He died with supreme grace and bravery with his children holding him and his wife by his side.For a man who never did anything in a hurry he seemed to die with alacrity. 
As an impatient seeker, yearning for peace and wellness but on the journey very hard on himself.  

 He found peace when listening to his kids talk about their lives. He found it body surfing and swimming. He found it camping in the bush and he found it in his work.

As a healer and masseur he spent a good number of his 57 years helping and touching others. He healed their bruised, stressed and misshapen bodies. When his liver and kidneys started to fail he was trying to figure out the lesson that brought with it. 

A student of Chinese medicine he saw the body as a landscape and often made the connection connection between internal and external environment. 

I painted in the bush with him 2 weeks before he died. Despite the pain he felt in his bent and vulnerable body he scrambled over rocks to find the perfect spot to view and draw the valley below. 

I liked to talk with him about what he could see and how he worked. And nearly always he answered in a language better used to describe physiology. He saw organisms everywhere, describing shapes with vascular, skeletal and muscular metaphors.

I’m trying to paint that way now – in an organic way. As I do it brings me closer to understanding the great gift of life. No matter how short or long it is. How we spend it will be how we leave it.

He left his life because of a terminal  illness but with an interminable wellness of spirit. Bright, brilliant and gilded by love.

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One day we decided to capture on post-it notes every common expression we used during the day, whether it was a hand-me-down from our parents, or our own perennial favourites.

By 5.00 that afternoon, the wall was covered in post-it notes; some contributed to by others in the team, but mostly the work of our own hyperactive ADHD, Cafeine addled brains. During the day a minute couldn’t pass before there was another expression spat out and posted.

• cop it sweet
• tell that to marines
• kill me now
• like I care!
• that’s five minutes I’ll never get back
• if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.
• it ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings
• talk to the hand
• it’s fine now until someone loses an eye.
• you’re riding for a fall
• whatever!!

And as we progressed through our Forest Gump moments of wisdom, life was less like a chocolate box and more like a audio track of 10second sound bytes. Which I must say, fits with my take on the corporate world, move fast, get in and out fast,  out and on to the next.

My boss, I have to say, is brilliant at the art of the 10 sec sound byte. Her ”elevator pitch gives you vertigo! She has to be. She’s distilled it down to the moment where reasonably sensible exchanges of information can happen in under a minute.

She was so enamoured of our making things explicit, she believes there’s a book in it. But to quote our sage like wall “As if”! 

Not a book …. but in 10 seconds – a blog post for sure.

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For instance today she reflected my need NOT to look outside for answers. She reflected my need for patience and she reflected my pursuit of perfection – in what I contribute to the world. And she led me to think about my own thought patterns.

Now there, right there , is a no-win no brainer. We’re not meant to be perfect. The whole struggle is to cope with imperfection and change. Our thought processes change accordingly.

I’ve been depressed lately – which is a habit and a neurological reality. The co-joining of low seratonin levels, palpable fear over change were mixed in with a propensity to brace for shame. In short – a recipe for misery.

My depression manifests in tears, a great weight of grey grief and a romantic desire to end it all. So many people take that fateful step without needing to journal about it, around it or into it. They simply get on with the gig. You’ve got to admire that focus.

I’m one of those “thinkers”, “waiters” or “watchers” a procrastinator waiting for external validation or a “fix”.  Wondering if I can weather the storm without the medication. Wondering whether my triggered anxiety versus free-floating anxiety equates with a certain category of depresssion (aka not so bad, realy bad, suicidal etc etc).

Paint, they tell me. Put it all out on a canvas – objectify it, look at it, as if it’s a bug you can spit up and out. Of course if you paint, you’ll realise that all you see is not a remedy but a reminder; a permanent stain to perpetuate the misery because the painting is most likely to be badly executed. So not only miserable but also a bad painter.

Last week painters competing in the Archibald prize (a prize in OZ’s artworld for portraits) put themselves in such a situation.

