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Yesterday’s conflagration, tomorrows loneliness: a reflection on the 2019 Australian bushfires
Looking out from my Blue Mountains home west of Sydney, across the vast swathes of eucalypt forest and heath understorey, I feel the ancient landscape’s spacious, timeless presence permeate my mind. Worn by time and water, shaped by life over the many millions of...
Genuine hope within the moment point: moving beyond sugar-coated hope
In my last blog I reflected on the importance of having genuine hope, genuine in the sense of the preferred future state being realistic, better if the intermediary steps are actionable at the personal level. I contrasted this with the sugar-coating kind of optimism...
Hope for the wrong thing in the Anthropocene: finding courage within the “waiting”?
Listening to ABC Radio National this morning, there was a discussion about a large national survey of over 54,000 Australians - Australia Talks National Survey - about their views about a range of social and environmental issues and contexts. I listened to the social...
“We empty ourselves, we surrender, we unfold”: reflections on surrendering
In my walks for connection, my walks for escaping, walks into beauty and splendour, walks with my sons, the most challenging barrier has tended to not be physical but mental. Even when my intent is to become calm and connected, it often takes longer than I expect to...
Healing the wounds: my encounter with an Angophora tree
When I do my own NatureConnect I tend to just walk slowly without much of a plan. I know that I have a suite of activities up my sleeve I can choose from when the right moment arises. Given the challenge of quietening my busy mind, often filled with anxieties,...
Reflections on the role of the consciousness of connectedness in a Brave New World
How does Australian society reflect the dystopian worlds portrayed in the books, 1984 and Brave New World? Some reflections upon corporatized democracy, its aim of enslaving and disempowering citizens and the importance of connectedness to empower us to counter these...
Nourishing your journey to Wholeness: some reflections
My journey towards wholeness, like everyone else’s on this meandering, scrubby track, is a ‘work-in-progress’. In my dark moments I fall into self-judgment and feel like a Swiss cheddar cheese, filled with the gutted holes of negativity that I have sought...
Coping with the bad news about Climate Emergency
On the 28 May I attended a conference organised by the Uniting Church in North Parramatta around the psychological effects of the threat of the Climate Emergency (CE). It was an innovative, positive gathering of like-minded people concerned about our future and...
Reflecting upon an insight by Stephanie Dowrick from her 2009 book, In the company of Rilke.
“There is tremendous longing for the direct experience of God but not certainty. Here is a poet who talks to God while doubting God.” Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist who wrote exquisite prose of love, life and God. Stephanie is a...
![Living the [mindful] moment of Love](https://natureconnect.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/TRACK-400x250.jpg)
Living the [mindful] moment of Love
I was reading the thoughts of an American Sufi mystic and writer Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in his article in the Parabola journal, Living the Moment of Love. He speaks about practicing spirituality in this time of the “Great Forgetting”, the times of global environmental...
Lessons in vulnerability & openness
During the final stage of a recent solo NatureConnect session in an intimate forest enclosed gully, I met a thick, gnarly old eucalypt quietly beckoning me. In my meditative state I was drawn to the gaping crevasse spreading up the trunk, my intrigue pouring into the...
How does mindfulness cultivate a consciousness of connection?
Mindfulness has been used in various contexts – spiritual, psychological and therapeutic - to refer to a contemplative technique of taking a non-judgmental approach to observing the flow of experience within each moment. As well as technique, it can be used to...
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