Tonight, I dreamt of a bright guiding star. Together, we walked to a dark black star.
Isabella Hone-Saunders
Pre-amble: To Lean.
I’ve seen that car pull up so many times, the dust now has its own muscle memory. It’s a 94-minute transition, where the car acts as a space for the city-brain as it tries to untangle and smoothen. It’s a frantic fidgeting and tension in the stomach, until the gravel starts to spit up from underneath the tyres, and then suddenly, the sky just opens up. It’s that unedited blue that makes your own internal noise fade.
I see the human get out, and they look like they’ve been carrying a building on their back, all those habits of mind and heart, the dog-eared pages that they treat like a survival kit for a world that has unravelled. They aren't just here to think; they are here to find connection in the intimate immensity of the donkey’s ribcage.
They’re looking for a counterweight to ease the despair, something gritty and non-negotiable, and they find it in the lean. You just lean. You simply lean your weight into the other, and suddenly the individualism that we’ve been taught to wear like armour falls to the ground. It’s a shared breath, it’s interspecies solidarity as a somatic reality, where the human hand refuses to let the creature sink into a dry creek bed.
It’s a meeting of two different architectures, the flighty, upright delicacy of the person and the immense, horizontal steadfastness of the donkey. Both are standing now in the devastation, trying to figure out how to be. The human is trying to figure out how to (co)inhabit a hope that doesn’t feel like a delusion.
I’ve watched this act of devotion unfold a dozen times. The way the human presses a palm into the heat of a strong, thick neck, tracing a cross down a spine as if they’re reading a map of a territory not yet colonised. And in that touch, they are challenging the idea that a self ends at the skin. Is hope the name we give to that hand?
It’s not about projecting a future; it’s about an awful, beautiful proximity of staying. It is the persistent, gnarled reaching of a River Red gum that knows the water table began retreating a decade ago but continues its lateral search regardless. Not because it is optimistic (optimism is a thread too thin) but because it is committed to the search.
How do you gaze at an unformed horizon without blinking? You do it together. You build a solidarity that functions as the final infrastructure, an interconnected practice of holding the warm, heavy truth of another body until the light changes.
Every week, I watch as the pale moon rises. The human leaves, convinced that hope has a rigorous gravity, a recommittal to the weight of the world, and the donkey remains, graceful and patient, a physiological commitment to the earth.
I stay in the silence after the car door closes and the wheels retreat. Watching the violet air descend and wondering if the unmoored precarity of the human has been mitigated by the steadfastness of the animal. Or if the beauty of this meeting is just in the friction of the attempt.
It’s all just lines moving around in the stars, really, and the only thing that remains is the pressure of a hand on a spine under a raven sky.
Part One: Reaching the Donkey.
Each week, I go to visit the Donkey. The drive takes approximately 94 minutes. I’m distracted by half-formed thoughts, my petrol meter and an email I intended to send. I’m listening to Spinning Away, a Brian Eno and John Cale track that bursts me open, makes me receptive to feelings packed tightly in my chest.
When I was young, I slept with an Eeyore soft toy, held close in the dark. He had a removable tail (adhered by Velcro), and somehow, I lost it quite soon after being gifted the toy. So, forevermore, the donkey had a small, rough, scratchy, square where the tail used to join. The donkey remained in sight every night until I left my parents’ home. A first lesson in the aesthetics of lack. A donkey defined by what was no longer there.
I’m writing a PhD on hope. I am trying to prove that hope is not a soft-lit sentiment or a palliative for the privileged. I am trying to prove that it is rigorous, demanding gravity. A recommittal to the weight of the world. A gritty, non-negotiable weight.
I go each week to think alongside the Donkey. I drive through a landscape that feels like it’s holding its breath. I drive through the thick gold of the afternoon.
I’ve asked my cousin (he’s an ecologist) to write an essay about hope. To contribute to my research. He works in a threatened species department, and his field research includes tasks like hand pollinating orchids and relocating platypus from Kangaroo Island to Adelaide. I feel fondness as I imagine him, taller than anyone I know, devotedly doing the work of a hive of bees, alone. And the platypus, moving them from one mode of crisis to another, hoping the scenery change will encourage their thriving.
He also studies towering 500 year old River Red gums in drought-affected areas of northern South Australia. Even their anchoring and lateral roots can’t reach enough water to survive. He is dragging his feet. Avoiding my calls. Some days, his wavering relationship to hope seems irredeemable. He sees the infrastructure of the earth failing in real-time. Writing reports to convince the government to fund their projects, to act, to conserve.
