I Know You've All Been Very Naughty This Year

It is the time of the year known as Christmas, or Chanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Solstice, or Saturnalia.  It's a time for feasting, drinking, and enjoying the company of loved ones.

It's a time then for me to wish all of the readers of my blog, my humble audience, whether in Australia, the USA, England, Germany, India, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, or even New Zealand (apparently) a most joyous time.  If you have family and friends around you, enjoy the precious gift of their companionship.  Some cannot make it home for various reasons, whether because of work, distance, financial circumstances or health.  Some have no family at all.  It shouldn't matter, we keep those we love and care about in our hearts, no matter the distance.

So then, whatever your beliefs, where ever you are, what ever you do, remember there are more important things than money, position, power, status or your ambition.  Turn yourself instead to family, remember why you love them, and lose yourself in simple acts of generosity and kindness.

Aum, blessings upon you all.

Not Quite Christmas Yet.

It is however the day of the Solstice.  Here in this part of the world the longest day of the year, and for people in the northern hemisphere the longest night of the year, and the time of the ancient pagan celebrations.  A time of bonfires and mid-winter darkness, of druids and dancing and drinking and feasting together to keep the cold at bay.  A time to celebrate the end of an old year and the soon to commence year to come.  Naturally then like Janus we look both backwards and forwards, to see where we have come from, the things we have left behind us in the last year, those parts of our life that had to fall away, like dead branches being pruned, so that new life and growth can come forth when the springtime returns.

Conversely we look forward, our dreams and desires for the year ahead laid out before us, and we offer them up to the universe.  Some fall by the wayside, others become real and concrete and are fulfilled.

All this is reflection for me of course.  It has been a long year, and it has taken many twists and turns for me to get to where I am.  12 months ago I was preparing to spend the holiday with my partner and her daughter, I was buying presents and baking a chocolate mud cake with enough chocolate to kill a large donkey.  How things change in the course of a year.  First dealing with a miscarriage, then I found myself single again, and then in another relationship, I turned 40 and felt age starting to catch up with me a bit.  And yet I feel more positive and optimistic about the holiday season than I have in many years.  Life is getting better. 

So what do I have in store for me in 2012?

I wish for all the things that we all wish for, good health, happiness, prosperity, being with family and friends and the chance to enjoy life and love.  I would like a new and better paying job, the chance to upgrade to a slightly newer car, and the chance for my current relationship to continue to grow and evolve.

I do indeed wish that everyone could know happiness and joy and good things.  Often though it is not always the case.  Some people hold themselves back through stubborn attitudes, through lack of compassion, or being trapped in a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness.  How we choose to live now determines how we shall be forced to live in the future.  Time to open our hearts and to be compassionate to all, and especially to ourselves.

A Busy Few Weeks

Been a busy time at work the last month.  My employers bought themselves a new house and very graciously gave me a lot of extra hours helping to renovate.  Thus I spent my days pulling out a 40 year old kitchen and bathroom and enjoying breaking things very muchly.

This meant of course I didn't have as much time to spend on a few little things I need to get done.  I still have to go and see about my prostate and find out whether it is worth panicking, I still have to attempt to do some Christmas shopping.  And I finally commenced my test run for Christmas lunch by throwing some pork on the BBQ to slow cook.  I have been wanting to try this recipe for a while, after sampling pulled pork in a restaurant several months back and enjoying it immensely.

This weekend then has seen me pickling my piece of meat in brine, liquid smoke, and bbq rub for a day or so, and this morning adding extra rub and putting it in the BBQ to slow cook for 5 or 6 hours, encrusted with smoky smells and bbq spices. 

I cannot wait to try this recipe for myself.  It is time intensive, and certainly not a quick snack, but it means taking time, and preparing, and savouring and anticipating.  Thus the opposite of instant gratification.  It's the same when cooking soups and stews and casseroles.  The act of preparing ingredients, of pre-heating the oven, of allowing things to slowly cook for hours on end.  It forces us to be patient.

Life then happens while you are busy making other plans, and a good feed cooks slowly while we patiently drool over the outcome and busy ourselves with other duties in the meantime.  Good things come to those who wait.

Some People Just Don't Get It

I have not always been the greatest example of humanity.  I still don't think I am necessarily.

In my life I have met people who have seen me at my worst and denied me the possibility of redeeming myself in their sight.  Fair enough sometimes, trust is easily shattered, and hurt is hard to overcome.

I have also seen others at their worst, and I have tried my best to overcome and to forgive their less savoury moments, and to see the potential there in them.  It's what I have always aspired to, to see the best potential in people realised.  I also would like to see my potential realised, a journey I have slowly and haltingly taken over the years.

I have in my time though, met people who seem to be wasting their potential. 

I do feel sad for them and I would like to help them.  But I realise that the only people worth helping are those who are helping themselves, and who show a genuine will to improve their situation.  As for all the others I would only be casting my pearls before swine.

The sad thing is, mainly from my point of view, that such people are sitting there wasting their lives, wasting their potential to make a positive impact in the lives of those around them, and instead they are doing nothing, save for blaming others for the position they are in, for the hurts and indignities they believe they have suffered.  And so it goes, it's never their fault, always someone else's.  And that becomes an excuse.  And nothing changes.

We have all occasionally done the right thing.  We have all on more occasions than that, screwed up royally and profoundly and made twats of ourselves.  My last relationship failed.  I blame myself for that.  I know it was probably a case of two people's issues making an unholy mess, but I am responsible for my failings as a person, not the other party.  They must attend to their house as I must attend to mine. 

So what is not to get here?  We all make mistakes, let's be honest enough to admit them to ourselves and to others.  Blaming other people for your problems is selfish and irresponsible.  Failing to see the good in people and their highest potential is just as bad.

We are not here to blame, judge, or pass the buck...

Trying Not To Have A Holiday From Blogging.

I have been a bit quiet lately in terms of writing output.  And my output was never that prolific to begin with.

That is not to say that I intend to beat myself up over the fact, it's just that life sometimes gets in the way.

There are times in your life when you face trouble and turmoil, and writing seems to be a way out, pouring your thoughts and your heart into a page, or into a screen.  You do therapy and take the journey of life and death, and you emerge from the underworld into a bright new realm of light and life.  It is natural at times like that you are more preoccupied with enjoying life than with writing about gloom and doom, but part of me calls back to myself and says that I should celebrate the happy times as well as deal with the darkness.

So this blog is a celebration.  In some ways the last few years have been a time of tutelage and transformation at the hands of a few teachers, some physical, some metaphysical.  I may not have enjoyed all those moments, I certainly don't know if I have fully learned all the lessons I was meant to learn, and I am certainly a long way from a fully realised person.  I do believe I am closer than I was two years ago, and for that I am thankful to all who have happened across my path and taught me to be a better person.  I am grateful to you all, and to a couple in particular.

It's been difficult, old love and friendship has not always survived, and as sad as that is, it is often necessary.  All things change and transformation is inevitable.  Resisting change is often more painful in the long term.

This seemingly fraught journey though, has not been without its moments of genuine joy and supreme ecstacy, and once again I am thankful for all these moments.

It leads me to a point where I find myself happier and healthier than I have been in many a year.  Not perfect and still a way off being close to it, but in a better place, filled with peace and genuine companionship.  I can honestly say that I love life, and that is something I could not say for many years, my heart was weighed down with anxiety and depression.

That leads me back to the start then.  Still blogging, but now celebrating the goodness of life.  The flowers in the trees, the birds singing, animals playing.  The blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the blue of the ocean.  Life is worth living and the world is beautiful.

Be blessed and happy.

Namaste.

Random Monday Morning Musings.

It's a Monday morning here.  I am home enjoying a day off work with little to do but rest and recover from the weekend. 

This weekend myself and new special friend travelled north from Brisbane to Bundaberg, a journey of around 400 kilometres (about 250 miles for those who think metric is the tool of the devil).  I have to say I have never travelled to Bundaberg before.  I have been further north, but the main highway north (the Bruce highway) stays further west and inland.  Like most Australian highways, it seems to suffer from a chronic lack of investment in the future.  There are large sections where it is a single lane each way with limited overtaking opportunities.  On top of this add in trucks and caravans travelling below the posted limit, along with bumps and no median divider, and you end up with a dangerous road for the tired and/or inexperienced driver.  The governments solution is to spend a long time building a new road and in the mean time reduce the speed limit on the existing road.  This means you are guaranteed to be stuck on it longer, behind more slow traffic, feeling stressed and fatigued.  It seems the whole of the Bruce Highway, which is part of the national highway system, is somewhat of a joke.  From Brisbane to the Sunshine coast it is a wide 6 lane modern free-way, but then it degenerates into 2 lane country road and sections that are often flooded and impassable in the wet season the further north you go.  This leads to increased numbers of accidents.  I remember the old Pacific Highway to Sydney was very similar in years gone by, and it was a similarly stressful and dangerous drive.  The national and state governments could do worse than to invest more money into creating a national highway system that would at least be up to the standards of the 1990's, rather than the 1960's as so much of it is.

