A slow day at work

It is such a slow day at the Art Gallery today.
Hardly anyone around.
Apart from being a long weekend here, I’m told there’s a replay on the TV of some football final – Aussie rules is heavy duty entertainment.
How sad that people stay indoors and watch TV when it’s such a glorious day outside.

I woke up early enough to soak myself in all that morning glory during my regular Saturday morning escape up to the hills before work. I spotted four koalas up in the trees, conversed with a few boisterous black cockatoos, waded through a creek, jumped down the waterfall rocks and just generally allowed the bushland to suck the poisonous remains of the working week out of my system.

Back to nature.

Back to simplicity.

The image above is the view from halfway up the hill I climb. You can see the centre of the city of Adelaide and the sea in the distance. Adelaide is beautifully nestled between the hills and the sea. But before this city was built, the plains of the Kaurna people and the Mt Lofty hills of the Peramangk tribe were wild, natural bushland that had nourished and supported the Aborigines for over 50,000 years. In building the city we annihalated their land, their culture, their spirit.



The fully sensual lifestyle of the Aborigines, their deeply spiritual communication with the earth, and their unshakable belief in their Ancestral laws created an Aboriginal psychology that was disinterested in acquiring and possessing material things. Their lack of desire for anything outside their own simple tools continually baffled early explorers.

Westerners assume that agriculture, writing, clothing and architecture comprise the very definition of civilization and the unquestioned pinnacle of human progress. Yet all the evidence of environmental destruction, constant warfare, starvation, and moral and social decline is asking us to overturn our ingrained assumptions and view our so-called technical advances as representations of a cycle of degeneration.

The materialistic industrial societies are increasingly caught in a round-the-clock whirl in which people are trapped, day after day, in a breathless grind of facing deadlines, racing the clock between several jobs, and trying to raise children and rush through household chores at the same time. Agriculture and industrialism, in reality, have created a glut of material goods and a great poverty of time.

Most people have a way of life devoid of everything except maintaining and servicing their material existence 12 to 14 hours every day. In contrast, the Aborigines, who had no need for clothing, agriculture, or architecture, had at their disposal 12 to 14 hours a day for cultural pursuits, while their 2 to 3 hours of hunting and gathering provided a more balanced, varied and nutritious diet than agricultural societies have ever achieved.
"Voices of the First Day" by Robert Lawlor

After my morning escapade to the hills I opened the Art Gallery at 11am and by 1pm I’d sold 4 artworks worth just over $8,000 – two of them were abstract watercolours by dear old Arthur Phillips who is teaching a Masterclass in the studio next to me right now.

Since then it’s been a quiet day with not much work to do so I’ve caught up on a few yoga blogs.

To be honest, most of the blogs I’ve come across today are pretty lame (mine included).
Reading them hasn't inspired me to practice but it has inspired me to clean up my own blog list as many of my old favourite reads are either discontinued or they haven’t posted for over 6 months. Sorry to delete you old friends (if you want me to put your link back in, let me know.)
To make up for the deficit, I’ve updated the blog list with a few that I either regularly read or have just come across today. Just amusing myself...
For me, reading yoga blogs is similar to the entertainment that most other women get from watching reality TV shows, or reading magazines. I haven’t read a magazine for…hmmm…must be at least 5 years or so. Up til then I was teaching yoga and felt the need to occasionally read Yoga Journal – yuk, not any more. That's pure yoga junk food.

Another half hour to go at work then I can walk out of the confines of time and space: away from the four walls and my designated 5 hours work on Saturday...back into my own timeless, limitless space again...it's the mystical place where I am most at home...and it's just a step away from here...