Visitors get to guess the portrait the judges will pick. Walking around the gallery that night, despite sculling appropriate amounts of plonk, I felt detached with absolutely no idea of what I liked.

I picked one because it was a portrait of a star gazer, light tipped glasses, childish joy against a black canvas, peppered with colourful stars. Was it good – how would I know? It was the only one that “spoke” to me. Plus the character looked quirky. He was happy and hopeful.

When the winner was announced it wasn’t the one I’d chosen. An editorial about the judging process mentioned my choice as one the judges had considered. It also mentioned that their choices exampled how these judges could either get it “really right” or “really wrong”.

Gasp! degrees of right and wrong. Sigh was mine right or wrong? And why did I care? I’d come so far away from what I liked and wanted, I couldn’t even relax in my own choice. I was looking to a random stranger (probably a rejected portrait painter) to tell me. All the stars went out right there and then!

The feelings (whatever they are) had become so externalised and externalising I didn’t even know whether they were mine or just a random guess which, alas I got “right” or “wrong”.

In hindsight guessing is as valid as any other process. The feelings, the thoughts, the choices and the activities we are in charge of (ie our own), can and should be whatever they need to be. If, for neurological reasons they don’t feel like they’re standing on solid ground then settle for sand. Likewise accept that they will or can be right, wrong, black, white, shifting, paranoid, blue, black, depressed, resolved, resilient or blank.

What they are however is ours. Not much else to claim, might as well claim those. We’re all looking at stars, some of us are seeing them from the gutter (with apologies to Oscar).

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I don’t know whether that’s true for everyone. Sometimes I’m not sure it’s true for me and I’m damn sure it’s not true for the low-life I saw being interviewed on the pseudo news show 60 minutes on the topic of stalking children online.

Although I could have turned off the show I didn’t – maybe as witness to the children – some of whom end up dead at the hands of these sick mothers.

Now, unfortunately,  I can’t forget or shake the image of this particular man. But It’s not the individual that I loathe – it’s the common man nature of them.

They are everywhere and anyone.

We spoke about one last night at a party. A random hopeless conversation about a man some of us knew who had been arrested for this same crime. A man who reminds us with waves of sickening horror, of just how close we come to evil everyday.

We have a responsibility to make sure that our own house is in order.

To that end, I’m in the process of changing the work I do. I’ve prepared all I can, and as a break I reviewed an astrological “progress” reading I had done when I was on holidays recently. A sort of QA that my choice of paid work would ultimately inform the life I’m striving to live.

A progress report means a snapshot of where the planets are placed against the planet “baggage” we carry around in our lives from the time of our birth.

For instance, my twin and I have 5 planets in the one area of the chart – the higher mind of the 9th house – which means everything we do is  to encourage consciousness, Whether it’s maintaining intellectual independence and discernment  whilst  managing relationships to ensure that integrity of purpose, meaning and direction.

It’s also about personal power.

Higher consciousness enables and requires not not giving power away. It also means not taking power off another.

We’re all potentially on a spiritual path; the path to being a better person. To be a better person we need to take responsibility for our own growth. We need to maintain our integrity and strength of life purpose.

If we become dissociated from that centre of truth – the thing that gives us meaning – we end up doing all sorts of things – like lying, stealing, hiding, bartering, bullying. Pretending the job we do is good enough. Or bluffing our way into a new job based on the money it offers or the sense of temporal status it afford us.

Separated from our centre we’ll fail to recognise the authentic choice. We’ll be stuck in the swing between stealing power from others or giving our own away.

That’s why some find themselves at the end of February 2010 trying to rescue people buried in the tossed up grounds of an earthquake and others loot supermarkets.

Poverty, crisis, child abuse, catastrophes are the stimulus, all we can actually control is our reaction.  We can’t be sure of a when an earthquake hits, or a Tsumani results. All we can be working towards is making the world better for each of us. Safe, joyous, abundant, creative and alive by the choices we make.

