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Joy in travel and seeing new landscapes – a photo essay

January 3, 2019

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

Joy and travel align so beautifully! This post explores how the joy of travel and new landscapes helped refresh my senses and provide new perspectives.

Joy as my Word of the Year in 2018

Joy was my Word of the Year for 2018. I’m reflecting on my experience of JOY last year in a series of posts here as a way of rounding off the year and stepping into 2019.

I’ve realised that each quarter of the year delivered a new lesson and experience about finding joy:

alongside deep grief
and resilience in challenging times
in travel and being away from home (this post)
in creative work and my calling (to come soon)

I hope you find these reflections valuable for your own journeys with joy, grief, resilience, creativity, travel and wholehearted self-leadership. And I look forward to your thoughts and experiences too on these issues and feelings.

Finding joy in travel

It’s pretty well nearly always joyful to set off on an anticipated overseas trip. But this one was so long in coming, it felt extra joyful.

We were just about to go overseas when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and so of course, we cancelled that holiday. In all, we cancelled six holidays over 18 months as we dealt with the challenges of late 2016 into early 2018 and focused on supporting loved family members.

Finally in the second half of the year, we set off overseas for a trip to Europe and the UK. We travelled first to Singapore and that evening after arriving, we sat in our favourite hotel with a drink relaxing and I felt quiet tears of joy.

It meant things were okay and settled down now. It was a desperately needed change of scenery, an opportunity to relax and see new places, and fulfil a dream of going on a river cruise down the Rhine. We also planned to visit towns in Germany where my ancestors departed from to travel to Australia, to catch up with online friends I hadn’t met in person, and to connect again with family and friends overseas. It was the most joyful of times.

Joy and travel revisited

Just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, so the inability to travel made me yearn for new landscapes. Until I could travel again, I would follow other’s journeys with such wanderlust, eager to also embrace travel as we had planned for this time of our life. This whole experience helped me to take nothing for granted. After the challenges of the previous months, I immersed myself in every new place and experience so in the moment.

In Singapore, we love the orchids and visited the National Orchid Gardens and the Gardens by the Bay as well as the zoo. We indulged our senses in every way in the humidity of Singapore, surrounded by flowers and animals. It was so refreshing for my jaded sensibilities.

We then headed to Frankfurt as a base for exploring Germany and connecting with ancestral places. I caught up with my friend Kerstin Pilz of Write Your Journey. First connecting online, we had met face to face in my village in February in 2018, then found out we were both flying into Frankfurt, from Vietnam and Australia, within the same 24 hour period. What synchronicity! It was such a joy to connect and have lunch in the Römerberg Square in Kerstin’s home-town. Catching face to face with online friends was a special feature of this journey creating such treasured moments I cherish.

Joy, travel and family history

A key driving factor in our holiday planning was heading to see the places in Germany where my ancestors left from to travel to Australia. Much of my family is from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but my paternal grandmother’s grandparents came from Germany. So I was so very keen to see the places they lived in and where they once walked and lived.

We visited Würzburg, Wertheim and Eichel on the outskirts of Wertheim where they lived. I went to the church where my great, great, great grandfather Johann (Jakob) Leonhard Roos was baptised in 1826. My ancestors were vineyard workers in this region of Germany and then came to work on Henry John Lindeman’s vineyards in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. I could feel their ancestral presence everywhere in this region of Germany and felt so much at home.

The joy of river cruising

The central part of our trip was a river cruise from Amsterdam to Basel. We’d never been on a cruise of any kind and thought a river cruise would be the best way to commence our cruising experience.

It was sublime. From the moment we stepped on, we enjoyed every moment. A combination of the pleasures of onboard experiences with onshore excursions made for such a pleasurable journey. Once you are aboard, you unpack your bag and just kick back for the week and watch the world go by.

We had also never engaged with more organised travel with a structured itinerary and tour guides. Again, we enjoyed this as it meant we didn’t have to navigate and could learn from guides with local knowledge. You could choose to opt out of onshore excursions and stay on the boat often cruising to the next stop. This was an occasional introverted treat when all the interaction and input got too much.

