For anybody who has been lucky enough to experience a meal at Ronit Robbaz-Franco’s property in the hills behind Byron Bay, the idea of eating in Open Table’s custom-designed deck overlooking the lake and partaking of a sumptuous Valentine’s Day feast is certainly seductive.

“We are super delighted to host this lunch,” says Ronit. “We’ll be starting with some canapés and bubbles followed by a sharing feast on long tables, with lush garden and great company. All types of food will be catered for i.e. including vegetarian, vegan, gluten free. Food will be sourced close by and from our huge thriving garden.”

Booking is essential and if you would like to know the full menu please contact [email protected]

https://www.facebook.com/events/439066582948761/

Valentines Day Pop-up Lunch at Opentable
Sunday 14th February at 12.30pm

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What more beautiful place to get married than the beaches or hinterland of the Northern Rivers?  Verandah Magazine’s photographer Vanessa (The Lioness) Moore, showcases three of her recent personal favourites.  From a wedding on the beach to a Hills Hoist hitch – there’s nothing like a like a little romance on Valentine’s Day.

Says Ness: “I’ve been photographing Weddings and portraits for the past couple of years in Byron.  It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world to work as a photographer. Especially as a wedding photographer because there’s so much love and beauty in the area.”

Moore is launching a wedding photography business in combination with local videographer, Terry Brown from Byron Video, creating individual packages for their clients.  She’s also a talented family portrait photographer, and delights in taking the candid, natural shots that are her hallmark. “I’ve got four children of my own,” she says, “and so I realise the importance of capturing those special times.  For me my photography is about striving for a natural, truthful beauty within my images and that is exactly what wedding photography and family portraits give me the chance to do.”

If you’re interested in talking to Vanessa Moore about her photography packages go to: thelioness.photography

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Even if we don’t have a particular ‘other’ writes Liz Winter, there is still plenty of love to go around on Valentine’s Day – and every other day as well…

It Is Here

What sound was that?

I turn away, into the shaking room.

What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?

It was the breath we took when we first met.

Listen. It is here.

                             Harold Pinter

Oh to be romanced, to be loved, to desire and be desired! It’s surely something we all want to experience despite the highs and lows.

Every Valentine’s Day we tend to analyse our love lives. If we are happy in love it seems somehow that we are victorious in some way, and if we are single or unhappy in our current relationship we feel justified to indulge in a sorrowful moment for ourselves. If we do receive a Valentine’s card, flower or present we are keen to share the news but if we don’t does that really make us losers in love?

Perhaps there are times in our lives where a partner is part of our destiny and then there are times when we gain far more by going solo.

And yet, it seems natural to want to be loved by someone special and to reciprocate that love. A lover who gets us, someone who makes us feel good about ourselves, someone who is there to support us and let’s not forget the importance of physical chemistry.

Do we have to wait to meet a soul mate or can we make it happen? Perhaps we can.

By taking some control we feel empowered and this can help us enormously when we feel like a failure in love.

Here are some tips I’ve used when I have felt like a faded wallflower preparing my spinster outfits. It can also help if you want to improve the relationship you are in.

• Do your wish list!  I can hear you say ‘I’ve already done that, it didn’t work’, but it helps if you review it regularly to keep the energy fresh. Be specific but realistic and also adjust it as time goes on. Read it often and occasionally read it aloud to help bring it in to reality.

• Spruce up your feng shui in the bedroom or the house or both. It is the right hand corner of your house when you are facing the main entrance or the right hand corner of your bedroom when standing at the door. Make a ‘love’ altar. Place things that represent love to you, cut out a picture from a magazine of the sort of partner you would like to attract.

• Affirmations can work wonders. Try ‘I attract my soul mate now’ and then take a moment to really feel how it would be if you were with your soul mate. Affirmations manifest best when married to emotion and visualisation. Make sure you also affirm that you are worthy and deserving of love.

• Become aware how you speak to yourself. Be kind and loving to yourself in thoughts, words and attitudes.

• Take an interest outside yourself. Avoid spending time pining for the right partner. Get out there and give something to the community or perform random acts of kindness. It will make you feel good about yourself and when we radiate positive energy, we attract love wherever we go.

• Keep your friendships active no matter what your marital status is.

