feathers. Dropped arrows. What was written that caused the woman’s accusers to drop their rocks from the centre of their palms and walk away? What was scrawled in the sand that day?

There was nothing mysterious about Ron’s notes as he transcribed the sermon– quite the opposite. They were unquestionable and stark. I wonder if Jesus’s words were the same that day.

Apparently, it doesn’t take many words to give a drink to the thirsty, to save a life, or to stop a bus.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

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A few things I’ve enjoyed listening to or reading lately:

Why is Gen Z having an identity crisis? - and
”I think that young people view themselves like products to be sold, to be analyzed and optimized, and put on display. And I mean, they’ve grown up managing their personal brand... I think that gives a lot of feeling of anxiety, of not knowing who you are.” [Also on Spotify]

On “The Man in the Water” and the value of writers - “Why bother? Why bother doing any of this anymore—writing, publishing, storytelling, advocating, thinking? Trying?

In an age when despair seems geologic in its immutability, on a planet that no longer seems remotely interested in what we have to offer, why?”

Time Forager’s Weekly Visual Journals -
Helen’s visual journals have inspired me to start painting again. I love her colour palettes, style and encouragement that what we paint doesn’t need to be perfect, but there is joy to be found in the process.

In August 2011, one month after South Sudan announced their independence from the North, I sat in a briefing at the UN Headquarters in Yei, South Sudan. Behind white-washed walls and protected by roaming peacekeepers in sky blue helmets, I felt safer than I had moments earlier, even outside of those walls. Days earlier, a rebel faction had declared a ceasefire agreement with the government. Outside of the gates, peacekeeping vehicles roamed the streets, muddied by thick dust rising from the roads. The soil of the youngest nation on earth clung to the vehicles, dirtying them shades of orange, brown, red, almost hiding them from view.

I have written before that war leaves nothing untouched, even a strand of hair.1 The first colour of Landrover Green, also known as Light Green, wasn’t so much an aesthetic choice as a necessity2 – there was a surplus of this colour available after World War Two as it was no longer needed to paint Royal Air Force planes. This reference is one of many, I’m sure, that show the consequences of war on the colours of everyday life in technology, employment, farming, fashion and our own homes.

We have all been watching war, lately. We are hurting for others but often unable to help. We are begged to act but feel that our actions are a drop in the ocean of state-funded, powerful transnational decisions. We are asked to bear witness, but our eyes and bodies are bound in specific times and places. I recently told a photojournalist friend after seeing a harrowing video clip: “I’m lost. What can I do?” She expressed that she felt the same and suggested that we must keep listening and talking in a way that humanizes people — at the very least. Language brings colour. She also told me that it’s okay to weep.

Everywhere we look, our chequerboard minds divide us.3 With limited space and time, we, as lookers and image-viewers, can clutch at simplifications. We are numbed; expecting reality to fall into the stereotypes and categories we have created, closed off to unexpected beauty and colour and variance. Overwhelmed, our minds (and vision) skips to black and white: Good versus evil, rich versus poor, the past versus the present, the migrant versus the refugee, us versus them. It’s easier to view these dichotomies as stark opposites instead of mingled, messy, time-consuming intricacies – much like the dirtied underbelly of a white peacekeeping vehicle.

Psychologist, Dr Kevin Dutton, In Black and White Thinking, The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World, writes:

“Life works because our brains are black and white. But wisdom lies in knowledge of the grey; in the deeper understanding that although, as cognitive grandmasters, we are destined to play the game, the squares on the board, indeed the very board itself, do not exist.”

In Dutton’s book, he writes about meeting an extreme negotiator, Claire, who worked in China (she speaks Mandarin), Pakistan and Islamabad. She’s one of a small number of women to have ever negotiated successfully with the Taliban. Extreme negotiation, she says, is actually about building relationships. To communicate appropriately, understanding must come first. Claire tells the story of a school deep in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: one day, a woman ran to the school and informed two teachers that a section of the Taliban opposed to the education of women were heading their way. A class of thirty three girls was gripped by fear. The teachers calmly guided the girls back to their villages. The women stay put. Some half an hour later “when a squall of boots descend on the school yard, they serve up basins of rosehip and cardamom tea and saucers of barfi and laddu.” They put the commander and his men at ease, showing them around the classrooms and playground and inside store cupboards. They ran through the curriculum and explained to the commander that by learning to read and write girls will be able to better progress their Islamic studies. The next morning, the school bell rang across the mountain pass and the girls began their first lesson of the day.

I love this account because I don’t know if I could ever do what those teachers did. For a few simple moments, they challenged the us versus them divide; wisdom was found in the shades in between. Language and communication added colour. Understanding what mattered to the Taliban was important, and against daunting and dangerous odds, the teachers’ courage and creativity saved the school, and possibly even many lives that day.

This story also reminds me of an ancient scripture where Christ asks people to remember the chequerboard doesn’t exist : Give your coat to someone who wants to sue you. Pray for those who persecute you. Serve tea to your enemies. If those instructions make you angry; me too. Jesus is flipping justice and vengeance on its head. He models a shade in-between retaliation and a passive permission of evil. It sounds dangerous and risky because it is.

I have been raking the news for colour lately, but it’s hard to find. I have spent years noticing colour in some of the most vulnerable places on earth.4 Searching for colour and the ways that people express their creativity, imagination and care has kept me believing that the face of God is visible in anyone. Isn’t hate and hopelessness easier to find? It’s often easier to show too. Dignity and courage in the face of terror or extreme poverty or terror is what keeps me here. Not necessarily because I believe the whole world can be saved this way, but, I believe that maybe some lives can.

I will never forget meeting Wilson’s family who lived between tombstones in the Philippines. His family furnished their home with cups, baskets and chairs all the same shade of green, carefully collected over time. Did I assume the colour of life would be hard to find in the homes of those living between the dead?

I won’t forget Princess and her family, Wilson’s neighbours, who had nailed a small jar of toothbrushes to their bare cement wall. In a small alcove, too low for an adult to stand, next to a neat row of kitchen utensils hanging neatly on small nails, the container was attached to the wall. Inside were eight well-used toothbrushes, one for each member of the family. Here was strength in a cup – a daily routine of resilience on display in the fraying strands.

I don’t know why I was surprised that a family who lived in a graveyard brushed their teeth. Surprise often shows me that my prejudices are without proof. Had I really come to believe that people living in poverty would be dirty? Had I assumed that a family living between graves would not take pride in something so basic as teeth-brushing? Was my vision so skewed by the death and the dying, that I had forgotten that living consists of hours and minutes filled with tasks which bring us order, comfort and satisfaction? Did I forget that as created beings, we will always create?

I also won’t forget MawPaw*, a refugee from Myanmar, telling me about a seedling tree she planted outside her home the same week she had to flee her country and how she hopes to return one day to see how much it has grown. Did I forget that some refugees long to return home, but can’t? Did I overlook the stories of refugees who can and do return home for good?5

There is much in the world that leaves me reeling: all facts and no feeling, all faith and no fear, sings Brooke Fraser. I don't know why a good man will fall
while a wicked one stands, she writes. I don't know why our words are so proud, yet their promise so thin.

