Patient resignation
From its custodians CERES Brunswick East requires a kind of surrender – a patient resignation that these ten acres of collective ecological yearning will exist in a forever unruly stop/start state of change.
Looking after the CERES site is akin to raising a child; return from two-weeks away you could easily be forgiven for wondering if things were going backwards – yet return after two years and the change will astonish.
Over the past two years many people have been unable to visit CERES, but this week if you were to return you would be witness to a transformation.
Through the pandemic CERES leaders, builders, farmers, gardeners and volunteers have persistently and patiently been at work across the whole park.
Walk under the new wooden entrance and down Lee St and you’ll come to a steel archway – step through into a garden of radiating concentric stone circles that focus your attention on our spirits’ role to care for the Earth.
In 2016 the CERES Meditation Garden started in chaos with a huge pile of rocks, like puzzle pieces tipped onto a table, waiting to be arranged into walls and pathways.
This garden takes five years of weekend volunteering, stone masonry awakenings and staff comings and goings before the final stone is laid and the garden planted in November.
Across Lee St over in the Community Garden and Chook Group a complete renewal has taken place in a seeming instant.
Yet the speed of this transformation belies the three years of patient, though not always peaceful, negotiations between gardeners, chook folk, designers and CERES leaders.
It’s this path of imprecise words and wills, of shifting give and take, of hurts and forgiveness that had to be trod before any physical structure could hold the community’s gardening and chook dreams.
Surveying the new plots from behind a ragged wooden paling fence a gigantic millipede born out of the imagination of designer Steve Mushin towers over the new Terra Wonder Playspace.
Forged out of scrounged industrial machinery, salvaged trees and old Spirit of Tasmania mooring ropes Terra Wonder is a 500 times magnified tribute to communities of insects, fungi and microorganisms who create life in our soils.
And always there’s more – new garden beds in the Honey Lane Farm, the forecourt at the Grocery, the pedestrian bridge entrance and the never-ending to-do-list that follows
It was ever thus at this old quarry cum tip site that keeps leading us back and back to somewhere before we dug out its bluestone, asking only for our patient resignation to its unruly stop/start astonishing change.
Delivery Update
After last week’s Omicron outbreak all of our packing crew have thankfully recovered and returned to work.
We still have some drivers isolating and have had to cap the number of delivery spots until they’re well again.
This means some days will sell out early this week – Monday and Tuesday are currently full.
We’re doing everything we can to stay healthy and are looking forward to returning to normal soon.
Until then get your orders in early.
Have a safe week
Chris
