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Monday – Funday

Credit: YourTango

While the meme is funny, this past weekend was definitely full of drama, wasn’t it? Besides the assassination attempt (which sadly happened in my hometown, really close to where I grew up), we lost a few quite notable celebrities of my generation’s “coming up days” – Richard Simmons, Dr. Ruth and Shannen Doherty (it’s really surreal to be of the age, where more and more of the household names of the 70s-90s are passing at what feels like a more rapid pace. Gulp.), and the Euros finals, and the Wimbledon finals were played. (Didn’t Princess Kate look beautiful and radiant? It was lovely to see her out and about with her daughter.)

May this week be less of a slap, and more of a pause, for all of us. Let’s all be extra cautious, careful and considerate. There’s intense energy swirling all of us in this world. Let’s all find our calm in the center of our storms.

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:

1046. Finish this sentence as if it were your life: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” (I had to pick this one because last night we had a window rattler of a storm. Even our collie, Josie, was hiding in the laundry room and she rarely shows fear.)

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Below is the poem which I wrote for today. Write your own poem today. Poems are secret messages from your soul.

When?

When will the world stop its tantrum of anger and fear?

When will the world settle into the stillness that’s here?

When will the world turn to the wisdom of the heart?

When will the world lean into intuition’s level of “smart”?

When will the world stop creating its own pain?

When will the world start behaving like it’s sane?

When I stop my tantrum of anger and fear,

When I settle into the stillness that’s here,

When I turn to the wisdom of my heart,

When I lean into my intuition’s level of “smart”,

When I stop creating my own pain,

I help the world turn “insane” to sane.

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:

1869. Where is the most magical place on earth, in your opinion?

Saturday’s Kick Arounds

+ “If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth, we must still march on.” – Stopford Brooke

I once watched a documentary where an Egyptologist/archaeologist was saying that many things that we hold to be true about ancient cultures have already been proven false because of the technologies of carbon dating and other discoveries from other sources of science. However, much of these new discoveries are still refuted, and left out of the history books, due to the fact that many academics refuse to “lose face.” No one wants to be proven wrong. And yet that is the way of progress – as conditions and perceptions change, so does reality. Finding the truth is often a process of “unknowing” everything that we are convinced that we already know. In an ideal world, wisdom and knowledge and insight, would always, always supercede our egos.

+ I recently read this fascinating story (which lead me to watching a captivating documentary and purchasing a book, of course – story of my curious life) about a strange, eccentric nanny, named Vivian Maier, who took hundreds of thousands of pictures of people, mostly on the streets of New York and Chicago during the 1950s/60s, and never developed the pictures. A man name John Maloof, purchased all of her negatives from a storage center that she had stopped paying for, for the paltry sum of $380, and astonishingly realized what an amazing talent this photographer had, particularly in finding the “soul” in the people of the photographs that she took. Vivian Maier had already died without a husband nor children, so this man made it his mission to make sure that her work was recognized for its greatness. Her photographs are now available in books, offered up in galleries all over the world, and many consider her to be one of the “greats” of street photography. Check out her website here, and enjoy this interesting little rabbit hole: https://www.vivianmaier.com/ If there was ever an artist who did the art, simply for the obsession of doing it for art’s sake, Vivian Maier is it.

+ One of my best friends from college texted us that she had just landed in Dublin, Ireland for her summer vacation. Coincidentally, my daughter, who is studying in London this summer, happens to be visiting Dublin this weekend with her friends. My husband said to me, “Can you imagine if you had been a prophet, and as you and your friend were sitting in a cozy, little dorm room in Virginia, you said, “We will be lifetime friends and more than three decades from now, you and my daughter will be in Dublin on the very same weekend?” I love this thought. It warms my heart. My deepest belief is that coincidence is just God being anonymous. Coincidence is always a delicious, enticing, comforting mystery.

