After my husband’s death, looking down was all I could do. Then I saw a dragonfly | Ailsa Piper

I’m late. It’s a clear pale morning, and light is seeping into the sky behind the steeple. I’m rushing to meet the sun, to watch it lift out of the ocean. We do this every week, but Old Sol keeps changing the time, rising earlier every day, so I’m racing, scanning the empty street, watching my feet on the stairs behind the sandstone church, scooting down the back lane. Finally, I make it to the crumbling uphill path, its surface perilous after recent storms. Hurry – the sun won’t wait.

But no: a stop is imperative.

Here, despite my heaving breath, attention must be paid to my ancient Moreton Bay fig. Its buttress roots cascade like writhing snakes over metres of earth. It is vast, this tree, and old. It has seen every imaginable human condition, including torrents of despair, but it knows joy, too. It watched over the wedding of my friend; blessing her under its bounteous canopy. This tree must be honoured.

• Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

My breath steadies. In. Out. I give over to the fig’s insistence on silence, my eyes tracing a root all along its length. I’m looking down, but I’m not downcast. There is no danger here, no grief and no fear. This is awe; that was pain.

Related: ‘Radical’, ‘a headrush’, ‘insanely clever’: the best Australian books out in July

In the wake of the sudden death of my husband, looking down was all that my shocked body could do. Held tight, I was like an echidna rolled into a spiky ball, all defences, but equally, ready for fight or flight. They seemed the only options.

It took weeks for me to venture outside, and when I did, my eyes stayed down, fixed on pavement. A toe could catch on a crack. Even a bed was not safe. My husband died in ours – alone, in the room where we’d slept and dreamed for almost three decades. If that could happen to him, then armour was needed. Hunch in. Batten down. Beware.

One day, I noticed a dragonfly, unmoving, on the asphalt in front of me. Was it hurt? In pain? I waited. Eventually, it lifted from the ground, hovering, flitting higher, hovering again. My neck lifted with it as it rose. It hovered overhead, a tiny elegant drone, and my spine unfurled just enough to allow me to see a patch of clear blue winter sky.

A magpie crossed my line of vision, my eyes following it on to the branch of an ornamental pear. My neck muscles, hard as granite, cricked and complained at this unaccustomed upward movement. The magpie chortled, warbling out its call that was an alarm and an incantation, a warning and a celebration, and I stood, eyes on the bird, letting the song pierce me. Maybe that was when hope began to creep into my body again. Maybe.

Now, a kookaburra belts out a raucous alarm, reminding me that I am late for my date at the lighthouse. I genuflect to the tree – why not? There is no one to see. Light is flooding into the sky now. I look out to the east, where swallows dip over white foam crests, then back west, across the glossy harbour, and then up, up, up to the cockatoos.

I can look in now, too. Even that doesn’t hurt as once it did. Death will come again – for me or for others I love. But for now, there are blue wrens and seabirds, and my eyes follow the traceries of those winged things as the heavens morph from pink to peach.

The sun will arrive any moment, right there at the point where sky meets sea, so I climb, faster, up the last curve, to the red-and-white striped lighthouse at the edge of the world, still sending out her beams of welcome and safety, as she has done all night long.

I probably should kneel. Reverence would be appropriate. But for now, I sit cross-legged on the cold sandstone and look out, across the water. I still. I breathe. I wait. The headland is bathed in gold. Gulls, a flock of them, wheel and dip, their feathers strobing from white to gold. I raise my hand and my wriggling fingers are gold, too.

Then, there it is, surfacing, right on time.

The sun. It rises and rises, and I’m looking up too, into its light.

• Ailsa Piper is the author of For Life , out now in Australia (Allen & Unwin, $34.99)