To be lost

When words are not enough

Writing words is my balm, but I have always known that my skill is entirely insufficient to explain what it is to live the grand life that we live. Life’s capacity to cause such enormous pain, can never be captured, or controlled, or made sense of, or resolved with the strokes of this keyboard. And then worse, words then feel like they betray the very thing they are attempting to emancipate – that deep and abiding desire to share this human experience with other humans with a ‘truth’ that, of course, is allusive. My words have only ever left a remnant of scent, something that resembles but doesn’t account for what it feels like to smell. They are just a whisper, when what I yearn to do is cry from that ancient place inside me that knows this way of being human, all too well.

This week, this year, this life – has reminded us of our fragility and as a result, it has reminded us of the profound love we have for each other. Profound. Indescribable. Love.

I happened to be driving across the Western Australian Southern Coast when the events of Sunday night broke the stillness of the landscape via a rusted radio in my friend’s four-wheel drive on the ABC News channel. I went from wondering about the state of academics in America – to being thrust, without warning, into the depths of a breaking news story. Hearing the voices of our journalists trying to formulate sentences from the scene that was senseless and unfolding before them, was heartbreaking in its own way. Their innocence, our innocense, to such an unfathomable moment in time, colliding with their job as reporters, felt as it should – absurd. Absurd collisions of the indescribable, with those valiant attempts to have them be described. But, no words can articulate what happened to us on Sunday night and attempts, as we watch on in real time, are painful to bear witness to. But we hang on to those words nonetheless, hoping they will tell us that thing we need to hear. That thing we know is missing from the account… that thing that we never seem to have words for. What is it? And since that night, words have continued to fail. All I know is that ‘that thing’ exists, and I have never heard it said, or written, or know it in language. It is the impossible wordless heart of all things. It is the feeling we are left with, or are born with, but cannot accurately describe. Perhaps it is the pain of love?

I was thousands of kilometres away, at a friend’s wedding, grappling with my own collisions. What is this betrayal of mine, when my day was filled with love and laughter and dancing, while others across stretches of our country have lost everything? I will never know how to resolve those collisions.

But the days followed on, and that stark moment of horror – for me, who was not nearly directly impacted by the injuries or the deaths of the ones I love, or as witness, or as rescue or report or as a close Jewish community member of Bondi and around the country - is replaced with buying coffee, getting sand out of my towel in the hotel room, and spending time with a three-year old boy, who has no idea of what a membership into this world really means. Instead, he and I spent the days talking about aeroplanes, and elephants and how he did a wee in the middle of his mum and dad’s wedding ceremony, in full view of everyone, and thought it was pretty funny. It was funny. And how his bike kept falling over. And that he planned to stay up all night and sleep in the morning.

All the collisions.

And now, I am back home in Melbourne and the muscles in my legs are beginning to seize. I grunt when I get off a chair because, in amongst it all, I took myself on a 12km trek up and down a trail that is called the Bald Head (bluff, surely?) that travels across the Albany coast. I didn’t know really what I was doing, I just knew I needed to do it. I haven’t moved my body in any productive way for the good part of a couple of months – and I haven’t run in nearly a year. I described myself to a friend a week ago as lost in a kind of disconnected busyness, not noticing anymore what this vessle needed of me.

When meaning fails, as it did this week, I remembered that there are places that don’t allow for words or thoughts, or sense or a relationship to time to take precedence. There are those places that we know, that take us deep into the land and outside of our everything else. So deep, that I often feel an instant confusion with it. Ha. It’s funny to write that, but that’s how I feel. Everything is so clear, and so stark – it’s confusing. I hadn’t been to Bald Head before, but as soon as my lacklustre sneaker took its first steps, there was an immediate recognition within every part of me – every part, but the sense-making part.

I spent those 12kms walking, lost inside what is known that I often don’t remember. You know what I’m talking about, if you’ve ever been immersed in landscape and land and water and smell and memory. And so, I walked and walked and walked. At times, I tried to trick myself into believing that I had perhaps turned around and was heading in the direction I had already been. Other times, I caught myself mumbling, ‘pink’, in response to the overwhelming colour of the flowers. I met a snake and a goanna, and lizards, and rustles from animals I could not see. And I lost myself.

When I think about it now, I can’t really find words for it. It was just a walk after all – just a city gal, encountering nature. But maybe, when we walk endlessly for a couple of hours in one direction, focussed on every movement, every indulation, every step, and then end somewhere unknown, there is a magic that can happen when you are in fact, momentarily, lost in timelessness and bush.

Lost. It’s the only word that feels like it might account for some of this week.

Lost.

I walked that trail like city gals do. I walked with the idea that I was doing ‘something’ and that something would be linear. I would begin, it would take me 2 hours there, 2 hours back and I would text my beautiful mate, who warned me about the snakes to tell her that I’d headbutted one, when I was done. But, the land and water has a way of showing you how foolhardy those linear pursuits are. I was lost. I needed to get lost. Whatever happened to me on that walk, is not something I can say.

To all who have lost, who are lost, who seek to lose those parts of humanity that hurt us all – there is a place for us. I can’t tell you where to find it, because my words are insufficient. But you’ll know it – you know it already.

When we are lost, perhaps that is when we are found - as they saying goes.

**My (our) love to everyone in the Jewish community, which is our community. May your days be held by the light. To all the babies and lovers who have died at the hands of this war - this genocide - we are all lost with you.

And we promise to hold you and be lost, by your side, until we find our way together.

Much love to us all. There is much love. Profound. Indescribable. Love.