Calm chaos

The tall silver timber reach up through the verdant canopy for the sunlight that occasionally breaches the blanketing grey sky. As quickly as the thick jungle gives way to imposing ridge lines created from some tectonic realignment eons ago, it then opens up to river systems casually carving their way down to the shoreline just beyond the tree line.

The highway from Buka to Arawa is sealed for rare odd patches but otherwise cuts through the imposing tropical greenery like a dusty conduit for hastily driven, highly tinted 4x4 troopies. The best way to remedy the unrelenting rough road constructed of karanas (coral) and a limestone-esque aggregate is to just relax into it. Sway whichever way the driver dodges potholes and gives maximum berth for the families standing on the side of the road, feebly covering their mouths from the dust.

I've been back and forward from PNG almost annually since relocating back to Australia at the end of 2011, and recently it's been a few times a year. Those two years in PNG carry some of my most heart-wrenching and heart-filling memories.

For someone who lives her life forward planning, colour-coding everything that gets entered into her schedule, PNG has this magic way of alluring me into its calm chaos. I can't actually recall how long it took me to realise that it's futile to try and force anything here. There's a way about how you need to be in this country. To exist and to appreciate how this calm chaos just is. It works. Just get that you'll never understand it all. Relish the part that has been shared with you.

Maybe for a country girl, used to near dead-straight horizons of wheat paddocks, it's peering out the window of the troopy at the wall of green that bursts from the fertile soil? I think there's also this part of it that straight up challenges the logical part of my brain. Again, coming from a place and a life that is so planned, so meticulously cropped, so colour-coded, so relatively regimented that it's like I can't make sense of how a place can exist otherwise. But, it does.

Seeing families etch an existence in amongst the tangle of jungle or upon desolate volcanic plains, my mind can't compute. Their resilience and fortitude astounds me - in complete admiration.

Lesson 29: Just. Let. Go. Of everything except maybe the Jesus bar.