Tag: inspiration

A Little Break

Stream of thought:

For some strange reason, my childhood mailman came to mind this morning. (that’s sort of an oxymoron, “mailman- maleman”) His name was Joe and despite living in Pittsburgh, PA the man was always deeply suntanned, before tanning beds became a thing. Joe wore his hair in a pompadour like James Dean and he walked up to each of our homes, as our mailboxes were hung right next to our front doors. He smoked long brown cigarettes as he delivered the mail, and Joe was always friendly to us kids, keeping rubber bands around his wrist and giving them to us when we pestered him for them. Do you remember your childhood mailperson? What about your bus drivers? Your school janitors? Particular teachers? Some people just have a way of “sticking out” in our memories, you know? I’m sure that Joe would have no idea the impression that he made on us little kids. I find this sort of comforting and hopeful. Perhaps in our lifetimes, doing nothing except going about, doing our daily business, we make an impression on more people than we realize. It’s such a good reminder to remember the kind of impression which we would like to make, especially for the little ones coming up in this world. The impressions we leave are our little chinks and marks and nicks on the world. Joe didn’t do anything particularly special, other than to smile and to take the time to pass out a few rubber bands, as he reliably delivered the mail each day in his cornflower blue uniform. And yet still, I remember Joe to this day. He’s probably passed on as I am 53, and I bet that Joe was my age when he was delivering our mail. But he left a mark, and it was a good one. . . .

Do you have something that you do everyday that you so look forward to doing? Do you have morning rituals or evening rituals that are your comfort signatures of the day? I have many, but perhaps my favorite habit is writing this blog almost every single day. It fills me with such joy and a sense of purpose. Thank you for being such a vital part of it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That being said, I am headed out on an adventure tomorrow and I won’t be back to writing the blog for over a week. I love writing this blog so much, that I used to take my computer along with me, wherever I went. I’ve written this blog from different states and even different countries. But I have learned from this experience, that it is best for me to fully immerse myself in my adventures, by leaving my daily rituals behind me. I’ve often thought that one of the best parts of travel is when you start to miss and yearn for all of the comforts and joys of home. Leaving home (fully) makes you appreciate it more.

Since I won’t be writing for the next couple of Fridays, I did want to leave you a bonus gift – a favorite of mine! The Insight Timer phone app has some of the best sleep meditations I have ever tried on it. There are so many different courses and guided meditations on this app, and so far, it has all been free. The Insight Timer is one of the most quality apps I have ever downloaded on my phone. Check it out!

If you miss me while I’m gone, please go through my archives. I’ve been writing this blog for several years now. It always tickles me when I see in the stats, years-old blog posts that are being viewed. I think there might be some treasures in there . . . .

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:

1921. Do you prefer cats or dogs? (I love most animals and my childhood cat is a legend in my mind, but I’m a dog girl at heart.)

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ Yesterday I received the sweetest text that I have gotten in a long time. It was a really kind, unusual, thoughtful compliment, out of nowhere, from a friend whom I haven’t seen in a while. It made my day! It made me want to do the same for other people. Don’t hesitate. Use this blurb as a nudge from the Universe to reach out and send some love to the first person who comes to mind. You won’t regret it. It’s the little things and kindnesses that keep our humanity afloat. Love makes the world go ’round.

+ I just read a really good interview that the author Cheryl Strayed did with another New York Times best selling author, Steve Almond. It was filled with good excerpts, but here are a few that I found to be interesting and sometimes relatable. Steve Almond’s words are the ones in italics.

 “That’s often how you know a piece of advice is useful: the inconsolable urge to tell the advice-giver to f*ck off.” (This is so true, isn’t it? If there is a thread of truth in a piece of advice that we get, it tends to trigger us. If the advice doesn’t apply, we can easily dismiss it or laugh it off.)

“. . . .becoming less of an a**hole. That’s what therapy did for me. I woke up to the various ways in which I was being inconsiderate to other people—and to myself.” (Therapy can be incredibly useful, when you are in a humble state of really wanting to make changes, instead of just wanting, and hopelessly waiting for everyone else to change.)

