Inside of Leah’s body, there is a tiny little Leah. With all her might, Tiny Leah strives to mobilise the body that is the big, whole Leah. Right down inside her, Big Leah can feel Tiny Leah’s face screwing up like a gym bunny attempting to lift an insane amount of weights all at once. She senses Tiny Leah’s will moving down her arm – the sheer force of will – and the arm that is so giant for Tiny Leah eventually manages to follow Tiny Leah’s instruction. Slowly, it rises. Tentatively.

It is touch and go whether the arm will crash down beside Big Leah’s body before reaching its destination. But it is rising now, inexorably, well over halfway there. Leah’s hand reaches the bedside lamp switch and presses it on before the arm loses power and lands heavily on the bed. Success. Part 1 of the mission has been accomplished.

Leah doesn’t know when she’ll find the energy for Part 2 – getting up to use the toilet. She feels the pressure of the fluid in her bladder increase. She mustn’t leave it too long. She hopes that Tiny Leah will find a way to get her there in time.

She’s starting to lose track of how long her current state of being has been going on and is consumed with dread about how long it will continue. Forever? Into the afterlife? She already feels like this is what death might be like. Your soul still trapped inside your motionless body. At least in death she wouldn’t need to use the toilet.

Some time ago, maybe a long time and maybe not so long, someone had been offended by Leah’s claim that she was Disabled. You can’t say that. There are enough people faking disabilities to try and get money out of the state. It’s a limited social fund, you know. Maybe it was true. Disabled people had a wheelchair or a guide dog or some easily recognisable trait that the non-Disabled could use to categorise them.

It’d taken a long time to contemplate using the word Disabled for herself. It felt appropriative. Because at the times when Leah was able to be in the vicinity of someone who could tell her that she couldn’t term herself as Disabled, effectively she wasn’t. The people who needed to see Leah’s discernable Disabled trait would not see her at those very Disabled times. Right now, Leah’s major endeavour was to get to the bathroom. Forget accessible venues when you can’t even make it to the venue in the first place.

There was also something about becoming Disabled that meant that suddenly you were supposed to be achieving great feats. Entering the Paralympics. Showing the world the things that you can do against all odds. Inspiration Porn for the able-bodied. If you want to set a Disabled person’s teeth on edge, you need do nothing more than call them Inspirational.

Chronic illness was a slightly different category, though. Chronically ill people didn’t even get to be Inspirational. Leah pictures entering the Paralympics for her country’s chronically ill team. She imagines the commentary. “And here we have Leah Jones, competing for Great Britain, virtually imperceptibly gaining the lead on who will be the first to make it out of bed, but possibly a streak ahead of her competitors. Oh no, after such a strong start, Jones has dropped back again – it looked like she’d be able to push the duvet back, but it’s not happening! She was just moving her hand to cover her eyes and keep out the brightness of the bedside lamp. We thought it might be a gold medal for G.B., but it won’t even be a silver or a bronze…”

Anyway, her chronic illness isn’t even real in the eyes of the world. No blood tests. No biomarkers. Still, the disastrous splurge of letters in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis makes it sound like something to be taken seriously. Not that she’s ever worked out how to pronounce it properly. And besides, everyone knows it as M.E., or Yuppie Flu, or middle-class disease… “you know, the one where you don’t feel like going to work today, not M.S., the crippling wasting disease.” Thank you, Ricky Gervais, obnoxious prick of a non-hilarious comedian.

But it’s true, right – everyone’s tired, aren’t they? Everyone’s working all hours, never sleeping enough, barely any quality of life. No one feels like going to work today. Except Leah. Compared to the crushing fatigue and the unbearable frustration from a soul that is still in there, still wants. In this giant, immobile body, the possibility of being able to go to work sounds like the best thing there is.

Okay, things are starting to get desperate. She will have to haul herself out of bed so she can piss in the right place. She pushes her legs out of the bed and moves herself to sit on the bed’s edge. Her head falls forward, throb-throb-throbbing. Keep going, keep going. Don’t stop now. She shuffles across the hallway into the bathroom and slumps onto the toilet seat, head in hands. At last, the liquid is released. When its flow is finally over, she still just sits. Now she has to find the energy to get back again. Dammit.

