IMPACT (Inspiration Meets Positive Action and Creative Thinking)

It’s sobering to read the latest news on global warming. I subscribe to the National Geographic newsletter (available here) and have been avidly following the discovery of a dinosaur that makes the T-Rex look like a pussy cat as well as the `Judas Scrolls’ but it is the articles on global warming that claim most of my attention. National Geographic News treats this subject with great clarity with no screaming headlines, making the impact even stronger.
In this story it is estimated that there could be mass extinctions of animals and plants by 2050 – that might seem like a long way off, but believe me, 2001 seemed like a long way off when I was young.
Even a story on projections that seem to show the earth’s climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought do little to lift the spirits – as Gabriele Hegerl, a climate scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, said; “[The finding] means the climate does react significantly to greenhouse gases,” she said.
“In other words,” she added, “we have really detected greenhouse warming, and we are really concerned it is not small.”

I always find the New Year an exciting time. Rather than resolutions, though, I look for new directions – where will I go this year, what new realms will I explore?
IMPACT will continue spreading a message of hope through art, as I intend to make this blog the basis for a `found art’ adventure this year. Found Art involves leaving little artworks in public places for people to find. It’s a delightfully creative and subversive activity, and hopefully people who do find the art will let me know through this blogger or the website.
The artworks I leave around will all have a positive message about good living in the world today, and who know, perhaps later I will be able to throw my net overseas, through art trading.
I took part in a wonderful exercise in heartfelt giving this year as one of the Artella Muses, and sent a package of art to the USA to my Musee. But I forgot that being a Muse also meant being a Musee – and I was delighted to receive a beautiful handmade fabric art card from a wonderful artist here in Australia! Artella is a wonderful site devoted to creativity that I recommend unreservedly – but taking part in the Mystery Muse really made me feel part of the wide and wonderful world of art.

So this year, there will be more of that – giving away your art may seem like madness to those driven by the dollar but I have discovered this is a way of sharing that makes you feel good and spreads the message of kindness and hope far better than anything else.

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.

IMPACT was born because of the impact reading Kevin Sites’ blog had on me. Sites is the journalist spending a year touring the world’s `hot zones’ and blogging about it at http://hotzone.yahoo.com/

Whether you think Sites is a master journalist adept at finding the human side of war and destruction, or an ungrateful punk parading his anti-Americanism to the world (and comments to his blogs show both extremes as well as a variety of intermediate opinions) it is compulsive reading. I was moved by stories of Somalia’s garbage scavengers
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1050

a pregnant 15-year-old Ugandan girl
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1286

and an injured Ugandan teenager
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1264

But when I saw the dedication to aid worker Marla Ruzicka and followed the link to the Civic Worldwide website
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1016

I knew I had to become involved with the world out there.
Who am I? I am no one of importance. For the last thirty years I have lived in Australia, been a freelance writer, had a stint as a journalist on a small Australian newspaper, and lived an ordinary life. I’ve never been very political. My husband and I raised seven children and today I am a grandmother, and loving it.
My heroes are the quiet achievers, the people who tackle whatever mess is in front of them and do it without complaint or attention seeking, except for their cause – people like Mother Theresa – and Marla Ruzicka.
I have always been a cleaner-upper. I like tackling a mess, but frankly, tackling the mess the world is in seemed beyond even my just-do-whatever-you-can philosophy. Dropping what change I could spare in collecting boxes and writing the odd letter to the newspaper wasn’t enough. But what could I, a very ordinary Australian grandma, do to make the world a better place?
Then I thought about what I was doing, and what I had done – particularly the pride I feel knowing that my husband and I have raised children without prejudice, without material greed and without feeling their lives would end if someone pulled the plug on the X-Box.
That was hard work in these times, and yet when I see them go out of their way to help someone, I understand that it is hard work for these children, too, to uphold the values we tried to teach them. Yet they do it, because they believe in it.
I may not have much material gain to show for my lifetime, but I hope that what I do have is as valuable as I believe it to be – I have learned tolerance, compassion, and the determination not to back down until a just solution has been found.
The result is IMPACT – Inspiration Meets Positive Action and Creative Thinking – but what does it mean, and what do I hope to achieve?
I believe that we all have something to offer, and what we have is just as important as the billions of dollars that flow to disaster relief. We have something to teach, something to say, a way of looking at the world that will help people cope with crisis and tackle the mess. It doesn’t matter who we are, if we are old, young, poor, handicapped or even if we can access the Web or not – we can all do something, we can do something that lies close at hand – we can help.
Even if all you can do is click on the Hunger Site every day, it is something. If all you can do for the environment is monitor your own water use and recycle your garbage, it is something. If all you can do is pray, it is something. But most of us can do much more.
The Buddha says: `With our thoughts we make the world”. IMPACT seeks no less than to remake the world – with your thoughts, with your actions, with your hands, you can make an IMPACT. Give away your art that carries a positive message, help someone with your skills, get it out there. Some people today don’t understand how to live a good a good and decent life – they think that disaster is an excuse for looting. We who do know should be telling them, teaching them, spreading the word in any way we can.
For a grandparent, this is particularly critical. We watch new generations come into the world and it is getting less and less a good place for them to be. David Suzuki captured me years ago talking about the value that `elders’ could be in the future – well, the future is here, and my gosh! I am an elder.
Time to get to work.