Finding our way home

It is now two months since I left Glastonbury for Australia. Hotel quarantine with a toddler was one of the most difficult things I’ve done and took quite a while to recover from.

It was my dad’s birthday on the day we got out of quarantine and that was the first time that my dad and brother met Sunny in person and I met my nephew, tears all round. We celebrated Sunny’s second birthday at the beach with friends and family in Sydney (regional Australia and other cities were in lockdown still, so those reunions were delayed).

I’ve been doing the beach and headland walk I used to do each morning over 20 years ago and I am blown away by how much everything has changed here! The beach shacks are now huge houses, the rugged trail is now an official one and the trees, I can’t believe how much they have grown! On our first walk we saw three whales off the coast and it felt like a special blessing from them. I’ve been meditating in the same spot I used to as a teenager and remembering how self conscious I used to be meditating in public then!

I’ve been developing a deeper relationship with the land, trees and flowers here, connecting with old allies like the paperbark, frangipani and the lavender and meeting others on a deeper level like the banksia, bottlebrush and the jacaranda. As children we are so connected to nature, the first time Sunny saw a fallen banksia flower, he picked it up and started brushing his hair with it and I had a memory of me doing the same when I was his age.

While working more consciously with flowers over the past few years, I have been remembering the flowers of my childhood (I remember my Nanna introducing me to the flannel flower for the first time) and how as children we innately know that we are nature.

In my work lately I have been exploring the grief many of us feel through the separation from nature and how reconnecting to the nature of our childhood can be so healing and nourishing and that through reconnecting to the plants we can answer a yearning that runs deep.

SOUL INQUIRY:

What flowers, trees or plants remind you of your childhood?

What’s your earliest memory in nature?

I hope that you are well and as we make our way towards the solstice that you are enjoying the ever changing nature around you and within you and that you feel the blessings of the flowers of your childhood always.