Travelling by river means seeing so much you cannot see any other way. A highlight was the mid Rhine River lined with castles and vineyards, the Lorelei a central feature we snaked through. We sat atop the vessel as we wove our way through, seeing castle and after castle and wondering how such immense structures were able to be built.

We visited cities and towns along the length of the Rhine River, hearing of their history and traditions. A broad-brush approach perhaps but a fabulous way to get a sense of place and identify where we to return to with more time to explore. We especially loved Colmar, Strasbourg, Rüdesheim, Cologne and Koblenz. A visit to the underground Maginot Line in France near the German border was an incredible insight into the lengths taken to defend against the potential reoccurrence of conflict after World War I. Our hosts went to every length to make sure each port provided opportunities to taste the unique flavour and history of each place we visited.

And then to Vietnam

Shortly after we returned home, I headed off for a solo trip to Hoi An, Vietnam for a yoga and writing retreat with Kerstin Pilz. It was my first solo trip overseas at 57 which caused much mirth in our family. But it was truly great to set off alone for a week of writing and yoga in beautiful Hoi An, a place I’d long wanted to visit. Having my trusted friend Kerstin, a local Hoi An resident, leading and shaping the retreat meant I felt well looked after and knew my needs would be supported.

They were supported and so much more. I’ve written a full review of the retreat here. Following on from time away in Europe and the UK, it was all about seeing with fresh eyes in every respect. The week was pivotal in getting back to both yoga and writing practices after my time away. I made enduring friendships and my senses were refreshed and revitalised, bringing a deep joy after an at times challenging year.

Having stretched both my writing and yoga muscles and revitalised my senses in every way, the scene was set for the last quarter of the year and experiencing joy in my calling and new work in the world.

Photo by Nigel Rowles

Find Your Word process + tools

First though, some information on the process and tools that can help you. If you have never worked on a Word of the Year, it’s a powerful process. Susannah Conway has a fabulous free Word of the Year ecourse available each year that I often dive into. It works really well alongside the Unravel Your Year process and free workbook that Susannah also creates and generously shares each year. I’ve been working through both processes to review my year and plan for the next one since 2014.

I credit these practices with contributing to deep realisations about where I was stuck and needed to make change. For the first few years, I found I was writing the same goals each year and not achieving them. This was mostly about writing books and making space for creativity in my life. Each year was swallowed up by work and my creative goals kept getting lost.

In 2016, I started doing things differently. I began to make my transition. Now at the end of 2018, I am two years in to my change journey and life is very different. It’s much more in line with the dreams and visions I had way back in 2014!

Amy Palko also offers My Word Goddess Readings with suggestions for your word for the year linked to a Goddess of the Year. Also a practice I have invested in for a few years now, it provides valuable intuitive insights and suggestions for words that might help drive your year’s energy positively.

You might also enjoy:

Joy and resilience in challenging times

Joy and grief: the paradox and wisdom of finding joy alongside deep grief

Finding JOY in the everyday – reflections on my Word of the Year for 2018

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

Writing retreat in Hoi An review + photo essay – seeing with fresh eyes

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story

Keep in touch + read the books that shaped my story

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Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

intuition music & images

Music, intuition and messages of songs

March 2, 2017

Before we live what’s next, it always seems like there is some answer we need to arrive at. But daring to enter, we are humbled to discover, again and again, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. when we enter, we become songs to be sung.

Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March

There’s a special form of intuition that comes through music and the lyrics of songs that is there if you listen.

Lines of music in the night

Recently, this intuition has been speaking to me through lines of music in the night. It’s more than just remembered music, the lines stuck in your head. It comes as random lines, perhaps from something I’ve been listening to but sometimes it’s a song I haven’t listened to for a while. This intuitive messaging via lyrics, song and music is marked by the qualities of being:

random
meaningful
repeated
a direct message
sometimes almost painstakingly pointed, sometimes a little more oblique
insistent enough to wake you night after night.

It’s a strange phenomenon. I’ve always been a lover of music, lyrics and the poetry of songs but it’s only lately that I can remember waking up with insistent and direct musical messages coming to me.

The most recent experience has been hearing the lines of ‘New York’ by Alicia Keys coming to me in my own voice. And it’s a specific set of lines that keeps coming to me in the night over and over:

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new…

Read more: Alicia Keys – New York Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I haven’t listened to this song for ages and I’ve never been to New York but I understand its symbolism.

