Communities...

Community, it’s a funny old thing isn’t it!

It’s like family. We want it. We need it. We love it. But crikey it can get complicated at times!

Out walking yesterday I reflected sitting at the heart of the Launceston community with Launceston Life we get to see & hear it all. The good. The bad. The ugly!

This image looked & felt like how communities are. It could have been a tree. A map. Lungs. River tributaries. It looked like lots of things representative of life. Nature. Connections. Organic growth. Support. All good community words. 

The thing is the tree needs it’s strong, steady, established trunk, keeping it firmly rooted and alive, to both protect & draw up the nutrients it needs to feed its family of branches. 

In turn they need its smaller more flexible branches to creep out & explore the wider space, slowly developing, growing, finding new horizons, branching out.

Those then need to support the smaller, more delicate, leaf growing, seed supporting twigs that either bend or break in the winds, & might one day grow strong enough to support their own, & scatter the seeds from which other trees will grow. 

Finally they ALL need the leaves, seeds that grow each year, making the difference between a tree being alive, creating new life, new trees, new growth, or not. 

Each year those tiny leaves grow strong, bare seeds, support the whole tree, knowing they will fall in Autumn after they have played their part. 

Yet a tree doesn’t question its need to support all these parts without ego, to grow, bare seeds, find new space, it just knows to survive it must. Perhaps sometimes we need to remember as a community we must do the same too. 

Growth both physically & mentally is never an easy process.

Going to the gym to increase your muscles aches the next day, trying to solve a problem or create a new strategy makes your brain strain, but whats certain is that it’s essential to keep pushing boundaries & moving forward so that the weeds don’t grow around our feet, so that we don’t get left behind in this fast paced world, so that as a community we grow diverse, progressive, strong & support each other & one day hope our seeds go off & build solid communities of their own.