So, I’ll keep searching for a thousand shades – a tiny thousand mirrors of God’s light in the most unexpected places.

I’ll remember that war zones can become gardens within a single lifetime, like the one I photographed above.

If I am myriad, fickle shades of light and dark, good and bad, grateful and discontent in ways that are impossible to quantify, then I’ll pay attention to the limits of my own judgement.

In-between the default spaces of my black and white brain, I’ll ask for wisdom and for a third way, wondering if a ceasefire starts with me.

Maybe to keep searching for colour is to keep asking for it, hoping it exists in the dark.

Look for the colours too, will you?

Thanks for your patience, readers. Between my day job and parenting, my newsletter frequency has been much less than I’d have liked this year. But, as always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections. Is there anything you’d like me to write about next year? Let me know in a comment, note or message.

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 Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats…

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I.           

In 2017, Hurricane Ophelia whipped across Ireland, felling an immense tree in the garden of my grandparent’s house on the Wild Atlantic Coast. The tree had held my foster-sister’s swing who had been adopted by another family years earlier. It was here that we’d spent hours of summer overlooking the Atlantic Ocean with her, teaching her first words, taking her wetsuit shoes on and off, seeing her legs learn to wobble, walk, run.

The complexity of the adoption into her permanent forever family meant that my siblings and I were never able to see her again after our time fostering her had ended and the adoption was complete. The night after Ophelia’s storm, years after she was adopted, I woke suddenly. It felt like the weight of a fallen tree was crushing down on my chest. I wept, missing her.

Where was she? Who was she becoming? Was she alright? Unanswered questions stretched like branches into the sky.

II.         

This year, Western Australia sweltered through its hottest summer on record ending in April, the Noongar season of Djeran. Djeran brings dewy dawns, cooler nights and light breezes across April and May.

At summer’s end, I willed my roses to wait until the winter rain, spraying the pests off their branches every morning when rainfall wasn’t forecast. Dig out your roses, they can’t be saved, the online gardening forum told me. Every morning, I went outside to defy the experts. You only need to wait a few more weeks, I hushed over the bushes. How hard could it be to prove that life could return against all documented odds? How hard could it be to bear grief in one hand and hope in the other?

III.       

One of my precious friends, Sam, left Earth in April.

The same week that his life abruptly ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about the two military horses that, startled by construction noises nearby, bolted out of their regiment and through the streets of London. They ran for miles across the city, unshackled.

For the last three months, I’ve been unable to sit down and write; I only hear the inflections of his voice every time I do and hearing him without the thought of seeing him again, here, is too much of a heartache most days. 

When I edited Sam’s writing, especially one specific project we were working on, I told him his sentences needed to rise and fall like a river, Your reader needs rhythm and rest, I’d tell him. When he was editing my work, he told me not to leave my reader behind me, Carry your reader with you, he’d say. 

During some of the most difficult days of his life, and a few days before his death, he wrote to me, reminding me to be like a tree who puts down roots near rivers, not worrying during hot summers, never dropping a leaf, staying serene in drought, bearing fresh fruit in every season and drinking from God’s water source that never runs dry.

I wish that I could have carried him with me as he reminded me to do with my readers so many times. We all do.

V.         

Have you ever seen a meadow buttercup bend in the breeze, tall and top-heavy? I wonder how they bear the wind’s buffeting over time. I’ve not been back to my home country in May for five years, nor seen buttercups in the meadows for a long time.

In May, the start of British summertime, I watched my son run the hills with his cousins, bursts of golden laughter flickering between their feet. 

Bearing the weight of grief and reaching into the widening futures of children I love, for a brief moment, I was J.D. Salinger’s protagonist standing on an open plain,

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all…I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.*”

VI.      

At my childhood home, I searched for shoeboxes of old letters and journals. I found my tattered poetry books: Blake, Eliot, Shakespeare. April is the cruellest month, wrote Eliot; the memory and desire housed in these words somehow makes me feel safe. Each page scrawled with my handwriting from over a decade ago; almost foreign, almost someone else’s.

I find old cards and letters in Sam’s handwriting, less foreign than my own. He left those he knew with a legacy of language: book reviews, letters, cards and a staggering collection of essays. In one essay he wrote,

“Are we driven by our desire for visibility to be recognised for who we truly are? Or rather, can we be liberated to live out of a place of abundance…out of an identity of security, in the arms of a greater love than could ever be grasped?”  

Now, when I write without him, I think of these words and try to write, and pray, that I can live fearlessly, roots planted in a source that never runs dry, branches stretching into the sky, bending in the breeze.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

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“Here dies another day

During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

And the great world around me;

and with tomorrow begins another.

Why am I allowed two?”

― G.K. Chesterton

Our brains can identify an image in as little as 13 milliseconds.1

Spanish artist Joan Miro said, ‘You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again,’ he said. ‘You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.’

Miro’s own life drew to a close over a decade before the first commercial camera phone was released in 1999 in Japan. I wonder how he would have considered our culture’s deluge of digital imagery weighed against the unforgettable power of a single picture. Psychologists and scientists tell us that by being more responsive to digital technologies, we are becoming less aware of our surroundings.2 The algorithms which curate our digital echo chambers and bolster our ‘ocular bias’3, show us what we want to see, rather than what we need to see or would naturally see. Our attention spans have diminished and, at least our looking – our seeing — is suffering. 

‘People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,’ Neil Postman eerily predicted in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 22 years before the invention of the iPhone. I have been wondering for a long time whether technology, especially social media, is also undoing our capacity to see. 

Recently, my eyes feel tired—fatigued by digital spaces that have no edges and no frames, no beginnings and no endings. I want to see to understand and also I want to be seen and understood, not in part, but fully, in person, eye-to-eye. 

We are exposed to more images than ever before, yet, in the words of one of the characters of Steinbeck’s novels, “I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.” 

Enter the Frame. 

You know, with actual corners and defined edges; a postcard, a page, a newspaper, a window.  I can look for however long I like. I can turn away when I am ready to. I can turn a page. I can fold a corner. I can close a curtain. I can open a latch.  The frame has no dark underbelly algorithm with motives we can’t see, it just is. 

Look around you now. Whatever is framed is probably ordinary, reassuring, beautiful or necessary.

I don’t often find those things when I use my eyes on social media anymore. It’s becoming harder for me to discern what’s necessary, what’s real, what’s wise, what’s helpful, because there it all sits; endless and visible, without accountability, without intimacy and without (seeming) vulnerability.

Writing my Polaroids regularly, was a way I could begin sifting through the volume of what I seeing, largely inspired by advice from author Anne Lamott, 

“I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph…”

All I have to do is to write down as much as I can see. 

A frame reminds me that I can begin and end in the same place and that is more than okay.  A frame reminds me I can settle my gaze on something within my reach. A frame gives me relief from the abyss of content in digital spaces with no edges. A frame encloses something hard fought-for, cherished, private, unknown by many except a few. A frame is not really the point, it is self-forgetful, allowing another to shine.

