I feel guilty if I look away. I feel sick if I don't.

Posts have been pretty light-hearted this week. It belies how heavy-hearted I feel about the bushfires and the carnage left in their wake. I feel ashamed to be posting about frocks and Madonna and a mother with too many children when people are suffering…….but I also need to look away sometimes and I imagine you do too….

I’m torn between wanting to sit in front of the news and read every story in the newspaper and online to try and make sense of the enormity of it and wanting to hide under the covers and cry. Remember after 9/11 when we watched that footage of the planes slamming into the buildings again and again to try and comprehend what had happened? It feels a bit like that. My mind just cannot come to terms with the scale of what has happened.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers…..181 dead. 1000 homes lost. 7000 people homeless. The first couple of days was all about numbers and tallies. But now it’s about individuals. Every one of those numbers is a person and a catastrophe of unimagineable proportions. And it won’t be fixed in a day or a week or a year. On the news last night I saw an aerial view of what looked like another planet. Rolling black hills as far as you could see with little black bits of stubble where trees used to be. And then you look at a picture like this one above and the tricycle makes you cry…..

As the stories of individuals and their photographs have begun to appear from the mass horror, my mind keeps wandering down the path thinking about how they must have felt before they died….and how they died….and then I yank my mind back because it’s just too distressing.

And then I feel guilty for trying to shield myself from the distress when I’m sitting in my house surrounded by my beautiful family and so many people have none of that anymore. So many people have nothing. So many people don’t even have their lives.

Every time I complain about something – the weather, the kids not sleeping, feeling tired – I’m struck by what a luxury it is to have such trivial things to complain about.

Are you feeling the same way? I sat with a colleague at dinner the other night whose father lives in rural Victoria. He is 80 and his wife died last year. On Saturday he lost everything he had. Now he’s camped out in a tent city with nothing. But he’s alive. I feel powerless to help in any significant way but we must do what we can.
Save up to do your weekly – or monthly – shop at Coles on Friday. They’re donating the day’s profits from every store in the country to the Red Cross bushfire appeal. Or just eat what’s in your fridge already and donate direct to the Red Cross.

And here is a fantastic site that tells you how and where to donate goods and services – toys, clothes, furniture or your time…..

Once again sending love, prayers, support and endless sympathy to those who have been affected……..
Mia xxx