East Melbourne in Autumn

A Friday Afternoon reflection from Albert St

Jane Ormonde

 When we are feeling string-thin, just the ordinary brittle of a ‘too much, too tired’ day, how do we come back – back to a more connected place? Back to the place in ourselves that somehow feels fuller and warmer and comfortable. The internal place - where the fire is well stoked and the scones have just been served.

How do we reach back into ourselves to seek a pathway back “home” again? 

I ponder this after escaping my city workplace one recent night. It’s dusk and finally winter has arrived as I am blown along Albert St towards my bus stop. I’ll take the long route today to let the fresh air wash through me. I’m dried out after three days straight of workplace training, on the heels of a significant family loss. 

No wonder I’m gasping for fresh air and connection back.

To what, though...? 

I recently had a conversation with a woman I know in Arnhem Land. She was sharing her dream of returning to her homeland after the wet season had passed. Her whole body was clothed in longing. 

But it was the wind she was really aching for. Sitting on the ground, with head cocked and arms cradling, she embodied the feeling of reconnecting with the winds of her Mother Country, rocking gently from side to side. I witnessed something in her that I didn’t know in myself. A deep connectedness to land that I knew about, but didn’t know as an experience of my own. 

When our own internal threads feel frayed, we each have to somehow find our way back home. Back to our internal Mother Country. Back to a feeling of being at home within ourselves.

Last night, as I passed by St Pat’s Cathedral, the glow of its dimly lit windows beckoned me. I had walked past but turned back and ventured inside. I love its vastness, it’s stone work and its majesty - it’s very design calls me towards the “something bigger” in myself.

I walked to the front and stood still and spoke my humble petition. Not world peace for today, just a simple desire after a difficult week.  I turned and walked back very slowly lingering along the echo-ey, uneven floor, each tile leaving its imprint of feeling through my boots.

As I continued down Albert St, I began to feel my internal cogs rumbling back to life. The warp and weft of my being - right through the middle of my body, where my sense of wellbeing lives – seemed to be reaching out to reassure me that all was well.

By now, I could even offer an occasion shy smile to a stranger whose eyes I met as the wind gusted and swirled a concoction of the day’s fallen leaves and dust around us.

I realised that today I had borrowed some of my friend’s feeling for wind and allowed the possibility that it could be retired from ‘a thing to be avoided’ and allowed to speak to me in a new way. I felt its energy and its power. It was exciting. And I felt grateful that she shared her raw longing with me so openly, so that I would learn something about my own.

As the bus stop came into view around the next corner, I realised I was settling deeply back into myself.  

I didn’t know how I would “come home” when I walked out of my cityscape last night. Somehow life showed me the path for today and I’m grateful and renewed in my sense of awe and wonder and soft comfort. That was today. As for tomorrow - who knows? 

I wonder what takes you away?

And how do you come back?