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The green of your garden. A white box. Hive of bees. The colour of you.
Sitting at my garden table one warm February day watching birds dash from paperbark to Tasmanian blue gum to palm tree, I realised with a satisfying jolt that I had been present for every season of this singular year; I had journeyed in sync with my surroundings on their year-long journey around the sun.
In its Christian context, Easter Sunday celebrates the rising of Jesus to life. It follows his brutal execution on Good Friday after rigged trials. Good Friday this year occurs at the beginning of April, a month which Pope Francis dedicated to prayer for ‘those who risk their lives while fighting for fundamental rights under dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and even in democracies in crisis’.
I never had to confront the idea that the British monarchy — and the British Empire at large — was built on racist principles and benefitted from racist practices. Not until it came from the mouth of one of the Royal family’s favourite iconoclasts, Meghan Markle.
The objections to the legislation focus correctly on the infringement of human rights. That phrase, however, is bloodless. It might suggest that rights form a list to be ticked off. Human rights are better conceived as a way of speaking about the conditions necessary for people to live decent human lives. The proper place from which to reflect on them is the actual lives of the people who are affected.
An everyday exercise in planning and humility is gardening. For amateur gardeners, at least, planning, planting, pruning, watering and placing all have their place. But ultimately the plants make their way and take their individual shape.
The freesias are a delight, for they flower in random places on their knife-edge leaves in yellows and whites and mauves, their beauty absolving them from their dubious classification as weeds. They delight the eye, therefore they are forgiven. But why not the nightshade and the onion weed, with their delicate flowers? What makes a weed a weed, anyway?
We have always lived thus, in our heads. Bone domes, impenetrable to others, we might project animus, animation, add to Duncan’s questioning. The mind’s construction in the face, enigmatic, Rubik cube with sixteen squares on each face, so any signs I give are laced, graced with ambiguity.
This year we’ll be celebrating a different kind of Mother’s Day: there won’t be any fancy champaigne brunches with all the restaurants closed. Some of us in this COVID-19 crisis won’t even be able to visit our mothers. And many of us are out of work, too skint to buy flowers.
We are at the end of the beginning. ‘If you feel you have coronavirus…’ I tune out emotionally and daydream as the public service announcement plays over and over in empty trams and trains, and in deserted shopping centres.
At the brink of dawn swelling with the cries of the pinkest of pink galahs, the sweltering Tennant Creek, thirsty with soul, stranded in the heart of the heart of the country.
While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.
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