Tag: life

Soul Sunday

We just had a wonderful time with friends who recently moved to Florida from up north. So they are so full of joy and excitement and adventurously exploring all of the different things to do around here. We have lived here for 13 years now, so it has become our “normal.” Being with them, revitalizes my own delight for where we live. I get to see my “same old/same old” with fresh new eyes. It is such a lovely gift. It is truly a gift when you feel revitalized by someone else shining their bright light on what you have gotten used to seeing, and thus sometimes leave in the dark shadows. Today, on poetry day on the blog, I am only going to share one of Kahlil Gibran’s shortest, truest poems.

“Desire is Half”

Desire is half of life.

Indifference is half of death.

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:

2740. What is something that you’re are afraid to try?

Stream of Thought

I just read a story about the second oldest woman in the world. She is 116. She was born when Theodore Roosevelt was president.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the fact that if we are lucky enough to grow old, we live through a lot of decades. We live through an incredible amount of change. My friends and I laugh that often we no longer recognize who the stars are on the covers of magazines. Sometimes it feels like I have entered an entirely different world from the one I knew.

We all adapt to change. It’s not really a choice. But how often do we embrace change?

What decade of your life do you feel like you most belong to? What decade did you feel the most comfortable in your own skin? Which worlds of your lifetime resonated the most? Is it wise to believe that the best is yet to come?

A friend recently remarked, “Curiosity killed the cat.” I replied, “But satisfaction brought him back.” She laughed. She had never heard the second line. I honestly believe that curiosity is my lifeline. I don’t want to revel in old “glory days.” I want to have glorious days until the end of my life. And I do believe that this is possible.

“When our mind is in shambles and we dare to reflect on the story of our life, we may discover, in the stream of our thoughts, the fault line between what we have underfelt and what we have overthought on our way.”
― Erik Pevernagie

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:

830. Name your secret obsession.

Monday – Funday

To those of you who are about to embark on the empty nest, do not worry. They come back. They come back more than you would ever expect, even. Our daughter brought home a houseful this past weekend, and after they left, our youngest son arrived here right afterwards, almost like clockwork, to help us eat leftovers and watch football. And while he and his dad were watching the game, I handed them the big, warm pile of towels and sheets out of the dryer, for them to fold. Déjà vu.

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:

1716. What wild animal scares you? (One of the young women visiting here this weekend is from Connecticut. She insisted that they have no dangerous wildlife in Connecticut. They only have robins and squirrels and chipmunks, apparently. It took a long time for this lady’s mother to get comfortable with alligators being on campus. It was also shocking for her mother to find out we also have deer in Florida. Well, I suppose that the alligators have to eat . . . . 😉 )

Being It

The son of one of my best friends from college is getting married tomorrow. He is the first of our group of friends’ babies to get married. It feels surreal. As you age, you get little markers along the way, reminding you that you are aging. (a lot of these markers have landed on my face in the form of wrinkles and bags) But every once in awhile, as you are moving along your life, you get big flashing lights that are determined to get your attention. They seem to scream: “You, my friend, are definitely in a different era of your life!”

I remember clearly going to this young man’s parents’ wedding. We all went to college together. There were a slew of weddings back then. And then, after a while, there weren’t many weddings to attend at all. Everything evolved to baby showers. And then there was a long period of supporting each other as we raised our families, sharing our joys and our griefs along the way. And not too many years ago, the graduation notices of the children of my friends starting coming into the mailbox more and more frequently. The Christmas cards we receive every year seem to have more wedding pictures on them, and now the darling babies featured on the front on the cards are often the adored grandbabies of our friends.

It is not lost on me that the major milestones that mark the turning of the seasons of our lives, are the milestones that show where all of our loving energy has been invested. The milestones in our lives show the growth of our relationships and of our endeavors, and the branches of where our lives have grown and spread. I’m not sad that I am crossing into this new era of my life. I am perhaps a little (naively) surprised, but I am not sad. I delight in everything that I have experienced and grown wiser about in my life. I am grateful for my life. I am grateful to share this journey with others who help me to reflect on, and help me to realize all that life really is, which is to say, can mostly be whittled down to one pure thing – experiencing, living, and being Love.

