Endless change A Story About Autumn Once upon a time a woman bought a house and moved in. There was a tree on the far side of the garden. It was tall and wide and had thousands of bright green leaves that shimmered in the slightest breeze, sounding like endless whispering of the wind. As the months rolled by and life happened to the woman, she went down to the far side of the garden, sat under the tree, and told it all the sad things she'd been experiencing. Sickness, insults, insecurities, pain and death. The tree listened. One day when the woman wended down the path to the tree, she n ..read more

How toys become real. How we become real. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is the wisest book I know.   Forget the Bible, Anna Karenina, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. They are left choking in the dust thrown up as The Velveteen Rabbit hops to the finish line to be awarded first prize.   The fantasy embedded in the story – that toys can become real if they’re loved, and that a fairy can change a threadbare velveteen rabbit into a real rabbit of the woods with a single kiss – is somewhat maudlin. But there are still treasures w ..read more

Don't think. Don't talk. Just listen. It’s time all of us grownups went to kindergarten!   Kindergarten simply translates from German to “children’s garden”. The first kindergarten was started by Friedrich Froebel in 1840. He called it “Garden of Children”. It included land where the children planted and cared for flowers, fruit, and vegetables.   Now we happily send young children to the nearest kindergarten to enjoy outdoor play and nature, knowing it’s very good for them. But we forget that it’s good for us too.   My grandson Reef, who is four, recently posted me a le ..read more

Connection, not separation I was sitting in a hospital bed wearing a pale blue cotton gown that gaped at the back when the surgeon told me what the operation I was to undergo would involve.   He did a crude drawing of what I assumed was my tummy area and made three marks on it. He held it up like a teacher would, and tapped two of the marks with his pencil, saying, ‘These two cuts will be made for the keyhole surgery.’ Then he tapped the longer mark over my belly button, and said, ‘Then we’ll pull the gall bladder out through your belly button.’   My eyes popped.   I’d been hel ..read more

A lesson for life After donating most of my cookbooks to a local charity shop, I recently broke my resolve to buy no more when my eyes alighted upon this one: Beat Cancer Kitchen: Deliciously Simple Plant-Based Anticancer Recipes, by Chris & Micah Wark.   As far as I know, I don’t have cancer, but I was ready for some new ideas to spice up my somewhat stale repertoire.   I’ve tended to shy away from raw cabbage, chickpeas, beans in tins, tofu, and fresh juices because of their explosive effect upon my digestive system. However, I squared my shoulders, and experimented. Tofu &nbs ..read more

Or just living a role? I’m writing a memoir about moving to the country during a mid-life religious crisis and finding inspiration and healing in the garden at Evergreen, where I live.   To help me shape the memoir I’m using the Hero’s Journey principles, as taught by Louisa Deasey. (If you want to write a memoir, I suggest you type her name into your favourite search engine.)   Using the Hero’s Journey concept means I must think of myself as the HERO of my story. I will hear a Call to Noble Adventure, Meet the Mentor, Approach my Innermost Cave, undergo a Supreme Ordeal, experience ..read more

And so is everything else Are you waiting for a miracle?   Do you want to be miraculously healed, fed with a free loaf and a fish on a mountainside, or be talked to by a burning bush?   Maybe you will be. Who knows?   But while you’re waiting, why not look around and notice all the miracles you’re surrounded with every day.   In his poem, ‘Miracles’, the exuberant American poet Walt Whitman wrote:   Why, who makes much of a miracle? I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or ..read more

Be kind every day Can you recall your last act of kindness? Was it this morning, yesterday, or last week? When I was younger, I planned to make a mark on the world by writing the quintessential Australian novel.   But it’s turned out that authors like Peter Carey and Tim Winton don’t need to step aside because I’ve let that dream subside into the mud of what might have been and decided that the best way for me to make a mark on the world is to simply be kind.   This is not a cop-out, as I will explain. A Nurse Making a Mark on the World   It was a young nurse at Fiona Stanley Ho ..read more

Always look for the gold within Did you know that you have the gold of light and love within you? My maternal grandfather, Frederick Western, was a gold miner in Reedy, Western Australia in the 1930s. Gold had been discovered there in 1899 by Mr Reedy, hence the name of the town.   I don’t know whether my grandfather owned a mine claim or worked for a company, but I do know my mother and her three siblings spent their early years living in a hut with bag walls and a dirt floor while their dad fossicked for gold in the red dirt of Reedy.   Mum told us that when Aboriginals walked past ..read more

Say it at least once a day I learned a very important lesson recently while watching Symphonic Horizons at The Sydney Opera House on TV, hosted by one of the world’s pre-eminent physicists, Professor Brian Cox.   The event included performances by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra of music by Sibelius, Westlake, Mahler, and Strauss, and amazing photos of outer space. Cox conversed about the awesome, unfathomable cosmos and discussed our own short, fragile lives within it.   Because he is a world-renowned physicist, I was surprised how many times he admitted scientists didn’t know the an ..read more