I wonder

Holidays are a good way to remind ourselves about wonder and gratitude.

We had hoped to go to Fraser Island for our honeymoon, May 1980, but couldn’t afford it. In May 2014, we finally made it there; landing late on the ferry from Hervey Bay, weary and disorientated but aware of the delicious anticipation that comes when you arrive somewhere new in the dark and wake up next morning with no idea what it will look like.

The island is 123 kilometres long and the unique thing about it is that the entire place is formed of sand and nothing else – a gigantic sand dune plonked down in the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it is covered in thick bush, grows massive trees and even has patches of deep rainforest. On the drive we take to the eastern coast, we stop off and walk through its hush, looking at Staghorn ferns barnacled on to the sides of immense trees and giant king ferns bending gracefully over Wanggoolba creek.

The creeks and lakes we swim in are the purest I have ever seen and are paved with pristine, soft, white sand. When I show my daughter photos of them, she asks where the water is and I explain that it’s there, but so crystalline, you just can’t see it.  At Lake McKenzie our tour guide tells us to rub the wet sand on our silver jewellery to clean it (she’s right, it works) and on our hands and faces too. ‘The locals reckon it makes you look ten years younger,’ she says.

Take ten years off me and I’ll still be well and truly middle aged, which still gives me a small shock. In the years between our first honeymoon and this latest one, we have seen many places around the globe: such variety, such complexity and beauty, such richness and colour, so many surprises. Here is yet another – a puzzle and a mystery – an entire world, made of sand and yet supporting a dazzling enough array of flora and fauna to keep a naturalist happy for a lifetime.

One evening on Fraser Island we take a platter of cheese and a bottle of bubbly onto the beach and sit for an hour, watching the sun go down and the colour leach from sky and sea. I have been watching the setting sun for five and half decades, three and a half of those with this man by my side and no two have ever been exactly the same.

One of the things I treasure about going somewhere new is that it reminds me that the best of the marvels I experience there are available at home as well: daily miracles like a sunset or a marriage that remains life-giving over a lifetime. Holidays remind me of the importance of gratitude, and that wonderful saying, attributed to medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, ‘If the only prayer you ever say in your life is “thank you,” it will be enough’.

First published in The Melbourne Anglican, July 2014