I would like to honour the children who are stolen before time and those in Chile who can’t be found. And wish all of us a safe year to find out what we should and could be doing right.

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I don’t mean the often discussed “work-life balance”. I mean the situation when the behaviours that are appropriate in the personal sphere are mindlessly and expectantly transported into the work arena where they just don’t fit.

We make friends at work because we spend the greatest amount of time there, but we often can’t maintain friendships through a work environment because of different “agendas” and motivations.

We also can’t expect to have friends with people at work unless the organisational status is in the same stratosphere. Someone gets ahead in the company because they are more skilled, more ambitious or perhaps because they knew how to source the support they needed.

Likewise that support team, often sourced from their “friends” complied with their choices for progress – many times because the supporter got to “piggy-back” on that relationship. This translates to a favour here and there – a chance for promotion or an opportunity that may or may not have been given to another. For the supporter – it’s an investment strategy, for the progressive one – it’s payment- in-kind.

The thing we can’t maintain, however, in this finely tuned exchange of energy, is the illusion of friendship. Personal comments and opinions are affected, the level of consistency and care varies, the quid-pro-quo invariably gets short of quo.

All of a sudden there’s an “ask” but no “reply”. There’s a “demand” but no “supply”, the relationship has changed. And someone feels hurt. It’s at this point that it gets messy.

Because we don’t grow at the same rate, and we don’t want the same things, the demander gets out of cycle with the supplier. He or she still moves on their projectile to their goal. The problem is, the supplier has changed their destination and they’re not on the same route. Because their job isn’t as all-consuming or singular, they’ve diversified. They’ve got more time for personal activities and pursuits and they’re not available, on-tap to supply the demander anymore.

This might come in the form of an overt disagreement or objection, or a failure to support the new direction. When they are now held to account for their objectionable response – the supplier is resentful, “If you didn’t want the answer, they intone, why did you ask the question?”

On the other hand, the demander who has often fed off the supplier for ideas, for support, for motivation, for encouragement is now also resentful. Instead of sourcing that support internally from a base of self-efficacy – they out-sourced it – making a quicker, more economical perhaps less mind-ful choice. But when that source dries up, the demander is at a loss, and resorts to the time-worn script and illusion of “friendship”. And things get “personal”.

“Personal” for a demander, however, comes with all the organisational sway at their command. Opportunities, requests, outcomes – the ball has always been in their court because they call the organisational shots. So what’s the answer?

Grow up.

We only have control over our choices and our relationships. We need to be clear on every choice we make and every relationship we invest in. If our investment strategy changes – we should be clear on that. And if we don’t seek favours or opportunities unless we’ve rightfully earned them, then we can rest easy.

We choose, for ourselves, what we want to personally achieve. At some stage, every supplier and every demander will get a wake-up call. Perhaps they’ve not been  mind-ful  Perhaps mistaking organisational behaviour for personal friendship they’ve misinterpreted relationships and been hurt or frustrated that the old modus operandi doesn’t fit. Perhaps a new player in the relationship has tilted the balance.

If we’re grown-ups we will behave in each sphere with appropriate behaviour with no need for manipulation or guilt or carrot and stick, or disguised favours. And then, perhaps we can all be honest with ourselves. And if we are honest there’ll be no need for tedious, predictable office politics that permeates every level of every organisation like some B grade Hollywood series.

If we can be honest – and support each other in a proper and equal way – each to their own, for their own, on their own – we might all get to grow up through our working life – as we expect to do in our personal one.

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I don’t know how Spammers spam, and I dare say there is an automated something that does the thinking for them…but something in the title or the content triggered a surfeit of the weirdest “stream of consciouness” one has ever read. It would have made Joyce’s Ulysses proud! Or in the very least provided the starting point for an excellent porn script.

I got a message from one of my readers today. What the?!! I have readers???

