I find myself looking at this sight and for the first time, really asking myself – can we reverse this? Can we really take these foolish grids of poured cement and instead restore something of the paradise that once was? How much can be healed? My heart weeps. The tears flow. I feel it is hopeless. I also feel there is hope. I live with resoluteness. I live with despair. Every day I rise with hope, drinking and flowing with beauty, whilst my hands churn with the clay of loss, of mourning. I realise the depth of one is the extent of the other. It can be no other way.

In our “society” we do not make space for mourning, for the tears, to weep the salt of the Earth. This is foolish. Virgil spoke of the tears of things – lacrimae rerum. They do not even belong to us, but they can come through us. It is a form of worship too.

We need to grieve in order to rejoice, to fully love, to worship, to surrender. And so today, I mourn, I cry, and I smile, and everything else in between. I’ll meet you there.