Goodbye 2005!

What a year this has been! Can you remember another year with as many natural disasters as this one? I am normally not a person who welcomes in the new year with open armed optimism as generally I have a stick in the mud character, telling me "Better the devil you know"; but this year I am throwing off my old pessimism and embracing the new year with true hope and optimism!

So goodbye 2005, can't say I'll miss you much. It hasn't been an easy year for most of us. Sensitive and Sensible alike seem to have really had a year of struggling through endless treacle to try to accomplish even the smallest task. And we are the lucky ones. So many have lost their everything this year, homes wrecked and washed away, families torn apart by disaster after disaster. The aid of the rest of the world in constant demand, at least enabling the aid agencies to do what they do best and unite this world in a time of constantly changing fortunes.

How many of us have spent days praying and hoping that children will find their parents, that homes will be safe and protected, that illnesses will not spread and that there will be an end to the apparent fury of mother nature.

However, no matter how much I will not miss the year that brought so much pain to so many, I will be giving thanks for the miracles which also occurred this year.

I will be giving thanks for my friend who has recovered from breast cancer.

Thanks for my Aunt who's cancer is also in remission.

Thanks for the safe arrival of two little miracles, twin baby boys who were born in November to a great friend of mine.

Thanks for the opportunity to give up smoking, and the new car I could afford because I gave up!

Thanks for the safety of my children, and my family.

Thanks for the doctors and nurses who have worked so hard this year to help so many.

Thanks to those aid agencies who have worked so tirelessly to achieve a sensible level of communication and bring help and assistance to those who needed it so desperately.

Thanks to every person who sent a healing thought out this year.

Thanks to mother nature herself, for showing us that we cannot ignore her or each other.

I guess that this is just the start of the list I will be thinking when I toast the oak at the end of this year.

I hope next year brings some of the lessons we have learned from the traumas of this year to a head, so we are more prepared, more willing, more united, more caring, more loving and more peaceful. Not only in our approach to each other, but in our attitude towards earth herself and all living creatures upon her.

Wishing you as always, Health Happiness and Harmony.

Keara