In scriptures, the Hebrew word Selah is like a frame. Some experts say Selah is akin to a musical note, others say that transliterated it means, pause, breathe, think for a moment, be calm. I imagine the invitation of a frame as the same: slow and see. 

Selah, slow and see. 

What matters? What is marked apart? What is worthy of your attention and time? 

As a photographer, I have written before about how a single image, or series of images, can narrow our gaze in a way that begins to change the world. I believe this, because I have seen images move people into action that saves lives. Colour can breathe life into weary bodies, I wrote a while ago. Color has biological and psychological effects, Magsamen and Ross write.4 A frame brings something large and abstract, personal and close, into the fabric of our bodies. In other words, what we see, lives in us.

Our eyes, Jesus says in scripture, are the lamps by which we see, and by which others can see into us— small windows framing the essence of who we are.

I’m reaching the middle of my life by some countries life expectancies. I need to be more certain of the things that matter, and less certain of the things that don’t. Looking for frames around me is one way that helps me to do that. When life is moving fast, I need the windows–– the chance to be still while light does the work, moving around me, bringing forth one minute, then another, then another. 

I need the edges to create good work; word counts, the borders of a single page, feedback, a topic, a title, a byline. Looking through my camera viewfinder teaches me restraint and decisiveness. Now, I need to embrace my own limits as a writer; during a typical week, I only have two hours to write outside of my full-time job as a leader of a creative team in a global not-for-profit and a full-time parent. 

Between seasons of chronic sickness and pain, I sit at the window, noticing what the light is doing. I see a sunset illuminate the steam from my boiled sweet potatoes. I see dawn tiptoe along the branches of my shivering native plants. I see the moon move behind the gum tree while my own body aches and moves slowly. 

Maybe this is the point: recently, I crave containment. When life feels busy, I search for the chance to be still while light does the work — shimmering while I cannot. I long to rest my head, my hands, my eyes against something solid in the age of the infinite scroll. Show me the beginning and the end. Show me the solidity and certainty; I’m tired of illusions. Show me the truth you’d stake your life on. 

My twin sister and I talked about The Atlantic Article : Why Rich People Don’t Cover Their Windows. We love the part about Dutch people letting their neighbours see inside their houses at night as an act of faith and trust. Letting people see into your home can be an act of vulnerability or security, the article argues. She, the history teacher of the family, tells me that in the Netherlands, during Nazi occupations, it was illegal to have curtains, making it easier for households to be spied on. Maybe, she says, they just didn’t put their curtains back up after the war. I like the thought of this oversight —post-war life moved on day by day and oppression faded as households began to trust again. Homes were slowly restored by letting the light in. 

I’ll never forget once seeing a mother who was blind, open the window to her small cement house in the tea fields of Northern Bangladesh. Breeze ruffled her sari. Dust shook from the wooden boards around the window. Sunlight soaked her skin. Someone who is blind doesn’t open their window to see, I remember thinking, she is opening it to feel.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

Summer Rest

Australia’s Southwest coast, a four-hour drive from where we live, is defined by orange-grey granite boulders. These gentle giants laze around sun-baking all day; heating rock pools, cradling bodies and warming cold sea-feet. It was crawling over the belly of one of these goliaths in February that my son and I found ourselves facing Antarctica—3,500 kilometres away. We sat north of the dark blue expanse before us, eating apples. 

“Cheeky seagulls want our apples,” I said, watching three of them dip and dive around the boulder we were lying on. I bit off a piece of apple and threw it. A seagull scurried it into his beak. Our son followed; one bite for himself, one for the seagulls, casting his arm dramatically in the air as he threw the apple. White wings flashed against the bold blue sky. Beauty blazed before me. Abandon. Delight. Surprise. The warmth of the rock kept us from shivering as the winds cooled our skin and we were audience to our own private pantomime.

Antarctica was my unit of measurement that day. Once unfamiliar and distant, now closer. It was a daydream I could smell on my skin. It was a country closer than my home. It was an unknown voyage that seemed possible with patience.

My husband and I were 90s kids. We removed CDs from boxes, recorded music on cassettes, wrapped telephone cords around our fingers and scribbled on paper to post. Life seemed slower. Our world seemed bigger, less explored, more mysterious. Of course, our parents say the same, our grandparents too. They would show us the Holy Spirit’s evidence of self-control and patience : not the ability to wait, but how to act while waiting. They would also know that some of our scripture’s holiest were those who hurled their anger towards God and away from others.

We worry about how instant life is for our son and the immediate gratification our culture grants us. One day, the world will sit at his fingertips and he will understand how fast the icebergs are melting but how slowly the lichen grows.

Tomorrow, when he thumps his fists on the floor because he is learning how to be himself and he chews his broccoli and spits it out on the table and he runs circles around the yard flapping his wings, I’ll remember the day we climbed giants and even Antarctica seemed reachable. 

Car Park Queues

I was shouted at by a man in his car, while I was in mine, and I heard his voice through his closed car doors and mine. His rage passed through two shells of steel. A woman sat beside him in the passenger seat, facing forward, stone still. I wondered how loud his voice was in her ear. I’d been waiting less than a minute for a car park spot to free up in front of us- the car in it was reversing out. Of all the things on earth to spit and scream about, he chose us that day. My anger burned. My adrenalin soared. My hungry toddler-in-tow with ocean light bouncing from his eyes, looked around his car-seat from where he was strapped in, searching for the raging voice. He looked at me. I sang something about seagulls or shells and not forgetting our sunscreen.

Men can fight. Men can yell.

If I drown, it will be spoon by spoon, swallowed.

How else can an angry mother be heard?

Words on War

I don’t know what I went searching for in attending some seminars as part of Perth Festival Writer’s weekend, but I don’t think I found it. The World As It Is?was a panel session with a poet, a newspaper editor, a novelist and a political columnist together making up a panel discussing the role writing and journalism play in responding to a world in crisis. It was advertised as a session with ‘bite’ and ‘frisson’. I turned up late and sweating, the first raindrops of autumn scattered on my glasses. I wedged myself into the only spare chair I could see in an auditorium of hundreds of people and sat down in-between ladies twice my age. The lady to my left was asleep. The lady to my right tutted “bullshit” when the newspaper editor said his paper didn’t have a political agenda.

I came with my own questions: 

Have digital spaces increased compassion fatigue? 

Has instant journalism given us a deeper connection to our world in crisis? 

Is citizen journalism less objective than traditional journalism? 

Has social media crippled our ability to “listen” and be united despite our differences? 

Can stories and words change anything? 

What, exactly, can we do when the world is warring around us? 

AND WHEN WILL IT STOP, PLEASE? 

(Oh, and, why does everyone want to save the world, but nobody wants to do the damn dishes?)

High hopes for a 45-minute panel.

Each panelist represented different roles as Storytellers. A journalist can hold a corrupt politician to public account but a novelist can ask, “What about the politician’s daughter? How does she feel about her father? What does she think?” While a news editor can train a newsroom to be agile and relevant to audiences with decreasing attention spans, a poet has the time to explore the complexity of paradox. A novelist can bring someone closer to the truth than a journalist. A journalist needs the poet’s sensitivity and empathy. 

