I'm back

It's summer. It's hot. It's already 30 degrees, and only 7:30am. Yesterday in the city it was 40.8 degrees, and still Melbournians were buying their steaming hot lattes. I love the way this city is addicted to its coffee!

I feel as though I am just ready to start the year now. The last month or so has involved a lot of planning and soul-searching, and re-planning and dreaming. I am quite excited about the prospects for this year, although it is also very daunting.

It's funny how the idea of moving from one year to the next can be such a powerful motivator for taking stock of one's life and making decisions. Who doesn't make new year's resolutions of some kind or another? But in actual fact the difference between December 31 and January 1 is just that the earth has made one more turn - the importance of these dates is purely in our minds. Still, it's a good opportunity to plan and dream!

The Best Christmas Present

A few drops fell on Friday night, and yesterday afternoon, and then it rained all last night. The sound of heavy drops falling on my roof is something I haven't heard for what seems like months. The parched earth and thirsty trees are soaking it up. It is putting out the bushfires and bringing relief to all of us in this drought, and especially the people whose livelihood is directly dependant on the land. What better Christmas present could we have?


(Image from stock.xchng)

A Charn Sunset

The light from the setting sun was blood red on the trunks of the gum trees as I walked through Westerfolds Park this evening. The smoke from the bushfires is a feint haze in the air, but more than enough change the light to remind me of the old world of Charn, in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, a book that I hadn't thought about for years.

Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon the world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that whithered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

There are rivers and lakes in this country that are little more than dust, thanks to the drought, and with a Prime Minister who is gung-ho for nuclear power, is it so strange to think of a world being destroyed by "magic"?