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:

2101. Can you do any fake accents? If so, which one? (This reminds me of a “No Horse Pucky” story. Let me start by saying that my husband and I have power of attorney for each other, and I handle all of our monthly bills. One month, there was a problem on one of my husband’s credit card statements that I was trying to get rectified. The customer service people told me that my husband would have to call about it, but my husband was out of the country on business. So, I thought to myself, “I’ll just lower my voice and pretend to be my husband.” Simple. Problem solved. I practiced a few times and I called back. I did my spiel in my “man voice.” The patient customer service person listened and then said to me, “Ma’am, we really are going to need to speak to your husband.” So fake man accent, is clearly not one of my talents.)

Pages from a Thought-alog

I have many notebooks full of thoughts that I have jotted down from signs I’ve seen, things that I have read, or insights that have come to me. In these notebooks I have pasted poems and artwork that inspire me, special cards that I have received, and feathers that I have found. I decided to flip through my current “Thought-alog” and share some of the goodies that I have in there, here on the blog today:

+ “Cycles end when you refuse to participate in them.” – SayItValencia, X When you raise a family, and then grow into becoming the elders of a large and growing brood, i.e. the matriarch and/or the patriarch of any family, and you are truly intentional about these roles that you have taken on, you inevitably become a cycle breaker. There are many things that you experience with your family of origin that you like and that you appreciate, and so you choose to deliberately continue these ways and traditions with your own family, but there are also things that you wish to stop. You want certain patterns of behavior and toxicity to end with you. You see how long certain cycles have continued on and on within your family line, and you decide that you will be where this negativity stops. You become a cycle breaker. This is not easy. People are resistant to change. You have to be continually aware and intentional to stop cycles from perpetuating. Generational cycles are highly ingrained. Sometimes as a cycle breaker, you even go a little too far in the opposite direction, and so your descendants may work to swing the pendulum a little bit closer to center. Regardless, I read somewhere that if you are an effective cycle breaker in a family or in an organization, you have likely changed the direction and the toxic patterns in this entity for at least seven generations to come. Being a cycle breaker is a worthy purpose and endeavor, in my book.

+ Major personal decisions should not be made by asking, “Will this make me happy?” but, “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” – James Hollis

Eating cookies for breakfast will make me happy in the short term, and this practice will certainly enlarge my physical presence, but overall, this choice only diminishes me. Of course, I am not sure that choosing to eat a cookie is a major personal decision, but unfortunately, these little decisions add up, too. Sigh.

+ “If you ignore it and it doesn’t go away, it’s reality.” – I’m sorry but I don’t know who to credit for this one, but I do think that it is an excellent litmus test. We tend to grow stories in our head that veer far from reality. That little bump on your skin becomes malignant cancer as fast as you can say, “Web MD.” Still, there are things that we know deep down that we have to address. They are the things that don’t go away and they keep pinging you and pinging you harder and harder to address them. I always tell my kids to always take heed of the first lesson that the Universe hands to you because if you ignore that lesson, you will most definitely get bigger, and more dramatic lessons headed your way. Face reality when it is manageable to do something about it.

+ “Our true nature is peace and joy if only we don’t disturb it.” – Swami Satchidananda Remember, the true and real and timeless essence of you, and of me, and of your dog, and of every other living being in this world, is that peaceful, calm, tranquil, unbiased observer and experiencer, in all of us. The observer of your thoughts and your feelings is the real you. The creator of your thoughts is just your ego and your ego has quite the imagination. Your ego likes to stir things up. Whenever you need peace, just take three deep breaths and sit back in the rocking chair of your true self – the unbiased, unfearful experiencer and observer of what’s going on around you and within you. When you are in that space, you can laugh at the drama queen that your ego tends to be.

+ Fun, new words and terms from the Urban Dictionary and other sites like it:

delulu – delusional

solulu – solution

popular loner (also known as background friend) – someone who has a lot of friends, makes a lot of friends easily, but tends to stay on the peripheral

JOMO – Joy of Missing Out. It is a term to remind us to stay in the present moment, instead of constantly checking our phones and/or social media feeds.

