I was with Isabel yesterday and we in the park talking and catching up over her camera on a lovely park bench overlooking a city pond. Being the lovely person she is she always wants to know what I am up too.

Somehow we got to one of my recent dreams where I have been photographing trees in the city. And I found myself saying it is a project I need to undertake.

It was one of those moments when you hear yourself giving yourself good advice. That things click together. When I realised I have been working on this for years. And as I write I remember that I have been working on it for thirty five years without identifying it. My mind rushes back to a charcoal drawing I did as a first year art school student. I’d go out drawing at night. Find a lovely place to draw. And draw late into the dark.

I opened Lightroom on my phone this morning and within a handful of photographs from where I last left it, this photograph jumped out at me. Yes, Len, you have been working on photographing trees in the city for a long time.

This of course doesn’t even include our dancing with trees series and book I have been working on with Jodi Rose. That was wholly photographed in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs right in the inner city. Which by the way is now at the editors. So exciting.

I don’t know where it’s going yet. Or even what it’s called. The trees in the city. I can see some night photography might be in order to reconnect my work as a teenager to now.

It’s all revolving around my passion for trees. My love for them and celebrating their presence in my life.

Today as we all breathe a sigh of relief on the world’s political stage, we can now can expect and continue our hope that the world can now get back to what’s important again.

For me that’s rebuilding our connections with Mother Nature and uniting in saving our precious and complex ecosystem that we depend on so greatly. By doing so we rebuild community too. Because it will force us to work together, bring us together and calm us.

This week I am fascinated by ecocyde laws. Making the destruction of nature illegal. Giving nature legal rights. Now, there is something to look forward to too.

I think this photograph is in Melbourne. Taken on my way to Tasmania. A phone snap. Lol. Photograph and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2020