Anyway, that rant over, we turn to Bundaberg, a town built on the sugar industry and rum.  Rum it seems is much beloved of bogans, who consume great quantities of it mixed with coke, and then go on sugar and alcohol fuelled sprees of violence.  Bundaberg is of course famous for Bundaberg Rum, the product in question, and usefully colloquially known as Bundy. 

My weekend was spent in Burnett Heads, some 15 or so kilometres from the centre of town, and near the mouth of the Burnett River.  It is a very sleepy seaside village, unlike it's neighbour Bargara, which has become a blight of cafes and holiday units and retired persons seeking some sunshine to keep them warm before death's cold hand grabs hold of them.  I have to say I enjoyed the relaxed (i.e. non-existent) pace of life and could happily see myself retiring to somewhere like it.  I fear however that it will be raped by developers and property speculators within the next few years.  In the meantime it seems like a lovely spot to holiday and enjoy doing nothing for a few years to come.

Finally some other observations from my time are:

I am not as young as I once was, I cannot drive 400km, spend the night partying too hard and then drive home the next day.  I am paying for it.

I must not drink so much, I forget I can very easily overdo it and end up alternating feeling rather ill with bouts of unconsciousness.

Sleeping on couches in your clothes is not as comfy as being able to make it back to your cabin you paid money to rent, and sleeping in a proper bed, with air conditioning.

It is possible to feel so queasy that the smell of bacon is not a good thing.

Hangovers suck at any age.


Back to our regular programming next week.... 

So That Is That Then.

I am closing a chapter on my life this weekend, on an adventure that began in December 2009.  My time and dealings with Sue have reached a conclusion as we have tied off the last off the last of the loose ends between us.  So what reflections can I take for myself as I move on and forward from this time?

I don't hate, and I don't feel bitter or resentful about our time together.  It certainly wasn't perfect, and I feel we both wronged and disappointed each other.  That is a part of being human, and perfection is certainly the domain of angels.  In the end our power in regard to perfection comes down, as in so much of life, in our reaction to it.  Do we choose to be angry at other people's failings, or to understand and forgive?  We may decide we cannot live with others flaws and imperfections, that's fine, but we will still have to live with our own.  I have to live with my flaws, I have to live with the flaws of anyone else I choose to live with, and they have to live with my flaws.

This then is all about life, love and the ability to forgive.  We are all part of a society, but then at a closer level we are part of a community, and at a closer level too we are part of a family.  What standards do we expect of each?  Of society we expect certain things, the law to be upheld, the garbage to be collected, social security if we need to access it, electricity and water and sewerage services.  In short all the basic infrastructure that a society needs to function effectively.

A community needs different things to function, individuals and groups need to cooperate and to communicate.  Ties are closer.

A family is a closer unit yet.  A group of people often placed together in a home.  Their flaws and strengths are all laid bare, all available for praise and criticism.  Love and hate are magnified by the proximity, as are other emotions.  It is a crucible of compatibility that a lot of relationships don't often survive.  But occasionally that crucible refines and purifies, burns off the dross, and leaves something pure in the hearts of those who walk through that furnace. 

And that is what I feel, I feel like I have grown, and found gold in my own heart.  Perhaps that is the secret of alchemy, the long sought after philosophers stone.  We place our hearts in the crucible of life and love, and the base elements of our beings are turned into gold, the pure gold of spirit.  We learn to rise above hate, resentment, and bitterness, and we find the power to forgive, to love, to let go and bless people and send them on their way. 

So then I send Sue on her way with my blessings.  I genuinely wish her the best for her life and hope she is happy and successful in all that she does. 

As for me, I intend to go on and be happy too.  The world is full of joy and love, there is no reason why my heart can not be likewise.

Possibilities and Inevitabilities.

Just a brief post from me this fine Friday afternoon, as I survey the Brisbane skies from the comfort of my leather chair while I peer out of the portholes in my secret volcano lair and contemplate world domination and cute kitten antics.

I was musing today on how things begin, and everything about them is new, and fresh and exciting, and the possibilities seem endless.  We have experienced something new and unfamiliar, a taste of something away from our mundane routine, and it liberates us, leaves us feeling free and walking on air, all happy and full of the new life we have discovered.  Or should that be rediscovered?  It's the same happiness, the same joy we are capable of finding for ourselves all the time if we learn how. 

Sometimes though, it all dies, and that death becomes a sad inevitability.  And yet still we grieve, we rail, we protest and ask why.  Is it because we left that new life to whither on the vine?  To die from lack of nurture?  All things are changeable and nothing lives forever, but not allowing things to grow and find their form is even more sad.  We lament those cut down in the prime of life perhaps more than those who lived a long and full life, do we lament in the same way for those things in our lives, those seeds of potential we allowed to die while we worried about the cares of this world, about money, status, possessions and power.  It's all just ego tripping.

Things Change

Things change, all things change.  All things are in a state of flux and impermanence.  We may start off as one thing but, if we choose to, we grow, we evolve, and we change.

Like evolution, this change can be slow and imperceptible.  Unless we spot the subtle signs, and we often do unless we have a complete and meticulous record, we are liable to miss change.  Sometimes we can look back, and spot the tipping point, the missing link, the "aha" moment when things started to change, and we know and understand that everything has led up to this moment in time, just as this moment is part of a chain of being that will lead to other moments.

The things is being in the moment, and recognising that this moment is both part of all moments, and another link in a chain.

Communication, Racism and the Cost of Your Principles

It has been an interesting few weeks here for me since I last deigned to prattle on in this blog. 

Not so much in the sense of being plunged into chaos and meeting disaster at every turn, but probably more in the sense of my dealings with people and the subtle shifts in the way I deal with others and my attitudes.  It has certainly made for some interesting discussions.  So as with all things, we begin with our story.

Thus we turn to my personal life.  Back in 2007 I was involved in a relationship that sort of continued on and off up until the end of 2008, a period of some 18 months.  So what you say.  It turns out that this was my first significant relationship, the first time I had ever known love and been loved in return.  For some of us that is something that happened in the distant past, for me though it is a recent reality.  I think no one ever forgets their first great love, and generally when it ends, it hits hard.  I spent a fair bit of time dealing with my feelings and moving on.

If we fast forward several years to several weeks ago, I received a phone call from this former girlfriend, with whom I had really not had any communication for some 2 and a half years.  It is interesting to relearn the art of communicating, and establishing a dialogue on the basis of friendship rather than sex.  It's a challenge.

And so on to this week, where I got into a discussion on Facebook about the asylum seeker debate that continues to rage in Australia.  It is a divisive and polarising issue, with some people thoroughly opposed to our country allowing asylum seekers to settle here, while others welcome refugees from other countries.  Most of the arguments against revolve around the way asylum seekers are jumping the immigration queue (which doesn't exist), or that they get citizenship and proceed to go on benefits and not work (but who drives your taxis and works in your convenience stores?).  Another argument is that if we allow asylum seekers in we will be overrun.  This flies in the face of government policy that caps asylum seeker intake at 12000 a year.  Our total intake per head of population is also low, just one arrives for every 1500 Australians.  Those who want to read more are advised to read this link.

In this debate I was surprised, or more rather shocked that in these supposedly enlightened times, there are still some people out there who cannot see outside their own culture.  I spoke with one person who stated he wouldn't work for a business run by immigrants.  I did ask the hypothetical question about whether this meant he would prefer to work for migrants for more money than he would if he worked for an Australian company and whether his principles were worth 15 thousand dollars a year.  Sadly I did not receive a reply to my question, so I cannot determine the cost of one man's principles.  I really wish I had an answer.  Sadly it seems the desire to tell ourselves stories to protect ourselves from the world around us, and to not venture outside our comfort zone leads us into a state of fear and hatred of all that is foreign and different.  Ignorance becomes easier than discovering and understanding different things. 


Thus this leads me back to communication.  We can choose to open a dialogue with someone, be it someone we have not seen in years, or someone who has arrived on a boat from halfway around the world.  Dialogue can lead to new relationships, to new understandings, new ways of communication, and making our lives richer as a result.  Hatred and fear only locks us up in a prison of our making.

Feeling Very Ranty About Fundamentalism...

....in all it's forms.

You may think fundamentalism is merely a religious phenomenon.  The image of a preacher in a cheap suit preaching hellfire and damnation to all us unlucky sinners, using the full authority of the Bible to back up his claims.  Or you may think of the Taliban running wild in Afghanistan, enforcing their own particular flavour of Islam, replete as it was with medieval misogyny and lots of enforced beard wearing.