Well, in all honesty, the “reader” is a dear friend I met in my workplace who has kept in contact.  As a thoughtful, clever young woman – whose finest gift is Love-ability - this  friend, Belle let me know she was reading and enjoying such spam-worthy words. Bring it on Belley-Mac-Bellestar!

I was gratified. Belle knows how to write.

My posts are now punctuated, as if on an internal bio-rhythm, by the month. As if magically, there is a yearning to spout some new thought, frame it reasonably sensibly, and then shape it into a manageable structure, to send out to the void. God! I think that was a line from a hollywood movie that featured online communication. Save me from filmic cliches! Is my porn-inducing script just the beginning?

What the hell. Cliche, smeeshay (yiddic type word spelt phonetically). I am as cliched as they come.

I have just joined a local theatre and am about to audition for a middle aged woman’s role!

Therefore, of course, I watched the Oscars because they were on.  At this point it wasn’t too dificult to connect the timing of the Oscars with the grand conjunction of my own thespian pursuits (enough to make any decent  astrologer blush).  I had to watch them.

  And just to add cliche to smeeshay,  I then followed up with a dose of  “Tootsie” out of my DVD collection. Of course this was just to ensure I was wholly in the mood for my new life as a suburban star… (Please note, with all due respects to Dustin- God! isn’t Phillip Seymour so much better – Hoffman, that does not make me a drag queen, or a nun-botherer!) ….  Sigh.

Soooooo – no great thoughts this month. It’s Dad’s birthday tomorrow.. I’m gratified that I can memorise 2 monologues a 24 hour period, and I am feeling pretty chuffed about most of my life.

loveya belle thanks for not being spam xx

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Another excellent artist, James Gleeson explains it as an integral ointment to the process of painting:
If the Light is right the darkness will remain
to hold the form in stasis.
Something will be that had not been before

As a amateur painter I can relate to the Gleeson, as a broken individual I am addicted to the Cohen.

I paint to retreat and make meaning of things.  Right now I’m painting a scene on the river at Woy Woy on the Central Coast of NSW. The painting is of the home of my grandparents.  A retirement home they gave up, when they moved back to Sydney to look after us following the death of my mother. My need to paint this scene, is parallel to my need to make sense of what home means.

The unfinished work sits on an easel in my spare room. And it’s as if there’s a presence in the house. As I pass by the open doorway and look in, it stares back. And I wonder – is it working?  Should I stop now when the potential is still there, before I stuff it up? Do it like it? Would I know?

Undertaking the actual painting is like navigating a battlefield – one part of you motivated and defending the perfect vision of home, memory, life and loss. The other part, questioning and criticising your choice of colour and topic, and always with the eternal chant, “You’re not a painter”, “You’ll muck it up, you know you always do”…crack..

To add insult to injury, watching the progress of a painting is like caring for the wounded. Wandering the corridors with a lamp, you’re motivated by care, diligence and hope.  Wanting to keep it alive, to rub it back, add more and then take off some.

And compelled at the open door, as if addressing an ailing patient, you whisper aloud, “You certainly made the right choice adding in that central focus point”.   “You did well with the tone and depth”. But always when you turn away, if you’re honest, you’ll admit it could just as easily turn septic with the next encounter.

And it can happen at any time. These mistakes that take us on a certain path, unlike the one we started out on, these are the cracks and breakages and they are part and parcel of the artistic – healing process. Gleeson writes,

From the known a newer resonance
shaking old doors open to a separate incarnation

Last week I got an email from my niece, Georgie. Along with it – she’d attached the copy of a beautiful painting she’d just completed. It was the way she processed the loss and separation from her long-time boyfriend. The work was done on silk, full of abundant flowers – each with a symbology of loss, meaning, honour, fidelity and care. Not the work of a depressed woman – but certainly the work of a mind-ful one.

