Imagining you’d come to say goodbye, I made a doll of raffia and string. I gave her thatch hair, and a broomstick skirt of patchwork satin rags. Around each eye I stitched thick lashes. Such a touching thing she was! That even you could not debate – impassive, undemanding and inert. Yes, surely she’d cause you yourself to sigh. Around her breast, I sewed a loden ring to guard her cotton heart from being hurt, then sat down in the fabric scraps to wait, between the rafters and the furnace grate, needle in hand, and never so aware no craft on earth is master to despair.
Taking it one step further to prune any tree of life you need first to remove all the fruit that has gone bad and keep the ones that are in need of care.
Take off the leaves of despair …..remove the twigs of pain and the branches of hurt.
Now you have the boughs of self-righteousness and the self-opinionated of the world that think they are stronger than the meek and the weak. So remove them and free yourself from being right over others.
Now freedom is in sight you can see the wood for the trees and a trunk needs to be brought to its knees just as peoples need to realise that the ❤️needs to rule the head of indecision and knowing what is taught by others and not by listening to God.
Onetime removed all that’s left is the roots of how it all began, by Adam disobeying God in favour of hearing what someone else said and believing and thus acting without proof.
So how do you remove the roots and begin again?
Tree of Life Needed Pruning By God
Taking it one step further to prune any tree of life you need first to remove all the fruit that has gone bad and keep the ones that are in need of care.
Take off the leaves of despair …..remove the twigs of pain and the branches of hurt.
Now you have the boughs of self-righteousness and the self-opinionated of the world that think they are stronger than the meek and the weak. So remove them and free yourself from being right over others.
Now freedom is in sight you can see the wood for the trees and a trunk needs to be brought to its knees just as peoples need to realise that the ❤️needs to rule the head of indecision and knowing what is taught by others and not by listening to God.
Once removed all that’s left is the roots of how it all began, by Adam disobeying God in favour of hearing what someone else said and believing and thus acting without proof.
So how do you remove the roots and begin again?
Just by following the path of listening with your ❤️and putting others first without expecting anything in return, as God gave without expecting anything in return say that you follow ‘ The Path of Righteouness ‘ not for self but for others.
Amen…🙏’s For friends and families at this time and always.
Love is a reality that pervades the universe Like an unguent on frayed nerves A factor unifying even contrary forces Love binds the like-minded, the love-loving.
It is the queen of all emotions, situations It is a quality, a characteristic, a feature A simile, a metaphor, an adjective. Like an infant on its mother’s bosom A father figure for the frightened and unsafe A nook where one can find shelter From the fierce elements of the mind. A path that takes you in the right direction You aren’t surprised when you gain your goal
Love is local, topical, general, universal All at the same time, and makes it special Love keeps the balance of good and evil In favor of the good and never the evil.
Love is not limited to the romantic love The boy-meets-girl–fall-in-love kind of love For love is many things besides For me love is just love, period.
This is because… To a person who understands what love is To one who is immersed in all its avatars Essentially, truly, literally, metaphorically Hatred is a veritable impossibility.
Somewhere buried in the fields of France is an Indigenous man who gave his life for his country.
He had barely time enough to live. He was not even old enough to enlist; he was not meant to be there.
The military records don’t show his name — he passed himself off under the name of his older brother, John.
By all accounts that wasn’t uncommon in 1914, when young Australian boys were impatient and eager to fight and the Army was willing to look the other way.
Why? Much the same as their white comrades: patriotism, loyalty, adventure.
No doubt there was another deep motivation — they were fighting for their country, the country of their ancestors.
It was also a chance to earn a wage. It was a shortcut to equality.
It’s thought about 1,000 Aboriginal men enlisted. The records are patchy.
Their race was usually not mentioned, but there were clues — euphemisms: ‘dark complexion’, ‘curly hair’, ‘dark eyes’.
Only now are we fully discovering the extent of the sacrifice of these brave young boys.
A tradition of military service
John’s real name was Ivan Grant.
In my family it is a story handed down through the generations.
I was told how Ivan changed his name, lied about his age, and set sail for war. He never came home, he will forever rest in France.
His name though lives on, passed down to my cousin Ivan. He is a soldier too, an officer who has served in Iraq.
Like so many Indigenous families, military service has been something of a tradition. Why would it not be? We are from a long line of warriors.
The first Ivan Grant signed up not even a century after his forebears met and fought the British — settlers and soldiers — on the plains west of the Blue Mountains.
In the 1820s, the Sydney Gazette newspaper reported widely on what it called an ‘exterminating war’. The Wiradjuri people, led by a man named Windradyne, fought a long-running guerrilla campaign against what they would have seen as the invasion of their land.
It was effective and it was bloody — on both sides.
The governor, Thomas Brisbane, declared martial law and armed groups hunted down the so-called “troublesome blacks”.
The conflict devastated the Wiradjujri.
Finally, Windradyne led his people on a trek over the mountains to Parramatta to sit down with Governor Brisbane.
It was said the warrior wore a straw hat and written in its bream was the word peace.
Equality in war but not at home
By 1914, a Wiradjuri boy was enlisting in the Australian army. He was part of a new country, and he carried the blood of white and black — his grandfather an Irish convict later wealthy, landed gentry.
I see this now as a nation being born, of white and black living, often uneasily, side by side. The first people now outcast and segregated yet looking for a way in — for a way to belong.
In 1939 war came again and Indigenous people heeded the call.
Cecil Grant carried the memory of his dead brother. He was a man in his early 30s, a husband and father. Cecil lived on the Aboriginal mission at Condobolin in western New South Wales and, with other black mates, rushed to enlist.
Cecil Grant with his family.(Supplied: Stan Grant)
Cecil was a rat of Tobruk — he fought Hitler’s army in the Middle East. Unlike his brother Ivan he came home, but it was to a country that still did not fully recognise him.
Cecil devoted his life to the fight for equality, for the right to belong in a country he had served in war.
He took his family off the mission and with others walked more than 300 kilometres to the booming Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area to work on the farms picking fruit.
He battled to get his kids into the town school and to be given the soldier settlement block of land that was his due. He later built a little tin and fibro house and lived there until his death in the late 1960s.
Cecil didn’t march in Anzac Day parades until the last few years of his life. With crisp white shirt and his medals on his chest he walked with his white comrades down the main street of Griffith.
With the others, he went back to the pub, but was stopped at the entrance by the local police sergeant who told him he wasn’t allowed in. Blackfellas were still barred — even a blackfella with war medals.
But something remarkable happened that day; his digger mates formed a circle around him and walked him inside defying the local cop.
Cecil Grant was my grandfather.
‘Lest we forget’ — and what we choose to remember
On Anzac Day, I heard the sound of the didgeridoo as it echoed over the dawn service in Canberra and I thought of my grandfather and his brother Ivan and of the many thousands of black diggers who believed in this country enough to fight for it when it did not yet believe in them.
I think of those people who met the coming of the whites with resistance and bravery and whose blood and sacrifice we still don’t properly recognise.
There is no wall of remembrance for Windradyne and his people or the countless others who fought and died for their land.
I think of that mournful phrase “lest we forget” and what we choose to remember.
On this most Australian of days, I think of the sacrifice of those in my family and what they demand of me still.
As Indigenous people we mark these solemn moments with our own memories, what the Polish Nobel laureate poet Szeslav Milosz described as the ‘memory of wounds”.
They are the memories of people who served and fought but came home to a still segregated land.
I think of those black diggers and their white comrades. I think of their sacrifice and the mateship they forged.
And I see the better Australia they fought for.
That’s the Australia Cecil Grant believed in. His brother Ivan lies in a field in France to remind us.
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