Allowing the Magic to Happen

August 29, 2013 Joanne12 Comments

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” ~ Lao Tzu.

The days have flowed naturally forward for me this past month, in fact they have flowed with so much ease that I am wondering where the last month has disappeared to. It’s not a complaint, but more of a learning process than anything. I’m actually having difficulty in finding the words here to describe how I feel.

Resistance is subsiding. I would love to be able to declare that resistance has disappeared from my life completely, but there are still occasions when I will bristle slightly, catch myself and tell myself all is well. I have learnt how to calm any adverse feelings very quickly.

I’ll be the first to admit that the recent anesthetic I had for a small hospital procedure has played its part. For two weeks I floated through each day with my feelings wrapped in cotton wool. Without the thought stresses of everyday living my household chores were completed with ease, a raised voice didn’t bring any feelings of tension, so my world just wafted along on the late winter breezes.

In realising that my anxieties over any given situation would neither make nor break the outcome I could see the benefit in letting go, giving up resistance, staying calm, letting what will be ~ be. I would even go as far as saying that my calmness may have even neutralised situations where other family members were involved.

During my time of still being under the peaceful spell of an anesthetic I made the choice to continue this gentle life after the chemical cushioning had left me, to allow the magic of life to just happen.

Situations are what they are, people do not change unless they choose to do so themselves, the world continues to spin, night becomes day and day becomes night again. The sun continues to rise, the tides ebb and flow. Birds build their nests and look out for juicy worms to catch. A baby is born, someone loses a loved one. And these events will continue, day after day, whether I am stressing, or not.

This must be why there are people who become hooked on drugs or alcohol, I contemplate. When the cushioning is felt, it’s a feeling you want to have stay around forever. How sad it is though, when the addicts don’t realise that chemical substances will wear off, needing to be replaced time and time again. I wish for those people that they eventually can find the magic within themselves, without the chemicals.

Life experience has brought me to the place where I’m now at. The difficulties of life are our greatest teachers. If you have read my last two posts, you will know what I’m talking about, how resistance can take us to an unhappy place. Talking, honestly, the kind of talk in which we wear our heart on our sleeve to our loved ones is a great remedy.

Imaging the worst case scenario, which I did before my bliss-giving anesthetic, only to learn that there was nothing wrong with me in the first place was a real eye opener for me. Worry didn’t change the reality of the situation, but worry may, and probably would have, caused a major health issue. Who needs that?

We will always experience human feelings so long as we are alive. Joy, pain, happiness, sadness, we want to feel emotions, but what is worry, is it even a real emotion? I know it can be destructive, so I am working towards banishing it from my life completely. I hope you can do the same. Show worry, resistance and stress out the door; flow with the tides of life, accept and enjoy what is.

These beautiful kookaburras who came to my garden when we were digging around in the earth, waiting patiently for a worm or some other grub to show itself for them to swoop down and enjoy for their dinner don’t seem to have a care in the world. We have so much to learn from animals and birds. They stay calm, remain patient, don’t complain about the sun or the rain, cold or heat, and they don’t hold any grudges against that dratted bird next to them who catches the worm before they do!

We have the choice, we can choose to put our busy minds into neutral and allow the magic to happen. It takes practise, but it can be done. How cool is that? 🙂

blessings · daughter · photography

A Morning with my Grand-Pups.

August 2, 2013 Joanne18 Comments

An intense moment for Bella, the Border Collie and Porter, the Border Collie cross Cattle Dog.

Last week my daughter phoned me, quite early in the morning, to see if perhaps, just on the off-chance, I might like to go with her when she took her two gorgeous babies for a swim in the river.

She didn’t sound too confident that I would say yes. I’m not usually a “make plans on the spur of the moment” type of person, but what she suggested sounded like fun, so around mid morning I headed off to her place, we loaded her babies into the back of her car and off we went.

......we're gettin' set....... — ……we’re gettin’ set…….

A couple of days later, I saw that Kathy, at Lake Superior Spirit, was sharing photos and adoption stories of her own “grands”, Kathy’s being grand-kittens!

What is it with us women with grown children? Here we are referring to our children’s animals as our grand-pets! Is there a secret longing that we are holding deep within our hearts that perhaps this addition of fury-grands may soon lead to “The Real Thing”? Or are we collectively heaving a sigh a relief that these grand-pets of ours, if they give our own babies any sign of trouble, can be unceremoniously put out the back door to give our children some peace? We remember the trials we have been through with our own real babies!

