Let It Be in Twenty Fourteen

As the  festive season came to an end, and I was faced with the reality of the year ahead, I felt a little hesitant. The temperatures are over 40 degrees, there has been no decent rain for months, it is hot and windy, dry and dusty, there are already a pile of bills to pay, farmers all around us are gripped in drought, I am stuck inside with two small children trying to stay cool (they have squeaky little voices, they are always hungry and they make masses of mess EVERYWHERE) and after we sat down and wrote our goals for the year ahead I was exhausted and overwhelmed.  I bemoaned to a friend "I don't know if I'm looking forward to another year exactly the same as last year, how boring".

Then it all changed, I opened my "Arrow Bone Marrow Transplant Foundation" newsletter and read about how Allan Frenkel underwent treatment for Acute Lymphatic Leukaemia at 18 years old and how the Walk 4 Whit team participated in the City2Surf in memory of Whitney Lane who passed away last year aged 19 years.  Now I am praying I have a year exactly the same as last year.

I pray my children continue to grow and learn, to be happy and safe and to be free and spirited.  I pray my husband and I continue to be fit and healthy so we can keep working hard to build our dream and  laugh and live side by side and take time to enjoy all the special moments shared while we have a young family.  I pray I get to keep talking and laughing with my sister and friends and that I keep growing and learning.  I pray I have a spiritual and creative year ahead.  I want to be softer and kinder to myself and others and now I am excited.

This quick and significant change in my attitude made me realise how easy it is to become a spoilt little toad when we have so much.  I have so much of everything; love, food, freedom, time and I still want more of everything, something.  I had the hide to say that another perfectly peaceful and happy year would be boring.  I kind of want to slap myself.

My theme song for the year is "Let It Be" by the Beatles, every time I try to plan years into the future, or fret about money I am going to sing this song and hopefully relax.  For as long as I can remember I have wanted to see how the future will turn out, this has never happened, but so far each time I get to the future it has been more amazing than I could of ever dreamed possible.  I need to trust this will continue to be the case.

We watched a movie about magicians the other night and they said the closer you look the less you will see!  I think this is true of life, when I look too closely at things, overanalyse thoughts or ideas, think too long about small decisions, try and micromanage each day and force decisions and outcomes, give myself nightmares over things that might not ever happen, then I become blind to the beauty and the gifts right in front of me.

After all the Bible says "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths" Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV.  I'm going to Let It Be and not keep such a tight grip on this life which is fragile and precious, and see how it all works out :-)  Happy New Year!!

Don't take the goat

I came hurtling around the laundry door about to launch into a fascinating story about who I had just bumped into down town when I realised Craig was on the phone.

“I just don’t think so”.

Silence

“Uh um, yes I understand”

Silence

Always the eternal sticky beak I was ease dropping, his tone was much more serious than usual, he was really concentrating and I could not figure out who he was talking to or what they were discussing.  After a long pause he says “Ok then, we will see how it goes, bring her out this afternoon”.

After he hangs up the phone my very practical and very kind husband turned to me and said “Fr Scott is bringing out the goat this afternoon.  She has destroyed their backyard and he isn’t allowed to keep her”.  Without taking a breath he continued “Council have already been around to say it is prohibited to keep a goat in town.  He has nowhere else to take her, we will just put a pen down in the paddock, and it will be fine.  Templeton and the goat might even become friends.”

I gently reminded him “I thought you told me, when we saw the very cute baby goat at the Bazaar, in no uncertain terms Don’t Take The Goat, it will destroy everything”.

“Yeah I know” he said, turning to head outside, he mumbled on his way past “It will be fine, I will make sure she can’t get out of her pen”.  The gauze door closed and he was off  to plan what to do with the goat.  I know he didn’t really want the goat either, but when it comes to animals he is a softy, he befriends them, talks to them and they are extremely loyal to him in return.

After lunch we headed to the paddock to goat proof the pen we had been using for our poddy calf.  It was hot, hard work but we were proud of it, it looked like a fort, completely impenetrable.  Not long after we had finished a young, enthusiastic, kind of ugly goat arrived.  She was not a cute baby goat anymore, with big floppy ears but rather she had long skinny legs, a fat tummy, crazy eyes on either side of her head and a kind of speckled black, grey shaggy coat and two stumpy little horns starting to grow out of her head.