While I’m driving, I think about how to tell him that I think hope isn’t about the water reaching the roots, it’s about the gnarled roots still reaching, persisting. I don’t know if that’s convincing.
Down the track, I almost always second-guess my memory and miss the turn-off. I pull up and see him standing there. Excitedly shifting his weight from one hoof to the others. Donkeys should always have a companion. They shouldn’t be alone in a paddock.
The sky here feels vast, an unedited blue.
I stand inside the fence and read from my notebook. He leans on me as I speak. I can feel the immensity of his ribcage against my shoulder and am comforted by the sound of his deep breath. I tell the Donkey that hope NEEDS practice in order to become historical concreteness. He does not blink. Pressing my hand into his neck, I trace the lines that make up the cross on his shoulders and down his spine. I brought him a pear. Circular chewing, satisfying crunching.
I wonder about our companionship. One based on the shared recognition of the unformed horizon. Anne Carson writes in Wrong Norma that, ‘to be a person is to be a certain kind of mistake.’1 This ontological mistake suggests that human identity is predicated on a fundamental lack. A dissonance between our desire for a future and the physical limitations of the present. The Donkey, meanwhile, seems to have made no such error.
The shadows of the Silver Wattle begin to stretch, thinning out across the dry grass. I turn to leave, before I do, I reach out to him one more time. Hope as a verb could mean, to reach. A reach performed in an attempt to connect, with devotion.
As I drive home, the air turns to violet. I pause on the dirt road before the highway. To look out and up from my car window. One by one, all the stars appear.
At home, I dream of the dark black star we are all walking toward. When I wake up, I call my cousin. I tell him about the hope of being seen in the dark. Not the hope of being saved. Just the hope of being witnessed.
1Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. Jonathan Cape, 2024, p 31.
Part Two: View from the hill.
I’m not sure about the metrics of time, but it feels regular, and it also feels like a long time between visits from the human. Not as regular as the day, but more regular than the shedding of my coat.
I hear the familiar sound of wheels approaching, car wheels on a gravel road. A rhythmic sound that tears through the spaciousness of the afternoon.
I walk down the hill and wait at the gate.
I lean my weight into them. I listen as they read from their notebook, chewing on a pear they pulled from their bag. To me, the words are just textures of breath, but I understand the intention. I understand that to be a donkey is to be a site of constant human projection. I am their Balthazar, their Eeyore, their Bottom, their moral compass.
As they speak, they reach out to me. I feel their fingers navigating their way down my back. My lines move toward the heat of their palm. I know they have felt the textures of my breath, too. We are communicative, but our language moves around in the space between our species.
They tell me about their cousin, exhausted by the bureaucracy of extinction, he goes wading into freshwater systems to trap and transport these small, strange creatures. First introduced to Kangaroo Island in 1920, as what they call a migrant population. I know what it is to be a managed population.
When standing here alone, I dream of those labelled wild, populating freely, in the Central Desert.
I hear about the cousin’s sadness at the old trees, so thirsty. The water table has retreated beyond the reach of the once-effective lateral systems, sceptical and searching.
They tell me of those donkeys in Gaza who carry the water when the pipes are turned to powder, the ones who pull the carts of the wounded through the white phosphorus and the rubble of the world's conscience. There is a terrible, sacred resoluteness there, an endurance that is not a choice. Watching solemnly, performing duty. Acting as the final infrastructure of the devastated in a persistent, rhythmic commitment to the still living.
They read to me, passages from dog-eared pages of a book. I hear the words, ‘the animal is a person who has decided to be silent.’2 I think this strategic silence functions as a form of resistance, a refusal to be assimilated into the human linguistic economy.
Our steadfastness is not a choice; it is a physiological commitment to the earth.
The human’s voice wavers as the light fails, a signal that I have come to recognise as indicative of their leaving. Their focus shifts from our connectedness toward the keys in their pocket.
They turn, I watch the car retreat, and I stand up on the hill, as the day dissolves. The pressure of the human’s hand is still felt, lingering on my spine.
At night, I look to the stars. Trying to find a lodestar in the dark. I am waiting to be seen again.
2Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. Jonathan Cape, 2024, p 87.
End notes.
Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. Jonathan Cape, 2024.
Spinning Away, Brian Eno + John Cale
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams
Donkey images taken on Wilyakali Country, Super8, digitised.
Footnotes.
1Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. Jonathan Cape, 2024, p 31.
2Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. Jonathan Cape, 2024, p 87.