Come on. It’s time to get on with it. Forget hand-washing. Let alone showering or brushing teeth. Just focus the mind on getting back to bed. She’s tempted to lie on the bathroom floor, but the temperature is close to freezing, and she’s shivering. So she hauls herself back to her bed again and disappears under the ludicrous layers of duvets and blankets that are the universal understanding of the chronically ill. Always cold. At some point, she’ll have to deal with the fact that she needs to drink water and eat food, but right now, forget it. Put off the horrific act of movement for as long as possible. Wait till she’s desperate.

She’s grateful that the brain fog hasn’t come on too strong today. Some days jfinvnreinjfnjindghgpuhu8nc;nco she hhiw[hincdjz;ihcohu[ag[h can nreu[gu[wq-qpk,lxzkmlx barely locate gnvurhulmpc’e9w’am the nvuiowep words in amongst fnupnmi[wnig the thick funk gnup;beup;jk[fai0’Q;lk inside her mind.

There’s a desperately uncomfortable heightened sensation that is growing right now. Leah can’t put a finger on what it is – an intense buzzing noise, like an insect careering about in her tiny bedroom. She allows her eyes to open slightly, and there it is – a huge hornet hovering around her, menacingly. On its own that was bad enough, but then she realises it has a human face – the face of Ricky Gervais, and he looks her in the eyes and says, “You never hear a starving African complaining about having M.E.” before dive bombing her and stinging her square between the eyes.

Leah screws up her face in reaction. The hornet buzzes off, leaving her with a pain that sears right through her skull. The toxins delivered by the sting start to circulate in her head, and the suspicion engulfs her that it’s only because she’s a pampered Westerner that she can get away with lying around like this. If she had to walk to a well for water, wouldn’t she just do it? If someone held a gun to her head and told her it was move or die, would she suddenly find there had been nothing wrong with her all along?

She’s been going through all this for long enough to remind herself that if there’s one thing comparable to the awfulness of fatigue, it’s the fear that this is something you’re doing to yourself. But the reminder doesn’t quite work, and the It’s All In Your Head theme tune thrums on and on. On some level, You Want This. Otherwise, you would’ve found a way out. It’s easier to stay here than to deal with life, and that’s why you aren’t getting better. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? There are Things she could Do to make this go away. Why hasn’t she tried the Lightening Process yet? If she hasn’t tried Everything Possible to make this better, the only reasonable conclusion is that this is All Her Own Fault. All In Your Head, All In Your Head, ALL IN YOUR HEAD…

It vaguely dawns on Leah that her thoughts are getting way too loud. Fucking hornet stings. She’s had to learn over and over again that it doesn’t help to fixate on the possibility that her own mind is causing the state she’s in. Another thing about fatigue is that you don’t have the energy to prevent your own thoughts from swallowing you whole. So what can she do for herself right now?

She fumbles for her phone and looks up M.E. and Lightning Process. A couple of sentences make it through from the M.E. Association’s webpage into her fatigue-addled brain…“It is very worrying to find that desperate people with Long Covid are being encouraged to spend large sums of money on the Lightning Process, a treatment that is completely unproven in relation to Long Covid and M.E./C.F.S…people report significant physical deterioration and emotional distress following a Lightning Process course.”

There. Surely just those two sentences are enough to stifle that nasty niggle. And even if the Lightning Process did work to cure chronic fatigue, “large sums of money” was a barrier if ever there was one. At least Leah couldn’t be charged with having M.E. as a middle-class neurosis. If it really was middle-class disease, M.E. was the only marker of being middle-class that Leah actually had.

Although before all this, she’d been on a trajectory to middle-classdom. She’d been smart at school and had got into a good university to study Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Science. University had been going fine, though she wasn’t particularly interested in the trappings of middle-classness. People from middle-class backgrounds thought they were interesting when they were just droning on about nutrients and superfoods again. She was, however, extremely interested in having cupboards with general ongoing food in them and a life where you got to do more interesting work, and your body wasn’t destroyed by physical labour, as her mother’s had been.

How ironic that her body had been destroyed anyway. She’d had terrible glandular fever as she entered her final year of study, and things had never returned to how they were before. Sometimes she chided herself for her internalised working class work ethic, pushing her back to balancing studies and work too soon after the acuteness of the illness had subsided. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t really possible to separate her work ethic from the fact that she was perpetually skint and had needed to keep making money to pay the rent.

