Here is the editor's letter from our Autumn issue. Enjoy.

Do you know what mindfulness is? For Buddhists it is the critical factor in the path to enlightenment but for the present generation of consumers it has come to mean something decisively less lofty. Today, even to eat means to consume not just food but petrochemicals for transport and packaging, paper resources, and huge amounts of energy and water. One really would need to be a monk to avoid racking up even the most meagre of resource tabs.
Mindfulness, which even though in our modern context is not exactly next to saintliness, is part of the answer to this question of how to leave a smaller footprint. Mindfulness is about quiet observation and the wisdom which follows. To illustrate mindfulness in action, contributing writer Michaela Isaac has explored the minefield of ethical and environmental decisions involved in buying even the humblest of staple foods. Our fashion brief to stylist Rebecca Riles of Roots & Wings Design was to scout labels ticking eco, fair labour, organic, low-resource, Australian made, and natural fibre boxes. Mindfulness is very much on the fashion radar. Local artist Lisa Madigan has styled Michelle Collison’s Numbaa idyll, where the ‘found’ and the hand made are displayed with love, every piece telling a story of family life past and present. And we talk to French-born architect Nathalie Curtet about green architecture. Her gallic heritage puts her philosophy into a rich historical context.
Creating this issue has brought to mind an Aboriginal proverb which suggests custodianship of resources, contrary to bumper sticker sentiments like ‘here for a good time, not a long time’ and ‘live fast, die young’.

We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.

RW.