The dogmatic madness of fundamentalism arrives in many forms however.  As these things should, let's start with a story from my own surreal catalogue of experiences.

I was chatting to someone the other week, and the subject turned to her being an atheist.  Now my take on atheism we shall arrive at presently, me considering myself to hold what approximates a weak atheist position, which may also be called agnosticism.  Somewhere in this conversation I referred to astrology and the way I find it useful.  I have to say I have never seen a conversation end so quickly and it got me to thinking if it was really me who needed to defend my thinking.

The thing I am beginning to understand is that the tighter someone chooses to hold on to their system of belief, and indeed atheism is a system of belief, the more frightened and insecure they are.  One sees this in the way people are prepared to fight and to go to war to defend what they think is right, or rather what they believe to be right.  Thus we had the crusades in the middle ages, we have ongoing conflict in the middle east, we have people prepared to fly a plane into a building or walk into a crowd and detonate the bomb they are wearing.

Aha then, the atheist will proclaim, as they sit back and laugh at all the religious people killing each other to see whose imaginary friend is the best.  However, we have seen militant atheism in places like the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Albania.  This was a part of the Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist doctrine, a doctrine held to as fervently as any religion.  Prominent atheist such as Richard Dawkins likewise are vehemently opposed to religion and belief. 

So then, we have the true believers, no matter what their creed.  They believe it and it must be so because of that.  They are a Christian, then Christianity is right and all other beliefs are wrong, they are a Muslim, then Islam is the only true way to God, they are an atheist, then there is no God or gods, and those who say there is are all wrong.  Or it may be a belief in a political system, or an economic system, or even on down to your football team.  It is tribalism writ large, a contest of tribal gods and heroes, vying for supremacy in the hearts and imaginations of their followers.  Those who don't believe in our tribal god are deluded, or those that think there are gods to help them are deluded.

All this comes down to fear and lack of reason.  You may know the arguments that you use to defend your beliefs ten different ways from Sunday, you may be absolutely convinced you have all the answers.  Guess what, you don't!  All you have is fear, and that is making you cling on to what you think you understand even tighter, and is driving you further from reason and open dialogue.  It happens all the time, people adopt a belief system, absorb the teachings of said system, and are thoroughly indoctrinated.  In the end they think they have the answers not only to their own problems, but to everybody else's.  They end up narrow-minded, judgemental of all the poor sinners who haven't seen the stunning revelation of the truth according to them, and they end up making themselves miserable, wondering why the world hates them.

Fear not though, there is hope.  There is no right way or wrong way, there is only ways.  It's more important to question what you think and believe, all the time.  It doesn't matter if there a god or great flying spaghetti monster.  What matters is how you live your life (cliché alert).  Do you help humanity by criticising people's beliefs?  Or by actually helping them?  Do you serve humanity by trying to prove your ideas are right?  Or by helping them?  Walk in the truth that no one has the whole truth.  If there is something bigger than all of us, don't pretend you have managed to comprehend the infinite and suddenly understand it.  If you have had a life changing insight, let people see it and not just hear about it.  Tolerance, forbearance, compassion, and love are more important than what is right and wrong.

And, now, with almost perfect timing, here is a quote I just read from the Dalai Lama:  The more contact we have with one another and the more we come to understand each other’s values, the greater will be our mutual respect.

Om, salaam, shalom, peace.

A Drunk Trying To Ride A Bicycle

I remember one drunken night many years ago.  The end of the night came and it was time for me to hop on my trusty push-bike and head home and crawl into bed.  This of course raised an interesting question; was I at this stage in any state to ride a bike?  Of course at the time such questions were not in the scope of my consideration, and I bravely took to the saddle and attempted to get my feet into the toe-clips.  This effort took me around about 2 meters before I crashed into the gutter I had launched myself from, and I found myself struggling not to fall over and lose what little dignity I possessed.  So up I hopped again and managed to get a start.  This attempt was moderately more successful, and I wobbled across the street and crashed into the gutter on the opposite side of the road.  Undeterred, I mounted up again and finally managed a more or less straight line and an unsteady and leisurely progress back home.

I thought about this incident several years later when I read Martin Luther's analogy of the church as a drunk trying to ride a horse.  First said drunk must make an attempt to climb up into the saddle in what must be a great piece of visual comedy for all casual onlookers.  Attempt to get foot in stirrup, foot slips, drunk ends up flat on back in whatever the horse has managed to leave on the ground.  Drunk climbs up, more or less gets in the saddle this time, but promptly slides off the other side and hits the ground again.  Drunks climbs up from side he has just landed on, mounts his horse and promptly falls off onto the side he originally started from.

Luther was trying to illustrate how he saw the church blithely falling from one extreme of thought and behaviour over to the other extreme.  We don't however have to be religious in any way to see that the behaviour of a church, which is after just a bunch of people, is shown as an example of the thoughts and behaviours of humanity in general.  Societies can often lurch from one extreme to the other and the balancing act of maintaining the middle ground is as difficult for us collectively as it is for our mythical drunk to stay balanced on his horse. 

It may be in the end that seeking to make a fair and balanced society for the interests of all then is either a delicate balancing act, or more likely, it is an accident waiting to happen, a perilous lurch towards extremism always a dangerous possibility.  In Australia and the United States (and no doubt in other countries) we are seeing the right and left of politics becoming more extreme in their posturing and the middle ground is rapidly starting to disappear, and we are all feeling that dangerous sway in one direction or another. 

It is hard to avoid being embroiled in polarising debates, to avoid taking sides, and to objective and able to consider both sides of a debate and to remain neutral.  Some would say it is impossible to be 100% objective.  We all have our biases and our blind spots and our places we fall down.  The best we can hope for is to maintain a sober outlook, and to do our best to find the middle way through life, even when it seems to be just a slender thread.

Winter's Almost Over, Spring Is Almost Here!

Had to go out and do a few things today, and managed an hour in the sun.  It was starting to get a bit warm out there, so much that I was feeling a bit uncomfortable for it.  It won't be long now before it is too hot in the midday sun for me and my fair complexion and reddish hair, and I will once again be back to looking for shade in whatever form it comes and forgetting to bring my hat when I need it. 

It still therefore, boggles my mind why I choose to own a convertible some days, but then I get out on a warm winter day and enjoy the interplay of warm sun and cool wind, while the road flows under my wheels.  I feel the connection that is unique to open air driving, that thing we lose when we travel in cars with the windows up and the air-conditioner always on.  It's that connection to the mechanical noises, the road, the sounds of other cars, and to the smells of the world around us.  Motorcyclists know it well, even as they balance on two wheels and try to avoid the blissed out masses with the windows up, the air-con going, and the radio blasting while they text on their phones, who are as determined to wipe them out as any Volvo driver ever was in years gone by.

I think we miss that connection to the world around us and surround ourselves with little cocoons, whether it as we walk down the street with our headphones in, or wrapped in a cocoon of our anxieties and worries.  All the things that stop us from being mindful and aware of the world and other people.  It becomes a way of losing spiritual situational awareness, and often we don't realise the trouble we are headed for until it is too late, and we are headed for the cliff and about to plummet into the abyss beyond. 

Materialism and love of things will conspire to wrap us in a soft warm cocoon of ignorance to the world around us.  So, put the roof down, take the headphones out, turn the telly off, step away from the computer, wind the windows down, go out in the garden and connect with nature and humanity.  Enjoy the sensations and be mindful and enjoy the genuine joy and bliss that comes from being a part of the whole, and not just an individual imprisoned in a cocoon.

A Nice Relaxing Evening

It's another Saturday night here for me, recovering from having a few too many last night and staying up late.  Was going to go out again but have instead chosen to come home and recover.  I was hoping to take off to Sydney for a work gig with a trade show, which would have involved two days work and a bit of playing tourist, but alas it seems I have been dashed in my hopes of securing a couch or a floor to crash out on for the week, and I sincerely don't want to sleep in the back of the truck.

I am slowly working through the whole getting over Sue process.  I have my days of feeling angry about things, but I am determined to remain in a place of gratitude for the good things. I take this opportunity to express to her my apologies for the times I failed her as a partner, and to forgive her for the things that hurt me and made me feel let down.  I wish you well Sue, may the universe life you up and let you find happiness and success in life, I bless you to go forward and grab hold of your dreams.

In the meantime my immediate plans are to finish the current university subject I am undertaking, and I am determined to pass and put it behind me.  I will certainly take on another subject or two at some time in the future, but for the moment I need to consolidate things, work and save some money ready for the next set of adventures I want to embark upon.  I have suffered a great disappointment and sadness, but I also recognize that this is part of something bigger than me, and I now have the opportunity to do some new and different things and see new places and enjoy some friendship and good company.

