Six Years

Two thousand one hundred and ninety one days ago [2191.45] , what we euphemistically refer to as “Black Saturday” was well underway.

I wrote this piece a few days ago, on Saturday the 7th, [today] My website will publish this for me..I will be planting and watering some more trees at our new home.

My father used to say to me…

..planting trees is making shade for your grand-children

David J. Morris, writing in Salon this week, captured and expressed his life experiences in such a way I felt compelled to write down his words, just so, I too, can revisit these words in years to come.

Wisdom and experience seem to be the next stage for him. For me, change is still present.

Family and close friends – connections to the world, are the difference. Of this I have no doubt.

David observed:

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. Trauma is the savagery of the universe made manifest within us, and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness, the myth of self-mastery, and the experience of time but also our ability to live peacefully with others, almost as if it were a virus, a pathogen content to do nothing besides replicate itself in the world, over and over, until only it remains.

This is not, however,  a dark or nihilistic [in the negative sense at least] concatenations of anger or bile, it is simply human experience writ large [and in my view] so very eloquently.

The timing of Morris’ words, coming as a settlement was reached in the Victorian Supreme Court for the survivors  of the 2009 Marys­ville blaze known as the ‘Murrindindi Class-Action’.

This agreement takes the total compensation bill for the Black Saturday fires to almost $1 billion.

As a member of the Kilmore-East Class Action, I am all too aware of the challenges and next steps for our neighbours in Murrindindi.

Morris concludes with sage advice:

There are so many ways to think about PTSD. As a construct, it touches on so many things, but the most important of these might reside in the simple meaning of the first letter of its formal name, the P. The loss, the insight, the fragmentation, the moral vertigo, all of these things only happen post-, after The Event has come and gone and we discover to our shock and surprise that we are not who we used to be. It is perhaps a facile thing to say, but it seems to me that the first duty of every survivor is to simply acknowledge the existence of trauma, to accept that there are things in this world that can break us. Only then can we begin to make meaning out of everything that comes after.