The main message for me is the inspiring words: ‘There’s nothing you can’t do’. It seems like an intuitive message from spirit, from angels, from ancestors. I don’t really know who it’s from, but it’s a message of encouragement from my intuition, just as rainbows appear in my life at key points. It’s saying that I’m on the right track, able to do much, and to tap into a collective creative spirit such as New York as a city might symbolise.

Intuition, symbols and learning to listen

Personality types for whom introverted intuition is a dominant or auxiliary function are the ones most likely to be finding this type of intuition coming to them. MBTI types who tend to rely on or experience this type of visionary insight are: INFJ, INTJ, ENFJ and ENTJ. People with these personality types can find that answers come from an interior intuitive kind of knowing. This can be via symbolic ways such as images, metaphors, lines of songs, words and dreams. And all people can learn to strengthen this type of intuitive insight whatever their type.

It tends to come as a whole piece that summarises the answer, feeling or thought succinctly in a kind of code you can hear or read if you learn to listen. It’s similar to how we can learn the language and symbolism of dreams. But like dreams, you almost have to go through an education or opening to its wisdom which is collective in nature but individual in context and application.

Intuitive Friday and intuitive music

I launched a hashtag project a while ago called #intuitivefriday about taking time to celebrate intuition in a mindful and deep way on Friday.

@todorf shared a particularly beautiful piece on considering intuition from the perspective of lyrics that move you, the poetry in compositions and people’s stories of lives changed by a piece of music or song:

Have you ever had a song that gets stuck in your head?

On an #IntuitiveFriday consider intuitions from lyrics that move you.

Have you ever had a song change your life?

CBC ‘s The Sunday Edition aired a popular series called 20 Pieces of Music That Changed The World. On a recent Radio broadcast, i heard stories by listeners from across Canada who’s life was changed by some song or piece of music. The ideas and emotions could be told from many countries for music is universal.

I remarked that the poets are alive and well in our music… also in addition to lyric, there is poetry in the compositions

20 Pieces of Music That Changed the World is the most amazing series on music and influence and its impact to make change from an interior to a wider world. It is about “feelings which coalesced in music first then moved out into the rest of society”. I am so thankful to @todorf (nod) for sharing this.

I was struck by the comments in the introduction to the first episode by Robert Harris about music as an “emotional package”, which has the “ability to crystallise emotional states”. He talks about how music:

has the power to show us a future that we only dimly understand intellectually but understand emotionally.

Music is unmediated and “beyond the power of words” but “our brains understand it instantly.”

Lyrics and intuition

So lyrics, lines of songs, coming to me in this way unmediated in the middle of night, through words somehow beyond the power of words, is a kind of intuition.

When I wake in the middle of the night, I get up to capture the words in my notebook in the dark because I know I will lose them if I don’t. They are a knowing without knowing, words beyond words, and a dialogue with spirit that I need to heed and listen to. They are messages from beyond that we need to get in some way though we do not always fully understand.

As I finish this piece, the lyrics singing out in the room from my own Spotify playlist are from The Stranglers’ ‘Skin Deep’:

Some days there’s things on your mind you should keep

Sometimes, it’s tougher to look than to leap

better watch out for the skin deep…

It’s a song I have listened to over and over, nodding and smiling, watching out for the skin deep, going deeper, leaping rather than looking and understanding that some days there truly are things on my mind I should pay close quiet attention to.

That power of music, lyrics, songs to reach from the beyond – or into the future – has a magical ability to make you smile, understand or get a sense of something.

Every life is a language no one knows. With every heart-break, discovery and unexpected moment of joy, with every lift of music that touches us where we didn’t think we could be touched, with every experience, another letter in our alphabet is decoded. Take a step; learn a word. Feel a feeling; decode a sign. Accept a truth; translate a piece of mystery written in your heart.

Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March

Thought pieces

Love to hear your thoughts on music and intuition:

When has a song or music come to you in the night? What did it say and what does it mean to you?
When have you sung words, listened to lyrics knowing they deliver something deeper that you don’t as yet understand ?
What music, songs, lyrics takes you back to a special moment you can hardly put into words? One that enables you to be able to capture exactly where you were, what you felt: the tears, the laughter, the grief, the purest emotion that you could not put into words if you tried?
What song has changed the world for you?
What’s your favourite song and you don’t even really know why?

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

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Lyrebird – spirit animal for Quiet Writing

February 16, 2017

This post is about the lyrebird, its meaning and why it is the spirit animal reflecting the heart of Quiet Writing.

Lyrebirds run across my path

Each day I drive through bush to the top of the hill through national park with rainforest pockets and waterfall rock faces. The road opens up at times to a cathedral of trees and sky. I sing to music or listen to podcasts on creativity and writing, finding minutes to express my self before a busy work day.

On many days I smile, as a lyrebird, tail down making a sleek black figure, darts across the road into leaves and bush. On some occasions, I’ve seen two lyrebirds in one trip. That’s when I feel especially blessed by lyrebird magic.

I wonder at its meaning. I don’t recall seeing the lyrebird in any spirit animal guides I’ve read, being an Australian bird. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. I know I will need to look into Aboriginal stories too. I commit to doing that silently. But when I get on the train for the commute to the city, I decide to start with an intuitive write of what the lyrebird might mean.

Intuitive thoughts on the lyrebird

This is what I write:

I think it means spirit, like a sprite, a visitor of wisdom saying “You are on the right track. I’m running across this road right now to tell you that.” Like the rainbows I’ve seen in the past that wrote whole narratives of my life in the sky for me to read, it’s so explicit and timely.

I think it’s a muse: a muse of Australia, a lyre, a stringed instrument, playing like a voice, saying: Tell your story, sing your song, be your voice, the sacred creative voice that you are and want too be. Tell the stories of those who did not have a voice, help those who want to have a voice to tell their stories. The suffering, the struggle, the resilience, the spirit there that teaches us.

I think it’s about hearing the voices of others, listening, absorbing and maybe sometimes referring, quoting, ‘mimicking’, singing and trying out others’ voices to find my own voice. Knowing that the uniqueness of my voice is from all these influences and experiences, my voice a conglomeration or filter, a series of lyrebird calls, the synthesis.

It was great to write out my intuitive feel of the lyrebird before seeing others’ thoughts on the lyrebird and its meaning.

About the lyrebird

The lyrebird is a ground-dwelling bird found on the south east coast of Australia. The male has a tail shaped like a ‘lyre’ or harp. The male combines the display of his beautiful tail with extensive songs and mimicry to lure the female. The female lyrebird is also skilful in being able to mimic.

The birds are capable of mimicking just about any sound including chainsaws, cameras, human voices and car sirens. However they usually focus on the sounds of other animals and birds. The voice of a lyrebird resounds through the damp, tree-ferned gullies and valleys where it mostly lives. You can often recognise its presence by a series of different types of bird calls in quick succession.

The lyrebird’s syrinx or voice box is the most complex and sophisticated of any song bird. It has three instead of the usual four voice box muscles which gives flexibility. The birds are shy in nature. They are an ancient bird, with the earliest fossil records from about 15 million years ago.

Check out this brief video from David Attenborough to see the lyrebird in action. I’ve included a few more links below because they are so interesting!

The lyrebird – what others say

I find that many have documented the lyrebird and its meaning including some Aboriginal Dreaming stories. Here are the key messages of the lyrebird honed from online sources integrated with my own thoughts:

1 Creating a unique song letting other voices move through you

The lyrebird encourages us to create our unique song, especially via other influences moving through us and making them our own. We are the unique collation of what we love and what we have experienced. Our ideas connect and integrate with the ideas of others in ways that only we can orchestrate.

Lyrebird reminds us that one of the reasons we are unique is because we can choose to create something new from the old. It is time to create our own unique song, if we do not have one, and it is time to strengthen it, if we do.

from: Animal Energies – Lyrebird by Ravenari

Another way to think of this might be as ‘collage’ as Austin Kleon does:

Next time you’re stuck, think of your work as a collage. Steal two or more ideas from your favorite artists and start juxtaposing them. Voila.

The unique way we choose and combine ideas is in itself an act of creation.

