I am terrible at giving directions. I am terrible at following directions. GPS directions technology has changed my own life, in incredible ways. Do you remember when you used to have to give people directions? Or when a slow moving car would sidle by you when you were walking, and ask you for directions? (This was such a tense, anxiety inducing situation for me. First, I would worry that someone was going to try to abduct me. Then, when they asked for directions, I would feel a slight tinge of relief, before the anxiety of having to give directions would make me all tense and nervous all over again.) Do you remember trying to decipher all of the funny landmarks someone would try to describe to you when you asked them for directions? Do you remember using paper maps? Do you remember having to try to fold back up said maps? My kids still love to tease me about the reams of paper I used up, in order to print out textbooks of Mapquest directions for our various road trips. Yes, in my own personal life, GPS on-time directions might be the one of the most positive change inducing inventions which I have ever experienced.
I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we could channel our own inner directions and guidance as easily as we can with GPS? Why does our intuition have to be so damn subtle and elusive sometimes? We definitely need better technology than Magic 8 balls for our sixth sense.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. I can think of no more appropriate a poem for today than this classic by Emily Dickinson. Let hope, peace, and love reign.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
There is nothing stronger in this world, yet paradoxically more vulnerable than a mother’s heart. A mother’s heart holds so much. It holds so much love and pride and vision and fear and worry and resilience and a load full of understanding and empathy for all of the other mothers’ hearts. A mother’s heart rarely breaks, because it can’t. Mothers’ hearts are the webbing of humanity’s entire existence and this webbing cannot afford too many bottomless holes of despair. My prayer is for all of the hearts, of all of the mothers. May those of us who are stronger and safer right now, keep the beat for the other mothers’ hearts who are bleeding down to a faintly beat.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning, friends. Happy Friday! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! The above picture is from one of my only two favorites for the day. That picture above is of Apollo, who is an orphaned black rhino. Due to poaching and hunting, there are only about 5,000 wild black rhinos left in the world. Apollo is taken care of by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an organization that is dedicated to taking care of orphaned elephants and rhinos, in order that they can be released back into the natural world, to be wild and free. Learn all about the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust here, at their website and watch their delightful videos of the precious, resilient, tough, very much alive orphans. https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/
In times of trouble, I find so much solace in animals and in nature. Don’t you?
Remember, little ones have big hearts. Little ones are amazingly resilient, resourceful and full of life. It’s hard to keep little ones down. Little ones are our future. Let’s all do everything that we can do, to make sure that it is a beautiful future worth having.
“And though she be but little, she is fierce.”
– William Shakespeare
“Mighty things from small beginnings grow.”
– John Dryden
“The world is moved along by tiny pushes of each honest worker.”
– Helen Keller
“Today’s mighty oak is just yesterday’s nut, that held its ground.”
– David Icke
And this is my new favorite song. (I find a lot of solace in music, too. Don’t you?) This song is a lovely way to bring in the weekend. Have a wonderful weekend. We’re all under the same sun.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“I’ve asked many, many clients to name their personal strengths and it surprises me how many people don’t know them — or don’t consciously use them. They just leave them lying in a drawer, which is such a waste.
Our strengths — the things we’re good at (whether they’re innate or a skill we’ve developed) — are what make us unique in the world. And when we bring those strengths together, magic can happen.
So test yourself: Make sure you can name your top three strengths – along with recent evidence that you’ve used them.” – Karen Nimmo
Yesterday I wrote about an article that I had read by Karen Nimmo, a writer and a psychologist from New Zealand. The above excerpt was also in her article, and honestly, it made me do a lot of thinking and pondering. I’m going to spend a little more time with this challenge today, for myself, and I hope that you will do the same.
It is easy to point out other people’s strengths, but it really can be a lot harder to admit our own strengths. Sadly, I imagine that most of us could quickly make a list of our “faults” a lot easier than we could proudly list the things in which we are good at doing in this world. Sometimes, it seems that we have taken this lesson in humility, a tad too far.
