An ode to Sarah Susak and the quiet victory of coming home to yourself
I am standing on a sandstone bluff in the northern reaches of the Hunter Valley, with my wife and dog beside me. The wind, ancient and insistent, moves through the gums and stirs a memory not entirely mine — something older, something forgotten in the silence.
Below us, the power stations hiss and hum, their funnels exhaling steam into the afternoon chill. From up here, they look small — as do the coal trains, with the grids, the deals and the deadlines. The cattle chew the cud, oblivious to the weight of purpose we humans try so hard to carry, as a flock of wedge-tailed eagles ride a thermal, circling a truth that can’t be spoken — only felt.
My friends and I are guests on a fourth-generation farm, invited by the daughter of a daughter of a daughter who was born to this land. The marsupials were here first, of course. The eagles too. And now we arrive — a Bondi knot of city people, momentarily untethered from our double-shot lives and curated veneers.
And something softens.
Not just in the scenery — though it does. But in us.
We take a red dirt road up to the main farmhouse, and it winds and whistles like a mantra, and with every bend, we shed another layer: of noise, of should haves, and of adopted roles. Wild goats appear like a hairy vision. Their horns curve toward nowhere in particular. Like us, they don’t belong. But they are here — stubborn, beautiful, mysterious. Like recovery. Like grace.
At the farmhouse, the working dogs bark, and time folds in on itself. Ghosts of four generations pass the tin teacups and share stories that hang in the air like smoke — part real, part dream. And I think of Sarah Susak
Of her story.
Of the wind she’s faced down — cancer, loss, uncertainty — and how she didn’t just endure it but transmuted it. Into a practice. A path. A course. A book. A life that whispers: You can begin again. You can come home to yourself.
There is a premise in her writing that stays with me:
Stillness is not the absence of chaos — it is the presence of awareness within it.
I see it here. In the way the wind carries ancient chanting voices the between hills. In the way the kangaroo mob moves across the ridge without hurry or apology. In the way Sarah’s words have invited so many into a subtler, deeper way of living — not a retreat from reality, but a soft entry into a more honest one.
It’s not about the incense or the theory or even the silence, though those help. It’s about the courage to sit still in a world that keeps running — and not flinch when your own thoughts come to greet you. To let them pass, like goats or ghosts, and return to the breath.
Back on the bluff, the sun begins its descent. The cattle cast long shadows. The birds return to roost. And I feel it — that gentle ache of truth rising in my chest. I hug my wife and pat the hound.
This land was never ours. And neither is this life. We are not owners. We are custodians. We are not fixed things — we are moving, shedding, growing, returning.
And Sarah’s course isn’t just about meditation. It’s a quiet revolution. An alternate reality not because it’s foreign — but because it is forgotten.
Until we remember.
Until we sit and listen.
Until we breathe.
Until we are.
And then the real work begins — not of becoming someone else, but of coming home to the one we’ve always been.
To Sarah — for the stillness, the courage, and the reminder that power, true power, is never in the noise. It is in the choosing. Again and again. To be here.
