Precious

The clock has ticked past 12, it's now the final
day of 2014. Just another day really.

Tonight Sam and I remembered, quietly and sadly friends who have died this year. 

It has been a tough year I have spent the past week just hanging out at home with Sam 

and the kids but in the back of my mind I worry about friends who are alone. This year we have seen too many unnecessary deaths! 

3 lost to suicide (all unrelated) and the tragic loss of two more beautiful children whose lives were cut short.

I know so many lonely people, so many people who are under pressure and too often alone, they suffer from loneliness but often they keep their despair to themselves.

When I look back over the years I have lost way too many friends to this thing! Something is wrong! Something is broken that so many would think there's no other choice but to take this most drastic step.

I don't know what I can say really, except acknowledge their passing and remember that our time here is short and soon we will all be dust.

We will all pass and before long forgotten. It's no great matter once we're gone. But while we live maybe there's room for just a little more kindness.

Candles still burning for Jenny and the kids. Morning after memorial on Rapid Creek.

In June this year news spread of a shocking incident which took place on a friends property in Jingili. The death of Jenny and her two children left our community numb and confused. Our hearts were broken to learn what had happened. The final report stated it was double murder suicide. How do we deal with such a tragedy? Can we ever understand the effect this has had on the families of those two children? I have thought of them over the Christmas period and pray they get some respite from their suffering. For the care of children it is right to ask ourselves what more could I have done!
A couple of days after the incident an impromptu memorial was organized by close friends and held on the bank of Rapid Creek. I am sure I'm not the only one who felt ambivalent about the situation. I was angry and sad, rage swelled in me to think a parent could do this to her children, yet it happens a lot. Pain! Too much pain. By the end of the service had resolved a lot of my outrage and could only think to care for so many lonely people, I had no idea at that time I would loose two more friends just 5 months later.

I left the memorial alone, without talking to anyone but returned the next morning before dawn. 3 candles were still burning. I sat by the river and watched the sun rise. Around me life went on as usual. People jogging, cycling, walking their dogs. Over night the tide continued it's rhythm, I threw some left over flowers into the creek, the creek continued to flow and carried the petals out to sea.

Stay - Leonardo's Bride

"...And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
  For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
  (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
      about death.)

  I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
  Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

  Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
  by God's name,
  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
  Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to

  try to alarm me..." 

 - (Walt Whitman. from Song of Myself of the book Leaves of Grass)

5

Your hearts were torn in life, may God bless you as you rest.
Tonight we'll light 5 candles.