An endless refrain

I know I keep saying how amazingly generous many people have been to me on this year’s journey but it still makes my heart sing… today I had breakfast with Harvey who I’ve known for my entire corporate life but have had little to do with over the last 10 years (albeit with different organisations, we both worked around 20 years for one IT corporate and left our respective jobs around the same time)… he is now the CEO of ClickView, an entrepreneurial organisation

An early Christmas gift

My painting and I are both ensconced in my house… she is way more well behaved and perky…

Why is it…

that every time you visit the doctor he finds something else to worry about… this time my cholesterol is high and my waist has considerably expanded… I guess they go hand in hand… so I scurried home and hid the chocolate, threw out the double cream and decided I didn’t need butter anymore… oh and he also took my height measurements… I have always nonchalantly believed me to be 1.64cm but the truth is a little different… I am a mere 1.59 and half… I am not sure which I was more upset about the height or the weight 🙂

Tramping in hope of a kiwi

I was desperate to see a Kiwi on our trip – here we were going to an island south of the south island of NZ renowned for its amazing birdlife living like Douglas Mawson… bracing myself through two flights, a fierce journey on a catamaran across Foveaux Strait… I kinda deserved to see this bird…I prayed to the Angel of Kiwis, I called up the spirits of birds, I wandered about in the dark trying to conjure the elusive creature… all to no avail… except for the younger members of our party who had woken late on the last day, flung themselves loudly onto the track and there in front of them was a kiwi… I was awarded at our celebratory dinner that night the tramper least likely to see a kiwi…

Tramping in mud

With our impending hike on the sub-antarctic Stewart Island I have this magical hope that somehow across the roaring 40s the weather will be delightful and the accommodation 5 star… the truth is my tooth is in desperate need of root canal (I kid you not), the weather forecast is for rain and well I know the colony of sandflies that awaits us at the joyless huts… but somewhere between the mud, the rain, and my tooth I am wondering if once again I can find the joy and meditation of just being in nature placing one foot in front of the other… or whether I will win the category of least useful tramper and most bitchy 🙂

Remembrance and peace

Rationalists please continue no further… 11/11/11 … magic or not it felt ironic to wake up to find the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald declaring that the US is to establish a permanent Marine base in Darwin on the day that fallen troops are remembered… so I was happier to believe in magic and the power of communal prayer and contemplation for a peaceful world… we went to Centennial Park for 11/11/11 and meditated at the site where a labyrinth is to be built… it felt beautiful to ground and blossom Em’s dream of bringing a labyrinth to our city…

Fear – a beautiful perspective

I am gathering content and information to create my programs around Building Resilience to enable You to Flourish… I found an amazing article written by Margaret Wheatley about Fear. She talks about Fearlessness simply meaning that we do not give fear the power to silence or stop us… and she suggests we might all ask at regular intervals in our lives: “What might I need to walk out of?” – the context is at times we need to Walk Out on something/someone/some belief in order to Walk On… Even when I repeated those words to myself, I felt this surge of terror – it’s a question that demands courage and clarity and an ability to stand and look at your fear(s) head-on… I know for me to allow my business to flourish in 2012 and beyond there are many self-beliefs that I need to walk out of to bravely walk on…

We have a carbon tax

I haven’t worked in the Environmental Sustainability area for almost a year but felt I had to comment on a landmark decision in Oz – our Carbon Tax has got the nod from the senate in a tight-won victory… this is a tax that has literally swept aside PMs and would-be PMs – a discussion that very few people can have without heated exchange 🙂 … … it seems fitting that this has happened on the eve of the next UN Climate Change conference in Durban… we all remember the possibility and hope that faded as the Copenhagen talks hobbled to an end a couple of years ago.. and all of this I write as a electrical storm pounds Sydney…

How to feel ancient

So as I try and conjure up possibility and opportunity and living and working with passion (and try not to dwell on how old I am), a package arrived in the post from the government… I tore it open and found a bowel cancer screening kit complete with test tubes and a “how to” that they send to folk of a certain age 🙂 … Now I know this is really important and having a familial history of bowel cancer I am only to aware of the importance of regular checks but the thought of popping up to the post office with my samples doesn’t fill me with excitement… maybe next birthday they will send me false teeth…

A passion voiced

What a tale of discovering your passion in an unannounced manner… Less than two years ago four of us sat at Emily’s beautiful country place painting Babushka dolls…Bob I don’t think had picked up a paintbrush since primary school and without being rude, his finished product wasn’t exactly flash… Fast forward to last night and off I went to Sydney Art School where same Bob has been doing an art course and his class had their public exhibition… His work sort of takes your breath way not just because it’s beautiful but also this amazing reflection of him finding a consuming delight in painting from some innocuous activity… it’s like his passion arrived without ceremony and importantly he recognised and embraced it… BTW I was late and roared into the class to find one of the paintings was of me which of course I loved :-)…