Veronika Wild

  Let's Make it a Happy New Year  Those are the children's fireworks which happen at 9 pm on New Year's Eve in several places around Australia. While you are watching them, let's also remember those children who look up in terror when the night sky lights up like that. Let's do better in 2025!  

Thank you, Fiona and The Irish Way. Oh dear, this hasn't loaded quite the way it should have. The first three words are "Two roads converged...." The original poem is by Robert Frost  and was written in about 1915 after a stay in the UK. It is about indecision which certainly strikes a chord with me. Read the full poem here . It remains one of the best known and misread poems in America. Just thought you might want to know all that. I chipped a front tooth on New Year's Day, which is not exactly a good omen for 2017. While I have been hiding away waiting for the Tooth Fairy to have a cancellation, I have been browsing through all the funnies and inspiring stories on this site. However, I am not the only one who didn't get off to a good start. Five -year -old granddaughter slipped on Hobart's fabulous long slide - always a favourite with several generations of this family, and managed to break four bones in her little foot. She is now the proud posses...

Have just finished seeing the New Year in with neighbours and family. The fireworks were spectacular, but half the time I was thinking why are we  sending all this money up in smoke? On the other hand, according to Chinese tradition, crackers and noise are to keep evil spirits away though these days we are more likely to call them stress and depression, and they have certainly done that.  May the New Year bring you all you hope for and much more. We also hope our elected representatives, bankers,bureaucrats and others who hold our lives in their hands are all busy making New Year resolutions to behave honourably and wisely and do better this year in the best interests of all. The Japanese custom of Old Year Forgetting which includes making up with those with whom we have had disagreements and paying up all one's bills, also has a lot to recommend it. For those who don't have much to celebrate this year because of illness, turmoil, incarceration or persecution, may this...

This lovely image comes from Adbusters  What better time than the New Year than to think about ways to simplify our lives and focus more on things which are really important to us. Thoreau gives us a few pointers (though I am sure he didn't have to worry about mortgages or school fees) and I especially like the way he begins ...... “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives,” Thoreau began one of his essays, noting that since time was short he would “leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism,” as was his way. “What is it to be born free and not to live free?” he asked his fellow citizens. “Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?” America may have been free from political tyrants, but it was painfully clear to Thoreau that it was “still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.” A tyrant called Mammon. This world is a place of “incessant business,” he was to lament, and there was “nothing, not even crime...