At the conclusion of the panel, everyone admitted they can make mistakes in their craft. Everyone talked about the importance of trusting people. Everyone admitted some sense of moral responsibility to inflame or distil fears. Everyone agreed that money complicates all the above.

As the panel ended, Tsiolkas, the novelist—and by far my favourite panel member by now— concluded with two thoughts.

The first was a short recitation of an excerpt from a poem by Anna Akhmatova1 documenting the trauma of Russian people under Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. Akhmatova conceived this poem in the months she spent waiting in line to visit her son in a Soviet prison camp. In the introduction, she remembers someone calling out her name as she is standing in the queue. Another lady standing behind her recognizes her because of her name -- and presumably knows of her reputation as a writer. The lady who recognised her, lips blue and shivering, looks up and whispers:

“Can you describe this?”

And [the poet] said: “I can.” Then something like a smile passed

fleetingly over what had once been her face.

What did that flicker of another mother’s smile hide? Relief? Justice? Comfort? Help? I still wonder. I wonder because of Akhmatova’s opening lines, 

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger’s wing shielded my face…

Her words were a witness; anger channeled.

Here, she could document what she saw and honor what violence stole from her. Although this poem was never published in her lifetime, her words preserved memory. Her language survived when little else in her life did. 

Secondly, Tsiolkas briefly cited Italian historian Vicenzo Cuoco. He read a quote about resting in paradox, embracing moderation without lukewarmness and not forsaking goodness in the face of suffering.

Revolutionaries do not have to be perfect, Tsiolkas suggested, but they do have to know how to wait in tension; able to hold opposing ideas together.

The Inuits

Known for their unflappable and patient parenting, one researcher2 found that inside the home of an Inuit family, small mistakes were ignored. Complaints and grievances didn’t exist. No one flinched during accidents or setbacks. When a child spilled a teapot of hot water which started to melt the igloo floor, no one fussed. 

When you yell at children they stop listening said Inuit Sidonie Nirlungayuk3.

If a child isn’t listening, it’s because they are too young for the lesson, they believe. 

Arguing with children is a waste of time, they say. Children are illogical beings and you are only stooping to their level if you argue with one. 

If a child isn’t meeting expectations, change the environment, not the child.

Instead of seeing children as manipulative and testing, they recommend, see them as tiny citizens trying to navigate a world they don’t yet understand. 

Writing helps me to realise how small I am and how big the world is and there is so much I don’t know and can’t communicate. Maybe our little ones feel the same. 

There was once an ordinary girl 

who became a princess who did not ask

for fame but knew it would come if she married

the man she loved. While the world

rumored and remarked,

she closed her windows

and her doors and held

her kin, bravely, quietly.

She shared

a frame on Mother’s Day

celebrating

her wings shielding,

healing, protecting. 

Inside this frame, a small mistake.

A mistake anyone can make.

We all make them;

the journalist told me.

We all make them;

the poet told me.

We all make them;

the mothers 

hold me. 

The historians know royal portraits

favour the pictured. The pictured

know that truth is not always

what people want to see

or hear.

Still, she

Waited.

Then, she spoke before a bed of blooming

daffodils and cherry blossom and we listened,

breathless,

as she held back winter.  

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

Facebook user wrote: my mother died and my plants know. Nothing else

has changed. Some of her plants are weeping_.

Are they grieving?

To survive, leaves shed moisture

containing excess minerals that would harm

the plant if they remained. This is necessary

and normal, state the experts.

Someone replies: we took care of a plant for a family, whose son

was having chemo and unable to be near

potential contamination_. Years passed.

The boy passed away and within a week the plant died.

No changes to the environment, care, nothing.

Molecules grieve absence, a nurse writes.

Maybe she spends too much time

with the dying, she admits.

A granddaughter remembers the grandfather clock

made by her grandfather’s own hands. The hands

of the clock stopped the minute and hour of his death.

Her mother gave her a clock too. It did the same.

The spring after someone’s friend

died, their friend’s rose bush flowered

enough to make up for its fourteen years

of flowerless springs.

A niece writes about the spacious land her uncle tended,

always beautiful and green, with a forest bordering

the property that flourished. When he left

the earth, it was never the same: dim, browned, grieving.

It's been like this for a decade now.

Did you tell the plants your mum loved them?

All living things grieve. Even the rocks cry out

and the earth groans, says another and I believe

it because I hear it.

Another granddaughter remembers the plum trees

fruitless, when her grandfather died.

Her uncle gave them a stern piece of his mind

and they started growing fruit again.

We are the only animals born unequipped

to deal with life on our own, states one scientist.

We never escape helplessness.

Crying signals that we are unable to cope

Alone.

I’m sorry for your loss she has a beautiful garden

is written with no full-stop punctuating the clauses.

Where is this beautiful garden that belongs to loss?

Inside a tear drop?

All my Alocasia weep after watering.

I lie in a hospital room without sunlight,

wondering why the nurses can’t turn off

the glaring overhead and leave me in darkness,

curled.  

I would hate for you to fall apart

if one your plants begins to fail, so

start again with a cutting. Then propagate. Wait.

Someone plays music on the radio

for their plants. My plants grew taller,

faster when they listened to rock music.

I learn that plants hear the dawn long

before they feel its light.

I hear tender whispers on the wards

and for the first time ever consider the comments

page uncurtained and pure.

I arrive home in midnight silence. I walk

across the kitchen to our peace lily, checking, checking,

checking that her three white eyes,

are three little lives,

still looking back at me.

*I edited this poem into stanzas which don’t seem to be showing for now. If anyone is kind enough to let me know how I can put them back into the poem, please do :) I used the poetry block, but the formatting isn’t showing for me.

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I’m Ella and I live in Perth, Western Australia with my husband, Jeremy, and our toddler — who runs very fast at the moment, so most days feel like a blur!

I’ve been living here for six years now, but I grew up in a small town in the South-West of the UK and spent my university years and early career years living in London. I worked as a freelance photojournalist before landing an opportunity to work with a large not-for-profit and humanitarian agency documenting the effects of food insecurity and famine in Chad, Central Africa. It was life-changing. I worked with a small team who were inspiring and I loved the collaboration and teamwork. I witnessed creative storytelling acting as a bridge between people on different sides of the world.

Now, I work full-time for another not-for-profit leading a talented team of photojournalists and storytellers in the Asia Region. (Fun Fact : Perth is much closer to Indonesia than most other parts of Australia). I love the work we do and it’s mission - releasing children from poverty in all it’s forms.

Beyond my job, writing is a way for me to keep noticing colour and surprise in unexpected places. I write to find light when the world feels dark. I write as someone who believes that God loves the world he made, unfailingly. Writing is also a way that I tune my ears to the voices that matter - including my own.

My writing blends together inspiration from the natural world and our global humanity, with poetry and theology.

Will you tell me a little about you? How did you end up here on The Honeyeater Press? What have I written that resonates with you? What other topics would you like me to write on? Drop me a few lines below.

I’m ALL for hearing about you and a little about your corner of the world 🌏 ….

and thank you as always for reading this thing. I’m always amazed anyone does!

