Month: February 2023

These Five Though

Remember when Dorothy and her cohorts met the real “Wizard of Oz” and they realized that the wizard was just a human being, nothing more and nothing less? I’ve been noticing this phenomenon in myself lately. Without really knowing certain people, I have either built them up, or I have torn them down with stories that I made up in my head about them. I already had made up my mind about a few people whom I had only met a handful of times. And then I spent some open-minded, inquisitive time with these people, and it’s like I am getting to know someone completely different and new. This prejudgment is not fair to others, and it’s embarrassing and sometimes a little devastating to me.

The important question which I have been asking myself, is why did I need to do this? Why did I turn certain people into characters that fit into my narratives? Did I need a supporting cast to validate my own decisions? Why do we feel the need for superheroes and villains to exist, when in real life, all of us are a big mix, in between the two extremes?

Everything you ever read about obtaining peace and serenity, comes down to accepting life on life’s terms, in the every single moment. That includes everyone in your life. In “The Wizard of Oz” it turns out that the wizard could have easily fit into Dorothy’s little gang of friends, going along the paths of their lives, utilizing their talents and accommodating their flaws. I read something recently that said what we love in others, is what we love about ourselves, and what we can’t stand about others, are traits which we wish that we could consciously see, and accept, and forgive within ourselves.

When you find yourself creating stories about the people and the events in your life, get less curious and detail oriented about the fantastical stories about others, and get more curious about your need to create the stories. What are these stories that you are creating, telling yourself about you, and your needs, and your desires, and your fears? Take other people off of their pedestals, and/or pick them out of your proverbial sewers, and get to know them with an objective, realistic, humanistic point of view. The lessons are not in the fictional sagas which we make up, but in the everyday, in-the-moment nuances found in our compassion for others, and for ourselves.

Cowardly Lion: “I have always thought myself very big and terrible; yet such small things as flowers came near to killing me, and such small animals as mice have saved my life. How strange it all is! – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Dorothy: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right? – The Wizard of Oz

Wizard of Oz: “Frightened? Child, you’re talking to a man who’s laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe… I was petrified.”

Scarecrow: “I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.” – The Wizard of Oz

Tin Woodman (Tin man): “I shall take the heart. For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.” – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday-Funday

Spring is right around the corner. Living in Florida, this statement brings up mixed emotions. When I lived up north, I couldn’t wait for spring. In Florida, spring brings in a big old influx of people who don’t know where they are going on the roads, and the reminder that a hot, hot summer is just around the bend. Still, I love spring. I love the natural change of seasons. Each new season brings a fresh new start to whatever in your life needs a fresh new start.

 “Spring is the time of plans and projects.” — Leo Tolstoy

“Spring adds new life and new beauty to all that is.” — Jessica Harrelson

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

 “An optimist is the human personification of spring.” — Susan J. Bissonette

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. I’m feeling a little whimsical today, hence:

I am going to write a bad poem about a good feeling.

Like a fresh coat of paint that immediately starts peeling.

Nothing deep, earnest, soulful or blue

Just a poem about feeling contented, it’s true.

Don’t start yawning or scrunching up your face in digust.

I’ve turned Sundays into making poetry writing a “must.”

So today I feel rested, silly, goofy, and pleased.

I hope that my poem doesn’t make you feel cheesed.

Take a breath, take a pause, and make a choice towards healing:

Write your own good/bad poem about your own good/bad feeling.

And then share it with me . . . .

Your glee is my glee.

You’ll see.

Wheee!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Answer These

I am having one of those weekends that feels like a delicious, warm, comforting reward for a week of getting things off of my plate that have been nibbling at me. It’s so satisfying to look at my to-do list with lines all through it and to tell myself, “Okay, Lady, good job. Now, just go have some fun!”

Book I’m Currently Reading: The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest. I highly recommend this book. I’m halfway through it, and it is filled with interesting scientific facts about how our human minds work. I am finding this book to be interesting, helpful and in many ways enlightening.

Song I’m Currently Listening To: Bam Bam by Sister Nancy. This is such a great reggae classic. My daughter reminded me of it when she played it yesterday when we were driving in her car. I love that my kids bring back the cool stuff from ‘my day’ and make me love and appreciate these things all over again. I have reached an age that I am now so “retro”, that I’m actually kind of cool again. Bam Bam, baby!

