There’s a stretch of bushland near my home that is a narrow corridor where trees lean over a walking track, where stormwater pools and recedes, where the land is always remembering and forgetting itself.
It’s not wilderness, it has been cleared, farmed, built over, and only partially left to recover. The earth here holds both memory and compromise and the footprints of all that’s passed through.
I’ve walked there almost every day for years through COVID lockdowns, through holding endings and beginnings, through the quiet ache of days when I had nothing to say. The track itself isn’t long but it knows me now.
Not by name, but by weight, by rhythm, by the way my body slows when grief is heavy, by the pause when I wait to see if the kookaburra will arrive.
Kinship as witnessing
The kookaburra almost always comes. Perched low on a branch, or high where the track curves, they are sometimes silent, sometimes laughing in that way that splits the air wide open.
It’s not that the kookaburra is “my” bird. It’s not a sign or a symbol I control. It’s just there as a presence that witnesses my presence, without needing me to be anyone in particular.
There are others too: the rosellas flashing red through the trees, the magpies warbling from fence posts, the ravens thick-voiced and observant.
Snakes sometimes, blue-tongued lizards if I’m lucky, and the myna birds that argue with the sky. This place, and these beings, have been my Kinship Council, whether I was ready to name them or not.
Grief and the shifting land
Like the creek I once walked beside in another place, this bushland doesn’t care how I feel. The track floods when it rains too hard, the air thickens with heat in January, the undergrowth moves in and out, regenerating around the edges of old wounds.
There’s a strange comfort in that indifference, evidence the world keeps shifting, with or without my plans.
Grief comes, and the water rises. Grief softens, and the parrots move back in. This place doesn’t ask me to justify my unravelling. It just holds it, in leaf litter and birdsong, in the way the earth forgets and remembers itself.
Your Kinship Council
Somewhere, maybe close to home, maybe in memory, there’s a place or a more-than-human presence, that has been quietly witnessing you.
Not offering advice or demanding explanation. It is just holding space for you to exist, exactly as you are. Who or what has been quietly watching over your unravelling?
A tree, a stretch of water, a bird, a patch of sky?
Do they know your steps like this track knows mine?
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.