by tashmcgill | Jan 26, 2013 | Culture & Ideas, god ideas
Whether you embrace change, or change is thrust upon you without warning – the process of transformation is long and hard. I have long been a lover of Henri Nouwen’s journal of letters to himself, “The Inner Voice of Love”. If I was to minister to myself; this is what I would remind myself of.
“You need to recognize the difference between change and transformation. You keep expecting that these external circumstances that reflect change around you, will mirror or gauge the change within you. But you don’t change, people can only transform. One thing must become another. You can’t tear out your heart and simply replace it with a new one, much as one relationship cannot be exchanged for another. We must transform. So these external changes you are processing, can transform you internally, if you choose. But you must choose this: it will not simply happen by osmosis. It is too easy to adopt new behaviours and claim newness, when really all you are doing is maintaining a facade. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Jan 25, 2013 | Travel
It’s not often you get a call to say, Hey, you’re going to Palm Cove to stay in a 5 star beach resort for 7 nights and the bad news is, you have to take your best mate with you. My advice is when those calls come, be sure you answer the phone with a smile. We arrived in Cairns, in Far North Tropical Queensland just in time to settle in to our apartment at the Peppers Beach Club & Spa, right on the main drag in Palm Cove before dinner and enjoy an afternoon beside the pool.
As any responsible travel journalist should do, I’d Googled away to my heart’s content about Peppers. While the website had looked really inviting, there were a few reviews on TripAdvisor.com that made us wonder – was it really all too good to be true? Well,
by tashmcgill | Jan 25, 2013 | Travel
Apart from sugarcane, crocodiles and the Great Barrier Reef, you might be hard pressed to think of what else to occupy your time with (if you have to drag yourself away from the pool that is!) in Far North Tropical Queensland.
Having spent a few days in the sun and finally got in the air for a hot air balloon ride with Raging Thunder, we were excited to do something a bit different! A scenic railway excursion it was. Who would’ve thought that this magnificent piece of engineering would have been built from Cairns through to Kuranda, let alone that it would’ve taken creating 15 tunnels, 93 curves, dozens of bridges and 75 kilometres of track to complete and is now known as the Kuranda Scenic Railway. You can make a great round trip of it by catching the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway back down, sweeping over ancient rainforests for insane views. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Jan 25, 2013 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
I took this photo using a self-timer, my camera propped on the rooftop of the car. I had taken the car for a little sightseeing, headed east into the mountains and desert outside of San Diego, in October 2007. I was intoxicated with life, at the end of an almost year long journey into rediscovering myself. And by that what I really mean is, I’d finally shed nearly 50kgs of extra weight I’d been slowly accumulating. And now, when I look at that photograph, I feel like a failure.
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