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Well we made it to Perth on rainy day. And my traveling companions from the Land of Sunshine (i.e. England, for the atmospherically challenged) were complaining.
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Farewell to Yesterday's Rain

Tctraynor
2005-11-04 21:46:00

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our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.

It is so easy to exist instead of to live. ...I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:

* Consider the lilies of the field.

* Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear.

* Read in the backyard with the sun on your face.

* Learn to be happy.

* And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

So here I am. I want to live now rather than in yesterday. I want to live in happiness rather than in revenge. But I do not disparage anyone who wants revenge. We all do what we need to do. I just hope it doesn't mean more needless death.

I know this to be true with all my heart: God doesn't want us to kill in his name. That goes for the Christian bombing of an abortion clinic, the Catholic and the Protestant in Northern Ireland and the Muslim and the Jew in the Middle East. All carried out in the Name. It is definitely not God but human ego at work, plain and simple.

Call God by any name you like: Yahweh, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus, or Jane from Nebraska, Nigel from Essex, Yusef from Pakistan or even the ever precocious four year old Maria Luisa from Rio. It doesn't matter: God is an open heart, not a name with a passport. God is around us and in us all the time. All we have to do is stop and listen.
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So here I am. I wrote, I move on. I do realize that life is precious and can be taken away at any minute. I want to seize the moment. I want to learn. So these are the lessons I want for myself from the rest of the Buddha's Striptease (without being too anal retentive to letter of these goals):

* I want to live in hope.

* I want to skydive in New Zealand. I think by doing this I would be conquering
one of my BIGGEST fears ever. I hope it changes me to love the here and now more than I could ever do with my feet planted firmly on the earth.

* I want to stray from my comfort zone from time to time. In comfort there is peace but there is also complacency. I want to be stirred vigorously every now and then.

* I want to never, ever make a list of fut
ure goals again. Ever. I want to keep my future open.
* I want to learn to love the journey.

* I want to see God in everyone.