LIFE IMITATES LIFE

May 25 2026

I have been more than one person in this life. I know that now without apology.

The woman who walked across a continent in 2023. The one who nearly drowned in a wave that took thousands. The one who sat in the wreckage of her own mind after a train in Thailand rearranged what was possible. The mother. The fermenter of wild things. The one who talks to trees and means it.

These aren’t versions I grew out of. They’re all still here, moving around in the same body, sometimes contradicting each other before breakfast.

I used to think that was a problem.

Nature doesn’t seem to think so.

In the deep wet of the Daintree, a Cordyceps fungus colonises an insect from the inside out , rewriting its behaviour before it dies, erupting through its body in strange fruiting forms. Nearby, a spider has learned to mimic exactly this in the posture, the shape, the performance of something taken over. It knows exactly what it’s doing. To survive, it becomes what others fear.

Caladenia crebra, the spider orchid of the Australian bush, doesn’t bloom to be beautiful. It blooms to deceive… releasing a chemical so precisely tuned to female wasp pheromone that the male arrives certain he has found a mate. The orchid takes what it needs. Gives nothing back. To live, it becomes desire.

The tawny frogmouth doesn’t flee. Feathers the colour of broken bark, eyes half-closed, body angled just so against the branch, it becomes the branch. Stillness so complete it borders on disappearance. To endure, it becomes nothing.

In the shallows off the north Australian coast, the mimic octopus reads the water and answers in real time to the threat of a lionfish, a sea snake, a flatfish it shifts between forms as the moment demands. Body fluid with meaning. To navigate, it becomes change itself.

And the lyrebird, the one I’ve heard in these border ranges where I live, that voice that holds the whole forest and gives it back, doesn’t just copy. It composes. Chainsaw and Currawong and rainfall, woven into something new. To connect, it becomes chorus.

Mimicry, then, isn’t loss of self. It’s a different theory of self entirely.

I think about this when I’m walking country. When I feel the grief of damaged land move through me like it’s mine, because maybe it is, a little. When I sit with someone in the middle of their hard thing and feel it in my sternum. When I ferment and tend and wait, and something transforms that I didn’t fully control.

The brain injury took from me the idea that I was a fixed thing. Solid, continuous, reliably the same person from one day to the next. That loss was enormous. I won’t dress it up.

But here’s what grew in its place… a different kind of attention. A permeability. The ability to be remade by what I move through, and know that this isn’t weakness it’s actually how living things work.

We’ve been told to hold our shape. To know ourselves. To be consistent.

But I am bark and I am water. I am the walk and the woman who still can’t fully explain why she needed to cross that country. Six thousand kilometres that held her when she couldn’t hold herself, that asked nothing but her presence and gave everything back. I am the thing that survived and the thing the surviving changed.

I contain multitudes. Not as a clever quote. As actual lived fact.

I’m still learning to call that enough.

-By Lizz Hills

Trek2Reconnect Website