Tag: empty nest

Monday – Funday

Credit:@Design-Assassin, X

I devote this Monday to Cycle Breakers. These are the people who stop the continuation of “Hurt People Hurt People.” Cycle breakers alchemize their hurt to change it to good, and to healing, and to hope for others who are walking similar paths. Cycle Breakers change their hurt from “excuses for their behavior” to “motivations for change.” I know many of these people intimately. These are “my people.”

“A cycle breaker is someone who doesn’t perpetuate harmful behavior because it was all they knew. They went searching for other options. They were determined to learn more. They trusted that all they knew wasn’t enough because they wanted a different life.” – Nate Postlethwait

“A cycle breaker is someone who grew up without an example of the life they wanted or needed, and fought like hell to build that life later.” – Nate Postlethwait

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:

562. If you were entering a baking contest, what recipe would you make?

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. This is the poem to soak in and to feel and to live today, and onwards forever. Walt Whitman speaks of the confidence and the unconditional love we need to have for ourselves. There is no other way to peace. Sit content in this poetry. Sit content in yourself.

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:

439. Whom do you trust the most in your life?

No Place Like Home

My friend and I were having an interesting conversation yesterday about what feels like “home.” My friend is a recent transplant to her town in Florida and while she loves it, she’s not sure if it feels like “home” yet. I’ve lived in Florida for thirteen years now, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life, and sometimes I’m not even sure if it feels like “home.” If I’m honest, there were times I didn’t feel at “home” even in my own hometown. Truthfully, there are even times that I haven’t felt at home in my own skin. It got me to thinking that “home” isn’t really a place. “Home” is more of a feeling of security, comfort, acceptance, wholeness, belonging, peace of mind, and connection. We intuitively know we are “home” when we feel that perfect mix of these feelings all at once, wherever we happen to be, and with whomever we happen to be with. Yesterday, I felt perfectly “at home” with my dear friend.

I watched an adorable video this morning of a little girl belting out a song from the Disney movie, Frozen at a Waffle House. She was singing and dancing and along with her, a wonderful Waffle House employee was singing and dancing with equal dramatics and enthusiasm. They interviewed the little girl’s mother on the video, and she was gushing about this particular Waffle House. The little girl’s mother said that she and her friends think that it should be called “Waffle Home” instead of “Waffle House.”

We all know that distinction between “house” and “home.” A house shelters us, but a home nourishes us. A house is somewhere to stay, but a home is somewhere to heal. A house can be amazingly grand and perfect in every way, but if it is missing those essential ingredients of warmth and well-being, it’s just a lovely structure. Sometimes we go somewhere we’ve never been and we feel instantly “at home”. This just seems to prove that “home” is something that we carry with us.

We all have heard the adage, “Home is where the heart is.” When we reach middle age and beyond, our hearts have been stretched to many places, to many experiences, to many people, at many different stages of life. Maybe it’s harder to feel “at home” when pieces of your heart are spread all over the wide map of your own one life.

We all can agree, when we do feel “at home”, there is no better feeling. The people, places, animals and experiences which make us feel at home are the best gifts in life.

“Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” – Maya Angelou

“When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.” – Sam Ewing

“Where thou art, that is home.” -Emily Dickinson

“God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk.” – Meister Eckhart

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” – Hermann Hesse

“Home is the nicest word there is.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder

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:

1344. How would you explain your basic life philosophy?

Wayuu, It’s Friday!!

Hi Friends! Welcome to Friday! What’s not to love about Friday? On Fridays, I focus on the nitty gritty fun stuff. On Fridays, I discuss some of my favorite things and I am forever hoping that some of you will share your favorites in my Comments section, so that I can find some new favorites in my own life. (Sharing is caring.)

Today’s favorite of mine is seen above. That is my gorgeous Colombian Wayuu bag (traditional bags which are made by the indigenous Wayuu tribes of Colombia and Venezuela, also called mochilas) which I have been carrying around all summer. Now, I am a bag girl, and I have many beautiful, unusual handbags at all different price points, but never in my life, have I received more compliments on a bag. Never. I get daily compliments on this bag. I literally had a woman stop her car in a parking lot yesterday, to tell me how much she loves my bag. I LOVE this bag, too. It’s like I have a gorgeous little knit friend with me, all day long. I got my Colombian Wayuu bag at a local arts fair, but if you google them, you will find many sources who sell these gorgeous, colorful, handmade handbags that seem to scream, “Summer! Happy! Bright! Beautiful! Fearless!” Get yourself one or buy one as a gift. You won’t regret it.

Have an amazing Friday, 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:

2343. Do you like to read or write more, or both equally?

Dots

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all of the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs

How many of us, in these middle years of our lives, have already been able to connect some of the dots of our past, which help to make sense of the direction we needed, in order to become the person we are now? How many of us are now grateful for some experiences that at the time seemed horrific/unfair/unimaginable to us, but we now realize helped change the trajectory of our lives for good? I have always held the belief that life isn’t happening to us. It is happening for us. It’s not a game of individual stakes. It is a system that we are a part of, that is evolving towards its own perfection.

The end product of any great work of art, architecture, entertainment, scientific discovery, engineering, physical feats etc. rarely shows the mistakes, the mishaps, the sacrifices, the doubts, the do-overs, the anguish, the pain, the hopes, the fears, the wins, the losses, nor the countless hours of dedication that took to achieve it. We sometimes think that greatness just appeared easily, and out of thin air. Many of the ideas of greatness may seem to appear magically out of thin air, but bringing these ideas into fruition, involved a lot of bold individual “dots” before they are fully connected into the pictures of greatness which we witness today.

Trust that one day, what doesn’t make sense to you now, will someday make complete sense, when you are able to zoom out and see the whole picture, and you are able to connect the dots that form the picture of your own life, as a teeny beautiful part of the overall masterpiece of Life and Creation. You certainly don’t have to live in this state of faith and trust (you have free will), but what is a better alternative?

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:

1292. Have you ever walked a tightrope?

Oh So Trippy!

So, I have to take Trip to the vet today for his rabies shot. Trip is our Boykin Spaniel. Trip is the result of my Pandemic Panic/Sadness. “Oh, this is so sad! We need happiness! We need distraction! Let’s get a third dog! Let’s get a puppy!” (maybe Covid went to my brain)

Our family adores Trip, despite his spicy personality, his arrogant sense of entitlement, and his noisy insistence of all of the attention in the room. No one outside of our family shares our adoration for Trip. No one at all. (even our other dogs are lukewarm to the idea of Trip) When the veterinarian’s assistant called me earlier this week to confirm his appointment, and I had to check my calendar because I thought that I had a conflict, she quickly stated, “Look, we can change it. It is really not a problem at all to change the appointment.” (she was probably combing the schedule for her day off)

Why do we sometimes adore the most obnoxious personalities alive? Are they a projection of everything that we wish we could say, but don’t? Do we sometimes wish we had the courage to be more audacious? Sometimes I think that we in the family all deeply cherish Trip because of his exclusive love and adoration for us. “He likes us and nobody else. Aren’t we special?”

My son’s girlfriend said that Trip reminds her of Animal from the Muppets. I think that Trip is a cross between Animal and Oscar the Grouch. Despite his faults, I begrudgingly admit that Trip owns a big piece of my heart. (and he guards it ferociously)

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:

504. Do you talk to yourself?

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.)

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.)