Overwhelmed

Perfect Canberra blue autumn day.

I spent the day with Joey and Helen building their first garden bed today. Six weeks ago they moved into Joey's childhood home - a bush block with wombats, echidnas and roos, a dam, a wealth of trees and logs, hills, slopes, rocks and sticks, and a big old house cluttered with books, pots, tins, paintings, prints, photos, instruments, toys, shelves, cloth and drawers. The verandas have boxes and boxes of tools and bottling jars, newspaper and pottery, there's a swing set, a fallen down cubby, surfboards by the dam, rusty bikes, a Beetle filled with kids books, a windmill in pieces, a potters wheel, a giant ants nest. They are in the thick of making sense of the wonder and jumble of it all, getting the solar power, the generator and the pump for the dam all working, and getting the first garden built felt like a big achievement for the settling in effort!

While we dug and made edges, we also talked all day, off and on, about the baby collective. Helen is so eloquent when she talks about why she thinks that it is a wonderful thing for us to all be doing together. I didn't know before today that she'd thought about it from so many angles, and with such generosity towards all of the different perspectives. She makes me feel safe, and overtaken by such a sense of trust and love and overwhelming good fortune instead of the usual worry and fuss. And it is overwhelming - there is so much love and goodwill being extended for a child who doesn't even exist yet, and in every hidey-hole, magical bit of junk and little animal track into the tall grass all I can see is the joy of summer holidays together here and that feels like such a richness it is completely unbelievable too.