Last Days in Australia

I return to the U.S. tomorrow (7/14/25) after a three-week sojourn in Australia.

This time in my homeland was focused on my mum and her move to the assisted-living part of the retirement village that’s been her home in Port Macquarie since 2013 – first with dad and then, after his passing in 2019, on her own.

As difficult as I find it to leave my mum and family at this time, I’m choosing to do so with an abundance of gratitude in my heart.

First and foremost, I am grateful for the remarkable recovery mum has made (and continues to make) from the stroke she experienced in early April.

I am grateful for the many people who have helped facilitate and guide mum's recovery – from family members and friends to the staff at the various medical facilities mum has stayed at – culminating in her move to the assisted-living hostel that is now her home.

I am grateful for the ways mum has chosen to respond to the challenges and changes in her life. They are ways of grace and gratitude, surrender and trust.

Finally, I am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had these past three weeks to be mindfully and lovingly present to my mum, my family and friends, and the Australian landscape. Such mindful and loving presence has made a difference, a transformative difference, in my life and the lives of others. Familial bonds have been deepened, friendships strengthened, and I’ve experienced a grounding connection with the land and the healing energies that imbue it.

For all of these things I am grateful.

God of mystery and unimaginable inventiveness, who has created each of us in all our beauty and multifaceted energies, we give thanks this day for what we are and for what we have, for our own mysterious life forces and for our hopes for more of this life tomorrow. We simply give thanks to be and to be ourselves and to be linked to those we love. Give us courage for the unique life journey that is ours, and give us spiritedness to live it joyfully.

– William Cleary
From We Side with the Morning:
Daily Prayers to the God of Hope
Sorin Books (2009)

The landscape itself [is] plural, ever-changing, a festival of light and rock, always different, and so naturally this complex world [gives] rise to many stories, to many myths of place.

– David Tacey
From Edge of the Sacred:
Transformation in Australia
HarperCollins (1995)

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band
• Family Time in Guruk
• Journey to Gulmarrad
• An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Gifts of Abundance
• Giving Thanks: A Spiritual Act of Trust
• Grief and Gratitude

Images: Michael J. Bayly and Brendan Bayly.