Month: January 2024

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. Sunday is the ultimate “breathe out” day isn’t it. Breathe out, and write a poem today. You won’t regret it. Writing poetry is a great exercise in self discovery. Here is my poem for today:

“PRESS RESET”

If there was ever a reset button for anyone’s life,

it would probably be on a Sunday morning.

All of the plans, and actions, and inactions, forward motions,

mistakes, redos, have-tos, sideswipes, happy surprises,

less than pleasant surprises, items crossed off the to-dos,

items added to the to-dos, new things learned, old things confirmed,

aches and pains, losses and gains, dreamy nights, sleepless nights,

knowledge gleaned, wisdom earned, gratitude seeped in,

All of this. All of the bits and bobs, whirling around all week,

Sometimes ending in frenzy and collapse and exhaustion . . .

How to save all of this information?

In order to not have any losses,

Something deep within us, presses a button,

RESET. We are ready to begin again . . . .

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2045. Do you think chivalry is dead . . . and should it be?

I Do

We just arrived home from the wedding which we had attended last night. I’m tired, but happily so. There are few experiences in this world that are more beautiful, hopeful, earnest, and comforting than weddings. How lovely it is to see two people commit to be there for each other, in full support of each other throughout their shared journeys throughout their lifetimes. Many wedding traditions have changed throughout the ages, and it is true that not all marriages last, but during the celebration of the uniting of two people, the whole space around them is elevated. We attendees to the wedding are all delighted to witness a couple of our fellow human beings bare their souls to each other, and also to say to all of us who care about them and to Creation, “I’m going to take care of this human. I’m going to be there for this human through it all. This human is very special to me.” And we all feel happy that there is another twosome in this world that have committed to having each other’s backs in the most intimate, devoted, exhaustive way that it is not possible to do for everyone who we each know and care about. Marriage elevates us. It elevates our world. And you see a microcosm of this in any wedding event. You look over the sea of beaming faces and you see the elderly, and the youth, and everyone in between, and you realize that marriage is a huge part of what has made our humanity what it is today. Our biggest celebrations and traditions in life are always about love. Weddings encapsulate the act of love, not just the feeling of love, but the act of committing to actually being love in one of its most gracious forms, as a caring, dedicated, devoted spouse of another being. Weddings are wonderful.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1863. What song would you say best sums you up?

Furry Friday

Today we are going to a wedding. I always scour a couple’s wedding registry for something that I believe that the couple will have for a long, long time. I look for an endurable item. I think that it bodes well for the marriage, to use an item, or to see an item, and to remember your special day every time that particular item meets your eye. My parents’ friends bought us this large, unusual, beautiful salad bowl for our wedding and to this day, it sits out on our kitchen counter, holding apples and oranges. We’ll be happily married for 30 years in October.

I only bring this up about “special items” because on Fridays on the blog, I discuss the “special items” in life which make life more interesting. Favorite Things Friday is here! This Friday’s favorite I learned about from our dog groomer. She groomed Josie, our rough collie, the other day in about half of the time that it usually takes. (Josie is probably related to wookies. Her hair is similar to Chewbacca’s. Josie has A LOT of hair.) Anyway, our groomer said that she started using a new brush that has become a game changer for her business. It was invented by a Doodle breeder. The brush is called The Doodle Brush. You can buy The Doodle Brush on Amazon. I purchased one and haven’t used it much yet because the dogs were just groomed, but I trust my groomer. She knows her stuff. At $55, the brush is not inexpensive, but my groomer insisted it’s worth every penny. If you live with a furry critter (or two), this is a brush that you must check out.

Have a delightful weekend, friends! See you tomorrow!

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

520. How modern are you?

Being It

The son of one of my best friends from college is getting married tomorrow. He is the first of our group of friends’ babies to get married. It feels surreal. As you age, you get little markers along the way, reminding you that you are aging. (a lot of these markers have landed on my face in the form of wrinkles and bags) But every once in awhile, as you are moving along your life, you get big flashing lights that are determined to get your attention. They seem to scream: “You, my friend, are definitely in a different era of your life!”

I remember clearly going to this young man’s parents’ wedding. We all went to college together. There were a slew of weddings back then. And then, after a while, there weren’t many weddings to attend at all. Everything evolved to baby showers. And then there was a long period of supporting each other as we raised our families, sharing our joys and our griefs along the way. And not too many years ago, the graduation notices of the children of my friends starting coming into the mailbox more and more frequently. The Christmas cards we receive every year seem to have more wedding pictures on them, and now the darling babies featured on the front on the cards are often the adored grandbabies of our friends.

