IMPACT (Inspiration Meets Positive Action and Creative Thinking)

Will you be making New Year Resolutions on December 31, 2005? If they include volunteering for something worthwhile next year, check out some of these sites for guidance.
Volunteering in Australia offers many ways in which we can use our talents to help others.
Start early, by helping to have others have a happy Christmas. At http://www.thetithingtree.org.au/
you can send a tithing ecard to family and friends to let them know what you are doing with the present money this year.
If you are having a Secret Santa, why not add a donation or a gift for the local shopping mall Christmas tree to your list?
If you have spare blankets, pass them on to people who will need them next winter. You can find a list of organisations accepting blankets at

http://www.ourcommunity.com.au/giving/giving_article.jsp?articleId=1847#QLD
If you have a talent for knitting and crochet, making blankets is another way you can help. Or offer to make toys and blankets for Care and Cuddles at
http://members.tripod.com/%7ETammyMcCann/charity.html

Find volunteer positions at http://volunteersearch.gov.au/ or http://www.govolunteer.com.au/default_open.htm

Queenslanders can try http://www.volqld.org.au/SqlServerWeb/volunteers2.asp

International readers can go to http://www.worldvolunteerweb.org/ for information on volunteering worldwide.

There are many ways to help others now and in the New Year. Seek out like minded people and see how you time or talents can be used to brighten the lives of others.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/

Here’s something to consider – this is the `Bug Nebula” and the bright object in the centre is a dying star. It’s just one of the many amazing images from the Hubble Site, where photos taken by the Eye in the Sky are stored for public viewing.
have you ever really seen the night sky? I don’t mean a full moon and the handful of stars you see from the typical suburb. I mean a sky blazing with millions of stars, such as you see in the desert on on a mountain top. It’s a sad fact that many people today have no idea what the night sky really holds – `light pollution’, the bane of astronomers, hides the real brilliance of the night sky. No wonder we don’t feel like citizens of the universe anymore, and have lost touch with out own sense of wonder.
If you can’t make it out into the desert, visit Hubble instead. Download some of the images for your desktop. We need reminding that we are infinitessimally small in the grand scheme of things, and we need to be reminded that there are wonders out there we cannot even imagine…

Knowing what to do in a time of crisis isn’t a given thing, but the residents of an Australian apartment block knew exactly how to behave when disaster threatened.
The apartment block at Lane Cove in Sydney is uninhabitable after it collapsed into a hole. The block is on a traffic tunnel that caved in.
Two of the residents alerted others in the block as soon as they knew something was amiss, and together the residents got each other to safety – no one was hurt.
The most importsant thing to these people was seeing that their neighbours got out safely – they didn’t stop to worry about their possessions, or try to steal from each other. This is the kind of behaviour that makes the world a better place.

Read the whole story at
http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,17119639-5001021,00.html

Too often we are caught up in our own perspective, not really aware of the world beyond our borders until it impinges on us in some dramatic way, through war or natural disaster. While most aspects of western culture arepushed internationally through movies, commercial interests and the media, we get a watered down, sanitized version of other cultures when they become fashionable for a time, or a view distorted by struggle and hardship.
Yet taking a broader global view can be very good for us – it teaches us that not everyone does things our way, or has the same beliefs or social structure and quite often things are not better or worse in other cultures, just – different. In many fundamental ways, we also share basic beliefs and values that shine through when cultural trappings are put to one side. Often, there is something we can learn, ways to enrich our own lives.
They are constantly bombarded with images and logos of our culture – it’s time we redressed the balance and bombarded ourselves with reminders that we are all passengers on spaceship Earth, and that where we are is not the view that everyone else sees from their porthole.

Read the rest of this article at
http://www.impact.valeofavondale.com/global.htm

Seek beauty wherever you are – nature will show you the way the human spirit struggles to rise above its circumstances – a flower growing in a crack in the concrete, a clump of moss claiming a a stone step – here in Australia the jacaranda trees are in full bloom. I spotted this beauty at Caboolture railway station and loved the way its intense violet flowers looked against the wedgewood blue sky. At the end of its flowering season the jacaranda drops its flowers and forms a beautifulpurple pool under each tree. `As above, so below’ – beauty can be found at any stage of life.