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:

815. Have you ever been in a newspaper?

Foraging Friday

Hello friends and readers!! Happy Friday!! I hope that everyone is doing alright in this heat. I spoke to my aunt in Pennsylvania yesterday and she said that the temperatures have been hovering in the 90s there (not typical PA temps), and our poor son (who lives in Miami) has had a broken air conditioner for five days. Aye yai yai! Fridays are reserved for my favorite things on the blog, and admittedly high heat is NOT, at all, one of my favorite things.

But getting back to the good stuff . . . my favorite for today is something that I found while shopping for my “grand-dog”, Otis. It’s a snuffle mat. It’s made from fleece and it has hundreds of little fleece tabs that you hide treats and whatnot under. Snuffle mats appeal to dogs’ natural foraging instincts (think like when you are stuck on a walk, because your dog won’t remove their nose from a certain spot on the grass), and they help with relieving boredom in dogs. These mats are washable, and they come in so many cute, interesting varieties. (Amazon sells quite a few of them.) I have yet to purchase a snuffle mat for our three dogs, out of concerns that the snuffle mat could turn into “fight club mat”, but I haven’t ruled out buying one just yet. They’re just too cute!

Have a great weekend, friends. Stay cool, if you can!! 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:

770. Do you have any music on vinyl or cassettes?

Fasting

“If you are stressed out, maybe it’s because your mind is overcrowded with other people’s thoughts and activities. If this is the case, go on a “media fast” for three days- forgo your cell phone, TV, and internet. You will soon be able to listen to your own body and mind and return to a state of good health.” – Haemin Sunim

I gave this gift to myself for the most part this week. I haven’t done a total fast from my phone and internet, (TV is an easy pass for me) but I have drastically reduced my “media calories.” I’ve mostly stayed home. I’ve read two books, enjoyed quiet dinners and long dog walks with my husband, and gone to bed early each night. I’m feeling restored and refreshed after a “go-go” first half of the year.

Now admittedly, this isn’t too hard for me. As a natural introvert, I crave experiences like I’ve had this week. I need alone time like I need food and air. Still, in a particularly tumultuous year like this year’s election year (on top of everything else in this fast-paced, crazy world . . . .), I can’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t benefit from this “finest medicine.” It’s a way to get back in touch with yourself. It’s interesting, that just like Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz, and so many spiritual seekers of the world, what you often realize when you stop searching and grasping, and hunting, and you get to that quiet, solitary, special space, just within yourself, is that what you are craving and seeking is something that you’ve had with you all along. Peace is within.

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:

1766. What is your favorite thing about nature? (For me, everything – endless variety, unparalleled resiliency, the constant reminder that miracles abound.)

It’s Over

I was flipping through my emails this morning, and I came across writer/podcaster Kelly Corrigan’s quick summary of her conversation with Aliza Pressman, who is an author and a counselor and a parenting expert. So, I went down the rabbit hole of watching various interviews and videos Aliza Pressman had made on The Today Show and on her Instagram, filled with excellent parenting tips, and my overall impression was 1.) Aliza makes many practical, useful, sensible, effective suggestions and 2.) Thank heavens that our four kids are grown and I don’t have to frantically try out any of her suggestions! We don’t even have grandchildren yet. Yes, we do have three somewhat unruly, misbehaved dogs. (My daughter kept chiding us, earlier this summer, that we simply weren’t going to believe how extremely well-behaved the darling dogs of London are, running around leashless in Hyde Park only because they listen to every command their owners give to them, every single time. Yes, it seems that even English dogs have better manners than their American counterparts. I have always wholly admitted that we were much better at raising kids, than we were at raising dogs.)

I have reached that early empty nest realization that my younger self (and my husband’s younger self, and my friends’ younger selves) were total badasses. Parenting is hard! I was cleaning out ancient emails the other day and I found an email which I had sent to a family member, trying to schedule some time to get together one weekend. With four kids at home, balancing four crazy schedules of school and sports and activities, the schedule read like something you’d expect from a rock star’s world tour, or a dignitary visiting a foreign land and trying to make the utmost of the short time allotted. And I sounded so calm in my email. Just reading the schedule exhausted me. But my former self seemed to take it all in stride.