Today, I am going to take Karen Nimmo’s challenge and I am going to spend some time listing my strengths. I am then going to narrow these strengths down to my top three. I may even make a list of some of my “faults”, in order to make myself feel comfortable, honest, and humble. I won’t be doing this on the blog, or any other public forum. This list will be between me, myself and I.
I think that it is quite important to know what we are good at, and how we can best contribute to our shared world. Imagine if we were in a dire place, such as in Ukraine right now. It is vital for the leaders of the country and of the military to understand and to play to their best of each of their strengths. Who is the best strategic planner? Who is the best fighter? Who is the best negotiator? Who is the best communicator? Who has the best ability to keep the morale of the people and the soldiers alive and inspired?
While I think that it can be useful to focus on our top three strengths, I believe that an honest inventory of all of our abilities and talents (even the ones which are unusual and easy to overlook) can give us a real overall picture of who we are, and why we should feel confident and purposeful and important to the overall scheme of things. Strengths come in all sorts of packages. For instance, my husband has this uncanny, unstudied ability to find things. If something is lost, 99 percent of the time, I know that my husband will find it. He has found jewelry at the bottom of large public swimming pools, long lost mobile phones in thick national forests, and my father’s glasses in the deep sand covered by the waves at the beach. The other day, I lost a small stud earring and try as I might, I couldn’t find it. I didn’t even mention it to my husband. As I was brushing my teeth, I noticed that my husband had placed the earring, which he had found, right by my sink. And I already knew that this would likely happen. I had comforted myself with that thought, earlier in the day.
From time to time, traits that are sometimes considered to be “faults” can also be our strongest assets. This is another reason why I think that a personal inventory of our strengths and our weaknesses can be extremely helpful in getting to know ourselves and our purposes better. There is a young man on my daughter’s tennis team who is on the spectrum for autism. His matter-of-fact personality is very much in line with Sheldon Cooper’s personality, from the TV show, “The Big Bang Theory.” I have found this young man’s candor to be off-putting at times (which says a lot, because I tend to be a blunt cookie myself). Sadly, I imagine that this trait of his, may have made him a victim of unfortunate bullying, from time to time. However, the other day when my daughter was playing an opponent, her opponent called my daughter’s serve out (and this player had done this a few times, making calls which seemed questionable to me). There are no referees at high school tennis matches in our area, so the players’ calls stand. I didn’t think that my daughter’s serve was out at all, but I kept mum. I didn’t want to be one of those hysterical, sideline stage moms (on that particular day, anyway, plus my daughter was handedly winning). My daughter’s Sheldon Cooper-ish teammate did not keep quiet though. Without anger, but with a clear and direct confidence, he loudly announced to my daughter’s opponent, “Just so you know, that ball wasn’t out at all. Be careful with your calls.” The opponent embarrassingly mumbled an apology, and she didn’t make any bad calls, after our team’s own Sheldon outed the player on what may have been her intentional cheating. After the game, I thanked my daughter’s teammate for standing up for my daughter, and I told him how impressed I was that he had the courage to do that act, and to do it without anger, and yet with no hesitation. He said matter-of-factly, but with a proud smile, “Well, the ball was very much in.”
Knowing your strengths and playing to them is vital to your family and to your job and to any entity that you are involved with, in order to make the most positive impact on our shared world. One of my dear friends works as a director at her church. She was telling me that they are starting a new program to help parents of special needs kids get a break, for a few hours once a week. There are so few of these programs around, that parents are willing to drive for over an hour, in order to drop their children at a safe, comforting space, so that the exhausted parents can get a few hours to themselves to regroup, and to run errands that otherwise might be too challenging to do with a special needs child in tow. My friend is a compassionate, smart, and lovely person. She is easily one of the most organized people whom I have ever met. I asked her if she was going to be one of the caretakers of the special needs children. “No, that’s not my strength,” she said to me. “But I will have the program up and running soon, with the right people in place, because it is such a needed ministry.” And there is no doubt in my mind that she will do this, and it will be amazing. God/Universe/Creation is using her strengths for Divine work.
