In 2024, Caroline Liebelt proudly received the Spirit of Marist-Sion Award. As part of this special recognition, she had the opportunity to attend the Ecology of the Heart Retreat in Cairns, Queensland.

Lately, I have been walking through a kind of cathedral not built by hands but by roots and rivers. In Mossman Gorge I pressed my palm against the trunk of an old tree, and for a moment it felt like the earth was breathing back to me. The silence there was not empty, it was alive, humming through bark, stone and stream.

On Fitzroy Island I swam beside turtles, slow dancers in the blue, moving with a grace that makes time forget itself. The ocean wrapped around me like a hymn, salt and sun mixing into something holy.

Up in the Daintree, the rainforest swallowed me whole. Vines twisted like old songs, green shadows folding in on themselves, each step heavier and lighter at the same time. And in Cairns, the mornings start with the music that no person could write; the piercing cry of the Eastern Koel, the metallic rattle of the Figbird and the laugh of the Kookaburra that cuts the sky wide open.

I keep thinking how much I want to bring this home. To carve out little moments, even in Gippsland’s everyday light, to walk slow, to stop, to listen. To feel the way the wind in the trees speaks to us, the way our hearts fall into rhythm with the world if we let them.

Let us find that peace each day. Let us hold it, not in words but in silence, in breath, in the pulse beneath the ground we walk on.

Caroline Liebelt
Learning Leader – Visual Arts