I loved raising my family. However, I also love that this mission is completed. Parenting is hard work: physically, mentally, and particularly emotionally. There is no job in the world that you don’t beat yourself up more for not doing it “right.” When you are actively parenting, you are on call 24/7. Even when we were on vacation, when the kids were little, it often seemed like we had just packed up our life of parenting, and unpacked it (and unpacked, and unpacked, and unpacked) in a different location.

The thing about parenting is that it always carries a low level of “guilt.” Even now I feel “guilty” writing that I am relieved that my “raising my kids days” are complete. I see many people pining away for the days when the kids were little. I’m not completely sure what that pining is about. Is it loss of our own youth and vitality? Is it stuck in regrets of wishing we had done things differently, or that circumstances had gone differently? Is it losing too much of our identity in our roles as parents, that we feel a loss of who we are currently? Is it feeling a loss of control, and loss of great amounts of time and insight, into the separate lives of our now adult children?

I feel kind of fortunate that I don’t feel too sad that my active parenting phase is over. My friend loves to repeat the adage, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy that it happened.” Thankfully, I believe that I am a “moving forward” kind of a person. That is not to say, that I don’t ever get caught up in the grips of nostalgia from time to time, or that I don’t ever look in the mirror and wish that I could bring that 30-something body and energy back into being, but overall, I’ve plunged fully and enthusiastically into each new phase of my life, and I intend to do the same with this empty nest phase that I am just wading into now. Life is a journey forward. I know that someday, in my quiet, elderly years, I’ll look back at what my empty nest emails/texts/communications looked like, and I will be in awe of my empty nest self, and everything that she experienced and completed and learned in that phase of her life. I will think to myself, “She (and her husband and her friends) sure were badasses” and then I’ll keep being my badass elderly self until it really is all over.

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:

1591. Do your goals and dreams energize you – or exhaust you?

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ We have an adorable little plant and bookstore near us that states this mantra: “Support your body. Manage your mind. Expand your spirit.” It’s a great mantra. It’s a good mission statement. It’s a simple and all-inclusive formula to the best way to go about living a life.

+ I read this in one of Haemin Sunim‘s excellent books (it reminds me of two of my favorite axims in life – 1. Tears are our body’s God-made release valves and 2. Our lives are the clear, blue skies. The clouds always, always pass.):

“Clouds release their sadness by crying until they can cry no more. When they have no tears left to cry, they feel a great weight has been lifted, as heavy as all the tears they have shed. We can release our sadness into the sky within us. When we feel sad, it’s okay to cry like the clouds.”

After quite a dry spell, the clouds over us here in Florida have been crying a lot. In fact, they’ve had many stormy tantrums. And afterwards, everything feels so cleansed and refreshed and robust and healthy for it.

+ I have four adult children. I’ve noticed that my kids (particularly my youngest two) seem to believe that I have extra powers in my prayers. When they really want something to happen they often ask for my prayerful intercession with the Powers that Be, my “magic”, my mommy ju-ju. It feeds my ego to be “needed” but I know that their prayers are heard just as loudly and faithfully, and their intuitive guidance is every bit as strong and connected as mine. And so when they ask for my prayers, my prayer is that my children find this strong connection of their own, and that they surrender to it, and it boldly sustains them for the rest of their lives. I often tell my family this: Let Life Love You.

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:

2458. On a scale of 1-10, how funny would you say you are?

Monday – Funday

Credit: therandomvibez.com (Pinterest)

There is nothing like the jolt of the first Monday after a long vacation. It’s jarring and disorienting in its own special way. It’s like jumping into your place in a marching band in the middle of a performance. (or at least that’s what I imagine it to be as I have never been in a marching band) It’s amazing how you have to remind yourself of your usual routine.