It is not lost on me that the major milestones that mark the turning of the seasons of our lives, are the milestones that show where all of our loving energy has been invested. The milestones in our lives show the growth of our relationships and of our endeavors, and the branches of where our lives have grown and spread. I’m not sad that I am crossing into this new era of my life. I am perhaps a little (naively) surprised, but I am not sad. I delight in everything that I have experienced and grown wiser about in my life. I am grateful for my life. I am grateful to share this journey with others who help me to reflect on, and help me to realize all that life really is, which is to say, can mostly be whittled down to one pure thing – experiencing, living, and being Love.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2101. Can you do any fake accents? If so, which one? (This reminds me of a “No Horse Pucky” story. Let me start by saying that my husband and I have power of attorney for each other, and I handle all of our monthly bills. One month, there was a problem on one of my husband’s credit card statements that I was trying to get rectified. The customer service people told me that my husband would have to call about it, but my husband was out of the country on business. So, I thought to myself, “I’ll just lower my voice and pretend to be my husband.” Simple. Problem solved. I practiced a few times and I called back. I did my spiel in my “man voice.” The patient customer service person listened and then said to me, “Ma’am, we really are going to need to speak to your husband.” So fake man accent, is clearly not one of my talents.)

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

I’ve been stalled in writing because I am waiting for my mind to thaw, and my fingers feel like stiff little icicles that do not want to be separated from each other. I feel guilty living in Florida and complaining about the cold, but it is currently 46 degrees outside which is typically unheard of in our neck of the woods. And my husband and I are incredibly stubborn. We won’t turn on the heat pump unless things become dire. We don’t like the smell of burnt dust. I read something on the internet that said that those of us complaining about the cold, just can’t wait for the days that we can complain about the heat. Yes, that’s about right.

When I was in my twenties I had a boss who liked to ask quirky questions. She once asked whether I would prefer to freeze to death, or to be overheated to death. While I pondered the question (and also why she was asking it), she mentioned that freezing to death is actually a very calm, gentle, easy-going death. I never asked her how she knew this, but I never forgot this particular moment either. When I think about this now, I honestly pick “neither” forms of death. I pick neither.

I always feel bad for people from up north who come to Florida in December and January and end up coming in to visit us during a cold spell. The stubborn disappointment is palpable. Everyone seems to think that Florida is always sweltering because they once went to Disney World in July. These defiant winter tourists still wear their shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops and they pretend not to notice that their toes are turning blue. And of course, we overly dramatic Floridians are bundled up like we are about to ascend Mt. Everest, as we layer on every old coat which we have ever owned (“it’s a good thing that I kept my high school ski jacket for days like these”).

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1987. How do you feel about photography?

Pages from a Thought-alog

I have many notebooks full of thoughts that I have jotted down from signs I’ve seen, things that I have read, or insights that have come to me. In these notebooks I have pasted poems and artwork that inspire me, special cards that I have received, and feathers that I have found. I decided to flip through my current “Thought-alog” and share some of the goodies that I have in there, here on the blog today:

+ “Cycles end when you refuse to participate in them.” – SayItValencia, X When you raise a family, and then grow into becoming the elders of a large and growing brood, i.e. the matriarch and/or the patriarch of any family, and you are truly intentional about these roles that you have taken on, you inevitably become a cycle breaker. There are many things that you experience with your family of origin that you like and that you appreciate, and so you choose to deliberately continue these ways and traditions with your own family, but there are also things that you wish to stop. You want certain patterns of behavior and toxicity to end with you. You see how long certain cycles have continued on and on within your family line, and you decide that you will be where this negativity stops. You become a cycle breaker. This is not easy. People are resistant to change. You have to be continually aware and intentional to stop cycles from perpetuating. Generational cycles are highly ingrained. Sometimes as a cycle breaker, you even go a little too far in the opposite direction, and so your descendants may work to swing the pendulum a little bit closer to center. Regardless, I read somewhere that if you are an effective cycle breaker in a family or in an organization, you have likely changed the direction and the toxic patterns in this entity for at least seven generations to come. Being a cycle breaker is a worthy purpose and endeavor, in my book.

+ Major personal decisions should not be made by asking, “Will this make me happy?” but, “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” – James Hollis

Eating cookies for breakfast will make me happy in the short term, and this practice will certainly enlarge my physical presence, but overall, this choice only diminishes me. Of course, I am not sure that choosing to eat a cookie is a major personal decision, but unfortunately, these little decisions add up, too. Sigh.

+ “If you ignore it and it doesn’t go away, it’s reality.” – I’m sorry but I don’t know who to credit for this one, but I do think that it is an excellent litmus test. We tend to grow stories in our head that veer far from reality. That little bump on your skin becomes malignant cancer as fast as you can say, “Web MD.” Still, there are things that we know deep down that we have to address. They are the things that don’t go away and they keep pinging you and pinging you harder and harder to address them. I always tell my kids to always take heed of the first lesson that the Universe hands to you because if you ignore that lesson, you will most definitely get bigger, and more dramatic lessons headed your way. Face reality when it is manageable to do something about it.