2 Listening to the true meaning of ourselves and others

The shadow aspects of lyrebird are about letting our true voice out, being comfortable and facing our fears. Connecting with our feelings and influences will enable us to find our true voice.

Lyrebird encourages us to really listen beneath the surface. Just as lyrebirds make calls that include car alarms and bird songs to attract their mate, the lyrebird teaches us to see behind words and actions to the real meaning.

I’m currently working on life coaching. Learning to truly listen actively and with curiosity so we can gauge what people are really saying is a critical skill. This relates to lyrebird spirit:

Lyrebird gives us this power to see the truth in what a person is saying, no matter how they are saying it.

from Animal Energies – Lyrebird by Ravenari

3 Listening to and channelling spirit

Linked to #1 above is the idea of the lyrebird symbolising letting spirit and ancestors flow through us.

As Carl Jung reminds us:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

Lyrebird also encourages channelling. It might be via mimicry and new combinations as in #1 above. Or it could be working with spirit guides, ancestors and animal energy to help us find truth and meaning. Lyrebird is a link to ancient and ancestral voices, with a voice beyond time.

4 Valuing quietness and encouraging peace

Finding sacred places and practices to enable this connection is something that lyrebird spirit encourages. We need to find quiet places so we can listen to the true meaning within. Lyrebird particularly encourages expression of what we find out loud in some way.

Just as the lyrebird’s habitat is often secretive and hidden, so we need to go within to find space to reflect and gather. This is valuable for introverts especially as they draw energy and insight this way.

With their ability to speak in other ‘languages’ or voices, lyrebirds also symbolise peacemakers. In an Aboriginal Dreaming story, Lyrebird is given the role of the peacemaker in the first great dispute between all creatures:

As a reward, the Spirits gave Lyrebird the ability to be the only animal able to communicate to all the other animals. The other animals were punished by losing this ability, and Frog, the cause of all the trouble, was given a croaky voice to replace his once beautiful voice.

From Native Symbols info

5 Keeping sacred spaces clean and decluttering

The lyrebird also encourages keeping our sacred spaces clean so that we can create a clear space for spirit, influence and voice. Lyrebirds are elegant and tidy, scraping leaf litter and dirt to create a beautiful space within the forest to attract a partner.

This can be seen as a metaphor for attracting energy and creativity in our lives. The decluttering, the scraping away, can be physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. It’s essentially about getting clarity in our lives. This might be around issues of grieving and letting go of what no longer serves us and is weighing us down.

6 Being a teacher to help others to find voice and sing

Another Aboriginal Dreaming story links a few of the above strands together around teaching voice:

…there was a stream in which little bubbles contained spirits. One spirit wanted to become real when he heard Lyrebird’s beautiful song. While singing, Lyrebird noticed this bubble moving and dancing in rhythm with his voice. The Great Spirit told Lyrebird to remain singing until the creature was born. Finally, and it took Lyrebird time, effort and concentration, out popped a little green frog. Lyrebird’s purpose was then to teach this creature to sing.

From Native Symbols info

The spirit of teaching others to find their voice is another message of the lyrebird. The Dreamtime story suggests that it is through singing our own song that we help others come to life. This might take ‘time, effort and concentration’ and it may feel like we are not getting anywhere. I think of blogging, and how we can feel like we are howling into the wind. Or how when we are creating larger pieces of work that need crafting over time, it feels like they will never be finished. When sent out into the world, our creativity can help others in ways we do not even realise.

7 Symbol of the bard

The lyrebird is also seen as a symbol of the bard and of our poetic souls. It has a long repertoire of different songs and uses auditory memory to learn these songs and string them together. The lyrebird is a symbol of poetry, song, auditory skills, a love of language and poetic inspiration in all of us.

Lyrebird and Quiet Writing

So for all these beautiful reasons including its appearance many times running across my path, I have chosen Lyrebird as my spirit animal for Quiet Writing. Or rather Lyrebird has chosen me.