Ocean Swimming

The breeze conducts the ocean like a million orchestras. My skin submerges to its beat.

The sand stretches beyond my eye-line. Perth, The Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, The Bay of Biscay then the English Channel; I know the way home from here.

The song of an ancient king washes over me with the waves of each stroke, “Your thoughts, O God, are precious and uncountable, like grains of sand.” We cannot sift them through our fingertips. We cannot see them with our eyes. Maybe we are not supposed to try. Have we seen too much?

The sprawling ocean floor is clicking and scratching and bustling in softer tunes. Less than twenty percent of the seafloor has been mapped by modern technology. We have only seen a fraction of the visible.

Much-Afraid (in the allegorical tale, Hind’s Feet on High Places) asks her companion about the hidden mysteries of earth. “Sometimes I have wondered about the wild flowers,” she says to the Shepherd. “It seems strange that they should grow in places like this where the goats and cattle walk all over them. They have so much beauty and sweetness to give, and hardly anyone sees them.”

The look the Shepherd turned on her was very beautiful. “Nothing that My Father and I have made is ever wasted,” He said quietly, “and the wildflowers have a wonderful lesson to teach. Many people live a quiet, ordinary life…Some of My servants have won great respect from other people…but always their greatest victories are like the wildflowers, those which no one knows about….”

I pass over a shoal of silvery, blue fish and expect them to dart timidly away from me. I am surprised that neither I, nor they, flinch. Our bones are held buoyant by the oxygen visiting our lungs; each breath keeps us close to the sun. I feel a little lighter – a single breath more weightless – at the fact that we have not displaced each other.

No one saw but us. And while the orchestra played, we were unafraid.

A haircut.

I breathed deeply as the wheels of the salon chair rolled over cut hair.

“Why does someone just wake up and decided they want to bomb another country?” she asked me, her scissor blades poised. I was unsure if she wanted an answer.

I could reply in a hundred ways. I could tell her that even when you see bullet holes in the walls of homes and meet hungry families sheltering under tarpaulins you’re further from any kind of answer. I could tell her about my belief in original sin, human power without accountability and unforgiven hurt and bitterness. I could tell her about how easily we dehumanise each other (just put me in a traffic jam when I’m exhausted, with a sick, crying child in the car) and the language that springs from hearts under threat or in fear. We carry prejudice in our pockets far more easily than we will admit.

Instead, I opened my mouth and stuttered. The hairdryer next to me roared.

I looked at myself in the mirror, and for a split second, a stranger sat before me, another’s eyes looking into my own.

Three Words.

Moon, 

hold, 

heavy:

our son spoke a poem while his fingertips skimmed the sky, reaching for the half moon. I sighed. I will not write another poem about the moon today; our feet are on the ground, I’ve burned the omelette and the forests are on fire. 

What is there left to say about the moon when the earth is rippling with terror?

Words have left wounds where silence should be. Images have been weapons wielded. I don’t know where to turn or what or who needs my attention. We have a universe of knowledge at our fingertips but lasting wisdom escapes us.  

We are tired; but this is nothing compared to the weariness of those living in the land of the dead. 

The words of Topi* from Burma circle my mind again, a few years after interviewing her, recounting the day she fled her country as a child. She remembers asking her mum to hold her in the warmth of her arms one last time before she thought she was going to die. “Such a morbid thing for a child to think,” she shook, weeping. 

Where is God in all of this? Where are the leaders that we need? Where is wisdom? Is it hiding in the eyes of a child? 

A colleague reminded me of a scripture she thought about while she was sitting in a meeting with some government leaders recently:

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.

My colleague said questions and thoughts and more circled her mind, unanswered, until the Abdullah family stood up and spoke. 

Danny and Leila Abdallah's three children - Antony, 13, Angelina, 12, and Sienna, eight and their 11-year-old cousin - were walking to get ice-cream when they were struck and killed by a car in Oatlands, Australia in February 2020. The driver was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

The family have openly shared about their journey of grief and forgiveness as they processed the loss of their three children and the father recently spoke about his visit to the driver of the car in prison.

We can learn to forgive because we are forgiven, the Abdallah family say.

Forgiveness got us through that valley of grief, said the Dad. Forgiveness opened my lips, said the mum. “People would keep asking me to explain why I forgave. I forgave because I am a Christian.”

Moon, Hold, Heavy.

Love, hold, heavy.

Forgiven, heavy, hold -

Forgive, heavy, hold.

Our son is small enough to think he can clutch a planet or pluck a star from a dark night sky, but big enough to stamp on insects and to turn away when we ask him to listen. He is learning what is his to touch or not touch, to take care of or to give away.

Wisdom, be his, we pray. 

A Poem for the New Year*

Kneel and sip
the surface, travellers
distracted, restless, worn
 - the source runs on and on.

This ordinary water
asks nothing of you,
humming
over rough stones,
and tired toes,
rinsing away
unwritten poems and
the little that we know.

We lift water to lips.
We whisper to storms.
We let sky’s heartache
slip through open palms.

Still the river
carries what it cannot own,
shares what it cannot possess,
surrenders to the unrepeatable,
bubbling laughter,
as the sun hurries home.

We may still be the same
we may all be changed
when the current moves
us on.

*edited from 2022

Other things I’ve loved this month:

• The Winterage, by Max Jones who writes at . A stunning essay about traditional pastoralism and cattle herding known as transhumance, which has sculpted the landscape of the Burren in Ireland for thousands of years.

• A poem called ‘For The Unknown Enemy by William Stafford recently shared by Nate and

• An Article in the New Yorker, How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith.

• Logging off Instagram for a few months to start 2024.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflection, and, if you enjoyed the read, please pass it on.

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Bonnya’s eyes sparkled as she skipped through her village in the tea-fields in Northern Bangladesh holding her friends’ hands. Dressed in bold red and purple colours, she led us home. We met her younger brother, Sukumar and father, Kanai, inside their bare-brick-walled, dark home, with few windows and doors, and tragically, a home now missing a mother. I was squinting to see. A simple sack of food of some kind was stacked against one of the walls. There was no furniture – one single mat, no electricity, no water, just moulded earth giving shade and shelter. Bonnya’s little brother was smiling and laughing for most of our visit, his dimples were pockets of tiny shadows on the curve of his shining cheeks. As Kanai reclined against the brick wall, stretching his legs out in from of him towards us, I noticed his naked feet, lacerated, bleeding and covered in boils, swollen from untreated infection.

How would I photograph Kanai with dignity? If I focussed too much on his feet then open wounds may define his whole body, and in listening, physical pain was not the loudest part of this family’s story.

It would be easy for me to cut his feet from the frame. I could focus on the strength of his back and shoulders and the way his arms guided his children to sit or stand or the way his protective eyes glanced around to see what his children were doing. Cutting hands and feet from a frame looks visually abrupt or can look like a technical mistake.

But here were the feet of a father who loved his children. Here were the feet of a father that were still standing, still walking, still providing for his family. Here were the feet of a man who had walked paths that I would never walk. Here were feet that were tools used up for others, not manicured or curated.

Our hands and feet share so much of our stories by showing so little. Our toes, fingers, wrists, and ankles can expose comfort, longing, awkwardness, peace, pain.