+ My favorite quote from a recent, excellent WSJ interview with the actress Natalie Portman:

WSJ: What’s your most prized possession?

Natalie Portman: “I don’t have a prized possession. I have prized humans and prized dogs I love. I am into living beings.”

+ Tape these to your bathroom mirror (good reminders):

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” – Gary Snyder

“You cannot have a happy ending to an unhappy journey.” – Esther Hicks

“All stories have the same finale.” – Daily Stoic

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:

2105. What do you compartmentalize in your life? (Hint: Compartmentalization is a form of psychological defense mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict are kept separated or isolated from each other in the mind. -Wiki)

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. What I love about poetry is the mystery in it. Sometimes I write a poem, and it is still an enigma, even to me, as to what the poem really means. Writing a poem is like going into the deep tombs of yourself, and discovering unusual, foreign writing on the wall, and quickly and excitedly transcribing this strange writing, without fully understanding the meaning behind it. Reading a poem offers this same mercurial experience. Undoubtedly, there is a different meaning and truth that comes from any poem, from every reader of it. Everyone’s own experiences and emotions are what brings the context to the meaning in any collection of words. Here is my poem for the day:

The Universe has a way of getting really bored of my stubborn streak,

While I hem and haw and analyze, and strategize, and collect my allies,

The Universe says, Enough already!

And tends to make the changes that I couldn’t make for myself,

in one fell swoop. And then we Both sigh in utter relief.

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:

2361. Complete this thought: All roads lead to . . . ?

Your Masterpiece

I got back to art class yesterday, after a few weeks off for Christmas break. It was great to be back. I painted the little guy above as sort of a “warm up”. I thought that I would share him with you. He makes me smile.

The best part of getting older is coming to the proven realization that the end product of anything truly doesn’t matter. The real joy always comes in the doing, in the process, in the flow. Yes, a successfully grown family, business, career, marriage, homestead, project, craft etc. can give you a sense of satisfaction and pride and maybe even some accolades, but those feelings are such a small blip of feelings versus the myriad of feelings and experiences that go into the process of forming and building and creating and experiencing all of the works of your life. There’s peace in this realization. Your life is your main product. And it doesn’t end, until you end. And none of us really know what “when you end” means, if we are honest with ourselves. We all have beliefs and hopes, but none of us truly know the mysteries of what happens to us after we die. So, in the meantime, we are living our ongoing creative product – our lives. And this product is a collaboration with the entire world around us. Our main creative product, our individual life, has the support of the whole entire world which only benefits when our creative product brings more individuality and beauty and imagination and our own uniqueness that is unrepeatable, to the whole of it.

I’m a middle-age, empty nester who is attending art class for the fun of it. I’m not graded. My output doesn’t matter. It’s even okay if I don’t particularly enjoy my art class on any given day. If I spill some paint, so what? If I never frame my art, who cares? The joy is in the doing. The joy is in the exploring. The joy is in the accepting. The joy is in the gratefulness for the experience – every bit of it.

Your life is your only creative product. Everything else that you do is part of that product. Be joyful in “doing” your life. Explore. Accept the messiness and the so-called flaws of it all. Mostly, be grateful for having the experience of being able to create your one and only masterpiece, and also be utterly grateful for all of the wonderful beings who are co-creating with you. If our world isn’t a creative masterpiece of miracles, than what is?

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:

583. Do you prefer blue or black inked pens?

Soul Sunday

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” – T. S. Eliot

Welcome to poetry day on the blog. I believe that my readers here probably have bold, intriguing personalities and strong emotions. This is wonderful for living and being the fullness of life, but it is also a lot to encapsulate. Escape from yourself a little bit today, dear readers. Write a poem. Here is my poem for today:


I absorbed it all in this season,

The love, the laughter, the familiar sounds,

Of our family’s giddy banter.

I soaked it all in until I was satiated,

And sopping, and barely able to take in much more.

And now that you have all scattered back to your places,

I realize that I absorbed a new molecule of fond memories,

Into every one of my cells.

This is how an infinite love grows.

