I have a lot going on today so my mind is like a whirligig (this is a weird, fancy word for a pinwheel). When I come to the blog on a day like this, I go to my photos and I find inspirations which I have found on other days, that have struck me as funny or poignant. Today, I am leaning on the funny side.
I really do have an expressive face. My face does not know how to do “the poker.”
Ugh, the holidays really brings out the crowds, don’t they? Kevin Kelly’s book, which I wrote about on Thursday, says this, too: “Cultivate 12 people who love you because they are worth more than 12 million who like you.” On the 12 days of Christmas (December 25th through January 5th), write one person’s name who loves you on each day, and think about how much that you love them, as well (this can include people who have passed on – these people deeply live on, in our hearts because of the love that we have shared with them). I believe one or more of these 12 can be our pets, as well. Dogs do the act of love better than almost any of us, in my mind. You are welcome to include me on one of those days if you like, because I do love you. Coming to read my blog is an act of love which I very deeply appreciate. As I also wrote about earlier this week, being “seen” is perhaps the biggest act of love that we can give to anyone. And when you read my blog, you make me feel seen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Another big hint for this “12 Days of Christmas/12 People Who Love Me” activity: Add yourself to one of those days. If you don’t love yourself, ask yourself, why? How could you not love yourself??? No one has lived it all with you, and stuck by your side more than yourself, ever. Why are you not every bit as lovable, and deserving love, than anybody else on your list? This is a really good time of year to ponder, how can you better show love to yourself, and to those 11 others in the upcoming year. Could we pick each of the 12 months to devoting one month of the year to sending daily loving thoughts and prayers and immense feelings of gratitude, especially to one of our 12 people, in each of the 12 months of 2024? Wouldn’t that feel good? Get your calendars out and write a name next to each month. Fill your year with gratitude and love.
Enjoy the rest of your day, friends. See you tomorrow!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
For as much as I like to shop, I never go out shopping on Black Friday. I hate crowds. However, this is not to say that I won’t veer into window shopping on the internet today. Happy Friday!! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! My favorite things for today are my Merrell hiking boots. We got a pair of Merrell hiking boots for each of our family members, five years ago, before we were embarking on a trip out to California that we knew would entail a lot of hiking. Since then I have clocked hundreds of miles on my same pair of Merrells in all kinds of terrain, in the United States and abroad. They have never let me down (nor let me fall down), and my Merrell hiking boots are in good enough shape to wear, for quite a few more rocky trails, for sure. I look at Merrell hiking boots as an investment, and a good one.
Black Friday is a good day to get yourself a pair. Merrell is even putting their best sellers on sale for 30 percent off. If you have made having more outdoor adventures for yourself, a solid resolution for the new year, you NEED a nice pair of Merrell hiking boots. Show the Universe that you mean business.
www.merrell.com
Hope you are enjoying a wonderful, relaxing Thanksgiving weekend with your loved ones!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
+ The picture above is not a great picture because I’m not a great photographer. But you get the gist. That’s our neighbors’ Christmas tree. (That’s a really big truck below it, to give you perspective of its magnanimous size) That’s our neighbors’ mini Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. It’s really beautiful and they always manage to get it all decorated right before Thanksgiving. All of the rest of the decorations on our street have really just become accents to it. I mean should the rest of us even bother now??? Seriously though, the neighborhood’s “absolute opposite of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree” is huge and beautiful, and I love it. And yes I’m jealous, but the tree is fabulous and I love it.
+ Siri’s nice now!! For those of you who use iPhones, and if you did the latest update, you’ll notice that Siri now says, “You’re welcome!” in her best Chick-Fil-A employee voice when you thank her for the information that she gave to you. (Yes, I have always thanked Siri. Manners, babe.) She also doesn’t seem quite as bothered and smirky when you ask her for information. AI is evolving and in a good way, this go around, in my opinion.