Photographers, photography critics and image theorists have, for decades, considered the juxtaposition of beauty and suffering. As a communications professional in the humanitarian sector, I spend a lot of time thinking about when, how and why we witness – or see, or watch – another’s suffering (I’m also plugging away at a book manuscript on the topic too).

Should the bleakness of pain – especially someone else’s pain — mix with the thrill of light or colour, inseparably, inside a frame? Especially if the frame doesn’t ‘belong’ to the same body that the pain belongs to? If so, for what purpose?

These questions have existed as long as photography and image-making have. The answers are complex, but most photographers and image-makers will have their own views on the discussion. Of course - there are also times when images must remain untaken. I hope my views don’t stay fixed but are influenced by the people I meet and each person’s unique circumstances.

There lots of images which inspire my thoughts on the discussion. Here, I’ll discuss two different images taken by the same photographer which help me consider and reconsider my answers to these questions. Both images were taken by American photographer Eugene William Smith. One showed a body in crisis, one resulted from a body in crisis. One was dramatically stark, one was mysterious – poetic, universal. 

Eugene Smith is probably most well-known for his photo, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.  The photograph caught the world’s attention in TIME magazine on 2 June 1972, highlighting the devastation caused by Minamata disease – a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning in a city in Japan. Industrial wastewater containing methyl mercury from a chemical factory claimed thousands of lives, while the corporation responsible (and the government) did almost nothing to prevent the pollution.1

Tomoko was one of over two thousand victims of this poisoning. (Although later research states that the effects of the industrial pollution lasted longer and spread further than first believed, affecting tens of thousands of people.) Tomoko had been poisoned while she had been developing in her mother’s womb, saving her mother and siblings from further effects of the disease. She was born blind, deaf and paralysed and died at just 21 years old.

The image is hauntingly beautiful. Inside a traditional Japanese bathroom, mother Ryoko cradles her daughter, Tomoko. Tomoko’s eyes are illuminated by the 3pm light as she looks upwards – heavenwards. Her bony body is edged by light, and her skeletal limbs stretch almost the full width of the frame. The edges of the bathtub frame their relationship in this moment: the carer and the cared for, the helper and the helpless. This mother gazing at her child resonates with the timeless embrace of Mary and Jesus, Madonna and child. It feels deeply intimate. It feels ethereal. It feels dramatic. It feels almost other-worldly and yet sickeningly painful. 

How would I feel if my sister, my father, or my child was photographed like this? This is the question I ask myself in situations where taking a photograph seems like a brash insensitivity or intrusion, albeit one with full consent. How would I feel if this photo was shared with everyone I knew, and then a whole crowd of strangers? I look at Tomoko, and I wonder. 

It was an image for which Ryoko gave her full consent. This was an image she wanted Eugene to create and to share. It was an image made collaboratively, directed by both the participant and photographer. But it was also only an image – two-dimensional. Why is Tomoko sick? What disease is she suffering from? Who is this lady caring for her? The image doesn’t give us answers, even though, through other photographs and words, Smith did address some of these questions.

Smith wasn’t alone in his wrestle with the ethics of photographing the effects of Minamata disease—a type of mercury poisoning—during the 1950s and 60s. Many photographers represented the effects of this disease to advocate for justice for the victims. Japanese filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki visited Minamata in 1965 and grappled with the same questions.2 Should the victims of this tragedy be shown as beautiful? Could he film subjects who were unconscious or unable to express their approval? 

In fact, Japanese photographers and filmmakers working in Minamata around the same time as Smith, including Tsuchimoto, criticised Smith’s photo, especially the fact that he had photographed a naked teenage girl, unable to give her own consent.

What Smith’s single freeze frame doesn’t show is that thousands of the disease’s victims were shunned in their communities for two reasons. The victims were either assumed to be contagious (How can an image show invisible prejudice?) or they were thought to be tarnishing the reputation of this picturesque landscape through their legal cases. These photos showed that beyond the stunning landscape there was a toxic pain – an invisible poison was infiltrating the land. Eugene’s photo made the effects of this poison visible to a global audience. His photos exposed the inaction of the very authorities who had the power to also protect.

The timeline is important to note. The Chisso factory first started producing methyl mercury as a by-product in 1951, although some reports say earlier. In May 1956 – five years later – the factory’s hospital director reported the discovery of the disease. By October 1956, 40 patients had been discovered, 14 of whom had died: a mortality rate of 36.7%.3

So, this was not news in 1972 when Smith’s photos were published in Time magazine. And looking at the statistics of human-caused disasters which occurred during 1956 and 1972, the Minamata poisoning was not the deadliest. The Nigerian Civil War, Congo Crisis, the North Yemen Civil war, and the Papuan conflict all happened during this window of time; the Papuan conflict continues today. Smith’s photo acted as a rallying reminder that justice had not been served; albeit a belated reminder.

Eugene Smith had not been the only long-term activist challenging Chisso corporation. From 1971 to 1973 (before, during and after the publication of Smith’s photos), Japanese man Teruo Kawamoto, a patient of the disease, orchestrated sit-in campaigns, setting up tent near the Chisso corporate headquarters. Many locals joined him.

It’s good to remember that while one single photo may have brought global awareness, the multiplicity of local, smaller actions were just as valuable in effecting change.

Although Eugene was not the only activist, it was largely his photos which sparked action around the world to help the Minamata community. Governments began creating policies and standards to increase seafood quality and to protect consumers from mercurial poisoning and Minamata’s disease. Tomoko’s photo also helped usher in an era of heightened environmental consciousness as citizens worldwide began realizing the connection between pollution prevention and human health. Smith’s activism led the Chisso Corporation and their employees to believe that an intervention was needed.

In 1973 – 22 years after the first official report of the disease – Chisso was found guilty of negligence, and comprehensive compensation payments began to the victims. Of course, this was only financial compensation; lives had been lost, families had mourned, communities had been tainted forever. But it was compensation of some kind. It was recognition. The victims were being seen and assured that their lives mattered, although their circumstances may have suggested otherwise.

The direct impact of this photo on Tomoko’s family was mixed, however, and towards the end of Tomoko’s life, almost wholly negative. The photo fuelled rumours that Tomoko’s family were financially profiting from the image. They asked that the photograph be withdrawn from further publication, twenty years after her death in 1997. ‘I wanted Tomoko to be laid to rest,’ her father said.

Aileen Smith, Eugene’s wife, who had lived in Minamata for years, said around this time:

Photography is neither medicine nor god, and the photograph … in spite of its release worldwide, could not cure Tomoko’s illness … Needless to say, after Tomoko's death, this photograph meant something different. It wasn’t about Tomoko anymore …4

I am grateful for Aileen’s words. She accepts the limits of a photograph to directly treat, cure or rescue somebody. This documented moment is – after all – merely a mirror reflection of a moment in time. What an image can’t do, she implies, is what a human, or God can do. She accepts the photograph’s meaning has shifted over time. She accepts that the original purpose of an image can be twisted.