Not to be deterred we introduced her to the pen and Templeton, the poddy calf, who she was suppose to become friends with.  After trying to head butt the calf repeatedly with her tiny little horns she went exploring, and right there in front of us she jumped up and over the pen we had worked so hard to build!  Here began a long and repetitive pattern of Goatie escaping from the pen, Craig adding more wire and mesh to try and keep her in and everybody shouting ‘That bloody goat’.

Every time she escaped she would head straight up to the house.  She had spent the first few months of her life in a residential backyard, with two other dogs, four children and some chickens, she was absolutely domesticated  and thought she belonged up at the ‘main house’ and was an integral member of the family.  We had a very different idea, we wanted to fatten her up quickly and eat her as soon as possible.

We did try to be loving custodians of the goat, we would go down early in the morning and cut new tree limbs for her to munch on, we would let her out so she could run around the paddock and stretch her legs.  Each time she would do a couple of crazy tricks, running really fast, then jumping up in the air ducking and weaving her head.  We thought it was hilarious, we would start to relax and enjoy the fun but next minute she would do a mad dash back towards the house and eat the new growth of all newly planted jacarandas, rip the newly laid turf out at the roots, jump on the beautiful timber outdoor setting and cause mayhem and destruction.  We would then chase after her shouting “That bloody goat”.

After a week or two we would forget these incidents and we would let Goatie out again.  On one occasion we thought it would be brilliant to include Goatie in one of Sage’s eKindy web lessons.  We went and dragged big branches onto the deck, laid down some blue fabric for the creek, got big rocks, it looked beautiful, and then we added Goatie.  Well only about 30 seconds into the web lesson with the Brisbane based kindy teacher Goatie jumped onto the table and head butted the computer, scaring the life out of the teacher, Sage cried because Goatie was ruining everything and I tried, in vein, to regather and make the session work.  Eventually we gave up, I mumbled “That bloody goat” under my breath and dragged her back to the pen. Goatie thought the venture had been a great success, she couldn’t understand why everybody else wasn’t happy.

So finally, Craig had perfected the pen and Goatie was securely restrained then a friend who is a Vet popped in to visit, she suggested the goat probably had worms and would need to be wormed and have her pen relocated to a different part of the paddock.  Well this did lead to a number of expletives being expressed but we did it, we moved the 10 very heavy steel panels and all the wire and mesh down under a beautiful shady tree.  It took weeks to secure it because Goatie got out every time we turned our backs.  On New Year’s Eve we had all just gone to bed at about 1am, we had friends camping out on the deck, at about 3am we heard a loud shout of “The bloody goat is trying to eat our tent”.  By the light of the full moon only 3 hours into the new year I could see her out there chomping on the leaves of our house yard trees, the pen was too far away so I chained her up in the shed, next to a huge tuft of grass, where she ‘bleated’ all morning until the sun came up.  So on New Year’s morning we all rose from our beds saying ‘that bloody goat’.

Eventually we gave in to Goatie’s demands, we built a pen in our backyard so she could see us and talk to us all the time.  This made her so happy, plus we could feed her extra food much more regularly so she got too fat to escape from her pen.  All was good, but we did want to reclaim the back part of our yard, so the time came to ring the abattoir and enquire and the humane slaughter of the goat.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, the girls and I were out and Craig came home from work to take her to the abattoir.  It was such a difficult occasion, we thought we hated that goat but we were sad.  She had worked her way into our hearts and we had developed a relationship with her, that was not supposed to happen.  It was not made any easier when the slaughterer said to Craig “Is this your pet mate?” as Goatie looked up at Craig and bleated pleadingly to be taken home again.

On Friday 18^th October Goatie was lovingly marinated using a traditional Ugandan recipe and she was  BBQed on Saturday, when 45 of us gathered in the name of fellowship and fun to taste the  bloody goat and she was delicious.  It was an afternoon filled with laughter, singing, love and joy, it was a memorable event that people will talk about for years to come.  In the end Goatie bought us all a huge amount of joy and we are so eternally grateful that we did take the goat.

At the end of the feast Fr Scott said "Today at the Farmer's Markets I saw turkey chicks ... anybody keen"!!

She has lost another shoe

An ongoing dilemma in our home is shoes being lost!  Not the pair of shoes, it is usually just one and it drives me batty. I make threats of “If you lose these shoes you are not getting anymore” but the reality is we live in a town where the temperature is 35 degrees plus from September to April so if you walk on a footpath or road with no shoes it does actually seriously burn the sole of your foot.  As soon as I see a shoe removed I search for it, in an attempt to return it the shoe basket, but sometimes I must admit I get distracted and in a blink of an eye the shoe is gone.