“A couple of years ago, I was taking a walk with my teenage daughter. It was winter. Beside us, the Mystic River was sheathed in a plain of gray ice. I don’t remember what we were discussing, only that, at some point, she turned to me and said, “Dad, you’re like this guy who’s always walking on thin ice. But underneath that ice is a lake of rage.”

It was the single most devastating, and precise, assessment of my personality ever rendered. I wanted to drop to my knees—in awe and gratitude. And I’ve spent every day since thinking about what I can do to drain that lake of rage, which can be properly understood as a lake of poison.

Mostly, that’s consisted of me trying to shift from reaction to reflection. That is: to recognize when I feel the lake start bubbling and to ask myself: What’s going on here? Why am I being triggered? What pain or doubt or fear am I concealing?

I’m not suggesting that I’m walking around in some state of grace. Far from it. But I am in the process of trying to identify when and why I feel wronged. There are moments when I need to speak up (to stop walking on thin ice). But there are far more moments when my contempt is simply a way of hiding my vulnerabilities behind grievance.“

(Personally, I think by middle age, it is quite common to encounter many people walking on thin ice, and underneath them, lakes of rage. I think by middle age, many people realize that they haven’t lived a life true to themselves and the waters underneath them churn with anger and resentment and regret. The remedy is to thicken the ice, by being more true and authentic to yourself, going forward. When you love and trust yourself to tend to your own best care, it’s much easier to extend your kindness and grace to others.)

“Our job in life is to esteem who we are and what we’re doing. I don’t mean by this that we should just give ourselves a big hug and pretend that solves all our problems. But I do think that people tend to be too hard on themselves, and that this self-loathing inevitably gets inflicted on the folks around us.

I see this as a writing teacher, too. It’s the reason my new book has such an awkwardly aphoristic title. Over and over, I find myself encountering students who are, in one way or another, blocked when it comes to telling the truth—about their own experiences, and that of their fictional characters. The reason they’re blocked is because they felt guilty about breaking a long-held silence, fearful of the reaction they might receive, ambivalent about all the emotional disruption that comes with writing into deep truth. I tell them that the only path forward is through mercy. If they write with the intention of understanding, and forgiving, everyone involved, they’re going to travel further into the truth.

So I stand by that advice, especially for writers.“

Steve Almond’s latest book is Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories.

+“We want to be present to the beauty of our life, not the story of it.” – Ashwini Narayanan

This is an important quote. We tend to start telling ourselves stories about what is happening right in the moment. We start with the labels and the judgments and the categorization and comparisons (I wish I had a dollar for everytime I said, “This reminds me of . . . . ugh!), and instead of just feeling our feelings, we start telling ourselves more stories about why we are feeling what we are currently feeling. The next time that you are having a beautiful moment, and you catch yourself narrating it, in that very moment, tell the inner narrator to “hush”. You will best be able to vividly remember the moments and then later tell stories about them, only if you allow yourself to fully be present for the instantaneous “beauty” of living your life, in each and every moment.

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:

896. What is the coolest nickname you’ve ever heard for someone?

It Gets Weird

Sometimes you see something that describes yourself and you think, “Wow, spot on. I never saw it so succinctly written, but this is it. This is me.”

I almost feel exposed, but also relieved and validated at the same time. I am a happy, perky, friendly, upbeat person. I get excited about a lot of little things (and big things, too.) I laugh a lot and heartily. I think sometimes I have been mistaken for clueless, naive, “toxically” positive, sheltered, just “lucky”. Sometimes I almost feel like I need to be apologetic about my happy nature and yet, I have certainly had my fair share of heartaches, much like anyone else who has reached their fifties.

My nature is to experience everything fully and deeply. So when I am experiencing “happy” it’s BIG. It’s BRIGHT and SHINY. It stands out. But I take everything to heart. I mull over everything, the good and the bad – again and again. I tend to carry it all with me and sometimes this adds a lot of weight to my soul.

Does this resonate with any of you? Do you feel misunderstood a lot of the time? I hope this added a little understanding to at least one of you, today, like it did for me. It’s an interesting fact that the sun weighs 330,000 times the weight of the earth. So clearly, even carrying around sunshine can be a heavy load.