It is so easy to recall the joy I felt when my children were on their way into my life, the anticipation, the planning, decorating the nursery, choosing baby clothes and contemplating names. What a joyful time it was. And yet I simply cannot get my head around the idea of having an real human grandchild, one without the fur!

No Bella, it's MY ball! — No Bella, it’s MY ball!

I keep on telling my children that I’m too young to be a grandmother, but that story is getting old, way too old, especially considering my eldest is now twenty-eight years old!

And I've got it! I always get it! Porter wins again!! — And I’ve got it! I always get it! Porter wins again!!

When the time is right for my children, when they can almost smell the soft scent of a baby near to them, when they long for the feel of a babies gentle skin touching their own and when they know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are ready to love another human being to the ends of the earth and back again, then I guess I’ll be old enough to be a grandma.

Yep, Porter got it....again.... — Yep, Porter got it….again….

But for now, like Kathy, I will enjoy the long-furred, heavy-breathing, doe-eyed, unconditional love of my two grand-pups, Porter and Bella. Oh, and did I mention that I have two grand-kittens too? Like Kathy said, “Gosh darn, the important things we forget to blog about”!

Now it's time to......Shake! Shake! Shake! — Now it’s time to……Shake! Shake! Shake!

A Sense of Spirit · blessings · challenges · friends · new beginnings

A Different Light.

July 31, 2013July 31, 2013 Joanne16 Comments

In my herb garden, the dainty Dill flowers are looking simply beautiful.

I have something in common with my Dill plant. Hindsight is pointing out to me that I have been a bit of a “dill” recently.

Today, I feel as though the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders, and all it took to remove that weight was a morning spent in the hospital.

I have had a health issue for a few months now and my doctor sent me for a pelvic ultra sound. The results came back, which he somberly told me “showed some abnormalities”. What I didn’t tell my doctor, for fear of an over-reaction on his part, which would have sent me into a blinding spin of fear, was that my grandmother had died of a disease which I had the symptoms of.

Was this disease hereditary? I didn’t know. But you hear so many stories in the news of families who are pre-disposed to a certain illness. Was this one of them? I also knew that my symptoms may be nothing too serious at all. But in my state of panic, I managed to pre-empt the worst case scenario.

A visit to my one time obstetrician, these days gynecologist, abated my fears. No, although there may be a slight and very distant link to my symptoms as a hereditary disease, I was not a high risk case, having not one single “yes” to any known risk factor. I felt reassured.

So yesterday morning at 6 am, off I went to the hospital, to undergo a procedure which would fix my problem, amid a massive dose of nerves, fear, terror, dry mouth, racing heart, you name the “worry” symptom, I had it. By 1 pm, I was back at home again, slightly groggy, still very dry of mouth and starving hungry.

This morning I had a phone call from my gynecologists nurse, enquiring how I was feeling after my night at home. I assured her that I am feeling great, which I am, then I managed to muster up the courage to ask her if she knew how my procedure had gone. Her words were music to my ears, “Doctor has noted that everything went through without any problems and he has no concerns”.

Yes!!!!

See now why I think I may have been a bit of a dill? I’m such a healthy person, I rarely even come down with a cold these days, yet when something health-wise does go amiss I tend to always imagine the worst thing possible is wrong with me. I also hibernate.

Two weeks can change everything, I have discovered. In my last post, I had to get something out in the open. I realised that holding “bad stuff” inside of me was eating away at me, affecting my health and my state of mind. I hate to burden people with my worries and fears, or any adverse emotion for that matter, yet I had reached the stage where I couldn’t carry the burden alone any longer. I had to open up, and the response I got from you all was amazing! All of your comments brought tears to my eyes, I felt the caring in your words, and oh my, you have no idea how wonderful it made me feel! Thank you, one and all, for caring. I hadn’t really expected anyone to comment at all, as it was such a down-toned post, I just needed to get my worries out into The Universe . You were all so fantastic in your support; thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Sharing my worries with you all also gave me the courage to speak with my family about my wish to live elsewhere, especially with my husband. I told him that I have to be what he would no doubt regard as me being selfish, as I am causing myself to have health issues through my dissatisfaction with my life. I only have myself to blame. My restlessness ended up manifesting itself within my body, forming into something which only a hospital procedure could rectify.

