Archive for the 'for the love of it' Category

Green means we are what we love

Published on December 20, 2009 in Uncategorized, for the love of it and green living. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Now is the time to put your skepticism aside, just a for a second.

It’s okay, it will still be there when you get back. Buy it a hot chocolate, give it a magazine and tell it you’ll be just be a moment.

There are a million and one blogs, articles, tv shows and books out there to tell us how to care for the environment. What many do not address is the fundamental shift in consciousness required before anyone cares to begin with.

Undeniably there is a groundswell in interest and attention on global change around environmental issues and living in a “green” or “eco” way. For this I am so grateful. What this means is that when I talk to the stranger at the cafe about my garden, or no longer using plastic bags or bottles, they don’t necessarily look at me like I’m a radical militant greenie. Great.

The thing that is often overlooked is the simple principle of love. We are what we love, not what loves us. This message comes clearly through so many life-altering films and books and parables. When someone close to us dies, we often remark about how we wished we’d said we loved them more often, spent more time, had more fun.

It’s the same with being green and caring for the environment. If we don’t love our garden, it literally will not bear fruit.

So today, for me, green means love (as it happens to also mean in many spiritual modalities and colour therapies).

I love my garden, I love trees and native animals and nice weather. It is out of that love that I can be bothered to read about how to care for the environment.

So my advice to anyone that asks would definitely be to get out there and get into it, find joy in your garden, your bushwalk, the tree outside your house and local birds, whatever tickles you pinky-green.

If we start to love the environment we live in, we will naturally want to take care of it – much as we take care of the people and things we already love in our lives.

Enough scaremongering and de-sensitising, let’s really feel the natural world and fall in love again.

Because we are what we love, tell the environment you love it, spend more time with it, and have more fun being green.

We don’t have to choose

Published on July 14, 2009 in Uncategorized and for the love of it. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Reading a well-written and insightful blog about Buddhism today, I loved the part that discussed how “the special opportunity for liberation that the human realm offers is a vital teaching” along with the mention of “gaps of clarity”. At the moment my life comprises of a series of these gaps, broken up by those things involved with living – eating, sleeping, washing and child-rearing for some examples.

This evening, after the cooking of the meatballs (imagine the child, fingers deep in mince, saying “this is fun Mummy”) and then, thankfully, the eating of the meatballs, and after the highly imperfect spat in the car about, you guessed it, I can’t even remember what now… I had a beautiful realisation. For ages now I have intellectually understood the idea of being a multi-disciplinary artist and yet still, in the dark corners of my thinking, I have felt that I had to choose.

Mind-voice 1: Am I a painter?

Mind-voice 2: Well, I do love to paint.

Mind-voice 1: Or maybe, I’m a writer!

Mind-voice 2: Oooh, writing, yeah, that’s so cool. I’ve always been a bit of a natural at that one.

Mind-voice 3: Chocolate biscuits…

And then suddenly it hit me, like a cold wahu fillet to the cheek, I DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE!

Brilliant. I may have to choose clothes to wear, hairstyles (when I can be bothered), what to grow in my beautiful garden, which man to go out with (on a good day), but dangnammit, I don’t have to choose any one particular specific form of creativity. They are really and truly all good. They are all reflections of me expressed outwardly. They are all ways to communicate the inside bits to the outside bits and keep the flows happening.

Last night I went t see a very special friend of mine, the incredibly talented Peta Sergeant, in her current theatre show Savage River. (Hurry and go see it at the Stables/Griffin Theatre! Awesome show… and yes – I am biased but fair.) It struck me as I waited for her to emerge after the show that she is one of those brave souls who puts it on the line. She has relentlessly pursued success as an actor and is incredibly deserving of the many roles she gets. She lives her creativity and left her home-town of Brisbane, Australia, as a teenager to attend NIDA, the school renowned for breaking its students to pieces and putting them back together again as amazing actors (think ex-students such as Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman). She is also a singer and songwriter with the Bellows, a great cook, she makes beautiful handmade things (I still love the leather handbag she made me years ago), a filmmaker and a rockin’ wife extraordinaire. And I am only just seeing what a genius she is.

So now, I’m here, all inspired, tap-tap-tapping away on the keys and dreaming up ways to fit a piano into my tiny apartment, and how I’m going to make amazing things this week in any way I choose, in any medium that takes my fancy, just ‘coz.

When people ask me “why are you doing your blog” it is as if they want me to say “oh, to make a little extra from Google Ads” or some half-assed, cockimany reason… but I answer “I’m just doing it”. Surely by now you’ve noticed that those things that come from love + action are the greatest, most successful and most satisfying ventures in life. I bet billionaires rarely make meatballs, ya know?

For the love of it

Published on July 7, 2009 in for the love of it. 2 Comments Tags: , .

We’re going to ask you a question, and we’d love to see your answer with comments on this blog… When was the last time you did something just for the love of it? When have you acted solely to fulfil a dream or longing?

Man on Wire

The reason we pose this question is to shine a light on the inspirational results that come from such action. Phillipe Petit for example  carried out wire-walks between the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons (shown above), over Notre Dame and between the World Trade Centres. People stood and watched and he heard their murmurs from 450metres above ground. When the dumbfounded and clearly affected policemen that witnessed the event from the top of the towers were asked about it, they could hardly describe it. Even they were clearly heart-touched. When they asked him why he did it, he answered that there was no why.  According to the Academy Award-winning documentary Man on Wire, he tells the story of being in a dentist’s office as a young man and sighting a newspaper article about the planned building of the Towers in New York. He ripped the article out and raced back home, compelled. And that was before they were even built. As a child apparently all he had wanted to do was climb things, no-one could stop him.

There are some beautiful pictures of some work done in old disused newspaper dispensers in the USA. When I visited New York I used to see them standing like colourfully dressed bystanders on every corner. This lot put flowers in them, alive and grown, for the enjoyment of passers by. What a beautiful re-use of urban flotsam and jetsam. They’ve managed to turn their beat around with the power of an idea and a bit of soil and seedling action. Have a look for yourself on their website.

Man of the moment Michael Jackson said it like this:

‘Fun inspires me..out of bliss comes magic and creativity.’ – MJ

And here’s the amazing thing about our unstoppable nature as human beings: when we are compelled and driven by this kind of genuine love, not much can stop us achieving it. It’s powerful, just as are we.