When I woke up this morning completely blocked and breathing from my mouth, I thought of the only thing that would help – yoga practice.
So here I am in the Shed, writing to you, occasionally lifting my head to look out at the view – dewy, green grass with birds swooping in and out. Given this is Australia, the birds are not ordinary: king parrots, eastern rosellas, and kookaburras, for instance. (The magpies have been having sex this week, right before our eyes.)
I have faith that my practice will pull me together on all levels. […]
Nature
Countdown
Two weeks tomorrow Daniel and I will be in the U.S.A. I have mixed feelings about returning to the land where I was born. Not because I don’t want to be there, but because I don’t want to not be here.
I’ve so appreciated the gentle changes that have occurred in our environment since moving to the country eight months ago. And the bigger changes that we’ve bestowed on house and garden over that time. […]
A Good Day
Happier than a calf on the teat….
Happier than a white horse rolling around in the mud….
Happier than a sun-shiny day after weeks of rain and clouds….
Happier than teaching yoga to my new crop of students….
Happier than the anticipation of 7 weeks holiday….
Happier than harvesting my first crop of tomatoes….
Happier than sitting in the sun, sheltered from the sun and reading a good book….
Happier than a beach walk at high tide….
Happier than a roaring fire and hot bowl of soup on a winter night….
It’s been a good day! […]
Beyond Earthy
Oooh, it’s wet on NSW eastern seaboard. My Canberra friend wrote that even the dessicated capital city had had rain. Ninety-eight percent humidity has become normal and you could squeeze liquid out of the air, even when it doesn’t rain.
We are growing unanticipated things on the wetland portion of our land – the area that dried out completely in our several years’ drought.
I’m not complaining, no sir-ee, not in this wide brown country called Oz. […]
Time Wasters
Two all-time great distractions of the time wasting stakes are watching babies and watching baby animals. Sleeping or waking there is something other-worldly about them that fascinates us.
I confess to losing I don’t how much time today in observing Farmer Scott’s new calves out in the next-door pastures. Their mothers seemed rather indifferent to them and that’s when I started anthropomorphising.
My invented story about why they weren’t looking after their babies went like this: The cows had had rough labours. They needed to graze to get their strength back. Their milk hadn’t come in yet. […]
That time of Year
Being as close to and surrounded by Nature as we are, it’s a treat to watch the gradual slide from one season to the next. I don’t mean summer, fall, winter, spring; I mean, for instance, the January/February black cockatoo season. You should see and hear the cacophonous feeding that goes in our pines followed by raucous and drunken swooping from tree to tree.
As the weather becomes colder and even frosty, the local livestock grow wooly coats, much like the way a man grows facial hair on a holiday weekend. […]
Nature Trip
Today we were a sightseeing party of four, driving out to the very beautiful attraction ellenborough Falls, out past the hills villages of Bobin and Elands.
Never heard of those places? Neither had we till we became immigres to Mitchells Island. Which may be another area unfamiliar to you.
Located on the Bulga Plateau, about an hours drive north-west of Taree, Ellenborough Falls are a spectacular site. […]
Serendipitous Health
Just after sunrise today, I woke up early and drove down to the beach to see if I could sight some whales voyaging north.
Debbie who owns the General Store at Manning Point said she saw about 15 whales yesterday in the early am.
It really is the luck of the draw. You better plan not to be disappointed if your will power and the virtuous early hour you arose isn’t enough to conjure them. Even though we all know this is whale watching season, we have to surrender to their rhythms.
I’m reminded of a quote from Dr. […]
Red Birds
The other day, writing on this blog, I was trying to explain a yoga concept called vinyamaya kosha – not entirely successfully done, judging by a couple of comments I received.
I always put the responsibility for communications which the readers finds are abstruse back on the communicator. […]
The Incredible Shrinking Beach
I had to slide down a badly eroded slope to get onto Old Bar Beach today.
A few weeks ago the same spot had a defined path from the car park to the beach.
Where did it go? Compromised by all the recent rains and big tides, I guess.
Walking south along the beach, I had to skirt whole trees that had the dunes scooped out from under them. […]
Polishing Will Take Patience
That’s pronounced Pah-lish, not Po-lish, like my surname.
On this perfectly wet post-solstice day, I retrieved my polished stones from the 4.5 week tumbling journey that they’ve been on.
Here’s the steps I took the stones through:
1. Picked pretty stones on beach
2. Took them home and washed them
3. Placed them in a rotary tumbler withcoarse silicon carbide grit
4. Turned on machine & tumbled for a week
5. Opened tumbler, washed grit, replaced with next finer grade of grit and ran for another week
6. […]
Thumbelina
What else to call a creature only a little larger than your thumbnail? This one popped out of a pot to which I was transplanting a bamboo plant today. It was very lucky not to have been spliced in two by my spade.
When you think about it, it’s quite miraculous that tiny beings survive at all in nature. It’s such a bird-eat-frog world out there.
Frogs are a lot smarter than I thought, though. A little family of them lives in the circuit box on the side of the house. […]