A simple step

Zoos are cool places. When was the last time you went to a zoo? This morning (as with most Sunday mornings) was Amelie time, Dad and daughter spending quality time together, so we went off to the zoo.. Wandering along the paths listening to the cries of the spider monkeys echoing throughout the park, we seemed to silently enter another world .. a world that is made up of the energy of living things, a world that does not get concerned with the time of day, the weather or what is going on outside the realm of the animals living there. Time kind of becomes irrelevant. That's peaceful. We saw the cheetahs having lunch, the gibbon sitting in her usual spot on a branch by her enclosure fence, sitting watching people come and go, the baby giraffe galloping across the 'savanna' towards her mother. We smelt the rhinos and watched the ostrich pecking the ground. It always surprises me how calm small children are when they are at the zoo - in awe of the animals around them, or ...

21 degrees, the sun's rays flickering through the leaves of a pine tree, a cool breeze carrying white fluffy clouds across an azure coloured sky...a fantail chirping, flicking its' tail from side to side, the faint aroma of tea tree..a small stream of water trickling down a low rocky surface. No people. Life can always be like that when we want it to be. In those times when everything just seems to close in around us, too much to do, too many people making demands on us, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. To just stop and look around. We get more and more 'het up' and why? What does that achieve? Life is easy, life is a breeze - just make it so .. ;)

An interesting word and an even more interesting emotion, (assuming that is is an emotion? certainly feels like one when you feel it!). From the age of around 14 months, we all succomb to feelings of frustration ... and after 42 odd years, those feelings still appear from time to time. At 14 months, they tend to relate to the fact that a square block won't fit into a square hole, because your hand is too small and the block is sitting at the wrong angle. Or, you see a picture of a cat on a book you want, and the book is under a pile of other books in a box you cannot move. Or... you want a toy out of the bottom of the toybox and you cannot reach it. As time passes, those frustrations turn to things like, 'I've lost my keys......, again', or 'why does my computer take 20 minutes to start up these days', 'why hasn't that person called me back with an answer yet'... Wikipedia says 'Frustration is a common emotional response to opposition. Relate...

Have a go at this .. go on, it's quite interesting and will only take five minutes or so, and follow each step sequentially without jumping to the next or the end before you have completed the step you're on.. Look around you and find something that you can pick up that is a raw / natural material, like wood or stone, a leaf of seed, a nut or maybe a fruit of some kind. Now hold it in your hand and feel its weight and mass. Close your eyes and sense how heavy or light it feels in your hand. Sense how the object in your hand feels against your skin, how it is warm or cold, soft or hard, smooth or rough. Now place your nose over it and breathe in, sense the aroma it gives off for a minute or so - think about how it makes you feel. Look closely at the object, notice how it looks, its' form its' shape, the space it occupies in your hand. See how it fits into your palm. Look at the colour of the object, the surface of it - is it matt, shiny, bright? Focus on the ob...

We (or at least a lot of us) have heard of the law of attraction and the book and film called The Secret - it's interesting stuff... it got me thinking about the amount of time I (and my closest friend) spend playing on PC games and Internet games like Farmville (which recently won an award as a social gaming site) and the fact that the games offer us a means of creating a new, virtual reality for ourselves. They allow us to dream and to form a reality around those dreams - pretty cool stuff. The question I have been pondering from a negative angle, was whether or not these 'virtual realities' that we create could act as a means of blocking us from achieving our desires. For example, if we're playing Sims and creating a new home for our Sims family, based around our personal desires for a new home, does this mean that the Universe will see us as having achieved that desire - the new home has after all manifested itself, albeit in a virtual fashion.. Thinking about i...

How often have you heard the words 'control freak'? Quite a lot I'm guessing. I had a meeting today at which the person I was with commented on my tendency to want to control and this got me thinking... In nature, is anything controlled? Does the weather change to suit itself - is it controlled by God or the Universe? Do flowers control their growth? Do animals control their behaviour? We are all keen on achieving peace of mind for ourselves, which in essence could be argued to mean relaxed, at peace, out of control. Feelings of control tighten us, they create seen and unseen restrictions, boundaries. A financial controller's job is to control the purse strings, mission control effectively drive the actions of the crew on the space shuttle, but nowhere in nature do I see or feel control - why is that? Someone once wrote that the best way to obtain power is to give it away, and that principle could apply equally to control - if you have ever suddenly felt 'in t...

A funny day. I have my three boys here for the holidays at the moment who are all under 11, and today we decided to get the ferry from Devonport to Auckland City to have lunch with my Partner, Ali. We drove to Devonport and I duly parked the car in the car park, tried to buy a ticket (the machine wasn't working), ran to get on the boat and off we went on the 11.15am ferry towards the Sky Tower and Downtown Auckland. A couple of hours later, well fed and watered, we arrived back at the ferry terminal in Auckland and waited for 20 minutes for the ferry back over the water (it's only a 15 minute trip). The ferry arrived, but this time it was a different type of boat and much busier. We hopped on, checking with the ferry man that the ferry was the right one and going to Devonport (as I had reservations), and off we went.. As we neared the Devonport ferry terminal, Sam, my eldest pipes up .. 'hey Dad, this doesn't look familiar at all. This isn't where we left the car...