After her husband passed away, Aileen also said,

‘This photograph would mean nothing if it did not honour Tomoko. This photograph would be a profanity if it continued to be issued against the will of Tomoko and her family. Because this was a statement about Tomoko’s life, it must honour that life and by it her death.’5

There are words in here which I try to hold to.

 A photo means nothing to if it doesn’t honour the person it represents.

A photo cannot be issued against the will of the person it represents.

A photo has the power to be a statement about someone’s life, so it must honour that life, even beyond death. To honour Tomoko’s life was to stop publishing the image. 

Here, I come to talk about a second photo of Eugene Smith’s, which helps me think about the relevance of beauty in representations of suffering. Taken in the spring of 1946, the photograph The Walk to Paradise Garden was one of Smith’s first photographs after he was severely wounded during World War Two. Caught in Japanese mortar fire, his wounds left him with shrapnel in his skull and left hand. He was unable to hold a camera for months. The Walk to Paradise Garden was the first image he took as he was recovering from his injuries.

It shows two small children walking ahead, framed by trees, pictured from behind. They seem to be holding hands and are emerging from the shadowy undergrowth onto a more well-lit path. The children look ordinary, unremarkable even, but the beauty of the light and shadow and framing are shimmering, almost magically. It is quietly intimate in a different way to Tomoko’s photo. Its intimacy is simple. Its universality is tangible.

As I look, just as I looked at the photo of Tomoko, I am aware that the power of three people intertwines in any form of image-making. Firstly, the person being represented. If this person is poor, oppressed, silenced (or even silent, like Tomoko) there is a heightened weight of power and privilege on the other two people in this trinity.

The second is the photographer, who is close in proximity to the person being represented. The photographer is likely well resourced (as they probably own the camera) and there is a chance they are not facing the same depth or shape of suffering as the person pictured.

Then, there is the viewer: someone separated by distance, race, social class or culture to the person pictured. The viewer is distanced but brought closer to the scene through the image.

There will be times when the person inside the frame is hurting. There will be times when, we, the viewers are also victims of pain or poverty. The recent Israel-Hamas war and our reliance on citizen journalism in a place where no other journalists can enter, has shown us that the image-makers suffer too. “I’m not just covering the news – I’m living it,’ said Plestia Alaqad.

I have come to realise there will never be a perfect equilibrium of power within this trinity. But that also doesn’t have to be a bad thing. A power imbalance may exist, but excess power doesn’t need to be wielded; excess power isn’t always bad. Afterall, only ‘power without love is reckless and abusive,’ said Martin Luther King Jr.

Despite his limitations, I believe that Eugene Smith created the image of Tomoko and her mother with love and care, not with recklessness.

The Walk to Paradise Garden displays another power imbalance between adult and child, yet the photo has a timeless beauty to it. We have seen these scenes in our own lives; children curiously exploring trees and bushes. It’s as if we’re somehow invited to follow and we watch from a distance. Smith said of the photo: 

As I followed my children through the underbrush and tall trees – what joy of discovery everywhere was theirs – and as I watched, I knew again that in spite of all of it, and in spite of every way, and over every setback, that today, now, I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it. (1954)

Smith’s eyes had been tarnished by war, and his body was now broken by it. However, this scene restored him in a mysterious way. I wonder if he was holding this memory – of both pain and healing – his own children in his mind, when he met someone else’s child, Tomoko, in Minimata years later.

It is these two images next to each other which somehow begin to answer the question I asked earlier about pain and beauty living inside the same frame. Both Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath and The Walk to Paradise Garden were taken by the same person, almost twenty years apart. One shows Tomoko, a child bathed in light, depleted, and needlessly dying. Another shows his own children, Pat and Juanita, stepping into light at the end of a shadowy tunnel, adventuring. One is a harsh rally cry to empathy and to action, the other is a quieter reflection on ordinary life. One is another’s experience; one is our own. One was made to benefit the life of another; one was made for himself. Both images reveal both pain and beauty in different measures, in different ways.

The effects of Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath effects rippled far beyond Minamata, but The Walk to Paradise Garden was deeply personal – ‘however unimportant to the world.’ One was made in a position of privilege and health; one was made at a time of helplessness and pain. ‘I tried to … ignore the sudden violence of pain that … shot again and again through my hand,’ Smith says of the moment he took The Walk to Paradise Garden.

There are more uncontextualized images in our world than ever before, but both of Smith’s images, in their beauty, reveal a little bit of what it means to be human; to have or to lose power, to witness and to feel pain, to illuminate a large-scale injustice or appreciate the tiny, pleasing moments of daily life.

Here is what I am sure of: both kinds of images are needed. Both kinds of images hold their own limitations. Both images involve the photographed, the viewer, the photographer in highly imperfect ways. Both kinds of images serve a purpose, both images have a season of relevance and honesty.

I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it.

I cried when I first read these words. There is only so much pain someone can feel inside their body or witness outside of their body before hope begins to fade. I’ve felt that lately, watching war.

If photographs can make us feel more human and less like God then they are essential. If we are looking, we wont always see the ‘transfiguration’ that Robinson talks of in the opening quote above, but we might. Can images bringing peace during conflict, alleviate poverty or heal pain? I believe there is still a chance they can.

If images can show us that there are dancing dimples not far from wounded feet, then we need them more than ever.

 -Toni Morrison

A Note on Spring

Kambarang Season, Western Australia 

It’s my sixth spring here
but I’ve only ever seen two snakes, 
I tell my family back home. 
I still walk faster down by the river 
with the pram. 

The colours are still 
vivid before the summer heat 
parches and pales; 
before the desert mocks 
our striving 
from under hosepipe-watered grass blades.

She was here first. 
No one can hold her 
back forever. 

These are not the springtime colours 
I know well, but it is colour, 
symphony,
orchestra,
all of it,
all of us.

There are wars far from us
and wars within us 
and maybe survival for some
or for one 
is seeing one million 
colours resting   
in the kambarang sun. 

A Note for Myself [Compassion Fatigue] 

You are finite. You are here and not there. Your body trembles with limitations. Your minutes are punctuated by limited heartbeats. Your feet are bound by borders. Your brain can only process so much information. You can’t be everywhere, and you can’t care about everything.

Today, you may only have enough strength to lift your grocery bags in and out of your car. Today, you might need to let the laundry pile up. Today, reading the news can wait. Today, your planet might need to shrink down to the walls of your own home. Today, you might need to rest in the grace of others.

Today could be a good day to remember how enormous the world is and how small you are. Our heartbeats cannot be hoarded but we will only have around 100,000 today. So, make your sandwich. Sun your eyelids. Drink a chocolate milkshake. Stretch your toes. Sew some buttons on an old shirt. Smell an orange. Take a breath, and then take another one.

Today is a good day to pray for the people you can’t hold and the places you can’t reach. It’s a good day to remember that there are experts and agencies and local organisations serving around the world with resilience and dedication.

There isn’t a single way to be generous. There are many ways to care. You don’t have to understand it all. You don’t have to care about it all. You can still can do tiny things with enormous love.

