Category: staying true

Coming up roses

Posted in anxiety, gratitude, moments of beauty, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ...Tagged , , 1 Comment

Since my last post on roses,
I’ve started glimpsing them wherever I go.

Outside the entrance to my office, there’s a bed of low-lying roses.
They catch my eye as I walk through the automatic glass doors on my way in to work.
So I sneak down to soak up their beauty again in my morning tea-break.

After rain, the petals and leaves hang heavy, glistening.
And it feels to me like a moment of stolen beauty.

Coming alive for the first time to the beauty of something
that has always been around you
is one of life’s greatest joys.

Painting your life

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A gift

I have always wished that I could draw, but I don’t seem to have inherited my mother’s and my grandmother’s artistic gifts. Hand me a pencil or a paintbrush, and I freeze.
My grandmother dabbled mostly in oils, but towards the end of her life she tried her hand at watercolours, painting scenes from the Dorset village in England where she and my grandfather had retired.
One of her watercolours hangs in my kitchen:
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Now if only I could paint my world as well as she painted hers!

On running

Posted in a thought, anxiety, favourite quotes, health, life, rituals, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I love about ...Tagged , 3 Comments

Finally, after a summer of heartache followed by almost crippling depression, came the walking phase. After a hectic routine of lying under my coffee table weeping, I had reached a point where I had to get outside and see daylight. I wanted to feel the breath of warm air on my skin; I yearned to feel the blood circulate around my body again … Half-deranged by weeks of erratic sleeping — nights spent enervated and panicky followed by sluggish, heavy-limbed days — I decided in desperation that physically exhausting myself might make the nights seem a little more welcoming. I longed to yearn to lie down at the end of the day, legs aching from use rather than the anxious jiggling they did under my desk for hours on end.

from ‘Running like a girl‘
by Alexandra Heminsley

When I was twenty-five, I took up running to cure my own case of heartbreak. I lived by the beach (a different one then), and so I picked out my four-kilometre course, from one jetty to the next and back; and then I ran.
And the heartbreak lifted. Running brought me the simplest joy I’ve ever known, in fact — until I developed runner’s knee.
Twenty years later, I’ve started running again.
The joy’s still there …
… but so is the runner’s knee.
I won’t give up hope, though: running is the best salve I know.
Cross your fingers for me?

Stop and smell the roses

Posted in gratitude, moments of beauty, native flowers, nature, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ...Tagged , , 8 Comments

Native plants and vegetation are my passion.
(We all know that.)
So you won’t be surprised when I say I haven’t always been the hugest fan of roses.
They’re not native to Australia.
Sometimes they seem overblown to me, and showy — blowsy, even.
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But once a year, the rose bushes outside a library I visit frequently put on quite a show.
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Somehow, these roses please even my curmudgeonly spirit.
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They are, simply, quite lovely.
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They bring joy, not just into my day …
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but into my very soul.

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I think I’m slowly joining the rose-lover’s world …

Late spring

Posted in native flowers, nature, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ...Tagged , , 3 Comments

In late October, I went for another bushwalk.
In blossom were fan flowers:
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muntries:
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and those papery, daisy-like flowers, the common everlastings:
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I encountered other inhabitants of the area, too —
many of them.
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It was mid-morning — grazing time, I think, before the sun gets too hot.
I don’t like disturbing roos:
when threatened, they can be aggressive, especially if they are guarding joeys.
And besides, I’m aware that I’m on their territory, not vice versa.
So I stepped away and left them happily to it …
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… Do you think it’s comfortable in that pouch?
It doesn’t look it to me!

When all is said and done

Posted in a thought, anxiety, favourite quotes, solace, staying humble, staying true, Uncategorized, What I love about ...Tagged , , Leave a comment

Other people’s words about … staying still

Do you ever have the urge to just move?
Metaphorically, I mean — not physically. That feeling inside — that longing not to feel stuck anymore.
I do. (Midlife crisis, anybody?!)
I don’t think there are any answers to this longing. I think the more we try to move — to push on, to change — the more we forget the grace there is in surrender.
In simply staying still.
Maybe you’re not an ABBA-tragic like me (I know! I know!). But today I give you a song that helps me with this.
Have a listen.
See what you think.

Listen to the song: ‘When all is said and done’, by ABBA*

* Note:
Click on the orange ‘play’ button at the top of the page in this link to listen to the song. It’s one of my favourites. The song is about the end of a relationship … but I think it works equally well if you think of it as talking about the end of a phase in your life. (Bear with me here. I know ABBA aren’t known for the literary nature of their lyrics! I did warn you I was an ABBA-tragic … )

Me and Mrs Jones: Telling it like it is

Posted in a thought, anxiety, favourite quotes, health, solace, staying humble, staying true, UncategorizedTagged , 1 Comment

Other people’s words about … social media

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t do Facebook or Instagram .
(Or Pinterest … Or Snapchat.) And I never, ever take selfies.
Blogging is as far as I go.
One of the reasons is this:
It’s a bright, shiny world out there on social media.
Everything is beautiful in Insta-World.
But that’s not real life.
Life is a series of moments — some of them beautiful, some of them not —
and social media doesn’t capture that.
Here’s what lovely blogger Sheena has to say on the subject:

Social media is great, right? It’s the perfect way for me to stay connected to friends, see the world from different points of view, I can use it to work from home, and let’s all agree….it’s fun! It’s also the WORST….we all paint this picture of the perfect little world we live in–only showing our best of the best moments….it’s not at ALL a real representation of life. And I think sometimes it’s too easy to get caught up in that, don’t you think?

You’ve heard the term “Keeping up with the Joneses”, right? Did you know the phrase dates back to the early 1900s? I mean really, what was it that Jones Family was doing that was worth keeping up with–growing better potatoes? Riding a faster horse? Now, with social media, we know every little detail of the Joneses life. Where they are going and who they are with and how they got there! What they are eating and when they are eating it! What their perfect house looks like, what their perfect kids look like, and what their perfect face looks like, because now the Joneses share lots of pictures of their outstretched arms and close-up faces. They definitely didn’t have to worry about selfies back in 1913.

Those Joneses are BUSY, and they are everywhere. Doing everything. And rubbing it in your face.

Behind the square (1 October 2015)
from the little red house

My take?
Life isn’t picture-perfect.
And that’s —
just —
fine.

Deception

Posted in Australian bush, nature, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ...Tagged , , 7 Comments

On one of my favourite bike rides,
I pass an empty field outside a GP clinic.
Most of the year, it’s just a bare field with long, uncut grass.
But in spring, it changes.
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Such deceptive beauty!
These flowers, heralding from South Africa,
are considered weeds here.
They’ve spread far and wide, pushing out our own native flowers.

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It’s hard not to admire them, though —
their abandoned spread;
their cheerful, bright colours …

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… and their faces uplifted to the sun.