August in Canberra has been a cold wet month, winter drags on. But tree buds and blossoms abound. A new spring approaches, probably with the worst hayfever season for yonks. Long hours of work continue but are very rewarding.

Washing feet, speech exercises, cleaning houses, cooking, nursing all make for diverse days. Empowering people who have little in health yet can still make my heart bound and leap for joy, with their words of thanks, smiles or handshakes.

Yet its been a year of almost fortnightly deaths, age and illness kill.

A friend has emailed with news of declining chemotherapy and the desire to embrace the final journey. Included in the email a few lines from Boris Pasternak. I found the complete version:

It is not seemly to be famous:
Celebrity does not exalt;
There is no need to hoard your writings
And to preserve them in a vault.

To give your all-this is creation,
And not-to deafen and eclipse.
How shameful, when you have no meaning,
To be on everybody's lips!

Try not to live as a pretender,
But so to manage your affairs
That you are loved by wide expanses,
And hear the call of future years.

Leave blanks in life, not in your papers,
And do not ever hesitate
To pencil out whole chunks, whole chapters
Of your existence, of your fate.

Into obscurity retiring
Try your development to hide,
As autumn mist on early mornings
Conceals the dreaming countryside.

Another, step by step, will follow
The living imprint of your feet;
But you yourself must not distinguish
Your victory from your defeat.

And never for a single moment
Betray your credo or pretend,
But be alive-this only matters-
Alive and burning to the end.

I remember a young dude at McDonalds drive thru in January, 2006, telling me about his dying teenage sister telling him that pain is bearable because it let her know that she was still alive. May we all burn brightly to the end.