The value and skills at its heart are:

Creating a unique song and letting the voices of others move through you – acknowledging and working with our passions, influences and the voices of others to find our uniqueness.
Listening to the true meaning of ourselves and others – working in a process oriented way to get to meaning and voice – through understanding the self, listening and writing.
Listening to and channelling spirit – working intuitively to listen to and access spiritual energy including archetypes, symbolism, tarot, oracle and healing work.
Valuing quietness and encouraging peace – knowing that quiet places and quietness within are sources of strength and peace to be valued, celebrated and cultivated. Introvert preferences and skills such as introverted intuition are especially vehicles of vision to be strengthened.
Keeping sacred spaces clean and decluttering – working to clear space for the new by clearing out the old and unnecessary. There’s a spirit of being open and a work in progress where coaching, writing and other intuitive skills might clear energy and make way for the new.
Being a teacher to help others to find voice and sing – Quiet Writing has at its heart the focus of helping people find their voice in the world. Whether it be career or creativity, the aim is to help people find expression to be able to sing their unique song, loud and clear.
Symbol of the bard – Quiet Writing is fuelled by a poetic spirit, by words and a love of language as a form of expression. Writing – both process and product – is a tool to self-understanding and self-expression that helps us connect with ourselves and others.

So I am so glad I paid attention to the lyrebirds running across my path. I’m so happy too there were resources available to help me understand further including Aboriginal Dreaming stories. This combination of intuition, research and thinking is valuable.

I can summarise this manifesto of sorts now but it’s taken time to coalesce and is still evolving. That first piece was written on the train nearly 6 months ago now. I am grateful for lyrebird energy focusing my attention and pointing out the signposts so I could bring them together. This vision for Quiet Writing is something I likewise offer in focused attention to you as we move into the future.

Thought pieces and acknowledgements

Austin Kleon’s 25 quotes to help you steal like an artist captures thoughts on collaging and coalescing influences. This includes the Jung quote above. I love this way of thinking about influence and uniqueness. We are our own curated version of our passions, experiences and ways of expressing. I believe though that we should acknowledge our influences and sources and make them explicit. This enables others to share in them and learn from them in their own way.

Lyrebird videos: Do watch some of them, so beautiful and fun, some wild and some captive birds, but all fascinating:

Lyrebird song – Stephen Powell Wildlife Artist

1963 CSIRO Superb Lyrebird footage

Lyrebird Song

Lyrebird in Australia talking to an Englishman!

My thanks to these sites and books for their insights on the lyrebird to integrate with my own intuitive insights:

Animal Energies – Lyrebird

nativesymbols.info – Lyrebird

Lyrebird medicine – your spirit has a voice beyond time

Australia – Aboriginal Dreamtime

Readers’ Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds

Image acknowledgements:

Images used under Creative Commons licences with thanks to the creators:

Superb lyrebird photographs from CSIRO Science Image (awesome image bank!)

Photographer : John Manger

Lyrebird as Totem by artist Ravenari via Deviantart

Keep in touch

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

A change of scenery – a photo-essay

March 15, 2015

At the beginning of this week, my partner Keith said to me, “How would you like to go to dinner in Mudgee on Friday?” This, an invitation to go away for the weekend at short notice, to meet some other practical needs but also to have a much needed break and change of scenery.

Usually needing weeks of notice for such things so I can plan ahead, my eyelids fluttered and I came up with a few reasons why maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Some of these were real. Once sorted through, we booked a guesthouse a few days in advance for the weekend and headed out of the city on Friday afternoon.

It was lovely to be leaving the city. We hit the city outskirts and climbed the mountains, making our way through fog and the sound of bellbirds as we wound our way west.

Before too long we were heading towards our destination as the sun was going down. The open landscapes darkened as the sky turned into blue-grey dusky-pink tones making a back-drop for the shadows of trees.

We arrived about 7:30pm to find our beautifully warm and inviting guesthouse with every detail in place, like bush flowers on the centre of the enormous dining table.

We headed out shortly after arrival for the promised dinner date, ending up at a wine bar with a rustic and modern feel. We immediately enjoyed settling in after our travels with music, great food and good local wine.

The next morning we woke to find out more about where we were. We found a clear open landscape with the bluest of blue sky days waiting for us.

Our hosts cooked us eggs benedict with mushrooms and the most divine hollandaise sauce and shortly after breakfast we set out for a further drive of two hours to Coonabarabran. We drove through many small country towns like Mendooran and Dunedoo.

