A Kind of Hush
I had thought it had been a kind of rush for the whole day....and night. Such feelings were however mixed with doses of satisfaction and inner contentment, more of a kind of food for the soul.
It commenced with just food, partaking of vegetarian wraps with the Hindu worshippers on a mid-Sunday morning. The meal may have been simple, but the communal communion was sweet and embracing. Two little Indian boys sitting at a nearby canteen table were engaged in a banter of conversation in all innocence as childhood can bestow. The nearby temple was full of people engaged in ceremonies for an important holy day. Having grown up comfortable with this culture, to me, it was also food for the soul, even just as an observer. One of my fellow visitors, Phylis, remarked that it reminded her of elements of Jewish prayer. It struck me there and then that the world' religions can be somehow related, and that there is this invisible but strong bond of a string that connects to all things holy. The worshippers were decked in their Sunday best, holy smoke prevailed and there was the lilt of song in a sung prayer - we could have been attending the Papal Mass at Randwick Stadium in Sydney's eastern suburbs that very same morning.
The hush continued at a hilltop Buddhist temple complex which brilliantly shone under the blue sky and mid-winter Wollongong sun. The bare branches of deciduous trees and the flowering native succulents underlined the essence of Buddhist philosophy and thinking. A few of us wandered to a room dedicated to portraits in oil. The theme was perhaps womanhood. The expressiveness of the artists jumped out literally to me. A nearby pond, usually brimming with flowering lotus in early summer, had been mostly drained short of the muddy centre, which was now a playground for the resident ducks in winter.
Religion need not be organised. It can appear in the forms of Nature, and that late afternoon, I felt religion not in another man-made house of worship, but in the clean sweeping sand of Geroa, an hour by car south of Wollongong. The ocean side golf course links already put me in the mood. And then the seduction of an empty beach appeared and totally caught my heart and soul. It was windy but there were no surfing waves. Despite this, the vibes of the place appealed to my inner self and offered a calmness, just like in the Hindu or Buddhist temple earlier.
To wind up this special day, I found myself in the company of good friends a hundred kilometres from my Wollongong home, in a beloved recreation of Austria. We could not resist having our fav dishes of duck, snapper and pork, in a bush setting restaurant manned by true blue Austrians. Then we whizzed past the Sydney Bahai Temple by night, a circular structure with a light at the top. We had to return to the Austrian-German restaurant to retrieve a handbag forgotten in the midst of relaxed laughter and social enjoyment, but one of the staff members, brown-haired and blue-eyed Mario, was already waiting for us to return it.
So as it had been throughout this special Sunday in mid-July, the special kind of hush continued under the moonlight as I drove back to Wollongong late at night.
It commenced with just food, partaking of vegetarian wraps with the Hindu worshippers on a mid-Sunday morning. The meal may have been simple, but the communal communion was sweet and embracing. Two little Indian boys sitting at a nearby canteen table were engaged in a banter of conversation in all innocence as childhood can bestow. The nearby temple was full of people engaged in ceremonies for an important holy day. Having grown up comfortable with this culture, to me, it was also food for the soul, even just as an observer. One of my fellow visitors, Phylis, remarked that it reminded her of elements of Jewish prayer. It struck me there and then that the world' religions can be somehow related, and that there is this invisible but strong bond of a string that connects to all things holy. The worshippers were decked in their Sunday best, holy smoke prevailed and there was the lilt of song in a sung prayer - we could have been attending the Papal Mass at Randwick Stadium in Sydney's eastern suburbs that very same morning.
The hush continued at a hilltop Buddhist temple complex which brilliantly shone under the blue sky and mid-winter Wollongong sun. The bare branches of deciduous trees and the flowering native succulents underlined the essence of Buddhist philosophy and thinking. A few of us wandered to a room dedicated to portraits in oil. The theme was perhaps womanhood. The expressiveness of the artists jumped out literally to me. A nearby pond, usually brimming with flowering lotus in early summer, had been mostly drained short of the muddy centre, which was now a playground for the resident ducks in winter.
Religion need not be organised. It can appear in the forms of Nature, and that late afternoon, I felt religion not in another man-made house of worship, but in the clean sweeping sand of Geroa, an hour by car south of Wollongong. The ocean side golf course links already put me in the mood. And then the seduction of an empty beach appeared and totally caught my heart and soul. It was windy but there were no surfing waves. Despite this, the vibes of the place appealed to my inner self and offered a calmness, just like in the Hindu or Buddhist temple earlier.
To wind up this special day, I found myself in the company of good friends a hundred kilometres from my Wollongong home, in a beloved recreation of Austria. We could not resist having our fav dishes of duck, snapper and pork, in a bush setting restaurant manned by true blue Austrians. Then we whizzed past the Sydney Bahai Temple by night, a circular structure with a light at the top. We had to return to the Austrian-German restaurant to retrieve a handbag forgotten in the midst of relaxed laughter and social enjoyment, but one of the staff members, brown-haired and blue-eyed Mario, was already waiting for us to return it.
So as it had been throughout this special Sunday in mid-July, the special kind of hush continued under the moonlight as I drove back to Wollongong late at night.
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