Where earth ends and heaven begins (Longfellow)

Gratitude

According to various sources, there are 8.2 billion people on planet earth. Twenty-four of those currently live on Macquarie Island, a tiny speck roughly 34 km long and 5 km wide, in the middle of the wild Southern Ocean.

Those numbers make you take stock of how incredibly privileged we are to be doing what we are doing.

It can be easy to lose perspective when you live in a small isolated community far from family and friends. Small things become big things, we forget where we are and things like rosters, dirty dishes, and someone else’s taste in music can consume our horizon. It’s known in AAD circles as “the bubble” – we sometimes live in that bubble, feeling cut off from the rest of the world.

Perspective is everything. Sometimes it’s important to stop, go outside, fill your lungs with the always fresh air, and look around. There is much to be grateful for:

  • The goodness and kindness this experience brings out in people.
  • Our relatively good health, something we can never take for granted and something we all have in the main that allows us to do this. Many will never get this opportunity.
  • The sound of hail and rain on the roof at night.
  • Four seasons in 30 minutes - snow, brilliant sun, gale-force winds, sideways sleet.
  • The sound of giant petrels soaring above station.
  • When Sunday morning consists of climbing Doctors Hill and walking onto the snow-covered plateau to wonder at the landscape and the ever-changing light.
  • The cycles of nature and the abundance of wildlife in the everyday – gentoos, elephant seals, a leopard seal, New Zealand sea lions, fur seals, petrels, and spring has only just arrived.
  • The stormy, wild, strong ocean that carries large boulders onto the isthmus.
  • Dazzling green auroras dancing their way across the night sky and illuminating the clouds.
  • When you awake to a station blanketed in snow and walk those first crunchy steps in the golden morning light.
  • Looking out of the mess window and up to the majestic plateau that stands like a moody sentinel – glistening in the sun one minute and grey and dark the next.

This place has helped me to appreciate how poetry and art can capture something ordinary speech can’t quite touch.

The Golden Sunset, Samuel Longfellow

The golden sea its mirror spreads
    Beneath the golden skies,
And but a narrow strip between
    Of earth and shadow lies.

The cloud-like cliffs, the cliff-like clouds,
    Dissolved in glory, float,
And midway of the radiant floods
    Hangs silently the boat.

The sea is but another sky,
    The sky a sea as well,
And which is earth and which the heavens
    The eye can scarcely tell.

So when for me life's latest hour
    Soft passes to its end,
May glory, born of earth and heaven,
    The earth and heaven blend.
 

Flooded with light the spirits float,
    With silent rapture glow,
Till where earth ends and heaven begins
    The soul shall scarcely know.

I feel very grateful.

Karen Pye Station Leader, Macquarie Island

A hiker with walking poles stands at the top of a snow-covered hill. In the background some distance away is a snow-covered isthmus surrounded by ocean.
A snow-covered plateau in the distance, a snow-covered beach in the foreground.
Green and red ribbons of light dance across the black night sky.
A grey elephant seal sleeps on the white snow between green tussock grass near the ocean.
A black and white penguins with an orange beak and feet stands on black sand in front of the camera. There are numerous other penguins behind it in the distance.
Three hikers with backpacks in the distance scaling a tussock covered hill set in a hilly landscape.
Dozens of black and white penguins and their fluffy brown chicks stand on a rocky beach with a green grassy hill behind them.
The sun sets over the ocean with a green tussock covered landscape in the mid-ground and the wooden railing of a lookout in the foreground.

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