Fire

A friend of mine recently revealed his diagnosis and battle with clinical depression and anxiety. Another revealed that he was in that current mindstate. And another is in another of her suicide bids.

In the heat of summer when the paddocks are crowded with tussocks of dry brown grasses, when the landscape is like an overflowing tinderbox and the breeze breathes like the hot winds of a furnace, there is an odd calm, a rousing energy in the air, uncertainty, excitement.

Without warning sparks fly. The winds whip up and fire lashes its fury in the bush, in the fields and through homes, human or not. Flames lick the bark of gum trees, rogue pine explodes reminiscent of the nights of the Canberra Bush Fires seasons before. And in what seems like an instant of insanity and horror, the smoke clears and drifts lazily on. The flames have seemingly destroyed most in its path, raped the world of undergrowth.

But in tragedy, of all the death that came, triumph is seeded beneath the soil and has already begun to germinate in the heat of sorrow.