Beauty – Page 2

City Lights

Filed Under: Reflections · April 6, 2010 · 1 Comment ·

I love our city of Melbourne.

I don’t live there .. I choose to live way out of town. Not actually in a rural area, as I’m in the outer eastern suburbs. But I love my little corner of the world at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, where I’m surrounded by trees, possums use my garden fences as their thoroughfare and I wake to the sounds of magpies and kookaburras each morning.

However I also adore visiting the city, a busy, bustling feast for the senses. It’s a fabulous smorgasbord of sights, sounds and smells. A colourful cornucopia that is ever changing, always fascinating.

I especially love the pastime of people-watching. Such variety and diversity to absorb!

I was in town on Saturday night, heading for a show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

And, as always, the walk to the venue is almost as enjoyable as the show itself! My people-watching hobby can go into overdrive. The noisy, glittering crowd becomes a series of snapshots …

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Evening Seashore

Filed Under: Reflections · August 17, 2009 · 2 Comments ·

I drop back
letting the others and their voices
fade ahead of me.
This is not a talking place,
this beach –
I don’t even want
to follow their footsteps.
The sun has gone
But its echo warms my feet
in the rock pools.
I wriggle my toes
in the sand
near intricately
limpet-patterned rocks.
All I can hear is the sea –
even the seagulls are quiet
at this end of the day.
And I bask
in the sensuality
of silence.

Indra’s Net

Filed Under: Archive Slider, Journeys, Reflections, Resources, Stories · April 30, 2009 · 2 Comments ·

There’s a beautiful Hindu legend about the god Indra, who commissions an artisan to craft a vast net across the universe.

When the net is complete, at each junction Indra places a shining jewel – the facets of which reflect every other jewel in this cosmic network.

Each jewel represents a single atom, cell or life form in the Universe and all are intimately connected with one another. Any change in one jewel produces a change, however small, in all the others.

The legend also reminds me of a passage from Sinuhe the Egyptian, written by Mika Walthari in 1949:

For I, Sinuhe, am a human being. I have lived in everyone who existed before me and shall live in all who come after me. I shall live in human tears and laughter, in human sorrow and fear, in human goodness and wickedness, in justice and injustice, in weakness and strength. As a human being I shall live eternally in all mankind.

Both of these stories – a 3rd century metaphor and a post-WWII novel – resonate for me in relation to our modern, networked world.

As human beings we are all interconnected. Even a small change in one of us can ripple out through those connections to make changes in others.

Or, as Peter Block said more recently, we can “change the world, one conversation at a time”.

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My thanks to Doug Benner for his kind permission to use the beautiful photograph above.