• Beware of jealousy of other couples who seem to have a perfect relationship – this attitude will repel love.

• If you need to heal the past and are struggling, try counselling or another healing modality. Ask your Spirit Guides and Angels to direct you to the perfect healer for you.

• Call on the Romance Angels for help and guidance. Call on Archangel Raguel for conflicts in love and Archangel Jeremiel for heart healing.

• Finally, and most importantly, never give up on Love!

All these activities set an intention, and intention can indeed be powerful.

Happy Valentine’s Day…

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From Kim Falconer’s 11th House Blog.

 Astro-LOA Flash – Psyche and Eros are conjunct @21 Pisces within ear shot of Venus and Mars conjunct!

Internally, we may feel ready to meet a more profound level of relating, to ourselves and to others. This can manifest as a projection of that readiness onto others. ie, it can manifest in red hot love.

Psyche longs for a sense of completion through the unity of all life. This is were we are telepathic, intuitive and forever linked with everything, everywhere, all the time. Psyche binds us to the collective unconscious where we dip into the pool of creativity, taste the essence of spiritual awareness and bond with others of our tribe. When she approaches Eros, the bonding is of such a magnitude that we recognize, often for the first time, our infinite capacity to love.

It can be that profound.

This transit may correspond to sudden and super hot love unions, the meeting of a soul mate (our Self as others), the initiation of a creative project or the birth of a child. However it comes, it always takes our breath away. Phew!

This post might seem timely, but it’s just a fluke that it coincides with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day. The conjunctions have little to do with Saints, chocolate or paper card consumption perpetuated for commercial gain.

Actually, there could be a link to chocolate, so scratch that, but this isn’t about Valentine’s Day, it’s about experiencing and expression passion a la Eros, Venus, Psyche and Mars.

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Have you read the myth of Psyche and Eros? Talk about an exposé on desire.

In pursuing (Eros), we pursue our greatest desire. Yet, after all, we live in ignorance of how it will approach. We can only listen, and pray, for the sounds of Eros’ soft, quivering wings.

-Harriot Eisman (1995) The Other Loveliness, PARABOLA, The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. XX, No. 4.

Passion and desire here mean heart (oh gosh, another V day connection) and if you are laboring after a cause – relationship, job, career, education, creative pitch, you-name-it, and your heart isn’t there, this upcoming transit is going to slam on the breaks, whiplash and all. It’s a ‘get real’ shake up you will not soon forget.

But is it a time to fall in love? Let’s think about that. Richart Roberts has an interesting take, and it isn’t new. Basically, we fall in love with ourselves.

When we fall in love, we shoot out an arrow of psychic energy from the quiver of our unconscious. When this energy finds a person worthy of our projection (“worthy of our love”) then the energy flies back to us like one of Eros’ arrows and we are zapped. But it is not the quality of the other person who has made us fall in love, but the quantity of psychic energy projected by ourselves. Richard Roberts

If this is true, then let’s use this time to put awareness on our heart’s desires and see where they are driving us, where they have changed and where we are willing and open, ready to expand our consciousness and embrace empowered passion.

Think of the conjunction as potent and yes, but the big headline is authentic – authentic desires that resonate with core values, drives, connections, relationships . . . It’s a crazy level passion, and you may get a shock to discover what you thought was lighting you up is no longer, but something new has taken its place.

Where you find this conjunction in your chart is where you tune in to what you want to experience. You get current! If it’s in your 7th house then discover the core of your committed partnership drives. If it’s in your 2nd, what talents and resources do you want to develop? In your 9th, check your beliefs, and any plans to travel, or pursue a higher degree. Yes, you can fall head over heels in this area of life, triggered by the experience of your own psychic energy mirrored back to you.

Venus, Mars, Eros (1898DQ), Psyche

What to do?

Enjoy the hell out of it!

And for those astrologically minded readers amongst you – check the degrees of Pisces and Aries involved, and where they fall in your chart. Leveraging this energy begins with knowing a) where we are at now and b) where we would like to be. Once we know this, we can c) close the gap and experience the passion of the heart without reserve, or resistance.

“The Gap is the space between where you are now and where you want to be. If you know what you want but don’t have it yet, you’re in the gap. Getting what you want is just a matter of closing that gap – which means aligning vibrationally with what you want.” -Jeannette Maw.

