I love finding Life Lessons around me!

I’ve just returned from Melbourne. My white mulberry tree, to my great joy, is still bearing fruit. So I’ve been making up for lost time and enjoying their sweetness.  (Although the ripe fruit does look a bit like witchety grubs at first glance!)

And then I noticed that some older berries still hanging on gamely to their branches despite being brown, shrivelled and shrunken. I’m not quite sure why, but I decided to eat them anyway. Maybe because I’d missed out on some of the crop by being away.

And these ugly brown mulberries taste best of all. Concentrated sweetness and a lovely chewy texture.

So first impressions aren’t always correct.

And ugly things can be better than the beautiful, pristine ones.

Life seems to be gliding by these last few weeks. Or maybe it’s more like a rushing river. The ebbs and flows of each day running into the next. Gathering momentum and getting faster and faster.

Looking back over the last few weeks and remembering some of the high points. 

Seeing the smiles on our two-month grandson.

Playing with my grand-daughters.

Doing a bush walk with Rosie in the Serpentine National Park, called the Kittys Gorge Trail. Kitty was a cow who wandered from her home and was found in the Gorge. It’s not clear on the website whether she was found dead or alive. But I’m going to go with “alive”. Although finding her must have been a fluke. Tall, thick forests and lots of undergrowth and a long, winding gorge with a little brook running through.

We walked along a bush trail, often alongside the Gooralong Brook, still bubbling quietly along, sometimes cascading over huge granite boulders. Lots of orange and black butterflies fluttering around. We used gum twigs to switch away the few early pesky summer flies.

As I rounded one bend in the track I jumped up and nearly back into Rosie, as a startled black snake who had been sunning itself on the path quickly slithered off into the bush. I think it got more of a fright than I did! It was a wonderful walk and a day to treasure.

This weekend I’m flying back to Melbourne to spend time with my mother who is still in hospital.

I’ve also read a couple of great books recently. “How We Love” by Milan and Kay Yerkovich. “Sacred Parenting” by Gary Thomas. Very challenging and sometimes confronting reads for me. I’ve still got so much more work to do on me! I’m such a long way from a finished product!

There’s always a bend in the river. We never know what’s around the next corner. We never spend long in quiet pools and backwaters. But the current of life pushes us back again and again into the eddys and swift currents and swirls us around, and rushes us down to the next bend of the river.

I love this quote I read recently from Robert Hastings. “Sooner or later we must realise there is no ideal destination; no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life outdistances us. So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead climb more mountains, eat more ice-cream, go barefoot more often, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more and cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. ‘Relish the moment’ is a good motto.”

Mum is in pain and in hospital. It’s hard to watch. When there’s nothing you can do to fix it or change it. Or really help her to bear it.  Watching someone you love, suffer is heart-rending.  Tonight on the way home from the hospital on the long train trip back to Mum’s unit, I finished reading Caroline Jones’ book “Through a Glass Darkly”.  Her story of love and grief with her father’s last illness and death. Maybe it’s not such a “suitable” book for me to be reading at such a time as this.  Or maybe it is.  I picked it up at an Op Shop recently. Caroline is searingly honest about her journey of grief and doubt and pain. But this quote gave me great comfort. “I’m noticing that there is solace in a moment … when I can savour beauty once again. It lifts a load, calling me into present time, away from regret and anxiety.” While walking through the little park near to Mum’s little unit, I took a photo of these beautiful blossoms, revelling in their exquisite, dainty beauty. She talks about the “joy and suffering of life in equilibrium, or in ebb and flow; the contradictions not seeking reconciliation but each suffusing, permeating and giving meaning to the other.” I don’t know what’s around the next bend in the road. None of us does. Platitudes and cliches won’t help. But I can still hang on to the certainties of God while I experience the uncertainties of life swirling around me.

I’m in Melbourne for a fortnight spending time with my mother who has an intractable chronic illness. I went for a walk yesterday along nearby Diamond Creek and came across this spot!