When I was at the Poetry Pharmacy store, I purchased a wonderful card set, called the Emotional Barometer. Many years ago, I attended a workshop that showed how often we don’t know how to describe our own emotions and what they are telling us. In order to get in touch with our own emotions, and in order to have the ability to have empathy for ourselves and for others, we have to get a better description of the myriad of feelings we humans go through in any given day, and what these emotions may be telling us, and what they could mean for us in the way of direction and insight. This card set has a wheel on the front of it, that states twenty different feelings. Today, I considered that here, at this slightly “dazed and confused” moment, I’m feeling kind of “dreamy.”

The corresponding card to “Dreamy” has this to say:

This is like having wonderful cheap therapy in a box!! This wonderful card set/tool box is offered by THESCHOOLOFLIFE.COM I highly recommend this purchase.

Have a great week, 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:

1979. What TV show do you always watch reruns of?

Soul Sunday

When I was in London, my friend who is an English teacher and a fellow writer, sent me this Instagram video about the Poetry Pharmacy. The Poetry Pharmacy is located on an upper floor of the flagship LUSH store in London. Of course, right after my friend sent me this video, I was on a mission to go there. And I got there within mere hours of her sending the video!

Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. I got three “prescriptions” from the Poetry Pharmacy in London. Let’s see what “medicine” they have to offer all of us today:

From the Be Original pill bottle which has only one hot pink pill in a sea of white pills, the hot pink pill held this:

“Let it hurt. Let it bleed. Let it heal. And let it go.” – Nikita Gill

From the For Mothers pill bottle which is filled with red, pink and white pills, today’s pill had this to offer:

“This is a fifty-year-old love. It’s heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound/ of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon-/our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished.” – Eva Saulitis

The pill from a pile of brightly colored pile of “pills” from the Happy Pills bottle offers us this:

“Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.” – James Wright

Words are like anything else. They can be used for good or they can be made into weapons of evil. Words can certainly make for good medicine. Poetry is the formula for making words, the ethereal agents of our own healing.

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:

1886. Have you found the purpose of your life?

Ruts

“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.” – Edith Wharton

(****On an aside, I first started today’s blog post with “I think that the most important thing . . . ” and then I stopped and I deleted “I think“. Of course I think what I am writing. That is why I am writing it. When I add “I think” it is unnecessary, and makes it seem apologetic and less full of conviction. I remember getting blasted by an English teacher once, for starting every sentence with “I feel”. First of all, feelings are sensations. They are not thoughts. Feelings are a direct result of our thoughts and our actions. Secondly, if I write something, I should be able to stand by it, with conviction. Thank you to all of my wonderful English teachers throughout my schooling. Your lessons were not lost on me. <3 And yes, we writers do feel a lot about what we think. I feel. I definitely feel.)

The most important thing about taking breaks from your normal everyday life, whether it be on a trip or even a “staycation” is that you stop digging the rut of your everyday life. A rut is literally “a long, deep track made by the repeated passage of the wheels of vehicles” (Oxford dictionary). Vehicles often get stuck in ruts. So do people. Doing anything differently for a day, or a week, or a month, always changes your perspective to some degree. It gives you insight you didn’t have before. Taking the trail off of the rutted road helps you grow in new directions.

One of the meanings of vacation is this “a respite or a time of respite from something”. Is there something you need to take a respite from in your own life, so you can consider it more carefully? Look at the normal routine of your every day and ask yourself, “Why?” about everything. Be your own annoying five-year-old kid. Why? Why? Why? Why do I make my bed this way? Why do I eat these things? Why do I go to bed when I do? Why do I watch what I watch? Why do I belong to this club or organization? Why do I part my hair this way? Do these “whys” still make sense for me?

When I am on vacation, being the curious person that I am, I am a huge observer. I observe how other people do things. And then I observe my own reactions to my observations. I often start a few new trails in my own life, based on my new observations and my reactions to these observations.

Vacations do not have to be exotic trips abroad. Vacations are just movements away from our own rutted roads. Vacations are respite from our ruts. Give yourself a vacation from just one “everyday thing” in your life today. Journey off the rutted road.

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:

609. Do you do your utmost for the environment?