Read more from Jeannette here!

I give everything a 10 degree orb, at least, so this connection is on for months. Note: Mars/Venus is exact on the Zero Degree Aries Point. Also, the 14th of Feb has the sun conjunct Psyche exact, so tune in, ask higher guidance what you really feel in your heart and open to the answer. It will come in remarkable, spectacular ways.

I’d love to hear where this is happening for you and what you experience!

Happy Eros and Psyche conjunction. Live it up!

GVA circle members, we’ll be discussing this on our next live call.

If you’re not a member but you’d like a trial to check us out, email me!

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Let’s face it Lisa Messenger, Australia’s favourite entrepreneur and creator of the fabulous international magazine, The Renegade Collective, did start out with one amazing advantage for someone starting a communications company. Her name. Messenger, the internet tells me, comes from Middle English and Old French, it dates back to William the Conqueror, and literally means ‘a carrier of messages.’

In a sense, this is what the redoubtable Messenger has been doing for many years, first as a marketing and sponsorship manager, raising funds and support for both her products and for other people, and more recently as a publisher, not just of Renegade Collective but also of several books, including her most recent one, Life and Love, to be launched on February 14 in Byron Bay, at those wonderful purveyors of fine food, the 100 Mile Table.

The message, as you can imagine from the title alone, is of course a positive one. Messenger comes bearing us the ultimate gift – the secret of life – that we have it in us to create our own destinies, that we can live fulfilled, abundant, happy lives, and be cool, calm and centered in the midst of all our challenges.

The book came to her, as many of her ideas do, as a complete entity, but even she was surprised at the speed with which it followed her earlier book, Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing the Entrepreneur – a kind of over-turn everything you know business manual for creative entrepreneurs. “We’d only just completed Daring and Disruptive,” Messenger says, “and, as you are at the end of a project I was pretty much depleted. I’d even thought to myself that the book would come out, and I would go back to concentrating on business, but my imagination had other ideas. It was quite late on a Friday night, I remember, and I just suddenly had this visualization. I saw Life and Love – even its table of contents, almost exactly how it is now, and I knew I had to do it.”

It’s that kind of counter-intuitive, commando-style, boots and all thinking that has got Messenger where she is today. She did, she says, “veggie English at school. It was basically the lowest of the low for people who couldn’t write or spell. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve made a life out of writing books – I’ve written 13 myself and co-authored, contributed or custom published numerous others.”

But it was her first book which was the most important for her on her journey towards finding her purpose in life. She is open about the dark days that preceded her breakthrough. “I was stuck in an unhappy marriage,” she says. “I was alienated from my family, drinking too much and I’d spent ten years of my life largely isolating myself. Even though I was married I’d never felt more alone. It was hard to see how I was going to get out of the hole I’d dug for myself.”

In her blog on Life and Love Messenger writes: I had made the conscious decision to cut all ties with my mother – a decision I thought would empower me but only served as a domino effect to alienate myself from the rest of my family. Our struggles began when my parents divorced and over time the tension grew to toxic levels. I remember when I married my first husband – my ex-husband – instead of coming to my wedding, my mum and sister walked the Inca Trail. I can’t blame them. A mountain goat would have been better company than me at that point.

But something was brewing. She decided she wanted to know what happiness was – what made people happy, and how they find happiness, so in 2004 she set off around Australia interviewing people what made them happy, culminating in the book, Happiness Is…The book sold 36,000 copies in its first 12 months, which is phenomenal for an Australian author. People asked her to publish their books, and there it was – an industry was born. The Messenger Group has become a brand engagement agency specializing in custom publishing, and utilizing books and magazines as an extension of brand awareness. Eleven years and countless books later, Messenger is here to tell us that we can do create the life we love, and without compromising ourselves.

If there is a journey between Daring and Disruptive and Life and Love, it seems to me to be a journey from the head to the heart. If the earlier book was a kind of kick-ass book, this is the reverse – a gentle, reflective, beautiful book. A feminine book, if you will. “I think that’s right,” Messenger says. “I think Daring and Disruptive and another previous book, Cubicle Commando, which was all about being an ‘intrapreneur’, that is someone working from within a corporation, were both ‘yang’ energy, and with Life and Love, I was seeking my own balanceto that. I think I had a need to do something more ‘yin’, something softer and more organic.”

