Lighting the Fire in a room without walls…

Lit the fire for the first time this winter and we sat outside under a windy, wintery sky breathing in the heat and enjoying the warmth of good company and one of my very favourite Elements of all…

NAIDOC 2008 - Adelaide

Here are three gorgeous gals who caught up with one another during the NAIDOC march and Family day on the banks of the River Torrens.

Katrina Power, Pilwauk White and Jo Rigney…

The OM Song…finally…

I have searched for this song for so long! I was delighted to find it on youtube…

This 70’s classic by Ray Stevens speaks of the Oneness of all things…

“A lot of people think we are all connected together, at a level of consciousness where all our Souls merge…to become the Universal mind”…

The heART of the Apology …

We are having the launch of the heART of the Apology exhibition on Wednesday.

There were 11 posters created during the Apology at Elder Park here in Adelaide in the ‘heART’ Space that we established as a way to give ordinary Australians, of all colour, culture and creed a place to express their thoughts and feelings in a way that was divorced from the political footballing and rhetoric that was flooding the media in the months….and years … leading up to the Apology.

“I AM at Home with Peace and Prosperity”

This was the theme for our empowerment art work this week…to become comfortable with Peace and Prosperity when there has been a history of chaos and poverty….

I am ever amazed at the completely individual and unique creations the emerge from the same black and white template……..

Time…Spoken by Sir Lawrence Olivier…

Some of the most instructional words regarding the power of our Thoughts and their impact on every day life that have ever been written…spoken so eloquently by Sir Lawrence Olivier in the musical “Time”...

…take a few moments to really listen to what he is telling us and celebrate the serious wonder of such influence we have on our personal Reality, simply by what we think about…

Adelaide [Tandanya] - City of Contrasts…

People often relocate to Adelaide because of the beauty and the lifestyle, the smaller population and the general sense of not-quite-a-city-and-bigger-than-a-country-town.
Sometimes those same people complain about Adelaide being slow to change and resistant to development whilst also appreciating the things that make this city unique.

Heritage listed buildings (there are many) are protected from the 21st centuries vastly different architecture, though sometimes only the outer facade remains as the inside of the old blue stone buildings undergo radical surgery and extraction of almost all body parts.

The other day we were attending an event in the relatively new Mawson building in North Terrace and looking out of the window I was taken by the light of the late afternoon sun and how the new overshadows the old along this stretch of the city that overlooks the railway station and River Torrens behind it.

In the background St Peters Cathederal looks like it has a team of 2 storey fly swatters in front of it…the fly swatters being the lights that surround the staidly old home of tradition, The Adelaide Cricket Ground…

It is a good place to live and the surrounding country side produces some of the best wines from MacLaren Vale through to the Barossa Valley, from grapes that are perfectly suited to this climate.

The hills form an arc shaped range and we are nestled between the hills and the sea and the land in and around the city and in the further afield country side is rich in the Dreaming stories of the Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Nurrunga people - three of the largest tribal groupings of this part of the land..

The Adelaide Central markets offer fresh, locally grown fruit and vegetables, breads, cheese and scrumptious cafes and all along Grouger and Grote streets, (the back and front of the market) there is a wide vareity of restaurants and more cafes that are a constant reminder of how truly fortunate we are to be living in a place such as this.

The Winter of content…

It was raining yesterday afternoon and after the months of drought and over 10 days where the temperature reached 100oF a few months ago, the winter rains and green-sheen everywhere are very welcome in this desert state.

I was sitting under the back verandah with the two semi-homeless garden cats, Gabrielle- [Gabi] and her daughter Shima. You can see how gorgeous they are:

The garden was humming with rain drops and birds and leaves blowing down from the Cedar Trees
late autumn fall:

…and I remembered back to when I first moved in here and all I could see was a barren, dry patch of soil…

…..and how this piece of Mother Earths blank canvas taught me more about process, time, holding a vision, weeding and seeding, than I could ever have imagined when I first moved here during a trials-and-tribulations winter of discontent….

In our ‘outcomes’ driven, western society I learnt that the answers we are seeking about sustainable change and growth are to be found in Mother Nature’s process of Time, cycles and seasons….

……and how wonderful it is to create a room with out walls and a fireplace whose only chimney is the sky….

Adelaide in South Australia is traditionally named ‘Tandanya’ , home of the Red Kangaroo.

Living and growing and learning and sharing on traditional Aboriginal Land, Kaurna Country has its own special strand of environmental magic and possibility….As my good buddy Nungala reminds me:

“It can happen so much better and so much faster if you acknowledge the Ancestors and remember the Dreaming”…..

Friends…

We were at a public event and I didn’t know that one of my old friends knew my friend so I asked another old friend to frame them!

A picture paints a thousand words….

Don’t worry…Bead Happy!

I have recently introduced a program using beads that we hand roll from air drying clay to create an “empowerment necklace’ as mentioned in an earlier thread.

Meeting for between 2 to 4 hours a week participants shape their beads based on a Vision they hold for the future or as an expression of love / resolution / Spiritual strength etc.

Once the beads are dry we paint them and give them life, colour and vibrancy. Das clay is FANtastic as a quick drying and very hardy medium that is not heavy once it has dried…
The rolling of the clay and shaping the beads is a very relaxing process that activates the alpha state (open eyed meditative) of optimum learning and relaxation.

The ‘bead happy’ project engages two significant aspects - process and completion, which are often difficult to attain for people who are living with personal challenges, marginalisation, trauma and poverty.

The talking circle format is a very relaxed, informal environment which is more culturally relevant for many of the participants from non-western /European backgrounds. This kind of environment does not have a ‘counsellor -client’ dynamic, it is a far more empowering model that moves beyond pain and issues to the place of connecting with personal power, natural talent and possibility.
The very state we knew as small children before the external world imprinted limitations upon us.

Thankyou to the women whose work is in the image below…although they remain anonymous in the photos, the very personal stories and amazing creativity that is expressed through the clay and the beading affirms to me how privileged I am to provide art based life coaching at the grass roots, community level where so many amazing people have extraordinary stories to share….