Beach Pact

How is it possible that I have been living in downtown Byron Bay now for almost a week and haven't been to the beach.  Our apartments are located only about two blocks away...inexcusable!  I think it's because I've been so busy doing work and other school/personal related things.  Our days are so long here, usually we start around 8 or 9 in the morning and go until 5 or 6 at night. There isn't a ton of free time and in addition to eight hour class time, we have homework and journal entries due regularly. So my beach pact is that I am going to try to make time each day to enjoy the beautiful surroundings, whether it's taking my readings to the beach or walking around town.  I'm hoping to take one more surfing lesson while I'm here, at least!  We finally picked up our group's pictures from Black Dog Surf (earlier post was of other group):

While it's just wonderful being here, I don't think any of us realized how intensive of a program it would be.  I am learning a lot about myself including that I am much more of an introvert than I had thought and while I'm a very dependent person, I still value my alone time (which we get very little of here). Today was our first full day off in a while and I'm hoping to get my reading done and take a nap.  We got a chance to go to the beach for a little while, which was great.  Maybe I can finally get rid of the shorts tan and work on a bathing suit tan.  


This past week we had a Sustainable Futures Workshop, which was led by the Director of Sustainable Futures Australia, a sustainability services organization.  We learned about adaptation versus transformation when it comes to habits and systems, action learning/response and the change cycle, the concept of the unbounded present (the idea that the past, present, and future are all infinitely interconnected), the extended present (the idea that an exchange of knowledge should occur from generation to generation, sets up the family as a chain of connected generational rings), combining hindsight with insight and foresight, life cycle analysis of products, world energy usage and flows, and planning for sustainable communities (e.g. co-housing) among many topics.  We even got together in groups to design an eco-friendly/sustainable house!  Unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures from the two-day workshop except for these two:

Yes, that's right.  The spider was huge and it was sitting right above us.

Walking to the beach for a swim during our lunch break.

Last night was one of the group member's 21st birthdays so all 24 of us got together to have a potluck dinner.  Most people contributed really yummy things such as: JambaLYLE (Lyle makes really good Jambalaya) and mango chicken curry.  My group made vegetable lasagna with broccoli, green peppers, onions, squash, ricotta and mozzarella.  It was delicious:

Nomz.

The group...looking like it's Thanksgiving.

We're all going out to a Mediterranean place for dinner tonight for birthday celebration round 2 and tomorrow we're leaving for Forest Haven, a place about 2 hours south of Byron Bay for our Ecophilosophy/Environmental Psyschology workshop/retreat.