Not the Best of Times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it …

Day of Happiness

It seems somewhat incongruous to be celebrating the International Day of Happiness when so many people around the world are experiencing anything but happiness. The corona virus is still claiming lives and there is great inequity across the world in access to vaccines and treatment. There is also an unsettling disquiet about whose lives have …

Phosphorescence by Julia Baird

"How do we continue to glow when the lights turn out? All we can do really is keep placing one foot on the earth, then the other, to seek out ancient paths and forests, certain in the knowledge that others have endured before us. We must love. And we must look outwards and upwards at …

Travelling the World – Covid Style

Image by Peter Schulz - Unsplash We haven't really had a great start to the year. Despite all the assurances about leaning to live with Covid, Omicron is racing across our nation, people are queuing up for hours to get tested, there is massive disruption in workplaces, and the supermarket shelves are empty. Again. As …

A New Year – 2022

It is hard to believe that we are at the end of another year. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were relieved to see the end of 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic threw the whole world into a spin and we saw things that we could never have predicted: closed borders, local and national …

Accessible Housing Benefits Everyone

Image by Anastasiia Chepinska - Unsplash “We all aspire to have our own homes, we all aspire to be independent, and we all aspire to live in a safe environment.” (David Blower, Endeavour Foundation) Today is the International Day of People with Disabilities, one of the most important days of the year for the disability …

Carers Week 2021 – Millions of Reasons to Care

“Carers are an essential part of our health system. They are the foundation of our aged, disability, palliative, and community care systems.” Every year 2.65 million Australian carers perform 2.2 billion hours of unpaid care. There are many reasons why a person may become a carer - disability, mental illness, chronic conditions, terminal illness and …

Reading in Dark Times

I don’t know about you, but I have been finding the last number of months to be quite challenging. The news is rather depressing. It’s probably always been depressing, but I, for one, am getting quite sick of the never-ending saga of Covid outbreaks, political stoushes and humanity’s general inability to be kind, tolerant and …

Living in Dark Times

When we look back over history, there have been many dark periods. Plagues. Natural disasters. Oppression, slavery and unending violence. And countless wars. Yet there has always been a fragile thread of hope in human progress - an enduring belief that life could be better, more secure, fairer and peaceful. After the twentieth century, the …

The Gift of Pain

Usually when we think of a gift, we think of something pleasant, like a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates or a book voucher. I doubt that any one of us would consider pain to be a gift. The niggling pain in the middle of my back can be annoying sometimes. The blinding pain …