+ Today is the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Over a decade ago, I took all four of our children on a road trip through several states and even more cities (yes, it was crazy – one child was still in diapers, but that is what you do when you are young, energetic and idealistic. Also, there was no GPS at the time. My kids always laugh about my books of Mapquest printed sheets, which I used back then, to get us all around). We stopped at Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, and we were approached by a “tour guide” who turned out to be a homeless man with a lot of conspiracy theories. He was a colorful character who started all of his sentences with a dramatic, thickly Southern accented “Looky here! Looky here!” When I think back to that trip, I don’t remember a lot of it, but I do remember “Looky here!” In fact it has become part of our family’s vernacular. We gave the “tour guide” a handsome tip and I’m grateful for that because he gave us a memory which has lasted nearly two decades and still brings a smile to my face.
+ Before the holidays are upon us, remember that you are making memories, and these memories can be happy, funny, silly, “Looky here!” memories or they can become horrible, searing, imprinted memories that everyone tries to forget, but can’t. The holidays tend to bring out the best and the worst in all of us. If you are seeing someone who doesn’t visit often, but is coming to be with you now this Thanksgiving, relish that fact. Don’t use that time to make them feel guilty for not visiting more. Do you think that guilty feelings will make them want to come back for more helpings of ghastly guilt, down the line? Loving, enjoyable, easygoing energy is much more likely to pull them back for a few more visits, because everyone likes to feel good and loved and appreciated for what they do, and accepted for who they really are, in this world. Looky here, steer the conversations towards beautiful decorations everyone has seen, and funny “piles of Mapquest pages” stories that everyone can laugh about, and happily reminisce with each other. Stuff the turkey. Don’t stuff your opinions about volatile topics down everyone’s throats. There is a time and a place for those conversations, and a happy holiday gathering isn’t that time nor that place. If there was ever a time to concentrate on my blog’s tagline, it is during a holiday celebration. Print it out and put in your pocket. Imprint it on your mind. You won’t regret it. A surefire way to have a wonderful holiday season is to focus on all of the good. Be the star on your family’s celebrations this season. And by being the star, I don’t mean constantly stealing the spotlight for laughs and attention on you. When I say “Be the Star”, I mean be that beacon of light and love and kindness that puts the spotlight on others’ acts of love and light and kindness. Be that star which guides everyone towards hope and love and light. Here is my tagline:
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday!! I’ll get right to my Friday Favorite for today because Ralphie and Trip are modeling them for me. (Josie, our rough collie, has too much mane to don an original Daisy’s Dog Collar) Our boys are looking fancy with their new seashell collars that we recently purchased for them at a local beach fair. These cowrie shell, patent-pending woven collars are unique, attractive, waterproof, guaranteed for life and such a fun conversation starter with other dog lovers and enthusiasts. The owners of Daisy’s Dog Collars are recent empty nesters from New Jersey, who sold everything and now sell their collars at various venues all over the United States. They also give a portion of their profits to animal rescues all over the States, as well. Good product. Good cause. Good people. Good looks. Good dogs!
You can get your favorite canine a Daisy’s dog collar at their website:
https://daisysdogcollars.com/
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
There is nothing quite like waking up to a broken refrigerator. There is something special about buying from the local guys, though. Our local appliance shop were the only sellers who can get us a new one delivered tomorrow. I like to “Buy Local” when I can. We will truly miss our brick and mortars when they are no longer an option.
Interestingly, while picking out our new fridge, my husband and I both agreed, the simpler the better. The less doo-dads and the less gizmos the better. Our kids all wanted to know if we planned on getting the tricked out-model with a TV on the door, and with the ability to text with it throughout the day. No thank you. If the 1970s model came in a stainless steel instead of avocado paint coating, that is the one that I would purchase. Truly.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here’s a good reminder from Dwayne Johnson (“The Rock”) to start the week out:
“When you focus on you, you grow. When you focus on sh*t, sh*t grows.”