 I have not found an effective way to overcome this problem, so off we go down to Target to buy yet another pair of shoes and this sparks a great dialogue in my head about how money doesn’t grow on trees, then I start listing off all the other bills that need to be paid in the next month, including electricity, telephone, rates, food, car expenses, the myriad of insurances, birthday presents, Christmas presents and I start getting a feeling of dread deep in my stomach.  Sadly, this does not curb my spending; it actually inspires me to spend more because I think ‘Well this ship is going down so we may as well go out in style’.  If there are any Financial Planners reading this don’t panic, I have already been told that I live in a perpetual financial crisis that is not going to end well.

So, as you read in a previous blog, the realities of life sometimes lead to me suffering from the symptoms of P.I.M.P’s or alternatively I pretend my  life is a classic Australian television drama, and I am one of the main characters.  In my television drama I am the well educated, corporate who has abandoned the rat race to realise my organic, hippy, free range tree change in a small country/coastal town, not very original but it works for me.

Haha, do I sound completely mental now, I do love being in my television drama.  After writing my blog about having a poo in my pants a number of concerned friends and relatives urged me to expand my mind, one signing me up for a brain detox program, one suggesting I join the local writers group and one suggesting I need serious therapy.  Following their advice, today, in real life, I went to the library and participated in the Roma Creative Writing Group which I loved and I am going to embark on writing short stories to help expand my mind.  Then I took the girls for a milkshake at a café and I knew everybody there so had fun partaking in light hearted chit chat and it was all so Home and Away/Koala Brothersish.  It made me feel happy and slightly aloof from the reality of bills, endless (endless) housework and the demanding squeaky voices of my beautiful children.

As I write I am starting to think that the heat and wind, the lack of structure that school holidays bring and spending a vast majority of my time with a 3 and 5 year old, I may have lost my grip on sanity, I may be slowly descending into a weird and wonderful world of lunacy.  The exciting thing is I have been reading my Bible a lot more in the past week and every time I open it I feel like Jesus is encouraging me to explore this (temporary) craziness.  So I am keen to document the process because I am hopeful once school returns and structure becomes important (I know I function much better when I am busy) my mind will recalibrate and I will be far more normal, and I remain confident my life has a definite and meaningful purpose and this little journey is integral to discovering my specific objective.

Anyway, I’m off to start my brain detox so my mind will be clear and clean which will hopefully lead to much more normal posts from me - fingers crossed  J

I had a poo in my pants

I often get a poo in my pants, not literally of course, but you know when you just feel sorry for yourself, thinking you are awesome and getting frustrated because the rest of the world doesn’t see it.  You feel unappreciated and taken for granted by all those around you.  It is this awful feeling that I am referring to when I say I have a poo in my pants (P.I.M.Ps).

When I am experiencing all the symptoms of P.I.M.Ps life if not fun, I suffer dark moods, paranoia, helplessness and frustration that nobody understands me.  It results in a lot of sulking but sometimes it leads to me quitting jobs, ending friendships, yelling at my children and sometimes husband with threats to leave home FOREVER and I get cranky at God!  It is all consuming. 

The best way to describe it is like a beautiful crystal clear warm beach, lovely gentle waves, everybody safely swimming, laughing, joking, completely emerged in the magnificence of the moment.  Then completely unexpectedly a big, angry wave starts to quietly form in the background, no one notices and then all of a sudden it roars towards the shore, sucking up more water, building force and then crashing with ferocity on the sandy beach, leaving everybody dishevelled, upset, a little scared and debris scattered across the sand.  In this scenario I am both the wave and one of the innocent people dumped by the wave and unceremoniously plonked on the sand with my swimmers dislodged and revealing some of my most private areas to all other beach goers.

The severity, duration and frequency of the illness is irregular and difficult to measure, it wouldn’t occur more than once a month and can last for one hour to one week, depending on how successful I am at convincing myself that my life is repetitive, my family is ungrateful and nobody understands me because I am obscure and truth be told fascinating in a way that words cannot describe, haha. 

There are a number of treatments to remove the poo from my pants and improve my outlook on life.  Firstly I eventually realise I have ‘a poo in my pants’ and usually this thought makes me smile and the symptoms pass.  Otherwise I see something shiny, sparkly or pretty and this also makes me smile and the symptoms pass.  I can see a beautiful smile from my friends, children or husband, or even just go outside and water my seedlings all of which can make the symptoms pass. 