Wish me well...

Melancholia of a Burning Bucket of Water

A curious melancholia indeed has descended upon me tonight.  I will probably take to my journal and write about my feelings in more depth later on tonight, but for the moment this will do as a place of expression.  And besides, what is the use of having a blog if I cannot bare my soul at some stage in it?

I did indeed have a pleasant afternoon wandering around the surrealism exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art here in Brisbane.  Plenty of good pieces from the Surrealist era, although sadly not as much Dali as I would have liked to have seen.  Having said that though it was amazing to see some well known pieces of Rene Magritte's work.

There was however, a point where the psychic assault of the Surrealist imagery almost broke me.  Some of it is incredibly powerful imagery, deeply rooted in the unconscious and the expression of unseen imagery of the mind in a concrete visual form.  It's the language of dreams.  It all worked to make me feel slightly off-balance, and that was perhaps not what I needed after the rest of this week.  I have struggled a bit with a feeling of listlessness, with poor sleep, and irritability.  It probably isn't surprising for me to feel that way given a relationship has just ended.  It's early in the grieving process, and there is still a lot I have to come to terms with.

I definitely feel the burden of my own foolishness.  I think of all the things that could have been different, but I accept that things happened as they did and there is nothing within my power to change them.  Did Bono actually say something meaningful when he said 'a man will beg, a man will crawl, on the sheer face of love, like a fly on a wall?'  It feels that way some days, you try and try and then are shown bluntly that your best is not good enough, and there is nothing you can do to change things.  You make mistakes, you say the wrong thing, it all comes back to bite you on the bum, but you don't know when or where.  You start to think whether you were actually happy the last few months, or just maintaining a facade of delusion, afraid to admit to yourself that you can see the cracks growing, see love dying before your eyes.  Oh how you try to revive it, like someone trying to save a dying man, only to see all your efforts, no matter what their quality, of no effect.  It turns you to face yourself and question whether you are really cut out for partnership.  You know you can't survive in the world of the casual hook up, the pub, the night club.  No chance of competing with the noise and the alpha male swarms.

You were happy.  You had found someone who you could love and be loved by, and now it's all gone, and you find yourself cast adrift again on an ocean of loneliness and frustration.  You are devoid of the sacred connection you seek, of the simple joy of holding someone in the darkness and talking about things, about the day, about life.  Now you have none of that, just a cold empty bed and a world you had struggled so hard to move on from and transform yourself that threatens to press back in on you and consume your joy.

I am sure it's not all bad.  I keep saying I feel gratitude for so many aspects of the last 18 months, but I also know that I now have to grieve the loss of a lot of good things I had.  If I could do things differently, would I have?  If I had, would it have made a difference?

I don't know the answers to such things.

On Sudden Inevitabilities...

Like suddenly finding ones self single again. 

I thought I may be feeling worse, but I am surprisingly accepting about it all.  I have learned a lot about myself in the 18 months or so.  It has been good, and I feel I have a lot more to be grateful for than to be feeling angry and resentful about.  I feel I have grown more as a person, got in touch with spirit a lot more, and learned to be more positive and open.

In the face of all this I think there are a few practices that seemed to have helped me.  First there is having something outside of your own world, something you do for little or no reward.  I have been working as a volunteer at the Pine Rivers Art Gallery for 8 or 9 months now, and feel it is something I would like to continue to do.  The staff and other volunteers are good people, and I would miss not working with them.


The second thing I think is important, really important in fact, is to keep a journal, and to write about all the good and bad things that have happened, all the hopes you have and the disappointments you may have felt.  It doesn't have to be formal or regular, but more just a conversation you are having.  Sometimes it is good to have that space and time to reflect and gain perspective on things. 

At a time like this I think we all think about the loneliness that faces us, and we can be afraid we will not meet anyone like the last person or we go on the rebound and try and pick up, just to feel normal and to experience some sort of intimacy.  It's a temptation I think we all experience, if we are not feeling so crushed by the whole feeling of loss.  In some ways it is a yearning for something new, for the hope of another spring after the winter of discontent and disappointment.  It's good to remember that we will not be alone forever, unless we choose to be.

In the meantime, we endure the in between times, the time of adjustment, of finding new contentment in rediscovering all the other aspects of who we are.  We endure platitudes like "there's plenty more fish in the sea," when all we want to do is scream.  In the end I don't to stay in the sea, I want to crawl onto the land evolve and grow legs and wings and become a new creature; I don't want to follow after the old patterns, I want to forge a new path and a new paradigm for myself.  Why should any of us lead a life of quiet desperation?

Saturday Morning Fever

Ah, it's a lazy Saturday morning for once in my life.  I have a morning off from volunteer work, I completed an essay for uni yesterday afternoon, and I am consequently treating myself to a home alone morning while the girls are out roller skating.  This of course involves listening to the music on rage on the telly, and surfing the net and blogging.  All this is accompanied by several nice hot cups of tea.  I am also tempted to go enjoy some sun in the garden and bash out a painting while I let the cats wander round and get some fresh air and sunshine.

So this week was the culmination of a very busy fortnight.  At work we had three 40 foot containers full of furniture arrive, which not only had to be emptied out of said containers, but then loaded up into the truck and delivered to various freight depots across Brisbane.

On top of this I was struggling to find time and motivation to complete an essay on Kant's idea of the Categorical Imperative and his hypothetical example of the inquiring murderer.  It's a tricky thought exercise, but in the end we have to remember that while Kant's ethics are ideals, this is an imperfect world and often our morality and rules are similarly imperfect and flawed.  Idealism is capable of only being a guide to our behaviour, something a lot of religious fundamentalists haven't quite managed to get.  In the end there are no hard and fast rules that determine morality, there are guiding principles and ethical ideals, but to try and follow them to the letter on all situations is a recipe for losing your humanity.


In that spirit then, I am going to spend a day reclaiming my humanity and getting out and relaxing away from regular duties to art and study and enjoying some time with family.  Duty and responsibility are important, and we need to work hard at them, but we also have a responsibility and duty to ourselves, to tend our souls and our relationships with family and friends.

Hobnobbing About Hobbes

Haven't really had my mind on blogging the last couple of weeks.  My thinking has been otherwise engaged in the intricacies of thinking through philosophy and ethics, and trying to understand Hobbes and the idea of the social contract.

So far it seems I have the gist of it by saying Hobbes sees humanity as existing in a state of nature, or lawlessness for the most part, and that where there is lawlessness there is no violation of a moral code.  When people band together and form governments to regulate their affairs and legislate morality, then the people in that society are bound by that social contract they have set upon themselves and they are moral primarily out of the fear of punishment, and they are altruistic because it gains them something, even if it is only the warm inner glow of satisfaction that comes from performing a good deed.  His idea seems to be that humans are incapable of being moral or altruistic without a carrot and a stick to encourage these behaviours.

To me this is a cynical view of human nature, written at the time of the English Civil War, and it perhaps reflected the anarchy of those times with its emphasis on a strong leadership.  It is however the wellspring of much social contract theory.

So why do I dislike it?  As this is a blog and not an essay I can offer a personal opinion here.  I think in taking a view that humanity is incapable of rising up without authoritarian leadership to make laws and keep us in line.  It also takes the view that we do nothing for purely altruistic and selfless means.  If this is so we have to wonder about all the people who have given their lives in the service of humanity, what exactly they gained out of it.  I also think that it says we are incapable of making ourselves better for unselfish reasons, and that we always either need the carrot or the stick to motivate us.  Does this lead to a thought process where if we are incapable of being better people then we should not try that hard and just do the bare minimum to stay out of trouble and devote all our efforts to a selfish pursuit of happiness and feathering our own nests?

I think instead we should strive instead to heal our world by being more spiritual, less selfish, and more aware of how our actions affect those around us, and most importantly, taking responsibility for ourselves and not waiting for the government, or god, or blind fate to come and fix our lives, but instead to start that journey for ourselves.

Any Other Sunday

Here I am, relaxing and enjoying some very mild weather by winter standards.  It is not too cold at all today and it is helping me find some much needed motivation to continue study.

Last weekend saw me mired in the depths of writing an essay, and while there are a few more of them to go in this subject, it was good to get the first one out the way and receive some helpful advice from Sue on writing papers.  I need to work more on waffling less, repeating myself, and learning to structure an argument.  This is going to be a challenge for me to arrest my short attention span long enough to set out a coherent plan of attack and form that into a coherent, logical, and punchy argument.