In any case, if Leah had been told about post-exertional fatigue before she’d actually experienced it, she wouldn’t have been able to imagine what it actually meant. She knew what tiredness was. She was accustomed to squeezing extra adrenaline out of her adrenal glands so she could keep pushing through. Her darkest nightmares were no comparison with what fatigue was like. Tiredness was having a shower to feel better. Fatigue was having a shower because you haven’t made it there in some days, and even though it will use every unit of energy you have, and you’ll need to recover for half a day afterwards, you know that at some point, you can’t escape needing to take a shower.

It’s still dark, and Leah tries to guess what time it might be. There are so many hours of darkness when you’re awake so much of the night. It feels like dawn will never come, but she guesses it’s around 5a.m. Her phone says it’s 6.30. That’s good. A bit less protracted time being alive, and it would actually be light in another hour. She reaches for her phone again, and wonders if keeping it as her constant bedfellow is slowly killing her with its electromagnetic radiation. Maybe that’s why I’m so sick. Another thing not worth thinking about, and anyway, it’s a major coping mechanism for her right now. I’m dependent on the thing that’s killing me.

She ignores herself again and presses the button for the free audiobook app from the public library. She’s always got several audiobooks on the go. At the moment, she’s listening to Sapiens for about the fifth time, and she still can’t remember much about it, so she can keep listening without it driving her nuts. She turns down the narrator speed so that when she presses play, it sounds like more of a soothing drawl. Good for the nervous system. Chronic illness is all about keeping the adrenaline at bay. The words wash over her. All she needs for the next few hours.

By noon, Leah knows that she’s got to face eating. It’s the time of day when things get a little easier for a few hours, so she wraps herself in jumpers and dressing gown and slippers and scarf and hat and shuffles through to the kitchen. She suffers another bout of neurosis as she looks into the cupboard. Surely she should eat something better than a packet of mac-n-cheese? How would she ever get well again if her food was toxic? But she hasn’t got the energy to sustain such a neurosis, and she’s hung out with middle-class people enough to know that all food is toxic anyway. In fact, you shouldn’t really eat anything apart from avocados, goji berries and pasture-raised meats. She tears off the top of the packet and pours the contents into a pan. Thank fuck for mac-n-cheese, she thinks. Ready in 5 minutes, warm and basically keeping her alive. She realises in that moment that she really does want to live.

After that, it’s back to bed. Time slows down and speeds up at the same time. The hours go by with relentless slowness, but then she can’t believe that almost another day has passed. Leah looks out at the stripped winter tree tops, craving for their luxuriant green to return. From nowhere, a bird appears at the window and starts to tap its beak on the glass. It’s a blue tit, and it’s been doing that a lot lately. It flies off, then circles back and tap-tap-tap-tap-taps on the glass again. Why is it doing that? Leah can’t figure it out, but it triggers memories of growing up in her South Valleys ex-coal mining village, at that time surrounded by scraps of woodland and scrabbly fields of brambles and rolling hills. Where it all began – Leah’s nature love – bird spotting and bug collecting. Spending hours outdoors, within shouting distance of home, but having the sense of autonomy that children so often need and are disallowed.

Later on, Leah hears a key turn in the front door of her flat. She starts a little, then remembers that her sister Rhiannon had agreed to pop round to help Leah out, wedged between all her other endless daytime activities that are both the privilege and curse of the chronically well. It’s not bad that Rhiannon has come; it just feels complicated. This situation has been going on too long. It’s no longer a crisis for which people can pull out all the stops. It’s now just life. Most people have stopped coming. Leah usually has a bit of cleaning and shopping help a couple of times a week, which is as much as she can afford on her benefits income, but Jolene is away this week. She doesn’t want Rhiannon to have to come, but unfortunately, Leah has Needs and doesn’t know how else to get them met.

“Hiya Lee, how you doing?” calls her sister from the front door.

“Living my best life,” Leah mumbles. “Reaching for the stars.”

“Oh, Lee. Well, don’t worry, we can get you sorted. I haven’t got long – you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had, and I’ve got to get back to the school to pick the kids up from their after-school club that I can’t even remember what it is and get them home for dinner, then hopefully the babysitter is going to arrive on time for once coz we’ve got to get out again to this god-damn soiree thing – I don’t even know what that is either – ever think I’m not really in control of my life? Some sort of business deal thing that David’s involved with…so yeah, I’ve got about 45 minutes. Where do you want me to start?”

