Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech

I read a brilliant quote this week: “Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree” (Tagore).

I wish I’d read it before I had the Long Evening. That’s the one when I worried, and all the threads came loose. I couldn’t see how to do it – how to manage time and work and children and choices, and keep all my hopes of the future, too. On reflection, probably a good thing I hadn’t read it. I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the midst of my dilemmas, I wouldn’t have been able to hear the wisdom. Out the other side, though, and the wisdom within it feels electric.

Aside from it fitting so well with all the digging analogies I’ve outlined in previous columns, there is something immediately arresting about the visual image of a tree. Without soil, it would die – of course. Soil. Strange that it can seem mundane, when it thrives and teems with life and living.

And yet despite determining to live fully in the small things, despite being aware of digging in, in order to be nourished where I find myself – still, I was overwhelmed when the small details didn’t look like they were making up a very exciting future-bound big picture.

What happened to the theory? It wasn’t swept away, but it was drowned for a while in the emotion of unknowing. That’s the storm I find can batter belief in the process. And yet it would undermine everything if we only put faith in what is assured in our futures.

Surely the point is to believe that what we do well in daily life contributes to the big picture. We need to have an eye to the future, but maybe it helps to think of it as a tree. It stretches into the sky, grows limbs outwards, blossoms and bears fruit according to season. The future can’t be held static in a distant lottery-win dream. No. We are the tree, and we are the future we hope for.