Ryan Gosling was the first male to make it on to the cover of Renegade Collective.

Despite the stunning success of Renegade Collective which is now sold in 37 countries, and her Collective hub, which runs the spin-offs from the magazine, plus her other 13-odd companies, Messenger remains a hippy at heart, which is what brings her back to the Byron Shire for her rest and recreation. Having reconciled with her family some years ago, Messenger’s mother and her sister live respectively in and near Bangalow, and Messenger owns a house in Bangalow herself. “I love it up there,” she says. “It’s my feel-good place. I get away up there as often as I can.”

There’s a sweet synchronicity to launching Life and Love on Valentine’s Day. It took Messenger some years to find love again after the end of her first marriage, but in November she got engaged to her partner Jack Delosa, an entrepreneurial educator she met on stage during a speaking gig. “We were on a five-gig tour together,” she says. “On the third gig he asked me out to dinner, and the rest is history.” They share their lives with Bennie, a Cavoodle, who doesn’t leave Lisa’s side – and of course, if you run your own creative entrepreneur business you can take your dog to work!

The idea that print is dead or dying, has been around for some years since the internet began its inevitable encroachment on sales, but a bit like the ‘death of the author’, or the supposed demise of film to dvd, reprorts of the death of print, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. What has been proved by Messenger, and other brave do-it-differently publishers is that what was wanted was something fresh and different. “When I launched the Collective the idea behind it was being a business magazine for entrepreneurs,” she says, “but I didn’t want it to look like a business magazine. I wanted it to look like a fashion magazine, I wanted it to be gorgeous and and have a feeling for who I am, to morph between traditional business, fashion and design.” For those of us who soaked up her first issue, full of admiration for the tactile feel of a magazine full of handwriting across photos, collage and beautiful artwork intermingled with entrepreneurial derring do, it was irresistible – and cross-generational I might add in our house where it is compulsive reading for both me and my 23-year-old son. (Our two must reads? Renegade Collective and Horse Deals…)

Ignoring the dire prophecies of print death has stood Messenger in good stead. Richard Branson now puts a copy in every room on his exclusive Necker Island resort, and the U.S sales are booming. Messenger recently spend four days with Branson on the island, and was on the alert for insights. “I really noticed that of course Richard, as with other high-profile achievers is, of course, just an ordinary person, but entrepreneurs have this propensity for risk, and an ability to trust their own decision-making process.”

Branson has often said in interviews that when it comes to business decisions his final decision is based on intuition rather than logic, and Messenger concurs. “I’ve very counter-intuitive,” she says. “As well as being a hippy at heart, I’m really tuned into the idea that there is flow of energy – something higher than us, and that is where gut knowledge and intuition come from. It’s totally different to how most businesses are run, but I think we are seeing more of it in action – it’s conscious capitalism I guess.” That said, though, she is also a believer in what she has referred to as ‘fast failure’. “Not everything is going to succeed if you’re an entrepreneur,” she says. “I’ve honed it down to a fine art – put it all together, if it doesn’t fly, walk away.”

Even further back than Medieval French or Old English, messenger in archaic Hebrew was the name ‘Malakhiy’ – meaning ‘My Messenger’ or ‘My Angel’, definitions which seem only fitting for someone who is truly delivering a message of self-fulfilment.

Paper Runway are hosting a cocktail party for Lisa Messenger  on  February14 (Valentine’s Day) to launch the serial entrepreneur’s book Life and Love, sequel to her best selling book Daring & Disruptive.  There will be wines from  Burch Family Wines and the style-makers from The Canavan will be there to shake + stir cocktails from their 1960’s retro-styled caravan. The cocktail party will be held at Byron Bay’s hippest eatery – 100 Mile Table. With five years experience as Neil Perry’s right hand person, Sarah Swan relocated north to open 100 Mile Table and will be indulging guests with paddock-to-plate canapés.

What’s included –
Canapés
Wine
Cocktails
A signed copy of Life and Love
Treats from Paper Runway

Cost $150

Where – 100 Mile Table 4/8 Banksia Drive Byron Bay

Bookings – paperrunway.com

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