Driving through, the local Mechanics Institute Hall at Mendooran founded in 1935 caught my eye. So lovingly cared for, it stood in stark contrast to many of the other faded buildings in town. The Mechanics Institutes were the early forerunners of technical and trades education and my great, great, great grandfather was a founding member of one in Goulburn.

There were signs painted on the sides of buildings evoking times past surrounded by growing grass and weeds.

We headed back to Mudgee and a late afternoon winery visit, tasting organic wines and sharing a grazing plate of fetta cheese, olives, prosciutto, rocket, sun dried tomatoes and crispy bread. There was an exceptional organic rose of the most pure colour especially when contrasted with the bluest of skies.

We returned to our abode in the shadow of mountains to the sun going down and the opportunity to quietly enjoy the guesthouse all to ourselves.

It was the most precious weekend and I feel rejuvenated. It made me realise how much a change of scenery can stimulate the senses and be an invitation to relax, reflect and be open to new opportunities. There’s a time of transition coming up again and I’m ready to embrace it now with a calm heart.

With much love and thanks to Keith for the invitation and dinner date and for so often knowing what I need and how to get me there. x

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inspiration & influence introversion music & images

To be silent

September 30, 2014

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

introversion music & images

Waterlily thoughts

September 7, 2014

One image can sum up a holiday, a phase of life. You wonder what draws you to photograph certain sights, certain objects. What makes you strive to capture this particular image this way or that. Or when you take so many photos like I did when in Japan recently, it’s surprising how one or two images can capture the whole time and experience, the reflection in the lens coming back.

The image and symbol for that recent holiday and right now is the waterlily. The photo I took of two waterlilies in a pool of many at Yahiko, a little village in north west Japan, somehow captures this time now.

I’ve always loved waterlilies, the beauty rising from the mud, the perfection blossoming, the majestic clarity they carry and hold.

They have popped up at different times in my life. An etching I did once years ago at a time of immense change when I was pregnant, features me jumping from one lily pad to another in some archetypal riotous spiralling motion.

At another earlier time, Australian author Kate Llewellyn’s ‘The Waterlily: A Blue Mountains Journal’ became a favourite reflective piece, read at a time of great turmoil many years ago when my heart was somewhat broken.

Kate captures twelve months of making a life in the Blue Mountains in her poetically infused language and style and especially the sense of being present through the flow of days and the feelings that ebb with them:

Shall I say in similar fashion, that it is now clear to me it is all visitors coming and going and then being alone and then visitors and cooking and cups of tea and talking and picnics and looking at the vast blue valley and the fire and the autumn, and then meals and making dinners and breakfasts and then looking at the plants and feeding the birds and stoking up the fire and writing in between. Something like that.

I must reread this lovely book and lose myself again in the rhythm of her days to refocus mine. There is pain and longing there but the calmness of the moments being harvested is soothing.

The Book of Symbols tells me that the lily generally is connected with queenly divinities, identified with purity and innocence. Further…

Highly regenerative, the lily surfaces even after fire or drought. Alchemy honored the lily as evoking the very essence of Mercurius, the spirit of pysche’s unconscious depths and transforming opus. As the quintessence, the longed for goal of the adept, lily represents psychic integrity that is no longer pulled apart by affect.

The waterlily particularly symbolises the cycle of life, birth and death, and with its ability to produce blossoms and fruits simultaneously represents universality.

In the spiritual arena of Hinduism, the concept of resurrection is symbolically denoted by the water lily. This is because at night (or during darkness) the lilies close their blossoms and with the first ray of the sun, they open. It is also a symbol of purity, because even though the plant grows in mud, the flower is pure and free from blemishes.

From What does a water lily symbolise?

So many ways of interpreting this image, so many waterlily thoughts.

So what does the waterlily symbolise? For me, it’s a symbol of renewal, of optimism, and of quietness, recognising the stillness and productivity in each moment and in the everyday. It’s about beauty and positivity rising from an environment of muddiness and complexity. It’s about honouring the fact that the mud the plant grows from is the anchor and grounding for so much more. Without it, the beauty would not exist.

What images are you noticing and what are they saying in your life?

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