One of the things Australians do really very well are admission-free Botanical Gardens, I find. Even in the most horrible city you can escape the rat race and find tranquility in the midst of green. Brisbane has two such Botanical Gardens, one in the city and one in the west at Mount Coot-Tha. I was in the latter. The weather at the moment is nice -- days around 22 degrees Celsius, but cold nights (9 degrees in my campervan). So the nights get nasty, and I am glad to have a warm quilt for cover. In the long term I will really need to go 1000 km further north during winter.
I also attended a show in the planetarium that's next to the Botanical Gardens. They had a nice show about our place in the universe (narrated by Tom Hanks), and then an explanation of the current night sky (using a Zeiss projector from Germany that is rather old but fantastic quality and still works perfectly).
If someone asks me about my religion, I tend to say these days that I am approximately at the point where agnosticism, atheism and pantheism meet. Yes, it is a bit abstract, I am afraid, and you can probably not call it a religion either, but that's what best describes my current position.But if I ever wanted to develop my pantheistic leaning into a kind of religion, my likely direction would be: Worship that what is holy to you, that what fills you with awe, that what created you, and that what gives you life. The big life-giver for us on this planet, besides Earth herself, is the Sun. So sun-worship would make some sense to me and feel right in a way. But star-worship, in a more general sense, would be even more sensible. After all, all solid matter, everything around us, and what we are made of ourselves, was once cooked in the stars. In short, if there were no stars, we would not be there. Or as Carl Sagan said, "We are star stuff."
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