I believe that we are all responsible for our own thoughts, our own health, our own actions. We cannot hold another person responsible for our problems. When we are faced with an issue which we regard as something adverse, we have choices in how we cope with the problem. I know these things in my own mind and believe them with all my heart. It’s just that being a human being can get in the way sometimes, we can veer off track and mess things up. Yet we know we can do better.

That is how I’ve felt lately. Trying to cope with issues alone, trying not to burden my family, trying to carry my problem around by myself and work things out all by myself, so as not to worry my family with anything. I’ve been messing up, monumentally, in a very human way.

I should never have feared, my family were there for me, I felt their love and support. As one of my daughters has told me recently, as a child, she was the dependant one, coming to me with her problems. Now she is an adult, the tables can turn sometimes, I can go to her with my problems, and she can help me, she’s an adult now. Isn’t that sweet?

We are coming up with ideas, left, right and centre, about how we can have the best of both worlds, by keeping our home here, which I absolutely love, and my children never want to see leave our family, and having another home, where I can spend some of the year, in the place of my heart, the Blue Mountains. With compromise, planning and time, we are aiming to have it all.

I read a passage this morning, written by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, which really spoke to me. It is so easy to become buried amid the humdrum of day to day life and lose focus of the big picture. It’s a matter of learning to focus on both aspects of one’s life. I’d like to share his words with you here ~

“One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living. Buried within you is an unlimited capacity for creation that’s anxious to plant seedlings to fulfill your dreams and your destiny. The absence of balance between dreams and daily routine can reveal itself in symptoms of depression, illness, or anxiety—but it’s more often something that feels like an unwelcome companion by your side, which continually whispers to you that you’re ignoring something. You sense that there’s a higher agenda; your way of life and your reason for life are out of balance. Until you pay attention, this subtle visitor will continue to prod you to regain your equilibrium.
When you live your life going through the motions, it may seem to be convenient, but the weight of your dissatisfaction creates a huge imbalance in the only life you have now. It shows up when you’re sound asleep and your dreams are filled with reminders of what you’d love to be, but you wake and return to pursuing your safe routine. Allow yourself to think about this “fire from heaven.” What are your dreams and how can you shift your thinking habits to match your dreams? Commit to thinking about what you want, rather than how impossible or difficult that dream may seem. Give your personal dreams a place to hang out so that you can see them in your imagination and they can soak up the energy they deserve. Thoughts are mental energy; they’re the currency that you have to attract what you desire. Learn to stop spending that currency on thoughts you don’t want. Your body might continue, for a while, to stay where it’s been trained to be, but meanwhile, your thoughts are being aligned with your dreams. Align your inner creative energy—your thoughts—so that they match up perfectly with your desires. Dream and you shall become.” ~ Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.

I am dreaming, and this time I am sharing my dreams. Without anyone else losing their dreams, I can have mine. Oh how I do love compromise!

Next time I write I will be back to my usual self, with photos, happiness, joy and well being. Thank you for being my blogging friends. And please, if any of you have a dream, go for it!

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. Time will pass anyway.” ~ Earl Nightingale.

A Sense of Spirit · freedom · friends · gratitude · new beginnings

Lessons to Learn.

July 16, 2013 Joanne25 Comments

Winter wattle in bloom at Leura, on the Blue Mountains, July 3rd.

“Sometimes change in our lives is slow and steady, sometimes it happens really fast. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so good. Having to adjust to new circumstances, people, or places is never easy and we have to be kind to ourselves and trust that, with time, we will settle in – if we’re in the place we’re meant to be…

I just felt these words were meant for someone – no idea who! But whoever it is, hope it helps…” Sue.

When I read the comment above this morning, written by Sue, a Blipfoto friend, her words spoke volumes to me. I really enjoy adding a photo each day to the blip website, well, most days. I’ve been lacking in motivation of late, for blip, blogging, gardening, everything that I usually love really. My mine has been all a-muddle.

I’ve heard it said so many times before that “life is a journey”; it has become a cliché really. My life’s journey began to steer itself into a different direction, with me controlling the steering of course, about six years ago. That’s when I began to write again, which led me to blogging. That’s how long I’ve been searching for “me”, for the last six years. Many of the posts I have added to my various blogs have started out with me trying to work something out in my mind, to get some clarity on what is happening at that time, to try to learn something new. By the time I have finished writing and have re-read what I have written, I also realise that what I have just said may actually strike a chord with another person too, and that maybe, just maybe, my battle through my confusion might actually help someone else’s muddled brain also. It would be a massive bonus if that did happen.

