To a friend

I have a friend, and although we've never met personally, we share a lot of our lives together. We email, we read each other's blogs, we celebrate when good news is shared, and we mourn when hard times arrive. We both have properties, although she lives waaaay over the other side of the equator in the US. Her husband is Australian, so I guess that's how she gets our strange lingo and knows all about red-back spiders and poisonous snakes, LOL.

But my friend, Linda, is going in for major surgery tomorrow, to remove an invasive cancer which at this stage they don't know if they can remove. All the more reason I'm thinking about her today, leading up to tomorrow's surgery.

I didn't realise it, but I was putting together an altar of sorts. I had this urge to clean and rearrange things lately, and only realised once I put the finishing touches on it yesterday, that it carried the message I have been pinning a lot of hopes on lately. The Good Life.

Not the kind of good life that comes from a "lifestyle choice", but a good life which can be gathered from whatever is laying around. We make it good only by what we apply these things to. In the above picture, I have a protea flower I have been attempting to grow in some of our harshest conditions. It's survived both drought and flood and still manages to bloom. I plucked it recently and brought it inside.

The rosemary branch underneath, was from a real survivor too - not only having to cope with poor soil and minimal attention, but it still managed to live underneath a passionfruit vine, which had all but smothered it from the light! We pruned the passionfruit vine back yesterday and uncovered the toughest rosemary bush I have ever seen.

What is a survivor, but something that simply refuses to give in - it makes the most from what's at hand and adapts. Sounds like my friend, Linda. I wanted to let her know we are thinking about her, my family is thinking about her, and even my home imbues the kind of fighting spirit that comes from surviving against all odds.

Although she already knows it, I wanted to remind her of the Good Life, the one that waits for her after surgery.