Month: January 2011

Australia · floods · friends

The Courage of My Friend

Joanne7 Comments

“Courage doesn’t always roar.  Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

As we bid farewell to the month of January I am reminded that the theme at NaBloPoMo all of this month has been “Friends”, therefore I believe it is only fitting that my final post for the month should include an amazing article, written by one of my online friends, Káren Wallace, at the Calm Space.

January this year was always destined to be a huge month in Káren’s life, with family birthday celebrations, Káren and her husband’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the looming excitement of the family moving into their newly built home.

What they hadn’t planned on was the turmoil their lives would be thrown into, along with hundreds of other families, during the January floods in Queensland, Australia.

Once Káren’s electricity, telephone and internet connections were restored, she wasted no time at all in sharing her “adventure” with her readers.

I already knew Káren to be a true woman of substance, of integrity, strength, wisdom and grace. But it was in her article published late last week on “Courage” that Káren revealed another side to her personality.

Here we find the vulnerable and very real lady, who has endured, along with her family, the heartache and pain brought about by the harsh realities of the Australian climate.

In speaking of courage, Káren tells us that she is “daring to be real and vulnerable and show my real self to the world.”

And that, she does.

But perhaps Káren shows us a very large smattering of psychic intuition in writing this article also. You would think, for all the world, that she had written the article “The Courage to be Me, The Courage to be Real” after picking herself up and brushing herself off after the recent floods.

In actual fact, Káren wrote the article last October, during the month of the theme “courage” at the Calm Space. And for some reason, she didn’t publish it back then.

The timing wasn’t right. It was too early for these words to be revealed to the world. This article needed to be published now, in the aftermath of the floods.

I do hope you will read and enjoy “The Courage to be Me, The Courage to be Real” and join me in sending my friend Káren, along with all the other Queenslanders who suffered in some way during the January floods, calm thoughts of strength and love.

“May the sun shine, all day long,
everything go right, and nothing wrong.
May those you love bring love back to you,
and may all the wishes you wish come true!”

~ Irish Blessing

Photo credit.

freedom · spiritual

Where the Mind is Without Fear

Joanne2 Comments

I’m sharing with you today a poem that I have come across, by a poet I had never heard of before today. Rabindranath Tagore, I have discovered, was from India, perhaps explaining the spiritual note to his poem.

I enjoyed this poem on so many levels. I trust you will enjoy it too. 🙂

Where the Mind is Without Fear ~ Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

daughter

A Reminder of a Priceless Treasure

Joanne2 Comments

Further to last night and my post “A Time for Silence”…..

After completing my post, I wandered off to have a browse at what was on the television. I felt rather “brainless” and needed something to amuse me, without having to concentrate, before I turned in for the night.

At first flick through the TV channels I found nothing entertaining at all. Surely there must be something worth watching on the fifty-million channels available?

Fox Classics was the big winner. How did I mange to miss this, during the first flick through?

I had missed the beginning of “The Sound of Music”, but that’s okay. Hadn’t I seen this movie enough times during my life to know where I was up to in the story line?

With my body constantly breaking out in goose-bumps, I sailed along on my cloud of reminiscing, recalling most of my favourite songs from the movie; “Edelweiss”, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, “The Lonely Goatherd”, “My Favourite Things”, “So Long, Farewell” and of course, the movies signature song, “The Sound of Music”.

As the wedding scene began, I instantly recalled that Maria walks down the aisle of the abbey, to marry her beloved Gaylord, (played by the dashing Christopher Plumber), to the song, “Maria”. I remembered the post I wrote here last year, in July, noting that my own daughter, Emma, reminded me so much of Maria in “The Sound of Music” (played by Julie Andrews).

At the time, I gave the post the title of “Miss Seventeen”. Emma is now eighteen, is definitely still my “Maria” and still makes my heart dance and sing, every day!

If you would like to read the post, you can do so here….

As I re-read the words I had written about my daughter less than twelve months ago, it became evident to me that she has matured. Oh, for sure, she is still my “Wild Child”, but my girl is learning new lessons of life, every day.