Once upon a time I wrote a monthly post on another website and my section was called “Freedom Space”. Whilst I enjoyed the website and the community feel of it, I also felt like a fraud and lost the will to write about freedom, when freedom was exactly the thing I was in search of myself. How could I pose as an authority on gaining freedom, when I hadn’t a clue how to get it for myself?

It’s my own doing though, this lack of freedom that I feel. If I had been a more dominant person, if I practised standing up to people who tell me what to do more often than I have done, if I didn’t dislike confrontation so much…..if, if, if….. But I can’t change the past. I shouldn’t have to spend my entire life moulding myself into the person that I’m “expected” to be either, none of us should.

My mother dominated, I rebelled, I felt bad, I apologised, we’d argue, I felt bad again, I apologised again, she’d tell me that she knew what was best for me, she knew what I should have in life. Being such an authoritative figure in my life, I moulded myself to suit her ways, yet it never did quite gel for me, when I realised that I wasn’t my mother, I was me, a whole different person to her.

When I finally left home, (against my mother’s better judgement of course), it was with another dominant person, this time a male. My beliefs being as they are, I would often tell him that he must have been my father in a previous lifetime, as he sure did seem to enjoy telling me what to do. It was like I had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. He dominated, I rebelled, I felt bad, I apologised, we’d argue, I felt bad again, I apologised again, he’d tell me that he knew what was best for me, he knew what I should have in life – him. Yet he constantly hurt me. I would feel crushed to the core. When he realised that he had gone too far he would comfort me, try to make amends, say the words I wanted to hear. I’d believe him. He’d say things would change. They never did. And so it would all happen again, the arguments, the hurt, the comforting…….

So many times during my adult life I have found myself telling him, “I’m not a female version of you”. Isn’t that silly? Why would anyone want a person to be that much like themselves? Yet it (still) seems to me that that is exactly what he wants from me.

I went away recently for eleven days, eleven glorious days, just my youngest son (he was on school holidays) and me. We drove about one thousand kilometres south of our home, down to Penrith and the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, the area where I grew up, the area I still call “home”. My parents took me away from this area when I was thirteen. I didn’t want to leave. I moved back there when I left home, still a teenager. Twenty-one years ago I moved north again, feeling I had to as my mother was seriously ill. When she was gone, I wanted to go back, he didn’t want to, so we stayed up north, while my heart longed to be down south.

Now that I’m home though, back up north, the muddled mind has set in. Driving north again, as the coolness of the winter air we had enjoyed left us, and the heat of the north set in, I resented the sun and I resented the heat. This is winter, it should be cold now!

I just didn’t want to come back here, but I had to. My son is still at school, he needs his mother still, he hasn’t reached that almost-an-adult stage of his life yet, when he will have his independence and can make choices for his own life.

Please, oh please, my boy, make your own choices! Choose your own life! Don’t spend half a lifetime trying to make another person happy whilst compromising your own happiness; ultimately you will grow to resent them! Don’t make my mistakes! Learn from me, my beautiful son, learn! Feel the freedom! Enjoy your choices!

It has occurred to me recently, no, I’m down-playing this, it actually dropped on me like a bolt of lightning from the sky recently that we are all put on this earth with lessons we must learn. If the lessons are not learned, the problem will carry with you into the next lifetime, again with the same people. You will be given the same lessons, again and again, until you finally get it right. My lesson is that I must learn to walk away from the control-freaks, those who want to run my life. No matter how hard it is for me, I have to learn to walk away, to not fall into the same trap, time and time again, of being dominated, of being told by another that they know better than I do what is best for me.

So, as my blip friend Sue pointed out this morning, the changes may be slow, it may be scary adjusting to new people and new places, but I have to follow my heart over the next eighteen months and find the place where I am meant to be.

Right now, my heart is so torn. As much as I love being at my beloved Blue Mountains, my children would all be one thousand kilometres away. I don’t know how I would deal with not seeing them all regularly. We all have to live our own lives, but it is very comforting, knowing my dearest souls are not too far away.

