Meditation

Kosciuszko Road flares out, a vein pulled out, unravelling into the exterior world, unspooling as the car greedily eats the bitumen. The first thing you notice is the otherworldliness of the tumbled boulders. It's like they were rained down in some Precambrian catastrophe. The Australian gothic image is incomplete without the dead eucalypts - bleached ghosts with their gnarled limbs. They are victims of a beetle that found some chink to burrow in and exploit, and decimated the trees in this one location in Australia. Science is baffled. Then as you hurtle by, you are overwhelmed by the sameness. The flatness of the plains, a desert.

That is where the meditation starts. It reminds me of monastic all-night vigil where you settle in for the long haul, and in a meditative state you might receive a personal revelation. One night, the image of the Holy Theotokos as the Burning Bush answered my tearful question and I cannot explain or repeat the message as it is both infinite and tenuous.

Occasionally, the absence of distraction in church can be a personal battle as memories we thought long buried, fire in the internal silence. Nothing is forgotten! It's written in time. All the noise and our busy lives, our need to be constantly entertained and doing something - that destroys memory and our self-perception. We surmise that we have ADHD or early onset dementia as we struggle to keep track of every pot boiling. But there in church, in the hours that bleed into the night, we remember, and we are humbled by our past sins and our empty words. We might also hear a whisper of the eternal.

Detail from 15th-century icon of The Dormition painted by iconographer Andreas Ritzos and now housed in the Galleria Sabaudo, Turin, but originating in Heraklion, Crete

And out here on the highway, I recall my twin who I am losing one hair at a time. My twin was the one everyone saw first. It's my youth I am talking about.  I am at peace with the end of youth and the beginning of my blossoming into maturity. When we say Cradle Orthodox - those born into the faith - perhaps there is a deeper meaning to it. Maybe we are spiritual infants, carried by our communities and our parents and we expect it all to come to us effortlessly. We are like children who think that the laundry basket magically returns our dirty clothes in a clean state into our drawers, and when we grow up and strike out on our own we realise how hard we have to work for everything. I was young for so long because my parents' prayers were so protective and powerful that they covered me like an insurance policy into the start of my 30s. 

I had to choose to start walking the path towards Christ on my own, like a child leaving home. 

This ancient, empty landscape is so far from the grey skies and neat, orderly gardens of my childhood. I recall the blackbirds and the soft drizzling rain as the soundtrack of my early years, my eyes peering over the warm safety of the duvet.