Something else that happened yesterday was that I read that only10% of our happiness comes from our circumstances. The rest of our happiness comes from within us. That’s challenging food for thought!

External factors – people, places, circumstances – will not play a major role in my happiness. It’s up to me to grow and change. To take responsibility for it. I love it! What a wonderful challenge.

It’s Spring! That means warm, sunny days. Fat, green buds on my mulberry tree are getting plumper. Filling out and slowly uncurling to reveal their bright green leaves. Dark green spinach leaves in my vegetable patch unfurl, getting ready for picking and eating.

In the little house around the corner, our much-anticipated grandchild is welcomed into the world by his excited parents and family. There’s new life everywhere as we look around with glad eyes.

But there’s no rest, despite it being such a bright, expectant season. Always it’s war!

In the vegetable patch there are spritely white cabbage moths darting about to lay their eggs to become fat green caterpillars turning the spinach and tomato leaves into ragged limp leaves. White spots of scale are being spread by the ants on the mulberry and laurel trees to weaken those trees.

Our little grandson is distressed by colic and wind pains. Squirming and murmuring and crying with pain.

In this Life, there’s never any final arrival. No end destination. I will never completely get my act together. I will always be learning. Trying things out. Hitting another bump in the road. Coming to another bend in the path with no idea of what’s around the corner. Muddling along. Often getting it completely wrong.

We never get to sit down with folded hands and completely fulfilled dreams and hopes.  We may have short seasons of rest and standing still. Seasons of excitement and prosperity. Seasons of seeing some dreams fulfilled.

But there are many seasons of pain, grief and loss.  Even seasons of terror sometimes. Sometimes these seasons all run together like the muddled waters of a water colour. Always, somewhere, whether on the edge or in the centre, there is war. Troubles. Difficulties.

In the Lord of the Rings, the travellers returned to the Shire after their adventures when it seemed that “All things now went well, with hope always of becoming still better; and Sam was as busy and as full of delight as even a hobbit could wish. (But there soon) appeared a shadow of old troubles.”

I can appreciate Henry Cloud’s thought, “Become a friend of process.. embrace it.. live in it.  The answers and end points are along the way, not in the beginning.”

Last Saturday we went on a bush walk in the Perth Hills, along a part of the Bibbulum Track. To the wonderful sounding Abyssinia Rock. A perfect day for it. Bright and sunny with just a hint of a slight breeze. It felt like a spring day.

The walk is through open jarrah and marri forests. A bush fire blazed through there several years ago, and we could see the charred and blackened trunks and the grotesque shapes of trees hollowed out by fire. It was amazing to see how the forest has regenerated over time. Some of the early spring wildflowers were blooming.  Yellow hibbertia or guinea flower glowing brightly. Very tiny little purple flowers poking up through the soil. One of the things I love about some wildflowers is that you have to bend closer and focus to see their tiny exquisite beautiful details. I have to take time and thought to appreciate them. A bit like life really!

We walked for over an hour, along the trail through the forests. Over a hill and along a ridge that looks out through the trees to the distant grey-green hills. Then down the hill where the forest grows denser. Over a tiny trickle of a stream out onto the huge but not high, wide, smooth grey dome that is Abyssinia Rock. At the top of the Rock I added my rock to the small cairn of stones there.

We’ve had some recent showers of rain. In the dips and hollows of the Rock were small clear rock pools that reflected back the wide blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. Around these pools were green swathes of moss.

But it wasn’t until I peered down closely at the rock pools and the mosses and lichens growing there, that I discovered a miniature world of exquisite detail and fragile beauty. Tiny, dainty flowers of pale pink and white. Dozens of different kinds of mosses and lichens. As varied as the big forest that we’d just walked through. Pale grey circles of lichens. Lizards about eight inches long sunning themselves on the rock, but quickly scuttling and darting away to the safety of their crevices at the sound of my heavy boots.

A beautiful, quiet contained world for such a brief time. A few days of hot sunshine and little rain and it would all disappear till next year’s late winter rains. A very short life barely noticed. But doing what they were destined to do by the great Designer.