I have also been using a pair of crappy headphones to listen to lectures the last 4 weeks, in deference to the fact that I live in a townhouse and neither the rest of my household nor the neighbourhood want to hear the salient points of ethics discussed at great volume.  In this I stand in opposition to my neighbour, who operates on the assumption that we cannot hear his surround sound system when he is watching a dvd.  I am also using new headphones as an excuse to get in a bit more music listening without annoying others.

So the last few weeks of study have focused on the Greek philosophers, Epicurus, the Stoics, Aristotle, but this week we start to move into looking at cultural diversity and moral relativism.  It's the question of whether there are any moral absolutes in this world, or does all our morality derive from the culture we live in?  I like to think there are some lines we won't cross as a species, and that we are evolving and becoming more conscious, learning to love others and the world we have to share.  The more I think about ethics though the more I wonder.  And I wonder if I am that evolved or conscious? 

I wish I had answers, but I guess I must just keep pressing on towards the goal of a well-lived life.

Saturday Night Shenanigans

Nothing of the sort going on here tonight.

It's a cold night here in Brisbane, the coldest of the year so far, although that is still above freezing.  I have spent the day doing reading and research for an essay that is due Monday on Aristotle's concept of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics.  Having written for a few hours I have now decided to take a break from serious writing and instead to write a blog post before I go and put my feet up for the night.  My brain is swirling and churning with ideas and concepts and I find they need to percolate down and fooat round in the depths of thought for a while before they emerge in new forms. 

It is good to be thinking again, and to be remembering the techniques of critical thinking and examining.  After some serious doubts that study was a wise idea I am starting to find my feet and get back into the routine of lectures, readings, discussion questions, and essays.  It's still challenging, but it's not impossible.

As a result it has been a busy week, and as such the usual flow of prattle that I engage in on this blog has been slightly curtailed.  I would love to be able to offer some wise words or pithy comments on the state of the world, but for the moment I think I will instead hang back and allow study to change and alter my view of things.

In the meantime, hang loose, enjoy life, follow your dreams, love all...

Trying To Be Philosophical

Another Friday night in front of the computer, although on this occasion I have retired to the living room and dug the laptop out.  This has allowed me to run updates on all the software I have neglected to update for the last few months.  This is all background of course, relax and pretend you are sitting on the couch listening to me tell stories while you are really watching the television.

It's been an interesting week.  On Tuesday I was unloading the truck I do deliveries in for my current job, and while I was moving around I managed to misjudge my footing and take a tumble off the back edge.  The result a bruised ego and a sprained left wrist.  It's been interesting compensating for not having full use of my left arm while having to do all the same things such as lifting and carrying, and even driving and washing and drying myself.  It's that feeling when you forget and aggravate your injury afresh and feel that pain afresh.  It takes time to heal of course, but in the mean time you just have to deal with things.

I commenced my university study in earnest this week, and have to say I am having a bit of shock remembering what study is like.  This week I am up to neck in Epicurus, furiously trying to critically analyze his ideas and concepts and meaningfully participate in the associated online discussion.  I am also looking forward to writing essays again.  As an arch procrastinator however, I find myself currently strangely drawn to anything save study.

Now normally at this point in a blog I am sure I would find some pithy and sage point from all this but this week I am not sure I will.  It's not a dark place to be, I feel like I am working hard to try and get somewhere, and it would be disingenuous and dishonest to say life is always easy and the solution is always clear and straightforward.  There are times like this when we all have to knuckle down and fight through what may be difficult or painful for us to get to a better place, a point that has come through to me abundantly in the writings of Epicurus.  To enjoy life we must sometimes have to slog our way through difficulties.

Nothing In Particular

This may appear to be a typical Friday night blog post from me, but it's nothing that special.  I have three-quarters of an hour or so before I embark out for an evening of catching up with one of Sue's friends over Mexican food.  Anyhow, that's all incidental to what has indeed been an interesting week in our land.

It started with a Senate hearing where Liberal party senator from Tasmania, Mark Bushby decided to interrupt Senator Penny Wong with cat call and was roundly put in his place by Ms. Wong, in no uncertain terms. 

Following this on the same day we had the campaign by the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) to remove an advertisement they deemed offensive.  The poster and billboards in question show a gay male couple hugging and holding a condom and promoting a safe sex message.  The ACL, in the guise of concerned citizenry complained to Adshel, the company responsible for bus shelter advertising, who duly, on the complaints of no more than 30 people we are told, started to remove the offending ads.  The response to this was a surge of outrage from people across the nation who bombarded Adshel with protests and angry e-mails.  In the end it became obvious that those who complained were part of an orchestrated campaign by the ACL, which has been pushing for G-rated billboards across the nation.  The grassroots groundswell of genuine complaint about the advertising company giving into the vocal minority resulted in the end in the decision by Adshel to reinstate the billboards, a decision that no doubt left the ACL and their spokesperson Wendy Francis with egg on their faces, and fending off public anger, if not public abuse and ridicule.

Also in the news this week the government of this nation continued to push their "Malaysia solution" for the stream of asylum seekers arriving by boat on our north-west coast.  This basically involves the sending of these 'boat people' to Malaysia in exchange for refugees from Burma who have already crossed the border into Malaysia and found themselves detained in often very poor conditions.

So how does these two things relate?  I was having a chat with my GP this afternoon about the history of mental health treatment in our society, and the way before effective medication existed the mentally ill were often unable to be dealt with by their families or society at large and were locked away, often subjected to treatments that would be considered brutal or barbaric in this day and age, such as insulin therapy, electro-convulsive therapy, frontal lobotomy, ice water baths, and then locked up in wards, often the violent in with the non-violent, often left in their own filth, or brutalised by orderlies.  In other words, institutionalised and often not given the path to healing and rejoining the world at large.

In the same way our successive governments seem to be unable to find a solution to the problem of asylum seekers, and instead of allowing them to feel a part of the society many of them have sacrificed all to try and join, we instead lock them away in detention centres, away from society, often for years at a time while their claims slowly progress through the bureaucracy.  They are virtually prisoners, not detainees, and yet we react with outrage when they behave like prisoners and riot.  A prisoner at least has the luxury of knowing when they will be released, an immigration detainee often has no such luxury, their lives are put on hold and they are left at the sometimes tenuous mercy of the system.

In the case of the ACL then, we see the same desire to not deal with things, in this case we have a group who have difficulty accepting that they live in a world where people do not share their worldview, but nevertheless have an imperative to impose that worldview on the surrounding society.  It may be a fundamental tenet of Christianity to share its message with the world, but it does not necessarily follow that if the world chooses not to accept that message, that they should endeavour to force their worldview on society.  This attempt to live in denial of the realities of existing in a pluralistic, secular society is their great disadvantage.  They refuse to acknowledge that homosexuality is found in nature and is the natural predisposition of a certain percentage of the population.  The assumption that it is a lifestyle choice and that it goes against basic nature is a mistake.  It may have made sense in ancient societies that relied on procreation to survive and prosper in the face of wars and famine and infant mortality, it may have made enough sense to present it as a religious decree in order to ensure the existence of a group.  It certainly is an outmoded notion in the modern age of excess population and the pressures it places on our environment.  It is certainly a denial of people's right to freely express their sexuality, just as Christians have a right to freely express their religion.  It doesn't mean I have to agree with their message, any more than I choose to agree with any religion or ideology.

So then, if we choose to see our society as egalitarian, as welcoming, as the place where everyone gets a fair go, then lets start acting like it.  Let's not play the race card on asylum seekers, when all it really boils down to is that it's just too hard to deal with for most of us (politicians included).  Let's not shun and ostracise people on the basis of their religion or sexuality because we find their lifestyle confronting or too different to ours.  I have probably said it before but I will say it again, if we want to all live on this planet we have to learn to share it and live together.

Giving Yourself a Tune Up

I spent the day doing some work on my long-suffering car.  It's officially 17 this year, and has more than a few miles on it, it recently passed 230 thousand kilometres, and while compared to some vehicles it is in good condition, it has nevertheless reached the stage where it needs regular care and attention to keep it running well.  So today I changed the oil, replaced the oil filter, spark plugs, air filter, and most critically, I changed the fuel filter, as I had a suspicion that it had not been changed since the vehicle was new, and was probably blocked with dirt.  This was probably one of the reasons why I was getting worse fuel economy recently.  Anyhow, to keep short and to the point, afterwards all these little things meant that my previously deteriorating performance had been rectified, and all the lost performance had been restored.  Like all things though I found a few other little jobs I need to do, but that is the nature of things, that fixing one thing often reveals several other issues that will need correcting.

