HOT DAYS.

It's like late January, early February in Canberra at present.

Life continues to call me onto new endeavours.

After three months leave and a wonderful semester at uni, I was made redundant from the bookshop.

I jumped on jobseek and a home care/nursing agency advert grabbed my immediate attention.

I rocked up for the interview and have begun personal care work.

It's a different pace of life, and personally rewarding.

There is so much suffering in the world in war and famine but the hidden suffering in the suburbs from illness and aging is not exposed much.

I have come full circle in many ways in my life. God is good!

surfacing from study...

re-visited old posts @ agonist:

let me take off my patriarchial hat for a moment, and note that for maybe 50-60,000 years, the womb not the phallus was the predominant cultural metaphor.
Sex therefore served as an icon of the self becoming itself, a very different representational value, relating to erotic desire of divine becoming itself. We are made from stardust and we seek to return to the stars.. We are all neighbours, sharing in the cosmic dance.
The symbol of the womb is not a thrusting, pulsating overwhelming power representation. Rather the womb prefigures the whole human being, a being to be inclusive, embracing, nurturing, intimate - a gentle energy but more overwhelming than the brief pulse of the penis.
The long oppressive history of patriarchal dominance and interference, instilled by male models of philosophy initially and then male led medical practice, debased and decreased a holistic understanding of sexuality that included the female perspective.
As humanity settled into the city lifestyle and war became male dominated, the very idea of neighbour changed.
Today, as in Jesus' day neighbour is someone who lives nearby and implicity has the same value system.
Hence love your enemies became a profound metaphor for early christians. By the middle ages the dictum became personified and thus legitimised warfare between cities/states and countries.
Tolstoy railed against militant nationalism, and used the injunction to love thy enemy as his primary text.
I am continuall amazed by customers who come in and abuse me for stocking books on Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism; truly we have a long way to go in understanding who our neighbour is.

Peter Kreeft writes a reflection as Jesus: So the universe was a womb for humanity, and humanity was a womb for Israel, and Israel was a womb for Mary, and Mary was a womb for me. Thus, Mary is the point of the universe, and I am the point of that point but I have not got the book so cannot check if he is quoting someone else.

turns out the book in question was

Peter Kreeft,The Philosophy of Jesus(South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2007), 90.

nailed it at last!...

Re-reading Kreeft, I realise with 12 lectures on Pauline literature under my belt, that Kreeft's attempt to write 'The Philosophy of Jesus' was flawed from the start. The gospels are not first hand sources for Jesus' philosophy, rather are edited constructs to re-present his thoughts at the end of the 1stCenturyCE. Ah well I've learnt something...

Well its back to the cold, wet canberra winter, after a very relaxing week in Fiji.

Too many emails whilst I was gone, but one struck a chord, leading me to an interesting poem, that resonates within me:

Deeper cultures called it SPIRIT
pulled from first breath
to a hushed pivot of wingspan, a high point
of recovery over each life, a threshold of faith
in the heart's final treasure, holding its own truth,
its own measure of meaning: urgent, vivid as a myth
or a cave mural: the voice we fell from grace with. . .
it finally happened then: so much splendor went
to waste in us that eternity called collect (imagine,
the richest force in the universe!)
Who knew what to do or say? a pittance of awe
to pay attention with, & we still expected change!
Change came. An age passed, dust settled:
The first were last; a Bell went off
and there came to our senses
only shadows. . .

Michael Masley

Michael, the self styled Artist General and Berkeley street musician is better known for his posters stuck on power poles, but this poem surpasses any of them.

Day 2 of ~123 days leave.

Day 1 started with a sleep in, then time with daughters, and then the d i v o r c e paper arrived. Unexpectedly I was taken out for a wonderful Indian meal by a dear friend, and the pain was numbed by the great meal: perch, potato and spinach, garlic naan and hyderabad lamb mmmmm, and being with a beautiful woman. God always picks me up when I least expect it. Then some computer work, copying over tunes to a friends ipod.

Day 2 another sleep in, then helping out a m8 with some graphical design issues.
Off to university to get my ID card for Semester II - yep I'm returning to the theology study. Daughter time, getting expert at cooking kale/redcabbage boiled in fried cumin!Took advantage of a student deal to grab ultimate office 2007 and wiled away the late evening with some serious newsposting @ agonist.org. I haven't visited Mauberly for a while, I'm glad I did: breaking open Euthyphro and Socrates discussion on piety, the hooting of the unwise owl got me cogitating.

testing out windows 7 and excel 2010
Top 20 countries increase in confirmed swine flu cases:

and using wolframalpha for population figures to produce table of percent of confirmed cases:

This picture keeps entering my consciousness, not sure why but still I'm hoping for a miracle.

Commonsense, statistics and reality all tell me that life has moved on, has changed not ended, but there are no easy explanations.

So I pick up one foot drag it forward and keep moving forward!

I'm taking a leap into the unknown over the next few weeks.

I'll keep on riding the dragon, high or low!

Australia confirms first swine flu case

Australia confirms first swine flu case: "Australia has its first confirmed case of swine flu.
But the NSW woman who arrived in Brisbane on Thursday on flight QF16 from Los Angeles is no longer infectious and had a weak strain of the virus, authorities say.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the woman, who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, contracted the disease in late April while overseas and had recovered before returning to Australia"