It’s easy to think of relationship in terms of people around us. And of course, that’s the first place we find them, beginning from ‘day one’ when as infants, we are held in the arms of our parents. But of course, what happens after that is what counts. Is the relationship nurtured and therefore does it grow?

At grass roots, to nurture means to take care of … something. And speaking of grass, our entire environment can speak volumes in terms of how we might care for the people in our lives. The smallest seeds still need a regular drink of water!
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Last month I talked about loss and grief and the process of grieving.  While grieving  is always an individual process and has no time limit, part of the journey involves the re-discovery of happiness.

I think the pursuit of happiness has become unrealistically popularized and largely misunderstood.  Happiness can never be one attainable state but a feeling that comes in ‘chunks’ which, when put together, may result in contentment, a far more powerful and productive state of being.  So how can we capture those chunks of happiness, even when all seems lost?

I was reminded recently of that wonderful quote by Woody Allen: 80% of success is showing up.

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And so we come to the beginning of another month … a New Year and already February has arrived!

What does February mean for you? For me, February means the birthday of my father (on Valentine’s Day in fact) and a gentle reminder of someone so dear; it means long, hot summers and time at the beach; and another birthday, that of a very special school friend with whom I spent many fun filled hours in our growing years. The gift of her fantastic enjoyment of life still fills me with joy in every email we exchange.

And February also represents the beginning of the school year. After so much holiday freedom seeing those ‘back to school’ banners in the stores can trigger very difficult emotions for some kids. Not perhaps so for the older ones, but very often for those facing Years 2, 3 and 4. Challenges abound because it’s in those years one can begin to feel the pressures surrounding acceptance or rejection – and consequently, the experience of loss, confusion and anxiety.

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I’m writing this on a peaceful Sunday afternoon with the warble of magpies providing a suitable musical accompaniment to my thoughts. It’s two weeks since we returned from exploring Western Australia – the big State! And it is big – and in its vastness we were introduced to a range of extraordinary and interesting entities that capture some of the history of our planet.

Perhaps the most remarkable of these was our viewing of the stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay. These ancient marine wonders are intriguing and unique rock formations – fossils that have developed over some 3.43 billion years and indicate to palaeontologists the earliest forms of life on Earth. Though they appear inanimate, hidden within is vital growth! Sometimes described as living rocks, stromatolites are formed from microbial communities (cyanobacteria) that reside therein and continue, extraordinarily, to build them. It is believed that these communities, through the process of photosynthesis, were responsible for originally increasing the level of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere sufficiently to enable life as we know it to develop.

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We hear a lot about ‘resilience’ these days. I think the word is often interpreted as some extraordinary toughness that is needed if we’re to survive challenges that appear in life on a regular basis.

But resilience is essentially about flexibility and the ability to “bounce back”; about being equipped to react with an element of elasticity as opposed to inflexible, rigid and uncompromising attitudes.

As it happens, Ainslie Meares encapsulated the word resilience in one of his remarkable poems circa 1980 and long before it became the catch word of the 21st century:

Some run for shelter,
The tree holds firm
And sways with the storm,
The eagle is borne higher and higher (Thoughts, 1980)

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