So how does this relate to us as people?  Often we are like a vehicle, working hard for many years with little major maintenance, until we suddenly find ourselves in need of major work, we might find ourselves suddenly getting sick or depressed, our strength failing us and we wonder what is happening as we struggle to figure out where we went wrong.  Often we may face a major crisis that forces us to confront a range of issues that need fixing in our lives, but how many of these are a result of neglecting the warning signs?  Are you stressed, getting more easily irritated, feeling run down etcetera?  Maybe your body and your spirit are trying to warn you that unless you take action now something major will break.  Like in a car how a little noise can rapidly turn into an expensive repair, so ignoring the noises our body and spirit make now by distracting ourselves or drowning out those noises may leave us facing a catastrophic chain of failure and damage in the future.

So as with a car we can invest in regular mechanical work, or in teaching ourselves to perform regular checks of things such as oil and coolant and tyre pressure, and having unusual noises investigated and repaired early, so we can invest in ourselves.  We can take time out to journal and write about what concerns us, what frustrates us, what makes us angry, what brings us joy and happiness, what we dream about and strive for.  We can take time to meditate and enjoy quiet times, by ourselves or with family or loved ones.  We can have regular health checks and eat healthy, while taking in some gentle exercise.  We can take moves to make our working life less stressful and start to question our lifestyle.  Do we want to spend all our life working to possess things?  Do we really need a new car or a bigger house or the latest consumer gadgets?  Will we be better off financially and emotionally with less debt and more time to think without all the distractions that are offered through the television and the internet?  Sometimes it is good to go to the park and let the kids play while you enjoy a good book.  A focus on acquiring less and being happy with what you have is perhaps the best tune up for your soul.

Great Intentions and My Fickle Focus.

It's another Friday night here, and I am sitting down at the end of a long week and as I seem to be making somewhat of a habit of doing, composing a blog post and wondering what the hell I am going to write about.  I don't feel appreciably like I am an anything approaching a journalist or professional writer, but I like to think I can empathise with those required to produce a number of words for an editorial on a regular basis.  I do seem to recall from the study I have done that living with constant deadlines is its own special form of hell, albeit one which can teach the virtue of discipline and help build character, helping force the often chaotic mass of thoughts to emerge in a reasonably orderly fashion.

I had planned in honour of the State of Origin rugby league series that we are inflicted with at this time of the year to write a long discourse on what I perceive as the homoerotic aspects of football and the way that men who would recoil in horror from the thought of actually being gay, will nevertheless publicly engage in full body contact, then afterwards shower naked together and in some cases, engage in group sex with one woman and a room full of naked footballers or manage to take naked photographs of each other.  In all of this their only expression of outrage coming when they are found out and embarrassed, rather than it seems, showing any genuine contrition for the people they manage to hurt along the way.  I was going to write at some length my thoughts on the shadow that seems to haunt many men in Australia, the fear of being gay or being attracted to another man.  I think it is the fear of this shadow that drives many men to be so aggressively heterosexual, along with the fear that being labelled gay will cause them to lose social standing and power amongst their peers.  Many moralists would say that pornography and prostitution drive men to be aggressively sexual, whereas I believe that men making use of pornography and prostitution may instead be a response to fear and an attemt at reassurance. 

Let me say in the midst of all this that I am a heterosexual male who has come to terms the fact that sexuality is a spectrum of behaviour and preference.  Very few are either exclusively at one extreme or the other, a person can be gay or straight, be bi-sexual or merely bi-affective.  Some people cannot meed their needs exclusively from a relationship with one gender while for some friendship can have a certain intimate aspect that may not become sexual in nature.

It seems to me in thinking about all this that human sexuality is, and has always been a more complex issue than has been set out in the laws of religion and the state, and that homosexual relationships have always taken place, in every society around the world, even though those who chose to express who they were often risked death and ostracism from their communities.  We here in Australia, are currently debating whether gay people should be allowed to marry, and to achieve the full legal rights that come with the institution of marriage.  It seem that the time is now right for us a society to not just think about taking this step, but to take this step and recognise that how people express their sexuality is biological, and not something that can be regulated away through law or through threat of damnation, but is for a section of society, as much a part of being human as being left-handed or having red hair is for others.

So, the Rapture Didn't Happen...

Lots of discussion the last week or so about the declaration by Harold Camping from familyradio.com that 6pm Saturday the 21st of May was the point at which Jesus Christ would return and the rapture would occur.  This was apparently supposed to happen at 6pm in every time zone, meaning those in the Americas would receive plenty of advance warning as the time zones progressed around the world.

Well first of all, what exactly is the rapture?  Those Christians who attend certain fundamentalist denominations believe from their interpretation of the Bible that as the end of the age approaches, that humanity will devolve into wickedness and evil, such that it will be intolerable for the believers and the righteous followers of God.  Therefore Jesus Christ will appear in the air and lift all His followers up into the air and bring them back to heaven, whilst abandoning the rest of the world to its wayward and sinful path, an event that marks seven years of tribulation beginning before the visible return of Christ and the overthrow of the antichrist.  This interpretation of the Bible was popularised in the early 1970's by Hal Lindseay in his book, "The Late Great Planet Earth," and most recently in the "Left Behind" series of books and movies.

The first thing to say in critique of this view is that this interpretation of the Bible represents only one of several divergent views that characterises Christian eschatology (the study of the end times).  I will not go into the others at this stage, as it is not completely relevant to the critique I am making.

Secondly, I find it sad, and yet faintly (if not outrightly) comical that people will continue to believe the regular succession of preachers who choose to place a date upon the end of the age and the return of Jesus Christ.  The reader interested in placing these latest events in historical context would do well to read up on the Great Disappointment of the 1840's, which lead to the Seventh Day Adventist movement, or the continual revision of the date of Jesus' return by the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Even the Bible itself has a passage that says that noone knows the day or the hour when Christ will return, and yet individuals insist on trying to predict a date based on convoluted interpretations and mathematics.

At this point let me add a disclaimer to my opinions, I spent a good deal of my 20's in various churches, and studied Biblical theology for a couple of years.  I will not claim to be a great scholar on this subject, or even a modest scholar.  The founder of the college I attended had though researched eschatology as the subject of his doctoral thesis, and was thus well qualified to teach the subject.  I myself completed a substantial essay on the various eschatological positions held by the churches and did considerable reading on the subject.  As I write this I do so from the perspective of an ex-christian.  I am not an atheist, more agnostic, although I believe in religious writing and mythology we see many valuable lessons and archetypes that allow us to grow as people and give back to the world.

In the end the question of why preachers feel the need to try and pin down a date is one we need to think about.  Christianity is a religion that basically promises the presence of the future.  The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus Christ is both an immediate reality, and a promise to believers of the shape of things to come, much as contemporary anarchist thought makes much of the establishment of temporary autonomous zones.

It may seem natural then for those in Christianity, who have patiently awaited their whole lives the promise of the future made present, and who fear they may not see it in their lifetime, to begin to contrast the hazy memories of youth, and what seemed like simpler and more wholesome times, the world re-imagined through the lens of Norman Rockwell to look upon the present and declare it to be altogether more evil or sinful or what have you than the remembered idyll of youth and to think that things are getting so bad that it can't be much longer before God hits the big reset button and makes everything right again.  In that way then it can seem that the desire to see the future made now and the world made anew and pure is a kind of longing, a longing for I am not sure what, perhaps a reaction against a sense of being betrayed, of justice denied, a response to disappointment. 

In response though we have to ask then how many more will pin their hopes on such predictions and be disappointed, disillusioned and jaded with religion as a result?  That could be seen as a negative thing, but instead see it as a positive.  It's a wake up for many people, not in the sense that religion would have us think, that we live in fear of the return of a jealous god who will punish the unbeliever, but rather as a lesson in bringing us back to the reality of our existence on this planet.  We cannot wait for a miraculous divine intervention to fix our lives, or to fix the planet.  We as human beings and part of this wonderful interconnected organism that we call the earth, need to accept that we are responsible for our fate as a whole, as well as individually, that we need to love more and hate less, practice compassion and good will to all living beings, and love and respect our mother earth who sustains us and gives us life through the soil, the water, and through the air we breathe.  We cannot continue to disrespect our world, or other people, or animals, because we all depend on each other for life, and we don't get a magic get out of jail free card from Jesus or any other god.  We are all here, you, me, all of us, and it is time to accept that as a fundamental truth of our existence, and to start to live it.

Friday Night

Here I sit, another Friday night.  Which is a statement that could indeed indicate the beginning of a great unburdening of a sense of quiet despair and boredom with the state of things.

Truthfully though, I don't feel that way at all.  I sat back and looked back at this blog, and thought about it as a meditation on my attitude to life and how it has changed in the last 4 or 5 years, or however long it has been since I decided to blog.  Tonight I realised with some quiet profundity that in this life I have spent a lot of time choosing to see the world as being against me, when in fact the opposite may very well have in fact been the true state of affairs, and it may have been me against the world, projecting all my anger and bitterness and cynicism onto all that I saw.