Best Compliment I Received This Week: “I’m a really hard person to buy for and you completely nailed it.” It is such a satisfying feeling to give a gift, and to see that the person receiving the gift absolutely adores what you gave to them. We all love to receive gifts and we all appreciate the thought and the kindness and the resources and time that go into thinking about, buying, creating, packaging and sending gifts, but the total cherry on the top is when the the gift is exactly what a person loves and you, as the giver, get to be the simultaneous messenger/receiver of that love, and joy, and connection of the event of “just the right gift”.

Okay, friends. Please answer the above prompts just for yourself, or if you choose, in my Comments section. What’s happening for you right now? What’s feeling good this weekend for you? What’s your “vibe”?

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Dog Lovers Friday

Happy Friday, friends!! Happy Best Day of the Week!! Our daughter is coming home for the weekend from college, so needless to say this is a great Friday for us! (but aren’t all Fridays wonderful?!) My regular readers know that I dedicate Fridays on the blog, to the materially fun and frivolous. On Fridays, I discuss stuff that I like. That’s it. Nothing deeper than stuff and fluff that I like. Please check out previous Friday posts for more favorites and please share your favorites in my Comments section. I’m always looking to add to my list of favorites in my life!

Today’s favorite I picked up the other day because I love all things related to stationery. (And I love all things related to dogs.) Of course I didn’t need another pad of paper, but this one makes me particularly happy. Today’s favorite is Eccolo World Traveler Dog Lover’s Pad. What makes this pad of paper particularly special is that each piece of paper features a different dog. There is not one duplicate of the same dog! We dog lovers know that each dog, even if they are of the same breed, are as utterly unique as individual snowflakes and fingerprints. If you are a dog lover (and most of us are, it seems) you will find this pad for jotting down notes and lists, a must-have! You can purchase Eccolo World Traveler Dog Lover’s Pad at Staples like I did, or you can order it from Amazon.

I hope that your tails wag all weekend, and that you have new exciting tales to tell of what you explored and experienced! See you tomorrow.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Starry Skies

My sister used to say that everything has an expiration date. We were actually talking about hair stylists at the time. My current hair stylist is wonderful. I have been going to her for several years now, and unless she retires, I don’t see an expiration date in sight for using her services. But I have had several hair stylists throughout the years and at the time of having that conversation, I was feeling guilty about wanting to try a new one.

I was reminded of this conversation because recently my middle son was lamenting about feeling uneasy about a friendship that he is no longer interested in pursuing. He has had this friend since they were children, but they are going on two completely different paths in life, and they have very little in common anymore. The glue that keeps them together is little more than “guilt” these days, and perhaps a little bit of a sad nostalgia for “what was”.

I’ve had meaningful relationship experiences with people I was only with for a day – a nurse who held me and soothed me when I was crying about my miscarriage, an almost all night long, deep, meaningful conversation with other teenagers whom I had met on a summer vacation across the country, and a cancer patient whom I met on a long flight. She and I ended up sharing a pleasant lunch together at an airport. I have never forgotten any of these people. Obviously. I am writing about them now.

How long a relationship lasts does not indicate how profound or meaningful it is to your life. Healthy relationships are built on mutual connection and affection. Unhealthy relationships are based on fear, obligation and guilt. What was once a mutually healthy, growing relationship, can become unstable, and stale, and even toxic. Everyone and everything on this earth is involved in a constant process of change. Sometimes these evolutions bring you closer to others, and sometimes these transformations show that the time has come to go our separate ways.

Sometimes it’s necessary to love people from afar, and from a distance. Sometimes it’s comforting to reflect on all of the connections that you have made in your own lifetime, and to remember these relationships and experiences fondly and gratefully for the growth that they have created in you. It is sort of like gazing at the same stars, in the same sky. We all have stars of connection that we have shared with others throughout our lifetime, and the light from the stars of those same shared connections, continue to shine brightly, in our hearts, in the form of gratefulness and of fond memories. By the end of our lifetimes, we will have created a star-filled sky of connections for ourselves, and at the same time, we know that we are a shiny, brilliant part (no matter how distant) of many others’ star-filled skies of lifetime connections, relationships, and bonds. No relationship is ever truly over if it is always remembered. We just have to look up at the starry skies at night to understand this pure truth.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Two New Words

I spent some time over the weekend reading my Spirituality and Health magazine and I learned a couple of new words that I really like. The first word is a Finnish word called sisu. The word was invented in 1939, at a time when tiny Finland was able to hold off an invasion by the Soviets during a particularly frigid winter. Sisu means the ability to push your limits (mentally, physically and spiritually) further than you ever knew possible. It stands for pure grit, and by the time we reach middle age, all of us can look back on at least one or two “Incredible Hulk” moments in our lives, when our sisu kicked in. It is a good reminder to ourselves to remember deep within all of us lies the treasure of our indomitable sisu.