Once the poo is removed from my pants I can see the sun shining, I hear the birds singing, I can enjoy the children laughing and I remember how incredibly awesome my life is.  I am being a little bit cavalier about this but I do generally worry that one day the feelings might overwhelm me and I just might run away.  I also worry we may be creating generations of people who will suffer this illness, some with less severe symptoms and others will suffer profound and possibly life changing side effects.  At the slightest setback, whether it be feeling a little bit lonely, not having the perfect day, having to work a little bit harder to get something, waiting in line a little bit longer than expected, any of these little inconveniences can lead to the onset of the dreaded P.I.M.Ps. 

Building resilience is vital, and there is a lot of research around helping to build resilience in our children.  I think awareness is also important and I look forward to seeing a government advertising campaign in the future helping people recognise the symptoms of P.I.M.Ps and suggesting possible treatments.  Heheheh that makes me smile J

I've got peace like a river ... not

Just a few minutes ago I was standing in my dark pantry, quietly unwrapping my last Lindor chocolate, trying to enjoy the soft delicate milk chocolate before my children found me and said 'I want one', 'I'm hungry', 'What can I do?' ... Luckily I could have a quiet chuckle to myself about how absurd it was to hide from my family and eat a chocolate but it did make me realise how hard it is to find peace sometimes.

Recently in Sunday School and Religious Instruction we have been singing 'I have peace like a river, I have peace like a river, I have peace like a river in my soul'.  I love this song but I can't say it truthfully applies to me. For a big part of my teenage years and most of my 20's I had very little peace, I was searching for something and I did not know what it was.  Soon after giving birth to our first daughter I found God and I found peace, since 2008 I have loved Jesus with my whole heart and just writing it makes me smile.  However I am still searching.  There is so much more God has to offer me and for a million reasons I can not quite grasp it.  It is an ongoing journey, and my challenge is to find peace, not be constantly frustrated by my inability to fully comprehend God's promise to me and all of mankind.

Some of my most peaceful moments are watching my children, whether it is trying to do long jump for the first time, to finish a puzzle all by themselves, dancing their little hearts out in the annual dance concert, singing in Sunday School or sleeping peacefully in their beds.  During these moments my heart feels completely at ease, completely captivated by their brilliance and beauty.  However, the mess they make, the continuous questions they ask, the food and drinks they need, the number of clothes they wear in one day all of these things do not bring me peace.  I can sometimes feel suffocated and very angry that my whole life revolves around serving them, what about me?  I need to find peace in every aspect of being a Mum, not just in the perfect moments.

I have been blessed that I was born at a time and in a country where every child has an opportunity to be educated, I was fortunate enough to go to university and obtain a degree and I have had a number of really enjoyable and rewarding jobs, that enabled me to be creative, productive and be recognised and appreciated within my community.  However, I am left feeling incredibly frustrated now because I don't know how to combine working in a meaningful and enjoyable job and being a good mum and wife.  I don't work at the moment and keeping up with cooking, shopping, washing, cleaning, homework, gardening and still having enough energy to be emotionally available and kind to my family and friends is a struggle.  I can't see a solution.  Instead of just enjoying this time at home I panic about what kind of job I will ever have in the future that will not cause our family unnecessary stress.

To add to this I feel so guilty that I don't feel peace all the time.  I read books and blogs about it, I pray about it, I am sure I bore my husband to tears talking about it, but none of it changes the fact that most of the time I do not feel peace like a river in my soul and I don't know how to change that.  I will continue to practise thankfulness, because I am truly overwhelmed with the abundant blessings in my life, but I just hope I don't have to wait till I get to 90 to feel peace here on earth.

Do you feel peace like a river in your soul?

A salty kind of day

Wikipedia says "Salt is essential for animal life, but can be harmful to animals and plants in excess. Salt is one of the oldest, most ubiquitous food seasonings and salting is an important method of food preservation . The taste of salt (saltiness) is one of the basic human tastes.

Last night I was watching Grand Design on ABC and the couple built their home in a 1550's shed, it was massive, an overwhelming project but the result was nothing short of spectacular.  The lady with multi-coloured hair whose name was Freddie said "I just want a different experience from life".  She didn't want to live in a house with separate rooms and cosy carpet, their home became a creative masterpiece and their daughter could roller-skate everywhere and they had a wild meadow that grew up to their back door! 