Last Saturday we went on a bush walk in the Perth Hills, along a part of the Bibbulum Track. To the wonderful sounding Abyssinia Rock. A perfect day for it. Bright and sunny with just a hint of a slight breeze. It felt like a spring day.

The walk is through open jarrah and marri forests. A bush fire blazed through there several years ago, and we could see the charred and blackened trunks and the grotesque shapes of trees hollowed out by fire. It was amazing to see how the forest has regenerated over time. Some of the early spring wildflowers were blooming.  Yellow hibbertia or guinea flower glowing brightly. Very tiny little purple flowers poking up through the soil. One of the things I love about some wildflowers is that you have to bend closer and focus to see their tiny exquisite beautiful details. I have to take time and thought to appreciate them. A bit like life really!

We walked for over an hour, along the trail through the forests. Over a hill and along a ridge that looks out through the trees to the distant grey-green hills. Then down the hill where the forest grows denser. Over a tiny trickle of a stream out onto the huge but not high, wide, smooth grey dome that is Abyssinia Rock. At the top of the Rock I added my rock to the small cairn of stones there.

We’ve had some recent showers of rain. In the dips and hollows of the Rock were small clear rock pools that reflected back the wide blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. Around these pools were green swathes of moss.

But it wasn’t until I peered down closely at the rock pools and the mosses and lichens growing there, that I discovered a miniature world of exquisite detail and fragile beauty. Tiny, dainty flowers of pale pink and white. Dozens of different kinds of mosses and lichens. As varied as the big forest that we’d just walked through. Pale grey circles of lichens. Lizards about eight inches long sunning themselves on the rock, but quickly scuttling and darting away to the safety of their crevices at the sound of my heavy boots.

A beautiful, quiet contained world for such a brief time. A few days of hot sunshine and little rain and it would all disappear till next year’s late winter rains. A very short life barely noticed. But doing what they were destined to do by the great Designer.

“Busy – how to thrive in a world of too much” is the name of one of the most challenging, interesting, thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time. And I don’t lead a busy life!

Here’s a quote:

“Imagine you were told that one of two things would happen tomorrow: either you would be hit by a bus and become permanently paralysed from the neck down, or you would  win $27 million in the lottery. You were then asked to predict how happy you would be in a year’s time as either a paraplegic, and as a multi-millionaire.

“How much of a difference between your levels of happiness do you think there would be? … In fact, after a year, there would be hardly any difference in happiness levels! Hard to believe, but true. …. We massively overestimate the impact things will have on us, and the duration of that impact.

“… We sacrifice too much for successes that will provide too little in return. Success and happiness aren’t found in the outcome; they’re to be found in the journey.

“So commit to what you value the most, focus on what you love and on where you are strong. If our justification to ourselves for crazy busyness is a future success, we are giving up our effectiveness, relationships and wellbeing on a flawed belief.

“Work hard, but don’t sacrifice your present for the future; don’t cut too deep into what really matters for you: it just isn’t worth it. You’ll find your way to happiness whatever you do.”

“Busy” by Tony Crabbe. Check it out. It’s a great read.

I’ve read it once. Now I’m going to go back through it at a slower pace, and work out some strategies for my own life.

How did it get so that we make life so much harder and more complicated than it is?
I’m not minimising the multiple tragedies and agonies that are wracking and wrecking our planet. Heck.  I’ve just been reading the emails my sister has sent. She is in East Asia working with refugee organisations. Heart-rending stories that are relentlessly ongoing.
Everything can seem so overwhelming.
Even when you’re little, and you’re miserable with a bad cold. And missing your mummy who is busy for a few hours.
You can still notice. Stop what you’re doing. Look at the dried gum leaves from the nearby tree that have fallen on the green grass. Crouch down to look at them more closely.

And them start to pick them up. Looking at each one before you put them in your other hand. Seeing every one of those dried gum leaves in their differences of pattern, texture and shape. Finding great joy in collecting dried gum leaves.

Not wanting to ever stop.
No wonder Jesus tells us, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”