It seems like only yesterday, when she was just fifteen years old and I worried myself to a frazzle over her. Wanting to protect her, I tried to hold her down, just a teeny-weeny bit.

She announced to me one day, with the most solemn look on her face, that she knew I was only trying to protect her, but she wanted to make her own mistakes.

How could I argue with her? They were the very same words I had spoken to my own mother, as a teenager!

Emma reminded me that it is impossible to live someone else’s life for them. You can only ever live your own life.

So here we are, three years down the track from that most memorable of conversations. There are still times when I worry myself to a frazzle over my beautiful girl, but what else can I do? I’m her mother!!!

Emma is living her own life and learning from her own mistakes. She has grown in maturity since July last year and she is happy; oh, she is very happy!

Some things remain the same, though. Her bedroom is consistently messy, there are times when she is far too outspoken for words and as I write this post, late at night, she is not at home.

My Moonbeam is still sparkling, still shining her light of individualism and still making choices full of wisdom far beyond her years.

And as for me, I just keep on loving my Moonbeam, just as I have every day of her life, and since her conception.

How appropriate that my need for silence and watching an old movie has reminded me of how much I treasure one of my life’s greatest gifts ~ My daughter, Emma. 🙂

Uncategorized

A Time for Silence

Joanne1 Comment

I’ve spent a lot of the day talking today and I think I may well be all talked out.

It hasn’t helped either that the weather has been hot and humid, quite exhausting actually, after all of our lovely summer’s days of late.

Now, it is raining, not surprising after the humidity of today, and the frogs are happily croaking away in the stillness of the night.

Do you ever have days like I’ve had today? Days when your brain and body both feel rather lethargic?

The talking I enjoyed, the heat not so much. It’s Friday, the weekend is ahead of us and the summer holidays are all but over. The last of the school’s will reopen on Monday.

And so begins another year.

A year of new beginnings; new friends; new dreams; making new memories.

New lessons to be learned.

New mountains to conquer.

A year to know when to talk and when to remain silent.

Silence, to restore the soul.

And now is a silent time….

Goodnight. xxx

Australia · birthdays · Mount Warning · Tweed Valley

Youthful History

Joanne4 Comments
Captain James Cook

With Australia being such a young country and myself such an avid fan of any subject which remotely comes under the heading of “history”, it can be rather disappointing at times that my home country is rather lacking in the history department.

It is comforting to know that we do have a limited written history, however young, much of which has been carried out on my very own doorstep.

As I cannot relate to you the history of Australia’s Medieval Days, (they didn’t exist!) the seventeen hundred’s will have to suffice.

Let me take you back in time to the month of May, in 1770.

Captain James Cook and the crew of his ship, the “Endeavour”, sailed north along the eastern coast of Australia.

After reaching the most easterly point of Australia’s landmass, which Cook named “Cape Byron”, the ship continued north to a point where they struck dangerous reefs, some three nautical miles off the coast.

The prominent mountain sighted by Cook, just a few miles inland from the sea, he named “Mount Warning” as it seemed to be a distinguishing landmark to warn sailors of the hazards in the ocean nearby.

Cook named the land along the coastline near these reefs “Point Danger”, which is said to be the site where the Captain Cook Memorial Lighthouse is situated, on the border of New South Wales and Queensland.


In his writings in the ships log, on May 16, 1770, Cook noted a small island just off the coast, which was later named “Cook Island”, in his honour.

In this photo, you can see the mouth of the Tweed River, right next to Duranbah Beach (D-bar to the locals).

In the distance is the small island sighted by Cook and named for him.

As you can see, this zoomed in photo of Cook Island is rather poor quality, although it does show the rocky and deserted land of the island.

Cook Island

It would be almost another eighteen years before Captain Arthur Phillip arrived in the colony of New South Wales, on January 26, 1788, with eleven ships containing convicts, the so called criminals who were expected to forge out a new life in this barren land.

Yesterday, as Australians celebrated the birthday of our country, we could only lay claim to being 223 years old!

We may be a baby country in comparison to most of the world, but I do believe our history is well worth preserving.