It made me think of how much we do in life just because everybody else does it, how early in life do we stop asking why, how young are we when we stop thinking there might be a different way?  Often I see quotes that say "Life is too short to be ordinary" or "Refuse to be average.  Let your heart soar as high as it will".  The Bible says "You are the salt of the earth.  But if salt loses its saltiness...It is no longer good for anything...You are the light of the world...let your light shine before others" (Matthew 5:13-16).  Salt adds flavour and light gives life.  How much salt and light can your life have if you are average, if you are doing exactly the same as everybody else? When I hear quotes like these my heart goes a flutter, I get all excited, but the truth is I don't actually have any idea how to push boundaries, how to be anything but average and ordinary.  My parents, my schooling, my extended family and friends did a great job of making me pretty normal.  I have never had any real life experience with people who question the norms and live an alternative lifestyle, I have no real concept of doing anything other than what everybody else is doing, what I have learnt to accept as normal.

I get glimpses of a different way to be, but I am way too comfortable with my existing life to really challenge my way of thinking or change anything, but as I gain a deeper understand of the Gospel I get a strong feeling there are alternatives.  I do not want to be weird, I want to fit in, but at the same time I do want a different experience from life, I definitely want our daughters to have a different experience from life.   How can our heart soar with so many long held and deep seeded beliefs securing it tightly to this earthly world.

Jesus said "I've come to change everything, turn everything rightside up - how I long for it to be finished" Luke 12:49-50.  I think we are still a long way from understanding and comprehending the wonderful life that is available to us.  Oh but how to unlock the answers, how to discover the best way to enjoy earth for the short time we are here, without going crazy questioning everything just for the sake of it.

So my philosophy for the moment is "Don't think about it, just heart it", that is a Justine Miller original quote right there.  I have all the answers inside me already, placed gently on my heart from the moment I was created.  It is my head, silly logic, my fear and worry, my previous experiences and hurts and learnt knowledge that keep the answers hidden from me.  I want to release myself from unnecessary conventional thinking and unloving social norms and discover what it truly means to live in the spirit, I want my life to have the perfect amount of salt.

What are your  thoughts on salt, and life?

The possession obsession

Is a lot of your time taken up looking after all your things?  Tasks like washing, drying, folding and packing away, picking up, washing up, cleaning, maintaining, painting, mowing, detailing and working longer hours to earn  enough money to pay for all these things and buy some more.  Is your pantry full of food and you still don't know what to have for dinner?  Does any of this really bring you great joy?   I almost feel smothered, physically, emotionally and spiritually, by the stuff, the responsibility, the financial burden of all that surrounds me.

I think I am trapped in a possession obsession, which helps makes some people very rich but just keeps most of the world enslaved, destroying our souls, distracting us from what is truly important.

I look at our gorgeous girls, filled with so much love and fun, learning new and amazing things every single day and I do not want them to go to school, get a good education and earn money just so they can spend their entire lifetime wanting and needing more stuff.  Surely there is more, this can not be our purpose.  I do not want to be a rich fool and I do not want to raise our children to be rich fools.

I do love nice things, I agree with the mantra 'Life is short, live beautifully'.  There are spectacularly beautiful things everywhere, it is truly special to be able to own some of these beautiful items, but we don't need to own all of them!  I entered the workforce in 1999 and nearly every cent I have earned in that time has been spent on me, on creating and maintaining a lifestyle that I enjoy, buying clothes, shoes, going to the hairdresser, purchasing magazines and books, travelling around Australia, buying gifts, a car and a family home etc.  None of these things are bad, I have not lived excessively but I have lived greedily and selfishly and I still do.  In this time I could have put a lot more of this money to greater use, I could have sponsored more children, invested more heavily in projects that genuinely improve the life of others, respected each dollar for what it was, a gift and a blessing to be used to bless the lives of others.  I have not used this money wisely.

I still don't have the urge to get rid of all my things, I am not courageous or committed enough to sell all my possessions and give the money to the poor and then live a very meagre existence.  However, I am going to consciously work on my attitude and approach to the purchases I do make.  As a family we will look at all our things and donate what we don't really need and then be much more stringent about the items that do enter our house, and be much more purposeful when we buy gifts for others. 

I will always love beautiful things, these are precious gifts for us to enjoy and appreciate, but I do not want this short, beautiful and amazing time I have on earth to be focussed or obsessed with owning, maintaining, looking after and admiring possessions.  After all, the day I die it all ceases to mean anything at all, my family will probably look at it all and drop it off at the closest op shop.  I don't want my life's worth to be put in some cardboard boxes and dropped out the front of Vinnies.  Do you think you might be trapped in a possession obsession too?