Cheers To A New Year

The evening closes in on a warm summer's day and also another year.

The wine is coursing through me and through my friends but not down into the tributary of political discourse that can end up in an almighty row, but down the waterfalls of laughing memory.

Long forgotten stories and cackles emerge of times past while grand plans are made for the future still to be lived.

Sharing bread, barbeques, wine and those generous anecdotes - the simple gentleness of caring for the people we love.

Here's hoping 2017 is an awesome year for all of us. May everyone experience calm, peace, excellent health and success.

And may it be filled with good food, good friends and good memories......oh yes and good wine!

"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right."
~~ Oprah Winfrey

"Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy."
~~ Lao Tzu

When barging in Eastern France my friends and I experienced good food, good company, good memories and good wine!

Spiritual Virtual Reality

Dreamland is the original cyberspace, our own built-in spiritual virtual reality.

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day life.

Dreaming is a connection to our unconscious, to our selves.

It is to be treasured.

Isn't it extraordinary that an activity which takes up so much of our lives is so often relegated into the realms of unimportance.

We are based on dreams, they are our centre.

Listen to them.

"Dreams are like stars....you may never touch them, but if you follow them they will lead you to your destiny."
~~ Anonymous

Photo taken at Newtown, Sydney, Australia in October 2014

POSSIBLE OR LIMITED

I'm thinking about two especially frightening mental places to find yourself in life.

The one where you think everything is LIMITED.

And the one where you realise that everything is POSSIBLE.

Everything and Nothing!

There is truth in the statement that everything is limited.

There is also truth in the statement that everything is possible.

And there is the truth of the CONTINUUM.

Part of accessing possibility is the ability to ask, “What else is true here?”

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
~~ Mark Twain (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910) 

Visited a school in Laguna in the Philippines in October 2015 and captured these beautiful kids.

Courage

Courage is doing what is right for you when no-one else thinks it is!!

So step outside your comfort zone, give it a try.....don't wonder "what if?"

Sometimes suffering brings us the freedom and confidence to make bold choices about how we want to live the rest of our lives.

Believe in the power of your spirit.

Difficult journeys can offer us the chance to learn that we are loved and cared about.

I count myself fortunate to have had this chance to know so clearly and so strongly.

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
~~ Confucious

June 2016  - Sydney Opera House lit up for Vivid 2016.  Best Vivid Sydney to date!

e-revolution

We need to move past myths about e-language that the physical constraints of the new media will inevitably diminish our appetite for sustained text and thought.

Emails, Facebook, Text messages, Twitter, YouTube, some experts argue threaten to infantilise the brain. Some also say that social media is used at the expense of all other forms.

In other words, if the words, if the electronic uprising excludes other writing completely, we probably would be left thinking in short snatches.

But that is akin to saying that if the only sport we played was football, then no one would be good at tennis.....that's a big and unlikely "if".

These arguments remind me of the moral panic that has beset every new form of communication. People claimed the printing press was the devil's tool because it could disseminate lies. The telephone was going to cause family breakdown because we would stop talking to each other in person.

Now social media will deteriorate our brains because we are going to abandon all other forms of writing!

There is no credible evidence to support this assumption. Schools still require essays. Workplaces still produce reports. Universities still award degrees for these. Writers still publish books.

Writing in the new media is not a replacement but an addition to traditional genres. Much of it is a hybrid form somewhere between speech and formal writing.

It means kids are, in fact, doing a lot more writing and mastering a much wider range of styles.

"I hear YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are merging to form a super Social Media site – YouTwitFace.
~~ Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show (June 2009)


These bookends have been part of my life for many decades. I am sure books aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Cloud Watching

When we pause to look up from our earthbound scurrying, we will see that the skies offer an ever-changing drama.

Clouds shift and flow and move: the sky is never the same two seconds in a row.

As the sun moves, so the colours change and the interplay between the wind, the temperature and the sun create spectacles of infinite variety.

Clouds will form themselves into fantastic shapes, even for a second appearing to resemble an object from our world: a rabbit, a saucepan, a dragon or a heart.

Then they are gone, ever-changing, formless yet with form, solid yet fluid at once.

Clouds are natures poetry.

"Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty and live life with your head in the clouds"

"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky" ~~ Rabindranath Tagore Sunset Glenelg near Adelaide, South Australia  April 2014

Kids Give The Best Advice

The older we become the more we tend to be influenced by our experience and set in our ways.

Children on the other hand have a much less tainted view of things. They tend to see things from a totally different perspective than adults.

Because children have fewer assumptions (if any) and are less inhibited they tend to give a more honest and black and white view of the world.

Often they'll give us a totally left of field response without any concern for convention.

SO ASK A KID!

Mind you you'll need to phrase things in a simpler way - which in it's own right is a good thing!

"Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas"
~~ Paula Poundstone

 

 

 

 

This young boy is my teacher!
Top to bottom - Joseph 2015 aged 9, 2010 aged 4, 2009 aged 3, 2008 aged 2, 2007 aged 6 months and 1 day old 2006)

Seekers of Light

There is a small plaque in a quiet and picturesque waterside park in Northwood, Sydney, commemorating the exceptional Australian artist, Lloyd Rees.

For much of his life Rees lived nearby and used the bays and inlets viewed from the park frequently as an inspiration for his landscapes. I often walk to this park as it is one of my favourite spots.

Lloyd was a true seeker of light. His paintings, especially in the last twenty years of his life when his eyesight was fading, were filled with light and washed colours. The memorial plaque at Northwood records one of his beliefs, "If you look for light you find it."

The quest for light has always been important to me. Mine is not a search for literal light - more, the search for direction, a message, a cleaning away of uncertainty and the recognition of inner spirit and authenticity.

Occasionally, life seems to be a chasm - a pit I slip and slide into. There is sometimes a sense of overwhelming darkness and no light ahead. What I have learned is that there is always light, I'm just not looking for it in the right place. I am probably searching for it straight ahead, the most obvious place to look when, if I would only glance to my right or left, I would glimpse its radiance.

That special light can come from any direction. A chance remark, a line in a magazine which starts me thinking, the sound of children playing, the words of a song, a comment overheard on the bus - all and any can give insight and a way through. When times are tough I have now learnt to keep my ears and heart open.

Whenever everyday problems overwhelm us, it is a relief when we see a solution, when we know what to do, when we understand the reason for something and the lessons contained within it.

The light is always there......we just need to look in a different direction.

Lloyd Rees painting Northwood Point, Sydney Harbour, 1978

Déjà Vu Sensations

There are many theories as to what causes déjà vu.

One holds that our "spirit" can actually travel faster in time than our earthbound bodies so it charges off into the future from time to time for reasons we can't explain.

Another claims that it's because we are reincarnated and old memories from past lives are seeping through into our current consciousness.

And then there's the parallel Universe theory that suggests our lives are always splitting off into different directions whenever we make big decisions and that at the point of experiencing déjà vu we are connecting with these parallel worlds.

All of which rather ignores the actual sensation of déjà vu that is simply joyous and mesmerising regardless of what it actually is.

Déjà vu experiences stay with us too, logging themselves into our memory banks where they can be withdrawn whenever those "déjà vu" conversations occur, usually over a few glasses of wine late at night!


"There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar."
~~ Chuck Palahniuk


Top photo is a sketch penned by my friend Dianne in 2004 after she has suffered a stroke in 1999. She said it described how she felt when everything was muddled in her brain.

When Annemarie and I were in Norway in July 2010 and we stopped at this place for a short while, an eeriness came over me as I photographed this scene. I wanted to hop in that boat and paddle into the mist.

OLW 2016 - LISTEN

Each January I choose a word to focus on for the year. For 2016 my word is LISTEN.

Relating to my word, I came across this beautiful story narrated by the prominent Buddhist teacher and Psychologist Jack Kornfield. It touched my soul and I felt I needed to share it with my blogging friends.

"In Africa. There is a story that illustrates the quality of listening that can come through meditation.

In a particular East African tribe or village when a child is born they don't count the birthday of that child from the day the child comes from its mother’s body or even the day it is conceived as in certain other cultures, but rather from when that child was first a thought in its mothers mind, that is the real birthday.

And as soon as the mother realizes that she would like to have a child with this particular partner, she will go off and sit out in a field under a tree, and listen, and wait until she can hear the song of the child that wants to be born in her heart that will come from the wedding or the coming together with this particular man.

And when she hears this song, she sings it to herself, and then returns back to the village and teaches it to her partner so that when they make love together, joined together in love, they sing this song and invite this child to be born.

And later as she is pregnant. She sings the song to the child in the womb and teachers it to midwives so that when the child is born the first song or sound that it hears is those gathered around singing its own unique song.

And as the child grows the people of the village learn the song of this person so that when he falls or she falls and hurts herself someone picks her up and sings her song to her, or in the rites of passage or rituals of the village the song is sung, the wedding ceremony where both songs are sung until finally even at the end of life, the song of this child now as an old man or women is sung for the last time, and say their last words...

When I first heard the story in it touched in me a longing to live in a place where we heard one anothers songs, where we were so in tune with ourselves and with one another that we could greet each other in that way, to meditate allows us to hear the song within ourselves and to be respectful and hear the song of those around us."
~~ Jack Kornfield

Do you know your song? Can you hear the song of others?

Take the time to listen.

"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created."
~~ Brenda Ueland

This gorgeous pig and I became friends when I visited the Philippines in October 2015, we talked and listened to each other every day.