Ronella Gomez’s Vision

I’m Ronella, and I work in fair food systems. I share our little home and community on Woi Wurrung country with my husband and two young children. This is what I want to be able to say to them in 20 years.

In the beginning I used to be unable to sleep at night

So we composted the plans we made and instead
Determinedly lived into new processes
And just took the next step
with the most potential for life to unfold

We learned to hold the urgency of the many connected problems
with knowing the work is generations in the making
We held the space between teaching our children to think in new ways
while we still lived in the old structures

The holding was heavy work, sucking away our energy
Then our elders started inviting us to look through windows
into expanding universes that took our breath away
And so awe became our renewable energy

Inspiring us to garden for those not yet born
To time travel and see through their eyes
To embody ancestors lost through cultural interruption
And become the inner mother we need

I was one half colonised, and one half coloniser
Ever the immigrant, not of any place
Then we gardened our soil and people, and they gardened us
Now we are home at last and belong to each other

I sing your song to you, you sing mine to me
my child, friend, river, kookaburra.
I honour you in our Saturday night candle lit dinners
I have become me in relationship with you

Moving on from a broken system fueling our childrens’ anxiety
We discovered embodied learning, beyond thinking about goats and mountains
To herding goats and exploring mountains
With curious minds and able bodies

And we fused work and learning together through interdisciplinary projects
Where our 7 year old child could collaborate with a 70 year old
And offer value depended on by others
Building diverse forms of capital that cannot be hoarded

We moved from jobs to livelihoods to ways of life
Our economy is turning into beautiful cultures
Sequestering carbon and rehydrating our lands
Floating all boats, meeting our deep underlying needs

Our healers are the growers that tend soils
Our enterprises are run by people for each other
Our artists are our wise ones
Our gardens are our cathedrals

And when it is time to truly rest,
I can be laid into the soil and a tree planted
so that my children can hug me still, lay their weary head against my limbs,
trace the lines of my life and be nourished by my abundance.

We remain embodied in place,
that they may always be connected to the ones that loved them,
saw their light and sung their songs when they had forgotten them.
For we are gardeners creating the conditions conducive to life.