You are a soggy miracle.

Last weekend I was honoured to help announce the 2025 Nature Festival with a piece about this year’s theme: Flow. As the Poet-in Residence, my job is to help translate the mood, movement, and feeling of the festival through language and story.

This event felt like coming home. Thank you to all involved for your care, your big love, and for keeping your hearts open to the mystery amidst these trying times.

By popular polite request, here is a copy of the poem. It was intended to be heard, rather than read. So please listen to the audio version I recorded above at your leisure. For those who need to see words, a full transcription is written out below.

May it inspire you to bow down and kiss the ground of this sodden space rock we share.

Tessa

💋

FLOW

You would know
that your body is made of water
(seventyish percent at least).
I guess we haven’t changed so much
since our salty ancestors squelched
out of the primordial ocean
and up into this world of leaf litter.

It would explain why we so love a big wet horizon
we keep building our castles of sand so close to shore - 
to our original home
why we still seep out saltwater when overwhelmed - 
tears of joy or despair.

Such porous little beings, we are
always wet around the edges, 
all awash with feelings for eachother
emotions flowing into the next
each heartbeat rolling on to the following
every breath caressing its own re-begginning. 
Do you feel that?

This tide of your aliveness
a constant reminder - you are a soggy miracle,
so busy here making love and plans
and music and civilisations
and dreams.

And you would know
that you are merely one carbon based lifeform
roaming the crust of this sodden space rock.
You’re a speck of congealed stardust made conscious,
sequestered carbon jumping to conclusions
about meaning, and morals, and sci fi and AI,
and who is right, and messenger invites on where to drop the bombs,
and the budget, and your superannuation, if that’s even a thing in 30 years,
you think to yourself while filing emails, and wondering which kind of oatmilk
is more ethical as you stand in the supermarket aisle beguiled by all the branding
but tonight you will still stay up scrubbing your takeaway containers
till your conscience is clear because you desperately wanted indian
and couldn’t make it to frewville before dinner.
Delicious guilt and delight.

Such is the flow of our humanity
here in the late anthropocene
from my vantage point at least.

And yet, you would know
we have so many allies in this world.
Silent collaborators, invisible all around us.
I’m talking about the earthworms, of course
and their allegiance with the tree roots.
Old growth forests constantly conspiring with your lungs.
The sea breezes over mountains,
mother of pearl and cumulonimbus
slow dancing in such delicate atmospheric conditions. 
Not to mention the trillions of bacteria residing in your belly,
assimilating other carbon based organisms
to fuel your movements
through bowels and orifices and offices.
Plus the pollinators, with their relentless sex work.
Then there’s the mushrooms - 
mycelium, the original interweb 
we’re standing on right now -
omnipotent detritivores devouring decay
to reintegrate back into life
like some kind of holy, mouldy, deity.

There’s the liquid inside each chrysalis - 
dissolved caterpillar that somehow knows 
to become butterfly.
Cicada nymphs who sleep underground for 17 years
only to rise and sing at our ears
for a mere six weeks.

Bogong moths, crossing the Australian Alps
to chase the lamp in your lounge room,
little gurus of enlightenment.
And Daddy long legs, weaving his webs
in the corner of your kitchen,
keeping vigil till sunset
lest the mozzies come to bite you
in your sleep.

The breathing kelp.
The colour blue.
The song of kookaburra, Allocasuarina, la ninya, 
and that person, with the kind eyes
sitting next to you here, in this moment,
who I’d say already knows this too, and whose heart 
likely ripples in widening circles of care - 
the same as yours.

And you would know,
this planet is shaped by water - 
water and time.
Mountains made of ancient seabed.

And beyond us too,
even the moon echoes flow.
That pockmarked rock,
covered in hollows moulded by ice and impact - 
which we name, as we are want to do, as oceans.
We call them seas of tranquility, and crisies.

And in the very centre - 
a crater called Copernicus.
Who, you would know, 
was the first homosapien to say that we might not be
the centre of the universe.
The first hint to early empire
that human is not the sole, holy inheritor 
of this brimming blue orb.

This is our flow of knowing.
An undertow of understanding who we are
as eddies of insignificance.

And yet, 
we have also shaped existence on this earth
in this orbit.
As we circle our local ball of fire
constantly blinded by the beauty and the terror.
Light-drunk like stars
imperceptible in the billowing sunrise. 
Blinded by our own distractions
of empire, and emails, and oat milk. 
Blinded by the stories we tell ourselves
of our own
importance. 

Because
we can only name
that which we understand.
Which is longing and loss
sex and politics
love and apathy. 

But when you let go of what you know,
get porous and listen,
there is a warbling, fluttering
more-than-human story 
flowing all around us,

We do not speak
the language of starlight
or the tongues of lichen.
The ecstasy of the honeyeater
or the longing in the hearts of bees.

This thrumming current 
we have named: nature
washing between and through us all
as each moment steeps in the one before
as our lives flow into each others
like so many waves of being
crashing onto the shore of this - 
exquisite world
and then receding
back
into the big 
everything.