Ever Widening Circles

A really useful concept or thoughtful question doesn't just sit there.

It lands!

And it doesn't just land. It touches down in your consciousness and ripples out. Circles echoing circles. Reverberating.

It sets off a chain of spiraling cycles that move outward and downward simultaneously.

What started as a stone is not just stone. Skipping out over the water, it has now become a new thing that is STONE - MEETING - WATER.

No longer an object but an encounter. Maybe even a relationship. Patterns and circles. Centre and periphery.

As each question, stone skips its way through the water, the ever-widening circles takes me places.

I find the connections.....the self-similarity.

I can feel into the stretch of continuity between past, hurting me and where I am now, and then slightly future me who is waiting, arm stretched out, full of love.

The information accessed through stone-skipping is not the stuff you know from the surface. It has a different tone, a different vibration. It has different elements too. Water and stone.

You can use anything as a stone.

A word, a quality, a mantra, a question, a thought, a rhythm, a colour, a pattern, a shape.


"My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water".
~~ Mark Twain

Above photo taken at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Nov 2011 - Artist Keizo Ushio from Japan called it "Moebius in Space Planet" .
His statement - "The human being sometimes realises that we are one of the parts of nature"

Turning Pain Into Knowledge

Sometimes when I think back on various phrases of my life, it’s hard not to think of all the hurt.

The misunderstandings, the pain, the missed connections. The ways that I screwed up.

The residual frustration about all the ways that other people - weren’t able to be the people I wanted them to be, which by the way is not their fault!

All that time spent being annoyed about how hard it is when you "can’t get blood from a stone".

My focus was in the wrong place.

But here’s what the Word of the Year reminds me to do:

I am allowed to have my grief and my pain. And I can also look at all that agony and remember that it’s business school tuition.

Instead of a diploma, I can just frame the Word of the Year and put it on my wall. And look forward to the next one, because it will be unbelievably useful.

We all have our stuff. We’re all working on our stuff. It’s a process.

We let people have their own experience, and we don’t give unsolicited advice.


"Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge."
~~ Lao Tzu


Spent a lovely day with Charlie and Joseph on 13 April 2011. We caught a ferry from Manly to the city and Charlie who is not quite seven took this photo of the seagull landing near where we were sitting.

Just One Thing

Everything is connected. At least, theoretically.

And even if it isn’t, I can pretend (or assume) that within the world of me and my me-ness:

Connections are everywhere.

This comes in handy whenever things get overwhelming. Or when my to-do list is seventeen million miles long!

Look at the garden.

It’s a beautiful garden. It’s the place where all my projects, hopes, possibilities, things that might happen and gwishes are growing.

But there are way more things growing in this space than I could ever possibly tend to.

Sometimes it seems like there isn’t any point in taking care of any of these flowers, when taking care of one means abandoning all the others.

Here’s what happens.

I just decide.

Every time I lovingly, intentionally do one caring thing for one flower, something about that act and the process is secretly working to nurture and support the other ones.

Or you know what? Even when I do a sloppy, half-assed thing to care for one flower. It still counts.

And so I keep doing just one thing.

Any thing at all, really. Just one thing.

Today I will not be able to accomplish the shocking number of things that need and want doing.

But each piece will count. And somehow it is helping the entire garden.

So I don’t have to do everything.

Even though the urgency monsters say that actually I do.

One thing at a time.

Each thing activating, untangling, supporting and helping all the other things.
Even if I can’t see it or feel it. Even if it’s underground.

I’m going to let the fractal flowers do the real work, and I will do what I can, in the way that I can. Trying to trust that every piece counts.


"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly.
"One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
~~ Hans Christian Andersen


In Western Sydney where I occasionally work I spotted this mural on a wall. I felt a strong connection with the painting. - Durali Aboriginal Centre - June 2006.