Let that sh*t go! I was at a little arts and crafts festival over the weekend, and I purchased this little rock from one of the vendors:
I thought that it was a rock crystal carved into the shape of a little cone-shaped shell. I told the woman selling it that I didn’t know why, but this little piece seemed to be calling to me (in retrospect, I am sure that she got a giggle out of my statement). Upon closer inspection when I got home, I saw this:
My “shell” has a face. I didn’t buy a shell. I purchased a rock crystal poop emoji. I still love it though. I think that I am going to use this little guy as a visual reminder to “Let that sh*t go!!” Rocks know what they are talking about. They’ve been around a long time.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’m back!! As promised, Mommy always comes back. I missed you all. I definitely missed writing my blog, but I learned something important by not writing at all, on this particular trip. For a true “getaway”, you must escape all of your everyday life – even the good stuff. By really experiencing life completely out of your element, it makes it really easy to sort out what is important to you. The people/places/stuff that you miss the most about home, are what’s really important to you. These are your priorities. These are the vital things that make your life hum to your own unique inner rhythms. You also get clear about the other stuff in your routines, that aren’t so important, and you realize things that might need to be changed or finessed, in order to live a life which is more authentic and contenting to you.
It is also surprisingly shocking to me, every. single. time. after vacation, just how much needs to be done when you get home. I have piles of mail to sort, piles of laundry to do, piles of souvenirs to find places for, piles of groceries to buy, piles of emails to go through and unusual surprises to deal with, like the fact that my web server for this blog, must have had an entire major update while I was gone, and I had to watch a tutorial and go through security measures more stringent than the ones on my bank accounts, in order to load this precious space back up on my computer. Welcome back. Ugh.
I saw a shortened version of this beautiful thought, on a pillow in a shop in the beautiful town that we visited. Here is the full version of “I Want to Age Like SeaGlass” by Bernadette Noll:
“I want to age like sea glass. Smoothed by tides, not broken. I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass—made not weak but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.
When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck—just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause. And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.
I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along—just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder. And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.
I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina. Neither flashy nor dull, just a perfect luster. And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to this very here and now. And we’ll both feel lucky to be in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.
I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.“
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Yesterday, I decided to follow my own advice. I became Mrs. Potato Head (see yesterday’s blog post) on a scavenger hunt. I needed to get out of my usual routine rut. The maori mask above is what started my wild goose chase. I suppose what really started this whole adventure, was that Ralphie, our Labrador retriever, in exuberance and excitement for my husband gathering balls to be thrown into our pool for retrieving, knocked over a plant which we have had in our possession for over 27 years. This plant has lived with us since it first adorned our first son’s nursery. The ceramic pot which housed it, miraculously had lasted that long, too, through several moves to several homes in three different states. Thankfully, the plant survived, but the pot was dust. So I went to my favorite local nursery, which is so wondrous, you feel like you are in fairyland when you are there. Butterflies swarm the vivid colored plants everywhere that you look. While there, I purchased another fantastic pot for our precious plant and then I decided that I must also have the magnificent Maori mask decoration, too. (see above) Honestly, there were about 300 different lawn decorations I would have loved to bring home, too, including a life sized concrete collie, and a giant, colorful pot shaped like a pufferfish, but (probably by my husband’s design and foresight, in order that I don’t bring home too many large, strange, cluttery collections of concrete figurines), I don’t drive a pickup truck. Anyway, the Maori mask was signed by the artist, so I looked up the artist on the internet. (I figured I didn’t want our Maori to be lonely. I thought that perhaps he may need another kitschy friend.) It turns out that the maker of the Maori is a local guy. The artist of this mask refers to himself as a “yardist”. (I love this title. I may have to become a “yardist”, too.) His garden artwork consists of zany, brightly colored Tikis, cheeky oranges with sailor hats, and his top-featured “Pot Heads”, all having a mid-century flair to them. From his Instagram, I tracked down a local store that carries shelves of his artwork, and I purchased a Garden Girl, which is part of his “Pot Head” collection:
My Garden Girl will not be lonely. I love Pot Heads. I have collected various Pot Heads throughout the years (made by all different artists/yardists). I have Pot Heads all over my yard. Here are a couple of other Pot Heads who live at our home:
Now you would think this particular adventure and its story, in itself, would be enough for one day, but wait, there’s more. Happy with my purchase of my lovely new Garden Girl Pot Head, I headed to my car, and I crossed a little nature/bike trail that we have here, which runs through miles of our local beach towns. On the trail I noticed a black mailbox, with a large sign that said, Love Letters on it. I was admittedly curious, so when I got to my car, I went straight to the internet, on my phone, and that’s when I discovered the story of the Love Letters mailboxes.
