Leaving

Today I’m raking leaves. A few stray Eucalyptus, burnished by the late summer sun. They have slipped from their moorings in the stillness of the night. Unclasped and untethered, they simply took flight.

Holding a single leaf in my hand, I cast my wide eye over the red ochre of its parchment patterning, like a satellite beholding an ancient landscape, cleaved by the seam of a time-worn path. The line trembles as though pressed by a pencil into soft layers of coloured pastel. An arrow of direction. It leads from somewhere to somewhere else.

Walking my eye back down the leaf I see the line thicken and rise. The vein draws itself up into three dimensions, becoming first a ridge, then swelling into a stem. This humble umbilical thread points to origins. To the mother tree. And through her trunk to roots. To earth.

On either side trace capillaries converge towards the arterial way. A thousand smaller paths join together, witness perhaps to the journeys of individual pilgrims gathered in by the gravitational pull of the central path. Perhaps these are song-lines etched by countless generations of aboriginal feet. Or tracks in the dust left by elephants who remember year after year, the way back to the same life-giving waterhole.

Towards the tip of the leaf the path begins to fade. Less footfall here perhaps. Fewer pilgrims have made it this far. At the leaf’s furthest point, the path simply runs out. Dwindles into thin air.  Here the faithful traveller steps off the edge.

Letting go of the path, she simply takes flight.