My soul is restless, and not in a whimsical, fun way.
I would dearly love to feel the benign restlessness that can be solved with a few spontaneous choices, and a wing and a prayer. However, my soul, my consciousness, my whatever you want to call it, has an uneasiness that has long lost its novelty. This is something I’ve felt burning in the back of my mind for a long time.
For many years this restlessness was like a candlelight flickering at the end of a long tunnel, but increasingly I can feel the flames growing larger, roaring and sucking more and more oxygen from my space.
I find myself being irrational, and crying with rage, sadness, joy, tiredness, frustration, love and for all the reasons in between within the space of 24 hours. More often than not, I can’t find an acute reason for my emotional turmoil. With each plaintive cry I release (I’m outsourcing the trigger and watching yet another video about abandoned puppies that get rescued and then end up saving someone’s life), it has become abundantly clear that I am missing my peace.
There was not a discernible moment where I felt my peace leave. My childhood was love filled, but also peppered with complex trauma, with not a lot of time or space for nuanced reflection. I feel lucky to have grown up in the family I did. I maintained a sense of curiosity and awe, and I was overall pretty happy as a kid. It didn’t matter how many times we moved, or what new obstacles we faced, if we faced things together, it’d be alright in the end. It was the relationships I had, with my parents, siblings and my large extended family, that bolstered my sense of stability, peace and contentment. When things got really rough, I could always rely on my mum. Although not a tall woman, her love, nurturing, stubbornness and pure grit made her a giant in my eyes, and if she was around, I was home.
“With each plaintive cry I release... it has become abundantly clear that I am missing my peace. ”
For as long as I can remember, I also gained a deep sense of fulfilment from being on and caring for Country. I have a plethora of memories from my early years that helped fill what, at the time, seemed a bottomless well of contentment and calm.
I got to explore rivers, water holes, climb mountains, learn with my whole self, and contribute in a way that my ancestors have done throughout human living memory. I created connections and learned of responsibilities to beings and places that exist outside of linear time or gub ways of measure. I felt myself become part of a truly ancient, unbroken connection to land, skies, waterways and non-human kin. I felt an innate drive to nurture every part of it, my soul needed it just as my beating heart needed blood. It was uncannily familiar, exciting and new all at once. While they’re experiences that I was in a position of relative privilege to have, they were also fundamental to my wellbeing. They were how I restored my peace.
As a young adult, I was separated from this connection and my opportunities to cultivate this peace. The insipid virus of gentrification saw my family, multiple generations deep into cycles of poverty, forced to leave our Country. My home Country happens to encompass saltwater lands, and the sleepy coastal areas with mountain ranges nearby, so a single income family with no assets don’t stand much chance in the real estate game.The housing boom was just another wave of colonial violence, but seen as socially acceptable and all in the name of progress or development.
How do you determine a metric to present what this loss means? How is it possible to encompass the pain and hurt in one measure? The insidious harm, and grief, endured by all Aboriginal generations across this continent because of colonisation, forced assimilation, Stolen Generations, Land theft and more has indelibly changed our people, and our Country.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised just how many Indigenous kids didn’t (and still don’t) get opportunities to make those connections, nurture that peace or honour their responsibilities at all, let alone on their ancestral homelands. The barriers to this are always complex, and sometimes, impossible to overcome. What do you do if you can never go back?
I grew up hearing stories of my family’s own past lore through the occasional picture, but more often than not a long faded memory, sometimes secondhand.
Becoming a parent was the impetus for me to try and find my way home and share that lore firsthand. I was desperate to mitigate the impacts of my intersections, and give my children direct contact with their story, their Home. Life however continued to be consistently challenging, presenting obstacle after obstacle, preventing me from returning with my family to home Country and forcing me to rediscover ways for me to find that bliss.
I would tell my children Dreaming stories, yarns about our ancestral home Country and the days I spent there, as well as learning and sharing the lore of our adopted home. With the rise of social media, we were more easily able to share with my extended family, and also connect with local mobs. I was grateful to discover new ways to find peace. In this journey, we swam in rivers that sprang from different wells, walked under the sky of another’s ancestors, and learnt their ways, connections and responsibilities to each other, Country and non-human kin.
“I would tell my children Dreaming stories, yarns about our ancestral home Country and the days I spent there, as well as learning and sharing the lore of our adopted home.”
Stories are what keep us connected throughout, and have been part of our cultures since time immemorial. Practicing and sharing these new ways of being, and connecting to my peace with my children opened up many wonderful opportunities for me to redress the balance lacking for me, and helped me to navigate the waves of loss and grief I was knocked over by.
When my mum died, at the heartbreakingly young age of 54, my world was shattered. I wasn’t ready for my own mother to become someone who only lived through stories of them. Learning to live, to feel hope, to smile and laugh, with the grief of missing her was something I worked hard at achieving. My children were so young, I had to become the anchor amongst the sometimes ferocious world for these little people, as they too, had lost their matriarch.
Having lost my land, my father, then my mother, and in the following years far too many other people to name, I became numb. My attempts to feel that calmness never seemed enough anymore and I gradually noticed the depletion, until there was just an absence left. An absence of peace.
When I first became aware of this absence, I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. Not only because my avoidance had allowed me to continue putting one foot in front of the other, to survive, but also in the years of numbness, I was not absent of joy or love or care. I didn’t want to betray or diminish the love of my partner, of my children and my entire community as not enough. On the contrary, the last decade of my life has evolved in ways that feel like my dreams have come true and I have been honoured to be a guest on Country all across the Kulin Nations.
"What was this longing I carried around my neck like a weight? What was this niggling that always left me seeking … something."
There’s a great shame that comes with being discontented, in a world that sees you as ‘having it all’. What could I be missing when I have a wonderful, loving, partner, children who are the joy of my life and I have achieved many of the goals I set out to achieve? What was this longing I carried around my neck like a weight? What was this niggling that always left me seeking … something.
I know what that something is now. I can name it, the practical, theoretical and mystical. I can advocate for my need for it, for all mobs’ need for it. While we have come a long way in identifying intergenerational trauma and the compounding impacts of colonisation, not only locally but on a global stage, much more work to redress the imbalance must be done. It may feel impossible to lighten the weight that looms when you are disconnected from Home, wherever it is and I feel like even with an understanding of what’s needed to lighten my load, until I return Home or I know for certain that can’t happen, I don’t know that I will ever fully feel at peace again.
Until I reach that fork in the road, being a humble guest, respecting the Elders, mob, teachings and cultures of people whose home I find myself living on, caring about and showing up for my community, listening, learning and practicing how to care for Country, is the way I counteract that disjointed, restless feeling. I hope learning to do this, and supporting others to do the same, helps lift us all in an antigravitational pull towards joy, peace and lightness, wherever we are.
