They call it Waddy Point, where the land mass juts out to the east, dipping its toe into the Coral Sea. Like a giant mottled caterpillar, the land stretches in places and shrugs in others, inching its way to the ocean.
At its most eastern point, sits two trees, one taller than the other but similar in form, they could be brother and sister, created under a Harvest Moon from the love between Mother Earth and Father Ocean. Both leaning with the wind, their limbs are distorted in a similar fashion, their shapes a result of their upbringing – the forces of their island days having made them what they are.
Every vibration, every wave, contributed to their being, along with the particles carried on every gust of wind that soared around them, through them. If the wind had changed, they may have settled on a different part of the landscape but now they appear lone survivors, having not yet succumbed to the weather or relented to the winds or taken by flames. Stripped bare of their leaves, they exist despite their contribution to the atmosphere. From the beach, they could be the bones of what once was, like fish frames left on the shoreline.
In the distance they create drama, one reaching for the ocean, the other with hands raised to save it. Up close, their drama is lost in the surrounding dullness of spindly single branches and monotone coffee rocks. What is magnificent from afar, could be ordinary up close.
How many suns the sibling trees must have seen together – passing whales, pounding waves, moving clouds. How much they must have shared of themselves in the company of birds and boats and people, some who stay to appreciate their being, others who look past them to the land or ocean and leave. In their solitude, the trees once again, belonged to each other.
They must once have sprouted leaves under gentle breezes and pink night skies. Perhaps they came with the tide, under the same Aries moon that now carves their silhouette on the horizon. If the fire moon dictated their now naked branches, how different would their lives have been if they were created under the moon of a water sign.
My brother was born under the moon of a water sign and like the Pisces moon he was limitless, his connections vast. He favoured the ocean, his nature was intuitive like the tide, and he felt deeply, absorbing the energy of others. Those born under the Pisces moon are sensitive to spiritual forces and many were drawn to my brother’s indestructible soul, both the living and the not living. Sometimes he would talk of unwelcome encounters with souls who remained, because like the forces of the ocean, energy does not die. But like my brother’s heart, something died inside me with him. My cells, my core, my soul broke, but the forces around me did not – the skies, the clouds, the oceans continued, their energy unbreakable. Despite the neurons that would no longer be interrupted by his smile, the trillions of particles that made up his energy must still be here, even if they were now in an order I could no longer see.
There were times in my brothers last years when our family connections had become as bare as the trees on the crown of Waddy Point. But we would always reconnect, renew, and remember we had once belonged to each other. Perhaps he was the tree leaning to the ocean and I was the tree with hands raised to save him.
I would like to think my brother’s energy will stay with me, that the particles he left in the wind and the clouds will both save me and haunt me, in the same way the twisted limbs of two trees at Waddy Point, haunt me now.
From the South (photo by Tayla Lake)