Hundertwasser’s Kawakawa Toilets designed and built by Friedrich Hundertwasser were his final creation.  I recently had the opportunity to take a look at these unique toilets which  are in the main street of Kawakawa in the Northlands region of New Zealand. They have become a tourist drawcard for the 1870s and early 1880s coalmining town .

Hundertwasser’s ideas may challenge you, but this is what he said of his work;

“I should like, and I do it too quite instinctively, to live an example, live an example to people, paint for them a paradise that each may have, he need only grasp it.

Paradise is there, but we destroy it.

I want to show how basically simple it is to have paradise on earth.

And everything that the religions and dogmas and the various political creeds promise, is all nonsense.”

The toilets weren’t the only thing he he did while in town. He also did some wonderful murals with quite profound writings embedded within them. Here are some snippets from one of them.

A Hundertwasser Mural In New Zealand

Today’s Question: How do you create ‘meaning’ within your own creative output?

From garden cafes to posh places there is certainly no lacking in variety and creativity in the NZ cafe scene.

Here are a few images I’ve collected along the way.

Coffee decoration at Matakana

Artichokes In Garden Cafe At Geraldine

Iced Coffee NZ Style at Waiomu Beach Cafe. Don't you just love the chocolate fish!

Table Decoration In Coromandel Cafe

Shadows On The Roof In Picton

A foray into the Celestine Prophecies recently acquainted me with the idea that the first stage of spiritual awakening is when we perceive beauty within everything, that all things have their own inherent beauty.  As a creative person, this is something that resonates very deeply with me.  I find it fascinating therefore that some people who profess to have great spiritual insight, put forward the idea that this world is just a place of suffering and misery and basically ugly and un-spiritual along with everyone in it.

And yet there so so much beauty everywhere we look if we but have the eyes to see it.  One of the great benefits of training in the visual arts – painting, drawing etc is that you are taught to see the world in a very different way. You learn to be more present to your surroundings and pay attention to things that would otherwise completely pass you by.

Today’s Question: What loveliness can you find in your world today?

Well here it is the most controversial year in living memory!  If you subscribe to the view that your thoughts create your reality, now is a good time to stop and take stock of what you want your reality to be in this coming year.

Some people are forecasting times of great physical upheavals upon the earth while others predict that there is going to be a great spiritual awakening. Whatever the case may be it does seem that we are living through times of great change.  Our world financial system is on the verge of collapse and it seems that no one really knows quite what to do about that. However is this necessarily a bad thing – the fact that it’s collapsing? Sometimes we need to experience radical change in our lives in order to move onto something better.  If we are to afraid to make the changes ourselves then we often find that some outside event will force our hand, which can be even more traumatic.

Today’s Question: What are you focusing on that will become your reality in 2012?