It’s raining. But the world is still on fire.

From our small pocket of the world here in Wagga Wagga, you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief as this latest bit of rainfall made a decent show of it.

I don’t know about you, but 2020 has me feeling stressed.

Our summer newsfeeds were filled with apocalyptic images – firefighters who lost their lives, thousands of hectares ablaze, bandaged and blackened koalas, people wearing masks to keep out the smoke.

Here in Wagga, it felt we were collectively holding our breath throughout January, checking the Fires Near Me app each morning to see which roads were closed, which communities were now cut off. Waiting to see if the fires would surround us here, too.

Wagga played host to around 1000 people from the Snowys region, who were evacuated for several days. It’s hard to comprehend the wait – not knowing if your love ones were safe. Not knowing if your house was still standing.

It’s times like this that we get to see the power of narrative. The stories we tell ourselves shape our reality, and right now our reality looks pretty grim.

But it’s not all bad news. We saw the indefatigable tenacity of our fire fighters. We saw the resilience of our fire affected communities. We saw an outpouring of generosity, from here at home and around the world. We saw people jumping in to help save life and property. And we saw people who are suitably shaken up and ready to hold our politicians to task.

Last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a Royal Commission will investigate the role of climate change in these fires, and perhaps that means we get to shine a light on the practices and neglect that led to this catastrophic fires and take practical steps to prevent them happening at this scale in the future. A person can hope, right?

While it’s felt to me like the world was on fire, perhaps this is the very thing we needed to shake us out of our collective reverie and start shaping our next chapter – with hope and urgency and action.

Peita