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:

2435. What song do you know ALL the words to? (Ummm, “Happy Birthday.”)

Stick with the Good Friday

Happy Good Friday! Fridays are all good, but Good Friday is the “goodest” of all. The above picture is a sticker that you can purchase from Zazzle. I LOVE that stickers are making a big comeback. My sister and I shared a carefully curated sticker collection when we were little girls. Now my twenty-something kids purchase stickers all of the time. Recently, my eldest son’s girlfriend purchased one of the neatest stickers that I have ever seen from one of our local touristy towns. It had the depiction of an old-fashioned postcard but it also had a QR code on it that opened up to a slide show of all of the highlights of the town. So today, my favorite for this Friday, is stickers. Aren’t they grand? I might have to start up a collection of my own, to rival my childhood album of stickers.

*****Every single year since I started writing this daily blog, I have taken Easter weekend off from writing. I try to practice what I preach. I truly believe that Easter weekend is the ultimate RESET button and pressing this button, is exactly what I need to do. On Easter, I take time from my “typical” daily, routine life, to just be. I use Easter weekend to rest, rejuvenate, reflect and restore. Easter is the ultimate reminder of true, unconditional love. Allow this pure love to flow freely to you, all weekend long. Come back to your everyday life on Monday – reset, rested, restored and revitalized. See you then!

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:

932. Is there any experience that you regret not having had yet?

Your Most Precious Art

I purchased these little cardboard signs from a boutique the other day. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare and there were hundreds of them, but I pulled out a few and bought them, and these two that I purchased, shown above, spoke to me the most.

You are your own most magnificent piece of art. You, and how you go about your life, is a one-of-a-kind, priceless form of art in motion. Are you deliberate about your “art”? Are you creative about your “art”? Is your art truly yours and authentic, or is it a copy of someone else’s art? Are you too concerned about being seen and appreciated and understood? If a fabulous piece of artwork is being carefully stored in a warehouse, or sits quietly in an obscure museum or in someone’s personal residence, it is still a fabulous piece of art. Where the artwork is, or if it is being viewed or not, has no bearing on its gorgeous, unique qualities. Is your “art” one dimensional or is it fluid and evolving and multi-faceted? How are you treating the artwork of your life? Think of your most favorite possession. Would you let someone walk on this possession with their dirty feet? I read something the other day, that says that our bodies know to reject poisonous food. Our senses tell us when something is spoiled. We must trust that our bodies also send us clues when something, or someone, is poisonous for our minds. We must learn to trust our built-in messenger system, in order to keep our “art” in pristine, protected quality. Our intuition is the best plexiglass/alarm system for our own artwork, we could ever ask for, if we learn to trust its messages.

“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.” – Don Miguel Ruiz

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:

458. How shy are you when you meet new people?

Rose of Jericho

These are just a small collection of orchids that we keep on top of our “tranquility pond.” I bought many of them on impulse, during grocery store specials. After their blooms would fall off, I used to start to worry, and do everything that I could to make them bloom again. I often ended up over-watering them, over-spraying them with Orchid food, often to their detriment. My wise husband talked me into bringing them outside, hanging some under some trees and placing many of them here on top of the pond. Now I leave them alone for the most part, just occasionally watering them, and they are so happy. They bloom regularly. They trust in their own natural growth cycles, and now, in my wisdom which I gleaned from experience, so do I.

Above is “The Rose of Jericho” plant. It appears to be just a dead ball of twigs or leaves, but when placed in water it turns green again. It can continue this cycle again and again, drying and withering into a tight little ball, only to open wide up to the fertility and freshness of life, when it is ready to do so, and the conditions are right.

This time of year is the perfect time of year to meditate on your own resurrection experiences, in your own life. This time of year is the perfect time of year to see how many “springs”, both real and metaphorical, have occurred in your lifetime, as you have evolved into the being who you are today. The plants know when it is time to be dormant, and when it is time to bloom. They trust that the conditions will be right for their inevitable growth cycles. If plants and animals live in ease with the cycles of nature, why don’t we?

I read a good story the other day that said we can push “the reset” button whenever we want to, on our own lives, on our own days, on our own minutes. This is a time of year when the “Reset” button is just begging to be pushed. It is big and green and it is raring to go, with big plans for us to grow and to bloom and to come alive again in new splendor. Press the “Reset” button. Press it again, and even again, if you have to, but then trust the cycles. Bask in the nurturance and abundance all around you, and just bloom. Open up to life and bloom.

