We're a week away from the start of November. The weather is becoming progressively more inclement; cooler, windier, heavily overcast skies. The garden is in stress mode. What's left of it, that is. Still, there are remaining pops of colour, enough to buoy us up somewhat in mood, though it doesn't last long. This October, the month when two of our children were born over 60 years ago, has been fraught with the horror of death and conflict. October 2023 will be remembered for that.

 

Only this afternoon when we were in the car driving home from our weekly food-shopping expedition, there was an impassioned interview with a local Liberal Member of Parliament. The interviewer asked neutrally standard questions, and the interviewee, a woman whose name we'd never before heard, although she is a local, bemoaned the fact that the 'Palestinian question' remains, and the world has done nothing to settle it. Yet another Hamas supporter.

 

It boggles the mind that a candidate for Parliament was elected ostensibly for the purpose of representing her geographic region and the needs of the population living there, yet she has become -- or is revealed to be, through her own sympathies -- an 'activist'-agent supporting a foreign terrorist group known to commit atrocities and indeed surpassed its reputation on October 7. Who is it she speaks so passionately for, other than committed murderers who 'govern' Gaza, a governance that has kept the Palestinian people living there in a state of indigence, but for its elite  terrorist members.

 

A people mute on their Hamas masters who at intervals see fit to make them human shields whenever it shoots rockets and missiles at Israel, from weapons sites deliberately placed near or within schools, medical clinics, crowded apartments, hospitals knowing that Israel's defence forces like any other country under attack will respond to those attacks threatening the lives of its citizens, to destroy the rocket sites.

 

We're fortunate to live in a country where armed conflict does not visit. Oncoming winter sees us slowly acclimating to colder weather; our furnaces and our homes are warm and dry and comfortable, and frankly lovingly appreciated for the assurance they offer us of that comfort we so need. We know they won't be invaded by a death-cult-crazed legion of haters. But the world is a finite place and becoming more interwoven year by year. We have absorbed a population among whom an admiration has been cultivated for those deliverers of death to innocent people.

 

Jackie and Jillie remind us every day of our obligation to them and to ourselves, to live life with as much joy as is possible. Taking ourselves out into raw nature is one of those assets given our geography that we can indulge in, and so we do. The calming effect of nature's indifference to the affairs of humanity brings us brief intervals of serenity. And for this, we are grateful.