Rhiannon’s wired energy feels like being under an intense florescent strobe light. Leah covers her eyes to shield herself before she can muster a response. “Okay…so I need a washing load done. I need my sheets changed. I need some food prepped, and the washing up needs doing if you’ve got time. That’s it…”

Rhiannon is already whirring into action. She grabs a pile of Leah’s washing and puts it on a 30-minute cycle before Leah can tell her what the priorities are. Then Leah hears her rifling through the fridge and the freezer. She must have found the packet from Leah’s lunch on the counter top, as she calls out, “You know you can’t live on mac-n-cheese, Leah. You need something else to make you into a big, strong girl.”

“Tell me about it,” Leah croaks in reply.

Unlike herself, Rhiannon has actually made it into middle-class world. Rhiannon drinks juices with spirulina, enjoys lava bread and is experimenting with paleo-keto. It was Rhiannon who was the trailblazer out of the South Valleys, and these days, she’s practically lost her local accent. There’s an 8-year age gap between the sisters, and Rhiannon, the older of the two, made Leah see what was possible. They didn’t have the same motives for leaving their birthplace, though. Really, Rhiannon’s nature didn’t fit with the rolling South Valleys. She was a Rubik’s cube kid who romped through all the maths levels while everyone else was tessellating triangles. She’s now on some astronomical salary as a Chartered Accountant, juggling work, kids, and god knows what else.

Leah’s own motivation was softer than her sister’s. These days, she misses the South Valleys terribly, but she mostly misses the South Valleys of the past. Her Nan and the elderly neighbours who had mostly passed away now. And all her secret blissful little nooks and hidey-holes in the woods and fields that she grew up with had now been developed into expanses of flat-pack housing. All her tree and bird and bug friends were gone. This pushed Leah away from that place and towards her studies – towards dealing with the desperate fight inside herself wrought by the decimation of the Wild. And there was also something else – some secret waiting for its moment to surface – Leah had a hunch all along that she was queer, but she’s gone so rapidly from birds and bugs and jobs and studies into chronic illness that it hasn’t had the time to unfold. It isn’t that she found the South Valleys particularly homophobic; it’s more that she felt a pull towards the big city and its possibility of queer family, though she hasn’t found them yet.

Leah is never quite sure how Rhiannon feels about being sandwiched between a sick mother and a sick little sister. She suspects that Rhiannon doesn’t stop to think about it too much. Things have gotten easier since their mam got a boyfriend who seems to be good and supportive, but who knows what’s really going on? Anyway, it means less zipping over the motorway bridge across the estuary for Rhiannon, at least for the time being.

“I’m just throwing together a casserole for you,” her sister calls from the kitchen, rapidly chopping away at what sounds like five vegetables all at once. “Your fridge vegetables are pretty ropey, so I’m just throwing the whole lot in with some spinach from the freezer. I brought you some chicken, so I’ll stick that in as well. Can you set an alarm to remind you to come and turn the oven off when it’s ready? And can you get your butt to the sofa so I can change your sheets? Oh, and there’s post for you. Shall I open it? Let’s see what it says…oh yeah, DWP, you’ve got a PIP review form you need to send in…looks like this letter’s been stuck in the post for a while – you need to fill it in and get it back to them by next week.”

Leah’s entire body braces into stiffness as she hears the news about the PIP review. Her sister should know better than to dump news like that on her. Her heart’s already thumping, and the fear of the Department of Work and Pensions claws at the back of her neck. It was bad enough applying for Personal Independence Payment – known as PIP – in the first place. She couldn’t have done it by herself – it took hours upon hours for friends to make notes for her and write them all up into a form to send off. Fuck, not this again.

When Rhiannon has left, Leah feels tears well up in the corner of her eye. Big pulsing sadness. Things just aren’t supposed to be like this. Leah had a path, just like her sister still has one. She feels like a train that’s broken down, with an electronic voice stuck on repeat coming over the tannoy system, saying in monotone, “We are terribly sorry for the delay to this service.” Meanwhile, Rhiannon is Eurostar high-speed London to Paris. Leah can’t put a finger on it; after all, Rhiannon is kind and tries to help where she can, but somehow, it feels as if Leah is just another chore on Rhiannon’s infinite to-do list. It’s not surprising; it’s not like she can give much back.

