About Me

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Redbanks, South Australia, Australia
Contact me if you'd like to know more about this writing group. My email address is jeebers@aussiebb.com.au

Ananka - one of our Pharaoh Hounds

Ananka - one of our Pharaoh Hounds
Ananka knows how to enjoy life - catch and eat birdies!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Break Out of Your Passivity!

Do you use the Internet? Do you read websites and have opinions about what you read?
Are you on Facebook, or MySpace, or Mylot or Orble or any of those kinds of things? Do you Twitter? If you are a member of one of these sites, are you an active member?

By ‘active member’ I mean doing quizzes, leaving comments, ranking the sites anything more than just passively reading. If you use the Internet a lot, maybe have your own blog or blogs, you probably know how hard it is to get people to break out and actually do something more than visit a site, then move on, without doing anything more than passively reading content.

If you want to get more out of the Internet, I challenge you to put more into the Internet. It doesn’t have to be a one way street. If you start leaving comments on blogs, for instance, I can almost guarantee you will get more satisfaction out of your experience.

You will connect with people, begin to learn more about them and the other people who visit the website. You can meet the most amazing people online. Some of the people you meet may not be the sorts of people you’d like to meet in the street, but they can still be fascinating.

I recently read a blog all about pregnant women and tattoos. Apparently pregnant women shouldn’t get tattoos on case of harm to the baby from the inks used. The same goes for breastfeeding women. If I hadn’t been connecting with that website, I would never have learned about that fascinating fact. I didn’t leave a comment there, but the next time tattoos were mentioned on a blog I was reading, I made a comment.

When you make a comment, you can begin a conversation that continues on from the original blog and can go in all sorts of interesting directions. It’s worth it, you can always be expanding your mind and learning new things.

So there’s my challenge – make a comment and begin a dialogue, and find a friend, perhaps. It could lead to wonderful things. Don’t be a passive consumer, get active!

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Let Your Inner Child Loose

If you are constantly shutting away your inner child, you are doing yourself a disservice. We all have an inner child. Some, if not most, of the writers for children let out their inner child when they are writing their books for children.

If you never connect with your inner child, you are ignoring some of the most wonderful things that are going on around you, simply because you can't recognise them as wonderful.

Children gain much joy from seeing a rainbow, and tracing its arc across the sky, trying to work out where the pot of gold actually is, and wondering if there really is a pot of gold. If you look at the sky and see the clouds and not the rainbow, if you never wonder about the pot of gold, you have lost contact with your inner child.

Children are quick to wonder, and speculate, and make things up. Children don't have any need to immediately discount a fanciful idea. They are willing to take the fanciful things and make them even more fanciful. Children don't have to earn a living, or cook the tea like the adults around them have to. A lot of adults think the children have it easy.

But children do have to go to school, and get through the crowded curriculum, attend to their after school things, learn about everything in life. The children of today have to work in their own way too.

The young people, though, believe in things, hope for things, that adults won't consider. If a young person believes they can be the best goal keeper ever, well, they might be able to achieve that.

As adults, we forget how to believe in our possibilities, if we forget about our inner child. The next time it rains, and the sun comes out again, go outside. Spend some time looking at the rainbow, and wonder a little about that pot of gold.

Monday, April 6, 2009

There is a hospital in the US, Shands Healthcare in Florida, that has, over the last eighteen years, embraced Art and Creativity and used them to help the patients and staff.

There is a little girl, waiting for a heart transplant who has her room filled with art works she has created herself. Other patients are involved with theatre, dancing and a whole range of other artistic pursuits. Patients are benefitting, and so are the staff. Obviously healthier patients makes a nurse's or doctor's job easier, but some of the medical staff are getting involved in creative writing too.

Dancing can help to get overly high heart rates down, and can help patients with dementia and other mental illnesses, by aiding them to keep greater intellectual, emotional, and motor functions.

Art works in the form of paintings have been a part of modern hospitals, and can help give a soothing feeling to patients, visitors and medical staff. In hospital patients often feel out of control and getting involved in various artistic endeavours can give them back a feeling of being in control.

Waiting for night to come

Waiting for night to come
I love sunsets