Amy’s Wilderness

This is a story about a woman falling in love, falling into the wild and eventually falling into herself. Like all good romances, it begins with a little dose of heartache. Girl meets boy. Girl moves for boy. Boy changes his mind. Girl moves back home. And whilst at that very time one of Shakespeare’s most pleading of lines, “Oh teach me how I should forget to think” rang true, Amy’s propensity for spotting the light in the darkest of places, instead coerced her gently not to forget to think, but rather to explore.

Luckily for her, she could take her pick of explorations as she headed back to the Sunshine Coast hinterland, not too far from the tiny community she had grown up in, Bellthorpe. Having spent her childhood on her parent’s farm, she became a curious and creative child, who quickly learnt to use the environment around her as her greatest form of entertainment.  The great outdoors was her playground and within it, she rode her horse across the paddocks, waited eagerly to peer at full moons, and sat curled up in lantana bushes just to watch the sunset. Even her reading material favoured tales of talking animals and beautiful sanctuaries such as The Wind in the Willows, The Rats of Nimh and The Secret Garden.  Unbeknownst to her, her link to nature was already there, bubbling and budding inside her tiny heart.

An orphaned fawn, fondly named Emily, was also hand-reared by Amy’s family and unbelievably after returning to her herd as a mature doe, she magically reappeared years later when Amy turned fifteen. Often when she would return home from school she would sit upon her grassy hill that overlooked the flats, and wait for Emily. Sure enough, the animal would tentatively make her way towards her, and they’d spend the afternoons together as Amy finished homework or read books with Emily lounging close by. “Oddly enough, Emily was my greatest teacher,” Amy smiles. “I felt “seen” for the first time as a shy and awkward teenager and felt almost grateful to be me. How rare for a skittish animal to want to choose to spend its time with a human.” Her reverence for the natural world began and at a time in her life when she didn’t quite know what to do, she realised that it was time to go back to the beginning, back to her wilderness.

And so it began. Her love affair. “I wanted to fall back in love with the hinterland,” she says. “I’d been trying to leave it for so long, heading off on new adventures, but somehow it seemed to keep calling me back.” It was a slow progression, a run of small dates with nature, a dipping of toes into her natural dating pool. Some mornings were spent along the edges of creeks, waiting for a sleepy platypus to show itself. Some days were spent in the rainforest, beneath the canopies photographing an array of fungi that sprouted across lengths of timber. Some afternoons had her foraging for berries and edible weeds, tiny treasures served up to her like roses. It was a whirlwind of a romance rife with appreciation, and quicker than anticipated, nature began to move in.

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It began in the smallest of ways. A fern in the bathroom, a fiddle leaf fig in the bedroom, a flourishing array of pots on her deck. British gardeners, Alys Fowler and Mary Reynolds, renewed Amy’s interest in gardening and reminded her of the importance of allowing nature the capacity to be responsible for itself. Principles of companion planting took hold and her relationship bloomed. Even her furnishings were swapped for those with natural fibres and she began growing her own “bathshrooms” as a means to bring the outside, in.

The delicate relationship also began to influence her artwork. Sketches of fairy wrens, scarlet honeyeaters, nests and plants scattered her walls and bench tops as reminders of the many faces of her new found love.

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It became clear, that the wilderness had somehow managed to permeate every aspect of her life and Amy welcomed the familiarity of its warm embrace. It was a gentle companion, one that had brought her peace and taught her a humility that she felt no human possibly could. For she had received more than she sought. She had also fallen once again happily into herself, complete and full and now madly in love with the most nurturing of confidantes, nature its very self.