"Smile in your Liver"

I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if your fortunate enough.
But thats not how happiness works.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. Its easy enough to pray when your in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Taken from
eat pray love (chapter 87)
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury Publishing 2006

Prayers can become stale

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If i want transformation, but cant even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.

So now i take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what i am truly asking for. I kneel there in the temple with my face on that cold marble for as long as it takes me to formulate an authentic prayer. If i don't feel sincere, then i will stay there on the floor until i do. What worked yesterday doesn't always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate.

I'm making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.

Taken from
eat pray love (chapter 58)
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury Publishing 2006

Jews are as much English as...

Which was the stronger loyalty - to country or to faith? There was nothing to choose. As Rosalind's father said when reorganizing the New West End Synagogue after the Second World War, 'The whole idea is that Judaism is a religion not a race...the English Jews are as much English as other English.'

Taken from
Rosalind Franklin; The Dark Lady of DNA
by Brenda Maddox
HarperCollins Publishers 2002

First Australian Terrorist Act

When I was writing The Great Shame, I became aware that the first act of terrorism on Australian soil was an attack on the duke of Clarence, youngest son of Queen Victoria, at a picnic held in his honour at the Sydney suburb of Clontarf on March 12, 1868. As the prince passed the enthusiastic crowd, Henry O'Farrell, a self-proclaimed Fenian, drew two pistols and shot him in the back. "I'm a Fenian, God save Ireland!" yelled O'Farrell, who had earlier been treated for mental instability and was not a member of the Fenian movement, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The prince survived; O'Farrell was hanged at Darlinghurst jail.

The governor of NSW, Lord Belmore, an Ulster landowner, was near the prince and saw the shooting. The state government, which included Parkes, yielded to the temptations of demagoguery and stirred up in the community the belief that all Irish were involved in a plot of deepest Papist dye, to shed the blood of the royal family.

A Tampa-level hysteria was let loose. A ridiculous Treason-Felony Act was passed, which made the public utterance of republican sentiment punishable by up to 20 years in jail. The Irish, and even some evangelicals who thought the prince had been punished by God for his hedonism, were tailed, questioned, detained, sacked from their jobs. In a riot in Melbourne, an Irishman was killed.

Flattened by a Falafel,
Tom Keneally
The Australian Literary Review
February 2007

Obesity and World Hunger

It is the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities.

And for the first time in history, say experts, the impact is spreading from the developing to the developed world.

The increasing scarcity of food is the biggest crisis looming for the world, according to WFP officials.

2008: The year of global food crisis
By Kate Smith and Rob Edwards
Sunday Herald 19 July 08

Recently a study was done by a research institute in melbourne headed by Simon Stewart that gave the findings that Australians are now the world's most overweight nation, ahead of the notoriously super-sized Americans, who have a 25 per cent obesity rate.

Simon Stewart: Well we actually found that currently there are nine million obese and overweight Australians, and that's adult Australians. Of those, four million are technically obese.

We certainly have a phenomenon that I would term "fat fatigue", and we would certainly have a phenomenon where I think we have recalibrated our eyes to accept that we're larger and thinking that's normal.

This is taken from a transcript
from The World Today on abc radio
Friday, 20 June , 2008
Reporter: Sabra Lane

Redback Spider

There was a red-back on the toilet seat
When I was there last night, I didn't see him in the dark,
But boy! I felt his bite!
I jumped high up into the air, And when I hit the ground,
That crafty red-back spider Wasn't nowhere to be found.

Rushed in to the missus, Told her just where I'd been bit,
She grabbed the cut throat razor blade, And I nearly took a fit.
I said, "Just forget what's on your mind, And call a doctor please,
'Cause I've got a feeling that your cure Is worse than the disease."


I didn't see him in the dark, But boy! I felt his bite!
And now I'm here in hospital, A sad and sorry plight,
And I curse that red-back spider on the toilet seat last night.

I can't lay down, I can't sit up, And I don't know what to do,
And all the nurses think it's funny, But that's not my point of view.

I tell you it's embarrassing, (And that's to say the least)
That I'm to sick to eat a bite, While that spider had a feast!
And when I get back home again, I tell you what I'll do,
I'll make that red-back suffer For the pain I'm going through.
I've had so many needles That I'm looking like a sieve,
And I promise you that spider Hasn't got long to live!

From Slim Newton’s song
‘Red-back on the Toilet Seat’

Zamilooni, By Native Deen

He stepped inside his home, and he overwhelmed with fear
An angel came with words from God, things were still unclear
Saying read - read, but he couldn’t read, then amazing words he heard

A trembling deep inside his heart, confused by what had occurred
There was only one who could comfort him,
And help him see the light
To ease his fears, to reassure, It was khadijah, his wife…

He said Zamilooni, Zamilooni, Dathirooni, Dathirooni,
A mighty task has come before me,
I need you here with me...By my side.


We look for stories of love, in places dark and cold
When we have a guiding light, for the whole world to behold
But we're so selfish in our ways, and to the ones we hold so close
Our own pleasure and happiness is what we value most

But she sacrificed all her wealth and everything she had
And he honored her, and gave her faith,
when the times were bad...

Now years have passed, times had changed,
since khadijah breathed her last.
Message of the one true God, was spreading far and vast
But then he came across a neaklace, that khajidah once had worn
His eyes began to swell with tears, his heart again began to mourn.

Lyrics From Zamilooni
By Native Deen