Sunday 22 July 2012: Here and there...happily.
As soon as I feel a little anxious about anything I try and count at least three things for which I am thankful for. My family left Cambodia as refugees to flee the war over 25 years ago. It is not hard for me to think back to how little we had then, and how much we have now. But I guess its not about material things, it's about having security and being able to influence the future.
It has been a conscious decision to filter out the voices that tell me that buying things will solve problems. As I walked through our little bit of Eden with my family and our friend Inma from Spain, I realised how far we have come along this path. My children and I were warmly dressed in hand-me-downs or op-shop items, the solar on our roof has just been re-activated, and I took comfort that we have a fridge full of delicious home-made food, a testament to the new and valuable skills I am slowing acquiring with joy.
We managed a brief impromptu catch up with Alan our other next door neighbor who has a large vegetable garden on the shared boundary. Silverhead Alan is a retired school principal who at the start of the year , half his luck discovered he had cancer in the first few months of retirement. He was doing an amazing amount of work despite being in the 'low' part of his chemo cycle. We swapped notes about the role of 'assessment' at school, and he kindly potted up some stray self-seeded silverbeet, tuscan kale and bok choy for me.
Inma and Mr Rosewarne were on a roo spotting mission this afternoon, so we tumbled into the car and headed off to the pub for a quick bout of live music and beers, and then rolled off to Kangaroo Ground. We caught sight of plenty of roos on their home ground, and we also caught fellow blipper Nevermore flying past on the roller-coaster dirt track. What luck!
The photo is of Bella with her watercolour paint hands. She loves to paint.
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