I have so many photos which I want to share with you all! Yet since I have been home, when I look at the photos, my heart aches for the place I want to be. Is it the place I am meant to be? Time will tell. And I will give myself a talking to and add my holiday photos here for you all to see. How odd that sounds, “holiday photos”, yet they are the photos of the place that I regard as my home. Here, where I live now, I am ten minutes drive away from a world-famous holiday destination, the Gold Coast. It’s all rather back-to-front, really.

This is such a “down” post! Please, don’t let my words drag your spirits down. I’ve written this today to get it off my chest, to “come clean”. My posts are so erratic, I can go for weeks without writing anything, and I don’t ever want any of my blogging friends to think I don’t appreciate them; I appreciate each one of you. Reading your stories helps lift my day more than any of you could ever imagine. But some days I just don’t have the time to write, and if I go to the computer at night, I have been told that I’m spending too much time at the computer. So please, I hope you will bear with me. I’m still here, I appreciate your friendships. You all inspire me so much and for that, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. 🙂

Australia · enchanting · freedom · pecan nuts · photography

Ethereal

June 17, 2013 Joanne13 Comments

“To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning.” ~ Dejan Stojanovic.

The first day that a flock of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos invaded my Pecan Nut Tree was indeed a happy day for this bird-loving, photo taking blogger. For weeks I had listened to their raucous screeching sounds as they flew through the ether, bypassing my garden and heading off to parts unknown.

These are large native Australian birds, and whilst some may regard them as pests, there are many more, including myself, who love the personality, character and appearance of cockatoos.

During one of my early morning photo session I could hear my next door neighbour calling out “shoo, shoo” and when I looked towards her garden, there she was, running around her yard, waving a stick and obviously attempting to remove these angelic beauties from her garden. Not that she had many in her yard, and they were my pecan nuts they were munching on.

I chuckled to myself and continued clicking away with my camera. The cockatoos ignored the stick-waving human. The stick-waver gave up.

We planted our pecan nut tree about eighteen years ago, so you can imagine how large it is now, and we have enjoyed many seasons of munching away on the pecans ourselves. In fact, I’m sure I have a post, somewhere in the archives, of my delicious Pecan Pie…..

…..Here it is! And look at that, I added the recipe on June, 18th, 2010, almost three years ago to the day! And I’m more than happy to share my pie recipe with everyone, unlike my cockatoo friends, who are very possessive with what they regard as their own, as you can see here!

During the silence of the early morning, with around two dozen cockatoos breaking open the hard shells of the pecans, the collective cracking of shells being broken open resembles the sound of a fire burning. You know the crackling sound a fire makes when logs are burning in the fireplace? That’s the noise that the cockatoos make with the shells.

Their white feathers are so pristine in appearance and with the birds being so large, between fifteen to twenty inches in length, when their wings are spread they seem to look as I imagine an angel in flight would look.

Oh okay, yes, you’re right, I don’t imagine an angel with a rounded beak and black beads for eyes, but you do get the picture, don’t you? Their white wings look like gossamer, cascading through the air. I suspect in reality those wings hold power, though my heart wishes to believe they are gossamer.

A white flurry of gossamer wings.... — A white flurry of gossamer wings….

Cockatoos can be tamed and kept as pets, even taught how to talk. Apparently they are very demanding pets. I’ve also read that they are very affectionate birds, which doesn’t surprise me, after having been privileged to watch them interact with one another in the wild.

The long yellow feathers on their head, the crest, has its own set of muscles, allowing the bird to lift their sulphur crest when happy, excited or playful. As I have watched them, I’ve noticed that when something catches their eye somewhere in the distance, they will raise their crest before flying away.

My neighbour, who also feeds the wild birds, (not the stick waving woman!) has a huge pine tree in her garden and the cockatoos love chewing on the pine cones too. In captivity, they can destroy furniture, as they love to chew on wood. Perhaps the stick waver thought they were plotting to destroy her trees…..?

They seem to be quite partial to the exotic orange blooms of my African Tulip tree too. I’m guessing there must be seeds inside the flowers that they enjoy eating. I’ve also watched and wondered, as they shake their heads back when they have a mouthful of delicious orange-ness, just as this next cocky is doing.

I must admit, I wondered whether the cockatoos had left me any pecans on the tree at all! Not that I needed any, as I already have two buckets full on the veranda, waiting to be shelled, so I took another bucket down to the tree last weekend only to find that there were heaps of pecan nuts left for me! These gorgeous white-winged angels are not greedy at all. 🙂