The second word is freudenfreude which means taking vicarious delight in someone else’s good fortune. Most of us have heard of (and maybe even felt some shame for feeling) schadenfreude which means feeling some joy for someone else’s misfortune. I think that it’s sad that freudenfreude isn’t as commonly known a word as schadenfreude. I know that freudenfreude is frequently felt. I didn’t care who won the Super Bowl this year, but I was gleeful for the thrilled players and fans of Kansas City. I can’t help but feel freudenfreude whenever I see a delighted child, or a dog whose tail is going one hundred miles a minute. Perhaps the rest of this week, we should make it a point of feeling freudenfreude whenever we can. We should seek freudenfreude out. In my experience, I feel the greatest freudenfreude for underdogs who have gone all out with their sisu, and end up being victorious. That’s the best freudenfreude of all!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Decide and Move On

I’ve been noticing a phenomenon in myself and others a lot lately. We make a decision or we place a boundary, but then we explain our decision ad nauseum, to anyone who is listening range. We extol on why our decision was “right” or necessary, but by doing that, it seems to take away from the confidence of our decision/boundary. Sometimes we harangue so much about our situation, that it makes me wonder if we would be better off never making the decision or boundary to begin with, because the situation is obviously still eating us up, and taking up a lot of our time, peace, and mindspace.

When I was younger I was better about making a decision and putting the rest of it in the rearview mirror. I had confidence in myself that no matter what I decided, I would be able to handle the outcome, and be better for it. When I was younger, I better understood that there are no “perfect” solutions and most problems can be solved in many different ways. I didn’t need the 100 percent approval rate, that I sometimes think that I am vying for now.

I think that it’s odd that the confidence in my decision making has abated a bit in me. I suppose that youthful optimism, energy, and carefreeness wanes with time and experience. But that’s a shame, because I’m older now and there’s a lot less time to waste. My whole life has been a series of daily decisions that have worked out quite nicely for me. And even when I have gotten off track, I’ve used my decision making skills to get back on the best leg of my journey going forward. It’s best to make a decision and roll with it. If it ends up being a poor decision, more decisions can be made to move forward in a different direction. Lamenting a decision just keeps one stuck in neutral.

“Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right.”– Phil McGraw  

“You cannot make progress without making decisions.”– Jim Rohn

“Life is filled with difficult decisions, and winners are those who make them.”– Dan Brown 

“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.”– Anthony Robbins

“Don’t mourn over your bad decisions. Just start overcoming them with good ones.”– Joyce Meyer

“When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment.”– William B. Given

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday – Funday

Good morning. I read an article yesterday about the actress Sally Field. One time, one of her sons was going through a bout of anxiety, when he was constantly worried that she wouldn’t be there to pick him up from school, or she wouldn’t be there at night when he was falling asleep. Sally Field reassured him, “Sammy, I will always be there to pick you up, even when I’m not there.”

I thought to myself, “Isn’t that the truth? My own four grown children are all over the place, living their adult lives, and even though I am not physically there with any of them, I am there. I am always there. As I often say, my children are pieces of my heart walking around on eight legs.”

I hope that you have a wonderful start of the week. My husband is off for the holiday. I have to say that this late, leisurely start is the right way to do a Monday.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

My husband and I attended a wedding last night. It’s the first wedding that we have attended in a while. Young love is so poetic and inspiring and hopeful and pure. Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Here are some poems that I found online that reminded me of our experience last night, and about other lovely unions, including our own:

“True love comes
when you lose
where you end
and they begin
and the atoms
in your souls
forget where they belong
and slowly you become
pieces of each other
too close now
to ever be apart”
― Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“When I saw you first, it took
every ounce of me not to kiss you.
When I saw you laugh, it took
every ounce of me not to love you.
And when I saw your soul, it took every ounce of me.”
― Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild

“Put your hand on your heart,’
the old man said.
‘Inside you, there is a power,
there are ideas,
thoughts that no one has ever thought of,
there is the strength to love,
purely and intensely,
and to have someone love you back –
there is the power to make people happy,
and to make people laugh –
it’s full of compliments,
and the power to change lives and futures.
Don’t forget that power,
and don’t ever give up on it.”
― Atticus Poetry

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.