Happy Birthday, Mum!

In Australia today my Mum celebrates her 86th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Mum!

I’ve said it many times before but it’s always worth repeating: My brothers and I are very fortunate to have Margaret Anne Bayly (née Sparkes) as our mother. She is a beautiful, wise and strong woman who extends care, kindness and love to everyone she encounters.

I love you, Mum, and can’t thank you enough for who you are and for all you continue to be and give to me, my brothers, our family, and so many others whose lives are fortunate enough to be touched by yours. Wishing you the happiest of birthdays, and looking forward to next year and my next visit home! 💗

Above: Mum at the look-out in our hometown of Gunnedah, New South Wales, Australia – May 10, 2024.

Gunnedah and its surrounding area were originally inhabited by Indigenous Australians who spoke the Kamilaroi (Gamilaraay) language. The area now occupied by the town was settled by Europeans in 1833. Through my maternal grandmother’s family, the Millerds, my family can trace its connection to Gunnedah back to the town’s earliest days. For more about the town’s history and my family’s connection to it, see the previous Wild Reed posts, My “Bone Country” and Journey to Gunnedah.

In celebrating Mum’s birthday over the years at The Wild Reed, I’ve shared quite a number of photos from the Bayly family archives. In fact, I’ve pretty much exhausted my supply. So if you’d like to take a wonderful “trip down memory lane,” as they say, then click on any of the links below. You won’t be disappointed!

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Thanks, Mum!
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2023)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2022)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2018)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2017)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2015)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2014)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2013)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2011)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2010)
• Happy Birthday, Mum (2009)
• Congratulations, Mum and Dad!
• Catholic Rainbow (Australian) Parents
• Remembering and Celebrating Dad

Opening image: With Mum in Guruk, aka Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia – May 8, 2024.

Marianne Williamson on the Kind Mind Podcast – 12/2/24

Earlier today author, activist, and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson was a guest on Todd Fink’s podcast, Kind Mind.

It’s a great interview with a woman who I consider the “Cassandra of U.S. politics,” and who philosopher and social critic Cornel West says is “one of the few in the higher echelons of public life and public conversation who understand the intimate relation between the spiritual and the social, the personal and the political, and the existential and the economic.”

Continues West: “It’s very rare that people have this synoptic vision, [one that ensures that] spirituality, morality, and integrity sit at the center and at the beginning of any serious discussion about the relation of a self and a society.”

This “synoptic vision” is greatly needed in today’s fractured world, and it was on full display throughout both Marianne’s presidential campaigns of 2020 and 2024 during which she never wavered in changing the conversation from symptoms to root causes in a way that the political and media establishments routinely avoid. She also talked about the need to fundamentally disrupt the political and economic status quo so as to initiate a “season of moral repair.” Her “politics of love” was informed by both her love for democracy and her decades-long work with and for people in crisis, especially spiritual or meaning-making crisis.

In her hour-long conversation with Todd Fink below, Marianne reflects on the deeper lessons of 2024 and her campaign. She also discusses a vision of hope for the future.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Presidential Election
• Marianne Williamson: “A New Chapter of the Democratic Party Needs to Begin”
• “We’re Living at a Time of Spiritual Evolution”
• “We’re Living in Very Serious Times and We Need to Be Very Serious People”
• “My Gratitude Is as Deep as the Sea”
• Yes, Just Imagine
• “We Don’t Need More Data Analysis. We Need More Courage”
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Marianne Williamson