It just continually expands itself,

Into every direction that life takes you, my loves.

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:

1641. What is your most used phrase?

Six Percent

I did a search on my blog just now (I have been writing this blog almost daily for five years now) for “the holidays.” It turns out I have written eight pages of stuff about holidays. That’s a lot of writing about a relatively limited part of our lives. There are eleven official federal holidays in the United States. These holidays don’t include religious holidays such as Easter and Passover, and secular holidays such as Halloween and Valentine’s Day. So, for argument’s sake let’s bring the number up to around twenty holidays a year that we celebrate (with the idea of including our personal and family birthdays and anniversaries). Out of 365 days of the year, about twenty or so days are dedicated to holidays in our country. Less than a month, out of the twelve months in any given year are dedicated to holidays. About 6 percent of the year is dedicated to holiday celebrations. Ninety-four percent of any given year is filled with ordinary days.

Why am I turning the holidays into a banal, robotic, emotionless mathematical word problem? I am writing this because it helps with perspective. If you “live” for the holidays and celebrations, and the rest of your life feels like drudgery, or a countdown to your next celebration, you are putting all of your greatest living experiences into about six percent of your life. If you dread the holidays, and you live in angsty anticipation for weeks before any of the particular holidays arrive, you are living in fear of events which only take up about six percent of your life. The other 94% is all yours to do whatever you want to do with it, without the peripheral hoopla.

Perspective is important. Figuring low, at least 90% of our lives are spent in our everyday routines. If you wake up most days in eager anticipation of what the day may bring, whether it be a holiday or not, you will lead a fulfilling life. Don’t worry about the holidays. Don’t load them up with too many expectations. Put the same kind of effort, and thought, and hope into your every single day that you do for the holidays, and you will surprise yourself with a greater percentage of wonderful days. Don’t wait for the holidays to tell your friends and family that you love them and that you are grateful for them. Don’t wait for your birthdays to celebrate yourself. Live every single day of your life as a celebration of the gift of experiencing living a life. Our lives have been gifted to us, for no other reason than because Love and Creativity wanted to feel itself living a life through us and our individual perspectives. Perspective is everything. Keep this 6% perspective in mind this holiday season, and into the new year. If you make loving and cherishing your every single day in the new, upcoming year your major goal, next year’s six percent of holidays will just end up being the cherry on top, of your delicious, multi-faceted, fabulous sundae of a life.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. I like to think of poetry as the secret code of our souls. In order to write poetry, you have to put your most sensible, guarded, orderly part of yourself aside and let the poetry write itself. It is the one form of communication that you come to as blankly and open, as someone else who is just reading it for the first time. How many times have you written a poem and thought, “Oh wow, I wrote that?? That’s what is stirring deep inside of me??” Get to know yourself better and write yourself a poem today. I wrote this poem about a lovely bridal shower which I attended yesterday:

“The Elders Table”

We watched the beautiful young bride excitedly unpack each gift,

Clean, shiny, unmarked, powerful tools to create the sustenance of a fairy tale.

We reminisced of the days when we sat in her seat and her spotlight.

So full of hope, and promise, and energy, and expectant excitement.

We marvel at the versions of ourselves who long ago, once sat in her seat,

Radiant and innocent and ambitious and determined and clear.

We still have many of the tools showered upon us, on those days, long ago when we were the brides.

The tools are well-used, scarred with marks, some almost broken, but determined to continue their purpose.

We, who are intently watching the bride, are now the continuance of the women who bestowed these gifts upon us.

And it is only now, that we deeply understand why it was so imperative for our elders to impart these gifts upon us.

The gifts weren’t just pots and pans and knives and nightgowns and a little wad of money for extras.

They were the tools that helped sustain the hope, and the excitement, and the energy and the promise,

When life’s storms were determined to make their marks, sometimes gashes, all to test our tenacity and plans.

Would the inner gentle flower of our young bride’s heart wilt under the load of life?

Or would the dried, sustained, circle wreath arrangement of our elders, be our borrowed strength,

When we decided to fondly pick up a remembered tool, from a lovely little bridal celebration, and to calmly use the implement, so to carry on with life . . . . .

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.