Travelling at the Speed of Life!

Field Note: Trees, Time and Tenderness

They are enormous, unapologetic, and impossibly anchored; their wide buttress roots fold over one another like an orchestra frozen mid-swell. They anchor the landscape. Children climb them. Magpies strut their stage. Couples pose beneath their shade. Yet familiarity dulls the wonder. We walk past majesty so often that it fades into background noise. In this case, we miss the tree for the forest of busy.

Then someone visits, an American student or a friend from Fiji, and we wander down to the Point again. They stop mid-sentence, look up, and gasp at the sheer scale. It is humbling how quickly awe returns when borrowed from another person’s eyes. Distance can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, but attentiveness doesn’t require going somewhere new; it is about coming home to what is already here.

The Lovers’ Banyan

Earlier this year, a single story caught my attention. A Moreton Bay fig, grown from a seed sent from Sydney 150 years ago, was named one of Europe’s most beloved trees. It towers in the Quinta das Lágrimas Gardens in Portugal. Locals call it The Lovers’ Banyan. People travel across a continent to stand in its shade. I live among its kin and forget to look skyward. Distance may sharpen gratitude, but proximity must insist upon presence. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, spring light shifts, salt rides the air, and parrots return to the canopy. The season itself is asking for that kind of looking.

The Quiet Rhythm

You remember the old song: You can’t hurry love.

It is true. You can perform for someone, fix for them, or speak at them, but genuine connection needs time. It lingers. It listens. It waits for presence to catch up. That may be the rhythm our hurried lives were meant to keep, the deep breath before affection moves again. The Moreton Bay figs live by that rhythm. They are monuments to stillness. They do not produce more shade by straining or rushing. They simply hold: light, rain, laughter, the weight of years. They do what they were made to do: stay. Their patience is its own quiet ministry, reminding us that some things grow only in the absence of haste, like that tree in the Psalms, planted by water and still bearing fruit in its season.

The Cost of Rushing

Stillness can be confronting. When we stop, the noise of the heart catches up: the ache, the tiredness, the unfinished things. We all know the trick: turn up the radio, and you cannot hear the engine rattle. It is easier to hurry than to listen. Yet life keeps offering these gentle interruptions, a tree, a guest, a season turning. Perhaps attentiveness is not about staring harder but softening, letting our guard down long enough to be surprised by our own backyard.

This week, I will take our visitors to the figs again. I will watch their wonder and try not to hurry them along. Somewhere between their fresh eyes and my familiar path, I may remember what it means to walk at the unhurried speed of being truly alive. The only pace at which the holy can be seen.