+ “Our true nature is peace and joy if only we don’t disturb it.” – Swami Satchidananda Remember, the true and real and timeless essence of you, and of me, and of your dog, and of every other living being in this world, is that peaceful, calm, tranquil, unbiased observer and experiencer, in all of us. The observer of your thoughts and your feelings is the real you. The creator of your thoughts is just your ego and your ego has quite the imagination. Your ego likes to stir things up. Whenever you need peace, just take three deep breaths and sit back in the rocking chair of your true self – the unbiased, unfearful experiencer and observer of what’s going on around you and within you. When you are in that space, you can laugh at the drama queen that your ego tends to be.

+ Fun, new words and terms from the Urban Dictionary and other sites like it:

delulu – delusional

solulu – solution

popular loner (also known as background friend) – someone who has a lot of friends, makes a lot of friends easily, but tends to stay on the peripheral

JOMO – Joy of Missing Out. It is a term to remind us to stay in the present moment, instead of constantly checking our phones and/or social media feeds.

+ My favorite quote from a recent, excellent WSJ interview with the actress Natalie Portman:

WSJ: What’s your most prized possession?

Natalie Portman: “I don’t have a prized possession. I have prized humans and prized dogs I love. I am into living beings.”

+ Tape these to your bathroom mirror (good reminders):

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” – Gary Snyder

“You cannot have a happy ending to an unhappy journey.” – Esther Hicks

“All stories have the same finale.” – Daily Stoic

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2105. What do you compartmentalize in your life? (Hint: Compartmentalization is a form of psychological defense mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict are kept separated or isolated from each other in the mind. -Wiki)

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. What I love about poetry is the mystery in it. Sometimes I write a poem, and it is still an enigma, even to me, as to what the poem really means. Writing a poem is like going into the deep tombs of yourself, and discovering unusual, foreign writing on the wall, and quickly and excitedly transcribing this strange writing, without fully understanding the meaning behind it. Reading a poem offers this same mercurial experience. Undoubtedly, there is a different meaning and truth that comes from any poem, from every reader of it. Everyone’s own experiences and emotions are what brings the context to the meaning in any collection of words. Here is my poem for the day:

The Universe has a way of getting really bored of my stubborn streak,

While I hem and haw and analyze, and strategize, and collect my allies,

The Universe says, Enough already!

And tends to make the changes that I couldn’t make for myself,

in one fell swoop. And then we Both sigh in utter relief.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2361. Complete this thought: All roads lead to . . . ?

Lingua Cordis

I saw this the other day and I realized that I need to pray this prayer more often. Sometimes it is so easy and clear to understand what we are want to ask God to support us in. We come to prayer or meditation with a list similar to what a kid brings to Santa Claus, even if the list includes lofty, selfless things like for someone else’s healing, or for peace in wartorn countries. But other times, our heart is panging us. Situations in our lives keep playing over and over in our heads, like a broken record, but we can’t even define what the real problem is in these situations. We want the itching to stop, but we don’t know where to scratch. I often pray for clarity in my life. And when I do this, I want real clear clarity. I want the window to my soul to be so extremely clear that I could accidentally walk through it and not even realize there’s a window there. I want the kind of clarity that knocks you so hard on your head, that when you wake up, you feel absolutely stupid for not realizing “the truth of it all” from the get-go. I want God to hear my heart and then translate its message in perfectly simple straightforward English with the exact next steps to take. And God usually laughs at these demands and tells me that I need to stop relying on translators. “Quiet down and learn the language of your own heart. All of the answers you have ever needed I gave to you there, but only you can understand your own heart’s language.”

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

878. What is one thing you won’t admit to yourself?

Dragon It, It’s Friday!

credit: Dragon Eternity

I have a thing for dragons. (But after Game of Thrones, don’t we all?) Happy Friday! Happy Best Day of the Week! Friday is such an easy day to feel carefree and excited and fun, isn’t it? My favorite for today for Favorite Things Friday, on the blog, involves dragons. I honestly have become even more entranced with dragons when Ancestry.com recently sent me my enhanced DNA results and it turns out that I have a large percentage of Welsh in my heritage. The Welsh Dragon is the symbol of Wales and it is a beautiful, ferocious red (my favorite color). This is also the Chinese Zodiac’s Year of the Dragon. And so of course, there are a myriad of dragon products available to buy, from everywhere, already. My favorite dragon purchase so far this year, is this wonderful salad bowl from Sur La Table. At $30, I think that it is a steal (and a treasure)! Here is the link:

https://www.surlatable.com/pro-8053696-bwl-srv-dragon-peony-11/PRO-8053696.html

They also sell some fabulous red dragon kitchen towels that I snapped up, as well. Here is my bowl and my favorite coffee cup:

Have a fun weekend, friends! Let your inner dragon fly!!

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1659. What does your “happy dance” look like?