“If you want your story to be magnificent, begin by realizing you are the author, and every day is a new page.” – Mark Houlahan

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:

1160. What “new beginning” are you most looking forward to?

Monday – Funday

Credit: Bored Panda

Today is a full moon lunar eclipse. It’s considered a great moment to let go of all things that no longer serve you. Letting go is a deeply personal thing. It doesn’t have to be a big dramatic announcement. Letting go is essentially allowing outworn thought processes and perspectives and delusions and bad habits, to burn in the fire, so that there is room for healthier ways of being to stealthily grow.

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:

1264. Do you need to write things down to remember them?

Soul Sunday

Welcome to poetry day on the blog. This poem by Rumi explains love better than any technical explanation ever could. This is the beauty of poetry. It speaks of the “beyond”. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.

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:

1953. What is your favorite type of casserole?

The Cord

****Happy Birthday, A! I love you with all of my heart. I’m so proud of you. <3 (No more teenagers in the house.)

When you have children, you want to pour everything that you have into them – your love, your time, your presence, your resources, your hopes, your wisdom, your strength, your intuition . . . . .You want to keep the hardy stream, flowing from the umbilical cord, even though it has long been cut. And then sometimes you get glimpses that your children have incorporated everything that you had to give them into their own selves and yet also they have aspects of themselves that you just can’t help but marvel at, and you know that these added gifts come from a Source so much greater than just you. And then you feel so instantly proud, secure, grateful, and full of awe and amazement. You know that your own cord is just one of the cords that has been, and will forever be, the channel of goodness to your precious children, and your only prayer is that they accept all of the love – all of it, especially the Love which is unfathomably, even greater than your own.

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:

741. What can people count on you for?

Thursday’s Thoughts

+ The world’s annual happiness reports came out recently and for the first time the United States did not make the top 20. The nordic countries always seem to be at the top of the list. I’ve only been to one nordic country, and it was Iceland. Iceland is easily the most peaceful place that I have ever been in my lifetime. I kept commenting on it, during our time there. It was so quiet, serene, and beautiful. I felt so safe and at ease while I was there. Maybe our country is too addicted to drama. I don’t know. I just hope, as a whole, we can start clearing the path to the things which really universally matter to the majority of all beings.

+ I spent some time this morning looking at what Elon Musk’s Neuralink was able to do for a quadriplegic man in just its preliminary stages. And I just saw a headline about a pig kidney transplant being successful in a patient for the first time. I really do believe that we are on the cusp of a whole new world, in so many ways. I have that feeling in my stomach that you get before a big move or a big trip or a big life change. It’s a mix of nervous energy, excitement, fear, wonder, hope and anxiety all swirling together. I don’t like to hold this feeling for long periods of time. It’s not sustainable. So then that’s when the sweet remedy of curiosity and surrender turns out to be the best balm to soothe any overstimulation and worry.

+ I read an article that spoke of one of the major factors to Taylor Swift’s success is the fact that she always over-delivers. She doesn’t sit on her laurels. Her fans always believe that they get their money’s worth from her and she has shown them that they are absolutely worth her highest effort in everything that she does. There is no better feeling than being happily surprised with an item purchased, an enthralling experience that beats your expectations, and/or feeling completely valued and appreciated for your time, attention and money. It all comes down to trying never to take anything or anybody for granted.

+ Yesterday, I was doing one of my least favorite jobs, cleaning up dog do. I was lost in thought, going through the motions (while holding my breath), when something inside of me said, “Hey, stop, sit awhile and just be.” And so I sat by the small lake in our backyard for about five or ten minutes, and in that little amount of time, I got the realization of just how much life buzzes, in one small moment, in one small place, at any one time. In that moment, with my bare feet in the soft, luxurious grass, I witnessed all sizes of fishes swimming near the shore, two hawks doing some kind of aerial show in the air, a turtle blowing bubbles in the water, new spring blooms on my irises, the sound of an owl hooting in the woods, and an anole thrusting out his bright red bulbous throat as dragonflies whizzed by. And all of this happened as the warm sun tickled all of us, and a light breeze sustained us and lifted the mood. Life teems. Life is incredible.

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:

848. Do you have an expansive vocabulary?