I read an interesting piece in Robert Wilkinson's generally excellent astrology blog here where he speaks about changing our perspective and seeing our lives unfold from the divine point of view, where the only blocks to our growth and progress as spiritual beings is the things we place in our own way via our negative attitudes and thinking.  Instead we should look to cultivate an attitude of mindfulness, gratitude, and good will to all things and beings.  When we start to look at the world differently, we may start to see that the world looks at us differently.

Writers Block

Feeling a bit of the old writers block as I sit here on a crisp wintry morning here in my secret volcano lair on the northern outskirts of Brisbane.  I also have a rotten cold that is doing my head in, which is probably why I am struggling to assemble a cogent and comprehensible stream of consciousness. 

Nevertheless, and as is often the case I use the ability to blog (or to write in my journal) as a prompt to lead me to write.  As per the advice I have dispensed to others, 'stuff is always a good place to start,' along with 'physician, heal thyself.'  Grrr, me and my bloody sound advice coming back to bite me on the arse.  Often it is one of the simplest ways to overcome writers block for someone like me, to just start talking about the everyday and the mundane, assembling my thoughts on the page.  Talk about the day, the weather, how you are feeling, how the people in your life are going.  Obviously being a public forum maybe we need to leave out the more intimate details or embarrassing anecdotes (unless they particularly emphasise the point and drive the narrative) and all names will have to be changed to protect the innocent (although no one is truly innocent).  Always remember that real life is always far more interesting than fiction but that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, although everyone has a story to tell.

In the end I think that is it, to write, you have to know your subject.  And what subject would you know better than yourself?  Tell your story, it's unique.  In the meantime, I am off to take more cold and flu medication and rest.  Regularly scheduled programming will resume soon.

One Small Step For John.

Been thinking all about pursuing some more higher education the last few months.  Not that I haven't tried the whole study lark before, but without a lot of success, most probably as a result of my innate desire to run away when things get difficult and hard.  That in and of itself is not much of an excuse for the time and money I have wasted thus far.  Ultimately we need to develop character and strength.  It is a great comfort to me this time that I have someone wonderful in my life who does her best to encourage me when times get tough, and who gives me a reason to see beyond myself and to keep on going. 

Before I derail my own train of thought though, yes, I have decided to pursue a little bit more higher education.  I am still forming vague notions of what I would like to eventually study and major in, but for the moment I am content to work and support Sue while she studies full time.  In keeping with that course of action, I have enrolled in online study with Open Universities Australia, and have elected to take a few philosophy subjects.  I am only doing one subject at a time at the present, but will look at increasing that load depending on work and finances.  

I have to say though, it feels like a bit of a step into a new and unknown realm to be back in the study game again.  I think this time I am trying hard though to not set myself up for disappointment by placing too many unrealistic expectations upon myself.  As philosophy is literally the love of wisdom, so I am choosing to treat this as an exercise in enjoyment and expanding my thinking rather than pursuing a career driven agenda.  To be sure I will out this gain renewed skills in critical thinking, writing, and research, but at the moment I am doing this for the love of it.

Wish me luck...

My thoughts on the death of Osama Bin Laden.


Just been watching the news of the American military's operation to take out the notorious leader of Al Qaeda.  All the news reports so far seem to have been interspersed with the same footage, file footage of Bin Laden delivering messages and firing his AK47 at a training camp, footage of planes flying into buildings on September 11, 2001, and various other acts of terrorism his group have claimed responsibility for, and finally footage of various world leaders responding to the news, Barack Obama's address on the subject, and cheering crowds outside the White House and the World Trade Center site in New York.

In all this I cannot help but feel I am witnessing some very ugly things. 

Firstly it seems that the once again endless replays of planes crashing into the World Trade Center.  These images are still powerful, and almost pornographic in their intensity.  Are we addicted to this imagery?  Do we need to be reminded of the point incessantly?  Will it intensify our rage against these acts of terror, or will it numb us into insensitivity?  Is it a case of the modern media being addicted to this mode of storytelling?  Are we really so numb as a culture that we need these images burnt into our brains through this hypnogogic repetition? 

Secondly, lets look at the descriptions of Bin Laden from the media and from individuals such as George W. Bush and John Howard.  Basically as evil personified is how he is portrayed.  I am not saying he was a good man by any means, but evil seems to be a word bandied about all too often.  Are people evil or do they commit evil acts?  I would wager those committing those acts would say they are fighting evil by their actions.  Could we therefore say that our perceptions of good and evil are then more about our perspective, and our beliefs and values than about any absolute objective definition of evil in this case?  I don't think we should necessarily call someone evil because they hold beliefs contrary to our own, or a lifestyle contrary to our own, especially in this case where it would seem as we peer through the murky depths of political machinations in the middle east that Bin Laden's fanaticism was harnessed by the Americans in their fanatical idelogical battle to overthrow Soviet communism. 

Finally, and in a related way, let's look at the crowds cheering and baying for blood on the streets of American cities, celebrating the end of a life, waving flags and chanting nationalistic slogans and anthems.  Apart from those affected by the loss of loved ones on 9/11/2001, how many have been personally affected by terrorism?  I am sure far more have been affected by the rippling effects of the 10 year war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a war which does not seem to have ended international terrorism, and is slowly but surely bankrupting the United States.  Is there a way people could come together and approach a measure of reconciliation?  I think the mutual ignorance seems to be a hallmark of this conflict.  Americans and middle-eastern Muslims blinded by rumours and half-truths and outright lies about the other side, often preached by deranged fundamentalists of all persuasions, and no longer able it seems to stop hating or fighting.  I know that not everyone in either culture thinks like that, but it seems such ignorance and hatefulness is capable of poisoning perception incredibly effectively.

In the end I think that Bin Laden, though obviously a paramilitary leader and planner, was merely one man, and despite his symbolic importance, he is not irreplaceable, and other terrorist groups may well now rise up and fight even more ruthlessly for their cause.  There is still a lot of bad blood to be dealt with and spilt in this ideological battle we find ourselves witnessing, and this conflict of fundamentalisms may well continue to mar our age for the whole of this century.  In the end, we become the change we wish to see in the world, and as human beings, members of society, and an organic part of this whole great organism we call the earth, as children of the universe, we need to start to live in new paradigms and tell ourselves a new story, that peace and understanding can be reached and that we are all part of the whole.

A busy weekend it has been, out for a bbq yesterday and today checking out a hot rod show.  I am still going through the pictures I have taken and will undoubtedly do a bit more editing, but for now I thought this one is ok for a start.  Back to my usual prattling in a few days when I think of something else to prattle on about.

Friday Night

It's been a brief working week this week, a mere three days down the salt mine after the extended long weekend.  This weekend is another long weekend, this time for labour day, and another 3 days of relaxing before returning to the hustle and bustle.

So I am sitting here typing, while the girls are in the living room watching Gilmore Girls dvd's rather than enduring the incessant royal wedding coverage that seems to have sprouted on every TV channel just about.  In the meantime I am sitting back enjoying the joyous stream of cynicism and observation on twitter.

I will offer little in the way of commentary on the royal nuptials, I am happy for them and wish them a long and happy life together, however, having said all that, I would personally prefer that the television networks and news media in general refrain from their incessant need to bombard us with every single piece of trivial and tenuously related fluff they could lay their hands on at this time.  Some of us are getting a bit sick of it all, it doesn't engage us as viewers or readers, it just drives us to indifference and anger and we switch off.  There is other news in the world, as equally demanding of our consideration.

So then, after that rant, I am left with a problem.  Normally I try and write these posts to go somewhere and leave us all with something to think about and ponder and hopefully be inspired from.  Maybe not tonight, it's sometimes hard to feel positive and encouraged, and feel as though the weight of the waves is slowly drowning us and dragging us down into the depths, to the abode of Poseidon and Pluto.  Sometimes it feels like if you put on a brave face you are a fraud and you are dying inside because you feel like crap.  But sometimes you have to fake it till you make it, a theme that ties in with Poseidon (aka Neptune), who is the source of the stories we tell, the ocean of creativity.  We develop our own narratives and mythologies, culled from many sources, from what we were taught to believe by our families, by our friends, by society at large.  If it tells us we have no future, no hope, no purpose beyond being a cog in the machine, and if we tell ourselves that story is true, then how can we hope to rise above the truth we have made for ourselves?

So then, time to look at the stories we tell ourselves?  Maybe it's time to tell ourselves a new story, to begin to see that we have the ability to connect with a higher consciousness, and to see a better purpose for our lives, a new story we can tell ourselves.

Easter Saturday


Haven't had much to really say the last week or so, I have had an intrusion from the real world of work that has cut into my writing time.  That said however, and being as how it is a 5 day weekend (which takes me back to my art school days), I thought I would sit down and reflect a bit on things.

