A few minutes ago I wrote a tweet about one of ‘our’ local geese apparently musing over life, not the usual loud self-promotion but rather chuttering away quietly to itself. I suggested it might be meditation.

A recent email about whether I knew how to cast spells got me thinking about the blurring of lines about various areas of Mind, Body & Spirit topics. I suppose it’s sort of like doctors. While within the profession there’s enormous clarity about various specialities, to the public a doctor is a doctor.

Restaurant reviewing takes preparation. Recently I joined a pal who’s a reviewer for a major newspaper for dinner at a new, wildly expensive, sushi restaurant. My pre-dining investigation revealed it offered foie gras sushi. This was entirely new to me, but she’d had it before and emailed by return that it ‘never a good thing.’

Shelley von Strunckel’s list of favourite places, accommodation and experiences around the world: Caesar salad (and a margarita, of course) at Caesar’s Restaurant, in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico – where the first Caesar salad was created.

Easter, Passover, Spring Festivals. For thousands of years the period around the beginning of spring – the vernal equinox is its proper name – there have been rituals celebrating the fresh start that is what this season is all about. Over the next few days I’ll be examining the elements of these rituals. Today it’s Spring flowers.

Most of us are living in an era, and in circumstances that mean we ignore the cycle of the Moon, from the sliver of a crescent that follows the New Moon to the luminous smile of the Full Moon, about two weeks later.

Today the word astrology conjures up magazine and newspaper columns. However, the interests of Holst & co were spurred by a contemporary trend for exploring ancient eastern philosophies, of which astrology was only a part. Still, Holst and his friend, and astrologer, Clifford Bax, delved deeper, investigating individual horoscopes, which show the planets’ positions for an individual’s birth date, place and time, indicating they were well versed about both the star signs and planets.

Over the past two days alone, I’ve received two emails about the year 2012. One includes channelled information about the Mayan predictions in regard to this period. These said the world is not about to come to an end. But there are numerous books which interpret the writing of this Central American culture as stating very clearly that our days are numbered.

As a city-dwelling astrologer, living with skies are frequently obscured by cloud, if it weren’t for my columns, I wouldn’t know whether the moon was full, new or somewhere in between. Similarly, without a walk in a park, I could easily forget where we stand in the seasonal diary.