It turns out that a local young lady was suffering some heartbreak after a toxic relationship ended, and so she would go to a rocky spot near one of our beaches every single day, in order to process her feelings and sometimes write them out. She found comfort and healing in doing this and she wondered if other people did the same thing. So on a whim, she placed a mailbox there, in between some rocks, with a LoveLetters sign on it, and in the mailbox, she placed a notebook and some pens, with a note that encouraged people to write their own love letters in it. She welcomed them to sign their letters or to keep them anonymous, whichever they preferred. The young lady was amazed at how many letters that she would read, every few days when she would return to her spot. It gave her joy that her special spot gave so many other people comfort, too, and she felt connected to these people, despite never having met them. Interestingly, she kept her mailbox secret from her friends and family, but when she witnessed how many people utilized the mailbox and wrote their own Love Letters, she decided to tell her loved ones about it. They all thought that the mailboxes were a wonderful idea, and they encouraged her to make more of them. Now there are dozens of these LoveLetters boxes sprinkled all over our area, and beyond. Daynie Cutler, the creator of the Love Letters mailboxes says that the most poignant letter that she has ever read was a love letter from a father to his daughter who had passed away two years previous, but she feels touched and moved by them all. So, did I go back and read some of the letters in the Love Letters mailbox that I had stumbled upon? Of course, I did! And they were beautiful. Some spoke of the pure joy of celebrating milestone birthdays with their favorite people. One was from a soldier thanking his friends and family for sending notes and packages to him while he was away and how happy he was to be back home with them. Another letter, promised that the young couple writing the letter would come back to this same spot and get engaged to be married in a few years. This is the letter that really put in a lump in my throat:
I wonder if these people have any idea just how much they mean to this writer? She/he loves them “with all that I am.” His or her people sent her/his loneliness packing!! Sometimes the depth of our love can be so hard to express. How wonderful to have a safe place to send a love letter out into the Universe! How wonderful that there are people like the quirky “yardist” and the Love Letters mailbox creator, Daynie Cutler, who bravely put their full, joyful, vulnerable selves “out there” which genuinely encourages others to allow themselves to do the same! Despite all of the negativity, and the pain, and the evil and the sadness that is out there in our world, there is so much good. Be a potato head today! Go to a wonderful nursery. Write a love letter. Be curious to look for the good. You will find it everywhere. Sometimes you will find good in the most surprising of places. Do it. Look for the good. It will do you good. Then please come back to here on the blog and tell us about what you found in my Comments section. It will do us all some good.
Here is my love letter to you, my readers: Simply stated, I love you. I am so utterly grateful that you come here and read my blog. I feel so “heard” and “seen” despite never meeting most of you in person. You have made a huge difference in my life. You have helped me to safely and bravely speak my truth and given me a place to truly be myself. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I was unexpectedly delighted yesterday when I opened up my Kindle app. A while ago, I had pre-ordered a children’s book of poems by Bob Odenkirk (of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame) and it had just been downloaded to my Kindle. The book is called Zilot & Other Important Rhymes and it is adorably illustrated by Bob’s daughter, Erin. The book is engaging and silly and creative and fun. It’s a book that reminds me very much of Shel Silverstein’s offerings. Children and grown-ups alike, will delight in reading Zilot & Other Important Rhymes.
I devote Sundays to poetry on the blog. Here is “Lollygagging”, one of the poems from Zilot. I hope that you get a chance to do some real lollygagging of your own this Sunday:
“Lollygagging”
There’s not enough lollygagging
going on around here,
and daydreams are in short supply.
The whole week is jammed
with to-dos and to-don’ts.
No one is gazing at clouds in the sky.
THERE’S SO MUCH NONSENSE TO ACCOMPLISH!
I simply can’t do it all alone . . .
I’ll think stray thoughts and you mutter drivel.
You walk in circles and I’ll tunelessly whistle.
We’ll pandy about the most pointless of piffle
and cram this day full
of jabber and jibble.
We’ll aim to aim aimlessly
and traipse about spaciously
and fart around graciously
and fritter tenaciously.
Let’s not focus nor work
on what’s “necessary” or “needed.”
Let’s get down to beeswax
and get our lollygagging completed!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