George stayed with me following the death of my husband a couple of years ago. She’d graduated and had given herself a year before applying for college. Most nights we’d sit out on the veranda talking. We spoke about life and hope and loss. We talked of death and battlefields and of caring for the wounded.

As much as you would hope it wouldn’t happen to an 18 year old, she had lost a friend in a car accident only months before and had  seen it first-hand.

Georgie painted her way out of that grief as well.  Embellishing a plaster cast she had made of this girlfriend’s torso some weeks before the accident It was a living canvas – potent with life, as it should be when you’re 18. And it was now frozen in time, attended to by the painter. So she took that cast and painted it with decorative meaningful emblems and gave it to the girl’s mother.  The act was classy, brazen and inspired by love.

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

For you darling G

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Nothing new about that concept.

However, this last week in particular has led me to ruminate why it is that some people have a genuinely sweeter nature than others.  Kinder, thoughtful, empathetic – you know, all those qualities your parents and teachers tried to instill in you and those you and your therapist(s) tried to re-activate or even find!

One expects to find those qualities shining brightly in younger people – merely because life knocks most of it out of you the more years you stay walking on this planet. And of those older people – my peers and older - who  still manage to hold onto the qualities, well they’re one step away from sainthood.

This week just gone, I farewelled one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. No she didn’t die but she did change jobs and after 11 or so years it felt like a little death. We’d traversed so much landscape together, she was there for me at my nadir and I trust, in some small way I have been there for her at her lowest point.

I admired how she left. A lot of us would skulk away, shunning those who treated us badly and leaving the rest with a gaping hole (given that we are soooooo fabulous, they won’t realise what they’re missing till I’ve gone!).  I know I would do just that. I couldn’t risk finding out how few people actually liked me. I couldn’t face the fact that only the die hard loyalists turned up to my farewell. I have tried it before, and there was only a handful – so I’m right on that score.

But in the case of my friend – there were all staff emails, there were enormous group bbq’s there were farewell afternoon teas, dinners; it was as fine a farewell as any of Nellie Melba’s. And she deserved every one of them.

When we are couragepous to mark significant moments like departures, we give ourselves a great gift – the gift of love. We acknowledge our own splendidness and we play it out on whatever stage we strut our stuff.

When we are not courageous, we remain skulking in the shadows. Afraid of rejection and afraid of love. And in that shadow we make friends with the dark. We believe, often erroneously that we belong there.

When you are there, though, it gives you a great chance to make peace with what you find there. Your own dark thoughts and bitchy behaviour, your limiting beliefs and fear. You also great a great view of the light - In its absence.

Whether you can step into that light, spotted at times of transition, is merely a matter of choice and courage. Friends like mine however model it well and give me a gift far beyond the norm.  A lesson on living well.

All the best dearest s.t.g.

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My brother gave us a gift of photos – scanned from a box of old slides he’d collected from the family home. Most of the slides, he reported, were mouldy and useless, but he had managed to salvage a collection that he was able to digitalise.

My brother is one of the kindest people you could meet. Unlike me, his older sister whose response to life is sharp (alas more acerbic than insightful), Chris has a gentle spirit that doubles as a spiritual balm. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no saint – he’s a soldier and a guardian of memories.

The photos are rich and loaded with such balm. As he showed us the show, from his laptop, amidst the glare of an overdue sunny day, we caught a glimpse of a past.
 
Some images were in shadow with only a hint to their identity – was that Marie? No that’s Gel – see on the left, what was her name?  Others were so fragile and ethereal as if painted on rice paper, torn at the edges and only just able to hold their colour. And some, as if painted on a still wet canvas, pulsated redolent and vibrant, transporting us immediately to that shared place in time.

A time shared between us as an immediate family but also shared across our extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. So there we were gathered around a laptop in a sunny park on a picnic 40 years after most of the photos were taken.

The reunion was organised this year, 2 years after our inaugural one, by my cousin, also called Chris, an equally heart-centred person to my brother. She is mid way in a larger family, and the same age as my older sister. There was always a cousin who was the same age as someone else.