Tomorrow, the sun will rise without your help. Tomorrow, your empathy will not run dry. Tomorrow, your feet may travel a little further. Tomorrow, you can learn. Tomorrow, there will be more time. You are a helper, and so you will find a way to help, but today it’s enough to just look into the eyes of the people that you know.

Maybe it’s a good day to remember that courage has many, many faces and yours is also one of them.

A Note For My Son

I stitched your name into
your daycare bag tonight
as your eyelids curved close
like two sliced moons,
two spoons half filled 
with milk, sweet 
skin, my kin, 
may peace be yours 
and theirs, and theirs 
as you sleep. 


Outside your door,
far from here but near 
bombs rattle homes 
into skeletons. 


I check on you 
more than I should, 
listening, stitching 
cotton words
because I can’t 
sew peace or 
a baby’s breath 
together. 


All I can do now 
is make something, 
anything,
to give you 
when you wake
and the moon disappears 
into dawn. 

Other things I’ve loved this month:

• This poem gave me the shivers (‘Gethsemane’ Mary Oliver) because it reminded me that our human forgetfulness and frailty is a part of a bigger story beyond ourselves.

• ‘Write What You Don’t Know’ a substack post by . Especially this: “Write your way into knowing something and then unknowing it and knowing something different.”

• Recommended by , ‘s essay ‘Rewilding the Fairytale’ a captivating reflection on the stories that help us survive, “As a mother, I’m most interested in telling my children stories that will help them adapt and survive—through their relationships, their resourcefulness, their enchantments—on a damaged planet.”

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  As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections. Thank you for taking the time to read this little publication :)
  
  

Nothing’s farther away, nor nearer

than you being here.” - 10, Homero Aridjis

The Tailor Bird.

I write this from an airport – my 12^th international transit this year. I used to find airports overwhelming but somewhere along the way, the cumulative hours and tiny delights of these places have grown in frequency and familiarity.

Inside waiting minutes and cavernous spaces and momentary encounters, I make a nest. I carry my favourite teabags, I look for natural light, I find face cream or spray fragrance in the cosmetic shops.

In May, during a week of intense physical pain connected to chronic health issues, a friend sent me a video of a tailor bird stitching together her nest. I was moved by the delicacy and dedication of her soft body gathering scraps for her young. One by one, the twigs were gathered carefully into a cradle for her chicks. It was immensely reassuring watching her work and left me with something that I can’t yet name in my own language, so I learn from others: 

Sughog – the stain left by tears – Irish

Around forty planes a day take off from Perth airport, rising from the runway in the east, passing over our garden gate towards the west. They fly low enough for us to read the airlines names printed on the underside of the plane, low enough for us to hear their mechanical churning, low enough for our son to hear both inside and outside the house.

In this airport, today, on my own but not really alone, I think of him at home with his Dad. I think of the nest we have built together; both careful and clumsy, scrappy and safe. I think about the unknowns that our future holds, but the certainty of the nest, finding and building wherever we go. 

I think of our son spreading his hand as wide as a flower, palm open across his forehead, eyes skywards, and exhaling a long, tuneful sigh, Hiiiiiiiigh.

The Swamp.

Just before the winter rains, I walked past the swamp with our son in the pram. I wrote a poem ‘The Day We Needed To See God in the Swamp’ there, around six months ago. I gasped at the now dried-out belly of the riverbed. Where water had once stagnated, was now covered in woody purple-blue flowers, veined delicately like blood vessels under bruised skin.

Blood moves around our bodies at around 90 centimetres per second, travelling the course of our entire bodies in a single minute, if our hearts are healthy. 

A bruise is blood in transit, stopped. Beneath the surface, damaged capillaries and vessels, pool blood that has no place to go. Our skin becomes tender, our blood becomes visible.

Pain can often have a way of revealing what is once hidden. 

रक्त Rakhta –Sanskrit, blood, also the colour red.

The body eventually reabsorbs the blood from a bruise, and the mark disappears. Healing, the bruise changes colour and fades.

These bruise-flowers grow in the first rains and will be gone by the last, reabsorbed into the depths of the swamp.

I thought about the belly of the swamp as my own abdomen swelled in and out in chronic pain in the Emergency Room at hospital a few weeks ago.

I tried to remember that the sun is always moving, the colours are always changing depending on the light and the rains will come and the rains will go and the rivers will rush on and this, too, shall pass.

Azaleas.

In June, we saw peach-coloured Azaleas growing from the lower ground of volcanic mountains in Japan. It wasn’t planned that we’d see them for the few weeks that they were in bloom, it was just that our trip turned out that way. Their bright colour popped against foggy grey skies and muted forest greens.

Originating from Eastern Asia, azaleas grow best in acidic soils at altitude. Volcanic soils like the ones we were walking on are called Andisols, often enriched with minerals and often acidic depending on what kind of volcanoes are present – ideal for azaleas.

A popular Chinese story recounts a failed king’s fate. King Du Yu was exploiting his power. Anger stirred up against him and warriors tried to kill him. Just as one warrior was about to murder the king, he turned into a cuckoo, so the tale goes. This cuckoo’s song was whining and bitter— the song of a ruined king. The sharp song of this cuckoo was enough to draw blood from the flower, coloring the white azaleas red. 

They look like fires instead of flowers.
Why do you blossom for me especially? -

-  Chinese poet, Bai Juyi on azaleas.

 Now, in China and Japan, azaleas commonly symbolize a yearning to return home, the thought of missing someone you care about or a comfort for homesickness. Often, the flowers are given to someone you miss to remind them you want to see them soon.

Oikois –Greek, meaning home, also ecology.

The azaleas we saw were growing at the marshy base of the Hida mountain range, in an area that’s an ecotone. Ecotones like marshlands, mangrove forests and estuaries are areas where two different ecosystems meet. Where one landscape meets with another, a distinct ecosystem is created.

Although ecotones are areas of transition, they often hold more diversity and forms of life than a single ecosystem. I didn’t realise that life could thrive this much in these transitional terrains.

Ecotone – English, derived from ecology and -tonos meaning tension in Greek.

Orchids.

I shivered with surprise sitting under an art installation of over 13,000 orchids growing along transparent wires in Tokyo, Japan.

On entering the exhibit, the curtain lifted, and the orchids rose, and upon sitting, sensors let the curtain of orchids fall; we sat inside a cavern of flowers.

Orchids don’t need to be planted in soil to grow but have a unique type of aerial root that can trap nutrients and water from the air. These wandering roots reach out into the air, searching for moisture, but needing little to survive.

There we sat, listening to light.

This was a nest not of my own making. It was blood pumping through veins that were not my own. It was the soft belly of a bird. It was the budding floor of a swamp waiting for rain. It was a luxurious lament about brevity. It was delicate, soft, and breathtaking.

Mono no aware, 物の哀れ, Japanese, the transient beauty of fragile things.

It was us, in transit and away from home, but at home in the presence of each other.

It was colour displaced, relocated, blooming and alive. 

It’s been busy over here (as you can tell ;) ) and we’re currently taking some time to be with family in the UK throughout August, so I’ve grouped a few more months together than normal for this little newsletter.

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

Should I make these little polaroids into a small zine or chapbook? I’ve been hankering to print something. Other ideas welcome below!

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