Tag: inspiration

Ruler

This is the year for Ixora in my neighborhood. Ixora is a shrub (also known as West Indian Jasmine) that has the brightest orange flowers that you ever wanted to see. (Do you remember “Neon Orange” of the ’80s? Ixora’s flowers are a slightly darker, sophisticated, yet poppin’ off version of that color.) This year the Ixora is having its “breakout year.” This year, in our neck of the woods, Ixora is the Taylor Swift of pop, the Michael Jordan of basketball, the Gordon Ramsay of cooks, the Frank Sinatra of blue eyes. And of course, we don’t have any Ixora in our yard. We do not own one Ixora bush. Nada one. This year, our yard looks a little bland and “meh” compared to all of our surrounding neighbors who have rows and rows of Ixora shrubs accenting their homes from every angle. Even my bougainvillea has decided to have an “off year.” Why bloom? That takes work.

I commented, trying to hide my jealousy, to my neighbor across the street, about just how amazing his Ixora looks this year. He said, “I know. I even texted my ex-wife a picture to ask her if she ever remembered the Ixora looking so lovely, when she still lived here.” Hmmm. Now, was that just a little passive-aggressive move really necessary?

No, the truth is, the Ixora has never looked this lovely. It has never bloomed so hard. It has never popped off like this since we have lived here for over a decade. Ixora is having its year. The conditions must be in perfect alignment, because Ixora is having its own shining moment in the sun. Interestingly, the word “Ixora” means “ruler, or lord.” This year, Ixora rules. It’s Ixora’s day in the sun.

I’ve noticed this particular phenomenon every year with our plants. It’s almost like they happily take turns with the spotlight. “This is your year, succulents. Strut your stuff.” “Cannas, you’re looking taller and showier than ever, this year. You bloom, baby!” Gardens, even if you never change the plants, invariably look a little bit different in every single season, in every single year. The plants seem to give each other room to grow, and space to bloom. The individual plants don’t seem to compete for attention. They do their best every year, with the conditions which they find themselves in. And while each year, a particular plant does seem to have its own showcase moment, the others all around it, are what help to make its individual beauty look so amazing. The other plants surround it with their own beauty, and together the overall garden is what makes for the true “feast for the eyes.”

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:

2961. What excites you about the future?

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?

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?

Acceptance

The question is, “What to write about when the world seems like it is a mess?” I started writing this daily blog in 2018. I have written this blog, almost every single day, living through many “messes” already (both globally and personally): the unprecedented pandemic; the leaving of each of my four precious children out from our comfortable, safe nest into their own adult lives; the worst year to date, of the seizures that come with my youngest son’s epilepsy; the long drawn-out, debilitating illness of my mother-in-law which culminated in her death; suicides of loved ones, the craziness of seeing horrific wars erupt, and witnessing multiple divisive elections, multiple hurricanes, multiple societal horrors, etc. etc. . . . . .and yet here I am, sitting in my writing nook, in my peaceful stillness, looking out my large windows at the gorgeous, sunlit nature teeming all around me, my beloved dogs all afoot, dozing quietly and comfortably. Throughout all of the messes, I have experienced so, so many joys: witnessing each of my children thrive into their adulthoods, in both love and in their careers and studies and health; amazing, mind-blowing trips and adventures with my husband, family members and friends; countless delicious meals and vibrant conversations and stimulating walks and fascinating reading, on an everyday basis; and of course, Writing. I write practically every single day and it is one of my greatest joys and sense of being and purpose in my lifetime. Writing is one of my daily doses of joy which I freely give to myself with gratitude for my ability and propensity and enthusiasm to do it.

Messes, big and small, are part of life. Joy is part of life. Just because there are messes does not mean that you should deny yourself your joys. If anything, the bigger the mess, the more we need to double-down on our joys and our sense of purpose and meaning. We might never be able to make sense of the messes (although we often survive the messes, and sometimes even thrive because of them), but we can always find meaning in our own every day experience, even if that meaning is just to focus fully on the sensual, visceral experience of each moment that we are alive and breathing. When we bring ourselves to a deep level of peace, and calm, and awe, we add these beautiful elements into our collective experience, and the more that we do this on an individual basis, the more the joys outweigh the messes, in our own lives and also, in the shared experience of our world. And this is how, the whole world subtly gets lifted out of its painful messes.

“Acceptance is the key to unlocking the door of contentment.” – Celestine Chua

“Acceptance doesn’t mean you agree with, condone, or give up. It simply means you stop fighting reality.” – Dan Millman

“Acceptance does not mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” – Michael J. Fox

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:

1181. Have you ever built a snowman? (I think snow is a good thing to focus on, during this ridiculously hot summer).

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?

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?