There were shared birthday parties, Christmas parties, picnics, and religious rites of passage. And there were shared and common Grandparents who were central to the concept of family; they were formidable, immovable and almost sacred in our collective identity.

Dad had clearly started photographing after the death of his wife, for we couldn’t find any photos our Mother. I can relate to his strategy – capture everything you see, try to figure out what it is you’re seeing and then figure out whether you want to be a part of it.

I’m glad he did. I’m glad he thought we were important enough to photograph. I’m glad he came back from the abyss that goes hand in hand with death, an abyss so beguiling so tempting you want to fall headlong into it. I’m glad he wanted to come back to us.

My brother is like my dad. They look like each other – so says my cousing Brian and he should know he’s a great observer of life and people. I agree with Brian. And I’ll go one step further and say my brother is like my dad in intention and drive. Attending to the bones he trawled through a record of life – our life – and brought back the pearl of great price. A testament to love.

I am profoundly grateful to you darling bro. I love you.

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A Natal chart shows the planets in each of the 12 houses governing our relationships, our careers, our family and our home etc. As a Libran coming up to a birthday this month, it was like listening to a report card at the end of term.

Am I doing well? Meeting my potential? Have things happened the way they should, the way he said they might? Is there anything in this science of the stars?

My own proclivity for things “other worldly” apparantly grows out of some innate skills I was born with – psychic and intuitive skills and a strong connection to higher learning or arcane wisdom. I believe these skills get a “kick along” as a result of events in life that skew, threaten or validate our belief system. Transforming events like marriages, like deaths, like separations, or fortuitous events that guide or help us further along the path and push us up or out to another level. Events that align us to a truer purpose or message.

Librans are all into alignment – we like to balance, straighten, organise and collaborate to get things right. There’s a bunch of us at work, all coming up for birthdays this month ( proof  that the traditional Christmas holidays, occuring 9 months before, are an annual festival of baby making across all generations).

Yesterday, I met with one of my fellow librans and 2 librarians to talk about a collaborative knowledge and research program using Wiki technology Our aim is to build on the information associated with one person and one event, so that the organisation creates a storehouse of connected ideas and stories, threaded together as knowledge.

Some spiritual practitioners believe there is compendium of arcane wisdom referred to as the Akashic Records. It is a warehouse of wisdom, life purpose, lessons and stories lived by the brave souls who trod the earth one day light years before and after us Yet, we get to tap into that shared wisdom through our dreams, through divination; they appear as flashes of insight, archetypal art and myth or random co-incidences and events of synchronicty.

I’ve always found Librarians to be a “higher form” in the workplace. I find them gentle, clever, kind, insightful and generous, in pursuit of truth and knowledge. There’s something noble about that pursuit.

Our librarians live in a glass library. Above the library a void reaches skyward, passing through, and surrounded by 3 floors of open-space-workstations, in other words, there are no walls anywhere.  Central to the building, the library is a testament to learning and education. In reality, these poor darlings who work beneath the void, are battling noise overload, as they sift  through the  brittle static and crackle that comes with worker conversations in the air above and around them.

So as I listened to the whirring crackling noises emanating from my car tape deck this morning, I sifted through the  information housed in this astrological reading. David, although a young man, has also died  in the ntervening years. And as his voice reached me over the air waves, making predictions based on my natal chart, I got a chill. Yes, he portentiously predicted the inevitable separation of a significant man in my life 11 years from the date of the recording. 

But in that whirring and crackling noise that accompanied this kind and encouraging reading, I realised we’re all connected in cycles, waves, sound, light, learning, truth and knowledge. The wisdom plays out through us, around us, in us and over us, again and again and again.

So to all my libran companians and all the splendid teachers and wise librarians in the world, may your road be wide and long and bring you home safely and wiser for the journey you’re on.

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