She wonders if Rhiannon harbours resentment or if her sister keeps moving so fast that she doesn’t have to feel those feelings. The weird thing is that Rhiannon helps, but not in a way that is sensitive to Leah’s situation. For a while, Rhiannon kept putting money in Leah’s bank account to try and ‘help.’ Sure, Leah needed the money. It also put her in terror of the DWP clamping down on her benefits income. Whenever Leah brought it up, Rhiannon said things like, “Oh shit, yeah, I keep forgetting about that – just seems so much easier to PayPal you, I haven’t really got a minute to get to a cash point…” until Leah had to insist it was better that Rhiannon not give her anything at all than try to help in that way.

Eventually, the sadness begins to recede, and strangely, a deep peace envelops Leah, lying all wrapped up in the cold darkness of an early February evening, allowing herself to drop down into the velvety soft silence. There are times when it’s enough to lie there, alive and breathing. The night is clear, and outside, a near-full moon hangs in the sky, bathing Leah in its moonbeams through a large gap in the dilapidated curtains. Maybe magic was still possible, even going through something like this. Maybe the Leah that broke into doll parts that were strewn all over the place were melding themselves back together again in the healing power of the light of the moon.

What if being there, lying in full flare-up, is where she is supposed to be right now? The thought scares her and doesn’t really make sense. She often feels herself rile against her flare-ups with a seething hatred that she has no energy to express. White-hot it rips through her. If her inner landscape is already degraded, the hatred renders it charred and barren. Acceptance doesn’t come easily to her.

But in this moment, she feels different somehow. It’s a powerful feeling of the way that all beings are connected. She’s known that on a rational level for a long time; studying Ecology has given her that. The way the forests are all connected beneath the ground by enormous networks of mycelium. The way everything in an ecosystem affects everything else. But for herself, she hasn’t actually felt it until now – that she is also part of the vast web of connection. She mostly feels like a loose part. Maybe that’s because of modern life, or maybe it’s something about being from the animal kingdom rather than being a plant. She’s always imagined that plants have a knowing that they belong, with their literal roots sensing how they are embedded in the ground. Human roots are all in the imagination.

Something has happened in the last year that she senses has led to this feeling of connection emerging. A bunch of them found each other, started sharing with one another, and formed a group that they named ‘Spoonie Support.’ They’ve taken on the term Spoonie from the Spoon Theory, developed by a woman with Lupus. Every spoon you have is a unit of energy. People who don’t have chronic illnesses have lots of spoons. People with chronic illness have energy impairment and so only have minimal spoons, which are used for the basics of life. Brushing your teeth – a spoon gone. Having a shower – another spoon gone. Until the spoons are all used up, and you haven’t even made it out the door.

It was wonderful for Leah to realise that there were others out there like her. Now she knows that shared experience exists. All the beautiful souls with energy impairment. The unglorious diversity of chronic illness means that her fellow Spoonies have all kinds of bizarre traits, like being able to tell if it’s about to rain from the feeling in their knees, or being able to pick up on electromagnetic frequencies, or having a sense of smell so sensitive that you could tell when someone wasn’t trustworthy. They may have M.E., or Lupus, or Chron’s, or Rheumatoid Arthritis, or Fibromyalgia, or Long Covid, yet they all had one thing in common – incapacitating energy impairment.

Yet, in spite of what they are up against, they manage something beautiful. Their cells may not receive the energy they need to power their bodies, but they can still create Culture. And that means that Life is no longer mere survival. They tell stories and piece together information on how to navigate broken bodies that exist within a broken system. They share memes like, “I’ll do my best to not judge you after the ignorant comment you just made concerning a health condition you know nothing about,”and “Thanks for the unsolicited advice!” Their Whatsapp group is full of things to help them all get through. People start their own mini-projects.“Folks, I am compiling dickish, unhelpful and innocently misinformed things that people say to people with chronic illnesses,” and, “Remember, this is a great opportunity to talk about spoonie life and offload in a safe, boundaried environment, thus saving your friends, lovers, family, pets and most of all yourself from having to deal with it all the time.” They’ve tried meeting up sometimes, which is quite a feat to get more than two people together at once who are dealing with energy impairment. But when they manage it, the level of empathy touches Leah deeply. To be in a room with others and not have to perform anything. No social graces. It’s okay to just lie there if you need to.

It continues to be wonderful for Leah to have this source of connection, and it also devastates her. Once you start connecting with other Spoonies, you find they are everywhere. A private, silent, invisible disaster. All these people she’s met are so powerful in their own way. They aren’t supposed to be sharing tips via WhatsApp on how to survive their next PIP review, find a sympathetic G.P., or congratulate each other for taking the obscene amount of rest they each need to function in any way whatsoever. They are supposed to be taking on the world. They are supposed to be preventing the destruction of the Wild and fighting for justice. Instead, they are clutching hot water bottles and face-planting back into their beds after using up all their spoons on having a wash and eating some food.