It is of course Easter, which for the christians is their most important religious holiday.  It's all about torture and suffering and death, and paradoxically perhaps, a return from the shadow world of death.  Such themes are indeed common in ancient mythologies, and represent powerful archetypal patterns that we can draw upon for our personal growth and understanding the seasons of our life.

Some may think this must necessarily invoke thinking of things from a religious perspective, but it doesn't necessarily have to be so.  As I said, archetypes and symbols are found in every culture, and while the stories take different forms, they all carry very similar themes.

So lets talk about death and rebirth.  Death can take many forms, from the agonies of trying to construct a reasonably cogent and lucent blog post that communicates some message to its readers, to perhaps public speaking, through up to perhaps facing serious illness or great loss.  In such times we face what may seem to be insurmountable obstacles, and we are confronted with our deepest fears and anxieties and apprehensions.  All these things have the potential to send either of two ways, we can choose to hide and run, and not face our fear of dying (not literal death but a type of death nevertheless, usually of our ego), and head the other way from the direction we are supposed to.  We are of course quite welcome to make this choice, but the consequences of our action are liable to bring down destruction on not only ourselves, but often those around us who share our journey.

The other path, the one most of only come to after choosing the hard option first and having our backsides firmly kicked for our troubles, is to surrender to a higher power and admit that our life is not our own to always do with as we please, perhaps that we are not always as in control of our destinies as we purport to be.  See that the universe has a flow and direction that it is taking you in, and learn to let it carry you that way.

That of course digresses slightly from the topic of death and rebirth, and yet it is all a part of it.  Jonah ran away from his destiny and spent three days in the belly of a whale before he accepted his part, Orpheus had to die to be reunited with Eurydice.  In both cases we see someone having to die, either physically or through the surrender of the will, the ego, in order to get to a place where they were able to receive what their heart desired, or to be able to serve others, both acts of love.

In the end then Easter can be a religious holiday for you, it can be an excuse for going the beach and overdosing on chocolate.  It can be a 5 day weekend.  Whatever you do and however you choose to spend this time, remember that the universe is not only bigger than your problems, it is bigger than you, even though it is a part of you and you are a part of it.  You are not above it and you are not below it.  Take comfort in the people who care about you, and contemplate the nature of things.  Be mindful of the way things flow and if you get frustrated ask yourself if it because you have removed yourself from that flow or decided to go against it.  You may indeed be facing tough times, and I am not promising any panacea for your woes, except to say that things do get better and sometimes you must go through these times to reach the other side.  I have before and I probably will again, so I empathise with those who are doing it tough.  I know things get better though and it's not what you believe so much as having faith in the process.

 

Morning Time

Another morning of managing to wake up before 5am, something which seems to be a regular occurrence for me in recent months.  While I would rather enjoy an extra hour of sleep, I seem to be unable to roll over and fall asleep again, so most mornings I end up getting up and coming out to sit down and catch up on the all the internet goings on.  

This means sitting at the desk in the study and looking out the window, and as I have always done, I do so enjoy the peaceful calm of the morning.  It's always a pleasure to see the gleam of the dawn light and simultaneously hear the birds start up their dawn chorus, as the sky glows brighter in the east, and any clouds are illuminated in beautiful reds and golds as the sun begins it journey across the sky for another day.  It's a sacred moment, before the busyness of the day, before phones, TV, cars, and so forth, when you can just relax and be alone with your thoughts before the house is filled with noise, and it's a good time to prepare for the day ahead by doing not very much.

This then is my morning ritual, a place where I can practice a bit of mindful living.  It's always a good thing to do, to just find a place in your day where you can sit and be quiet, feel the silent and gentle side of the world, a world of soft light, and birdsong, reconnecting yourself with the natural rhythms of the planet, and remind yourself that it isn't in any way all about all the things that society likes to shove in your face, like breakfast television, the inane chatter of breakfast radio announcers, peak hour traffic, things that seem, whether by accident or design to keep us from thinking and connecting with ourselves and our spirits.

So the next time life seems all rush, rush, rush, why not sneak out of bed a little earlier and go enjoy the garden and listen to the birds.

Gratitude.

I have been checking the stats for this blog.  I have to say I am amazed at how many people seem to have read it recently.  It humbles me to think that there are those of you out there in the interwebs who actually take the time to click through and (hopefully) spend the time reading my ramblings.  I see most of you are in America and Australia. 

So today I am inviting you to scroll to the bottom of the page and post a comment and offer your comments.  I would be very grateful to hear from you all.

Many Thanks,

john!

A rainy Saturday morning.

Here I sit, enjoying the sound  of the rain and the cool in the air and enjoying the peace of 530 AM on a Saturday morning.  Autumn is definitely starting to assert its presence now and I am, as always, enjoying the change of seasons.  It's that natural rhythm of life, summer gives way to autumn gives way to winter gives way to spring gives way to summer again.  It's a constant, it flows, and it defines our lives, like the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the stars in the sky as the constellations wheel and change over the year as we travel round the sun, and the motions of the planets.  If we take the time to be mindful, and to look outside of ourselves and observe, we see these rhythms all about us.

It leads me on other thoughts of course.  There are indeed rhythms and cycles in everything, we are born, we grow, we die.  It's nothing to be afraid of, it's just life.  Along the way we meet other people all following their paths and living the cycle of their lives.  We may not know all the people on this earth, we may know a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten, but those we meet touch us all and leave their mark on us in some way.  Some of them we may meet only once or twice, some we may walk beside for a lifetime, some we may be friends with for years and either suddenly or gradually drift apart, wondering if we really knew this person at all, a place I suddenly find myself in.

The truth of it is to me that people go through life and there is this constant subtle energy that urges us to grow and evolve, whether we are only here for this life or if we have many incarnations to live.  If we resist the energy of change we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being left behind, withering on the vine and stagnating and dying, and wondering why we are being left behind by all the people who we used to know.  Most people cannot stay in the same place, they have to grow, have to change, do all the things that they do, marriage, family, a house in the suburbs, work.  Having said that we must grow spiritually and emotionally too.  To sit still for too long is to risk decay and stagnation, of being a teenager in the body of a 50 or 60 year old, too afraid to face the challenges that life presents and so clinging to the tattered vestiges of adolescence, like a child who grew up near me who kept his security blanket until it was a tiny rag that fit in his fist and far past useful for anything.  In the end people, whether friends or couples or colleagues, can either grow and grow together, or they can grow apart, and such separations, while painful, are often necessary, especially when you hold to the view that I do, that when we are so immune to the more subtle messages that the universe sends, that it will have to send along painful events to get us to sit up and listen and consider our path through life, and to shock us out of our apathy.

A Time For New Beginnings

Being a Monday (which I have off from work), and with my dear lady feeling a bit under the weather, I had time to drive her into university today rather than have her suffer the vagaries of public transport.  It gave me a couple of hours to go down to West End and sit in my favourite coffee shop and read the novel I am currently trudging through (The Remake, by Clive James, and while I say trudging it is rather good), write a bit in my journal, and drink a few cups of very good coffee (Ugees don't have a website, but you will find them on facebook).  Following this I indulged in what has become a Monday ritual lately and stopped off in Boundary St to buy pide for me and Sue.  I know this semester will end and we may not have Mondays any more like these ones, but I will always enjoy the thought of our little ritual.

All this talk of ritual though puts me in mind of the importance of ritual in our society, which is something I have struggled with in some ways.  I remember many years in art school being introduced to the whole conceptual process, and the idea of developing art from a concept.  Our assignment was to create art based on of our rituals, something I was uncomfortable with.  At the time I had just started the journey away from being involved in organised religion, from a safe institutional state of mind (a journey that continues) towards new ways of thinking.  Looking back I think I was unsure of the difference between ritual and routine.  I had entered into organised religion at the age of 19, and at the time it seemed to answer a lot of questions and provide safety and stability, as well as freshness and excitement.  10 years later I felt as though all that shine had worn off, I had spent time thinking critically and looking at some of things I had believed and decided I didn't really believe them any more.  All this to say that rituals can deliver a safe, warm, cosseting, environment, but they don't always encourage us to discover new things, and sooner or later we reach a point where we have to form our own opinions and come to our own conclusions.

From this we learn to create our own world, by our thoughts, and by the stories we tell ourselves.  In a way then we do create our own realities.  We can of course choose to believe other peoples stories and participate in their realities, but then we are merely players on someone else's stage, and we surrender our power to create our own story and create our own reality to someone else.

Today then is a new moon, and a powerful one at that, placed in Aries, the first sign of the zodiac.  What better time for new beginnings, to put negative thinking and negative people behind you, to begin to tell yourself a new story, to create a new mythology for yourself, and to start life afresh.