hope thicks the air - by Viv Cutbush
ISLAND | ISSUE 158This piece was written as part of the ‘Writing Climate Futures’ project, supported by a City of Hobart Dr Edward Hall Environment Grant.
Dear _____________
It was the year Love died. I was in someone
else’s bathroom and read a message on a
screen smaller than the palm of my hand. I
was bereft sitting atop someone
else’s toilet seat. Tears came,
later. It was the year Love died
you were conceived. I am
telling you this because you should know
when a glacier melts away they call it
dead ice. When a person passes
away they call it life.
It’s about the movement of water.
Clay, silt, sand and gravel.
The skin of a mountain ash tree.
It’s about Joan of Arc and hope
in the dark. It’s about the futility of words,
except without words all we
are left with is what goes unsaid. These
letters, dotted and crossed, are tied up in the
bark of a King Billy pine. They are for you.
This letter. It’s about minor gestures that
interrupt. Intercept and change course –
put into motion the unforeseen.
A fruit tree in winter is dormant but take a
knife to its flesh and you’ll find it breathes.
As a child my mum told me never to turn
my back on the sea. The tide is
turning. In turn, your mother will tell you
the same. Turn around. Turn full circle.
Water at the knees. Last night I dreamt my
mouth was full of ash and I woke
in search of water – a beach, a bay,
a creek – to keep myself afloat.
The phrase turn to ashes in one’s mouth
means something appears to be good,
but in reality disappoints. As if I were
to rearrange the letters of hope on a page
looking for a phoenix
but only finding foe. Think of corn
the colour of fading sun, cookies wrapped
in plastic or a cable car clutching the
skin of an ancient mountain.
I smell the fires burning not far from here
and the sky is bruised the
colours of dust and apricot.
How to move forward towards
an uncertain future has never been
more felt. This place is burning up.
Think of a way a leaf curls and cracks when
it’s fallen to the ground. Think of the smell of
smoke creeping into the fibre of your
clothes. Think of blistered skin
and sand blown up into the eyes.
You’re told to keep them open and let the
tears wash away the grit but you close them
instead. This place is burning up.
I don’t know what the future holds.
Bruce Pascoe writes we must teach our
children to doubt. Another word, he says,
for the desire to make this world a better
place. Another word, I think, for uncertainty
that buds the scent of brighter things. Like
the bloom of jasmine in a Sydney spring.
Or your housemate cooking dinner. A smell
which feeds your tired heart. I like doubt.
It’s a seed potato. A simple thing. At first
covered in crisp frost and dirt but then
buttered cream white on a spoon and into
your mouth. Doubt chips away at what
we are told is good for us but meanwhile
feeds despair from the inside out.
Doubt is the colour of wattle, all golden and
blooming and loud in winter. Or a clover
crop to be chopped up and turned back in,
to let things begin again. Better this time.
Doubt is failure. It’s addendum. A black
swan. A hand reaching out to pull you up.
D o u b t i s r e s i s t a n c e.
I am writing you this letter not to say I did
something. But to say something. I held the
future in the palm of my hand whilst living
in the now. And. Climate matters. I think
that’s what I really want to say. Beneath the
muddiness and chaos combined there is
hope I can feel it thick in the air.
I want you to know after the fires there will
be life again. After all, there is the old
saying rise from the ashes which I think
means things come good eventually if we
just wait long enough. Fire sprouts
blackened seeds and bowls to eat from.
The word resistance derives from the
present participle stem of Latin resistere, to
make a stand against. To oppose. To
withstand. Think of a schoolgirl, sitting on
a cobblestone pavement with a hand-painted
banner ‘skolstrejk fÖr klimatet’. Or a group
of grandmothers knitting for refugees in the
mall. Day in day out.
I want you to know that to stand and wait is
an intention requiring more than simply
waiting. It is a task weighted with hope.
Where hope is not passive but movement in
the shape of contrapuntal force. It’s about
pushing back against those
who would have you think you’ve no voice,
no power. It’s about making good.
Like from flour and water and
fire you make bread.
Think of a winter sunrise – the sky a fierce
orange now blazing pink now blinding blue.
I read somewhere that time brings us
together. Through rituals, placed within the
rhythm of time, we rub up against one
another’s life. Work rosters, church
sermons, Saturday sport, choir rehearsals.
But what happens when time scatters? Or
the very lack of time defines the shape of
our lives. Busy-busy. Time-poor. We walk
in the world with our faces to the screen.
How do we begin to slowly-slowly again.
How do we begin to care.
You might as well begin by attending to the
way the light streams and catches on the
kitchen sill. The way it fractures
on the native cherry blooming
by the bus stop. Empath. Go from there.
Recently I came across the idea of
commoning, whereby there is a shift in
thinking about the commons as a noun to a
verb. Thus whilst community is integral to
the commons, it is formed through the act
of commoning. In other words, resilience
is in the here and now – civic
discourse, community gardens and
conversations around the kitchen table.
More hands in the soil, hearts in
our hands and stories shared.
To whom it may concern is an ancient trope
punctuated with sincerity and regards and
wishes and love. We write atop the long
ribbons of pulped bark because we want
things said. We want things read and
known. Like how buds become fruits. Like
how at the same time as the Arctic melts
and the Greenland ice sheet thins and the
ocean heats up you boil oats for breakfast
and cycle to work. Letters form and
fracture. They stack up in order to unearth
lost knowledge or make something new.
Make words hold meaning again. Make
connections and conversations. Find love
again. Tend again. Like soil
now dry and sallow,
once thick and loamy. Make good again.
I write this as it rains cats and dogs. In other
words heavy and hard. The kind of rain that
moves sideways. The front door swells and
sticks against the frame. When it rains this
much I slam my body – thigh and hip –
against the door. One. Or two, or
sometimes more body slams are required
for the door to open. Climate matters, they
say. But on days like this,
as I slam against the door,
as it rains, I think of bodies that resist.
Bodies that matter. Bodies that
matter together and form a rhythm that
maps the sky like birdsong.
A rare kind of pulse that moves to the
sound of dissonance, the sound
of their own resistance.
You must be by the ocean now. Standing at
wait. There’s intent right down to your
marrow. Perhaps you’re on a shoreline, or a
cliff or beach. You scatter ashes.
The sea swallows and sighs.
King Billy and Banksia serrata. Now white
gum. River gum. Black wattle and silver-
top ash. You record their names.
L e t t e r t o l e t t e r. She oak.
Myrtle. Huon pine, paper bark,
h a k e a and m u s k.
Hands blackened by burnt.
Fossils and coal and mountain ash.
The sky now blue-grey bloom.
The heart ruptures. Heart splits.
Like the shedding of bark from a tree.
To let things begin again.
B r e a t h e a g a i n.
With all my love and more ▼
Image by Emma Theyers
This piece appeared in Island 158 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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