A fellow Spoonie once gave Leah some stickers with things written on each one that were supposed to make her feel better for the things she’d managed to do in a day. When you’d managed something, you could award yourself a sticker. The stickers said things like, “Ate three meals” and “Drank enough water.” Leah has yet to be able to face giving herself a sticker for having completed such basic tasks. It was demeaning. Not that she did manage to achieve eating three meals in a day. But that was beside the point.

This time round, it was fighting Destruction of the Wild that had landed Leah in an epic flare-up. She’d participated in a lock-on to block a road at an anti-fracking action organised by a local environmental group. For several hours, she’d lain in the road locked to a fellow protestor, to prevent the delivery of machinery to a fracking site. After the first hour, heavy rain started to beat down. By the second hour, her waterproofs had entirely failed. She became colder and wetter and heavier. Yet she was so elated by taking this action with others, surrounded in their solidarity, that at the time, she didn’t entirely feel it. The police arrested her and her comrades. They were all driven off in police cars to custody, except Leah, for whom there wasn’t enough space. She’d waited an age in her wet clothes, detained by several officers, before a cop car finally appeared to cart her off.

By the time she arrived at the police station, she’d been cold and wet for hours. The cops were decent enough to give her dry clothes to change into before they put her in a holding cell. It dawned on Leah that she may have made a terrible mistake. She wrapped herself in a blanket and curled up in the hard police cell cot and shivered and shook.

Months later, she was still sick. Had it been worth it for that single day of autonomy and elation? Well, no, but also, in some ridiculous way, yes. Just a tiny taste of that sweet nectar of being fully alive, even if the Gods would punish her with their hellfire for what seemed like all eternity for daring to take a sip. Other people didn’t have to suffer this. Sure, they were tired after that anti-fracking action for a few days, but not this.

She feels a lightning bolt of anger flash through her. Not just at her own horribly constricted limits but at all those in power who never seem to get struck down. Why do Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage, and jumped-up millennial tech heads, and moronic billionaire goons have so many god-damn spoons? Are there only so many spoons in the world and they are absorbing not only all the wealth but all the spoons too? Is the whole rest of the world going to end up spoonless?

Her mind moves on to a memory of when she was going through a ‘well’ phase and learnt about the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over two hundred years, women from every town and village were killed in the belief that they were witches. Huge amounts of healing and herbal knowledge held by poor women from peasant communities were wiped out. Lying here, Leah starts to wonder if this was the start of centuries of attack against all the high sensitives of humanity.

Maybe she’s forming a conspiracy theory, but she senses that the Spoonies of the world are growing in number, and the more of them she meets, the more she sees a pattern of a heightened sensitivity to the pain and craziness of the world leading to some kind of chronic overwhelm of the body’s systems. If you can’t get away with killing off all the witches that are left, why not create a world in which they are all immobilised?

She has no idea if her thoughts have anything to do with reality. But what if those thoughts mean that she gets to have a narrative about her own life again? What if her life still means something, even just lying here?

She feels her own energy soften and starts to sense the closeness of the Earth. Right there beneath me. Almost as if the life within it is on the verge of bursting through the crust of concrete and tarmac. Her heart calls out to the surrounding trees, and she feels that even the trees she’s loved and lost in her lifetime have become her ancestors, who will bring her wisdom if only she will ask.

As this thought comes to her, a great tree emerges from the ground and scoops her up into the embrace of its branches. She wraps her covers around her as the tree surges upwards, hurtling towards the star-filled sky. She glances down, and the trunk is so impossibly tall that she can barely see the land below. Then she looks around and realises that it isn’t just her – there are enormous trees all around her, and in the crooks of their branches, there are others like her. They are resting, but there is something that they each hold within them – not only within them but between them all, connecting them. She can see it now, like a web, shimmering. She can see then that they are in the dream time, the healing time, and their slowness may attune to the rhythmic pulse of the Earth.

What she can see around her is so beautiful, and she doesn’t yet know what it might mean, but maybe in the sickness and brokenness and pain, there is something else emerging. Maybe together, held by the trees, it’s all of them, the sick and the broken, who hold the possibility for renewal, not just for themselves but for the rest of the world, too, if only the world begins to desire it.