Today, or sometime soon, I challenge you to take Karen Nimmo’s advice, and at the very least, list your three best strengths. Get reacquainted with yourself. Get reacquainted with your unique qualities which make you such a special and needed thread in our immense, beautiful, shared quilt of Life. By knowing yourself, you best understand your own purposes, and your life becomes more meaningful to you and to others, more than it ever has before.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I don’t believe that there is any decent writer who isn’t also an avid reader. Most days before I start writing, I do a fair amount of reading. Interestingly, no matter how randomly I seem to choose my reading materials in the morning: news stories, essays, book chapters, tweets, horoscopes, old journal entries of my own, text exchanges, magazine articles etc., a common theme often seems to evolve. Today, from my various readings, I jotted down these ideas that seemed to be “the message” which my most intuitive self was trying to bring to the forefront of my mind and into the guidance of my everyday life:
Don’t fixate on the negative.
Enjoy and fully appreciate the everyday modest delights in life.
Keep it simple.
One of my readings this morning included this quote:
“A multitude of small delights constitutes happiness.” – Charles Baudelaire
This morning, not long after I jotted the French poet’s astute quote down into another one of my almost full leather bound notebooks (On an aside, I consider these notebooks of mine to be some of my greatest treasures in life. These ever-evolving notebooks contain thoughts and wisdoms that provoke my own thinking, and they guide me and inspire me to my own innate wisdom and peace. These personal treasure boxes are available for anyone who can read and who can think and who can feel, to create and to accumulate and to savor. If you don’t have a “thought museum” journal/notebook/scrapbook, start one today. They are like potato chips. You won’t be able to stop at just one.), I started reading another excellent article by the New Zealander, Karen Nimmo. Karen Nimmo is a psychologist and a prolific writer and this particular excerpt from her article stood out to me, and enforced and validated this one main message that seems to be the theme of my reading today:
“Life is challenging, that’s the deal we all sign on for. But if you find one thing — one thing — that gets you excitedeven in small doses, one thing that makes you come alive, preserve it. Nurture it. Build it. Sneak back to it. Invest in it. Because it’ll be there for you all the days of your life.” – Karen Nimmo
I have often thought that if I am fortunate enough to grow old and feeble, I hope that I will always have the ability to read, and hopefully, even to write. (More than once, I have even pictured little old lady me, perched in her comfy bed, in the nursing home, reading to her heart’s content, all day long until it’s time for dinner, and then I even hope to be able to read, while I am eating my dinner.) Reading gets me excited, evenin small doses. So does writing. Writing makes me come alive. And so every morning, as Nimmo suggests, I preserve these activities. I nurture them. I prioritize them. I sneak back throughout the day to look at my blog, and to read any comments, and to read other various written communications that have caught my fancy. I invest in these activities on a daily basis, because they are an investment in my own happiness and fulfillment and feeling of purpose. My happiness and excitement and contentment is positive energy that spills out to my home environment, and to my family, and to my pets, and to my friends, and to my community and to my world. My investment in my deepest, truest self (even in small doses) ends up being my gift of joy to the world. Win-win. What is “that thing”, that “one thing” that makes you come alive? What’s that “one thing” that brings out your most beautiful, positive, alive and happy energy, so that when you do “that thing”, it only adds to the bank of positive energy that our world so desperately needs right now? Whatever that activity is for you, doing “that thing” is your gift to yourself, to your family, to your friends, to your community and to your world. You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to all of the rest of us, to do that thing that makes you feel the most alive, even if it is only in small doses. In a world where we are facing a horrific crisis that has absolutely no winners, we need loads and loads more of the magnificent, light-filled, uplifting, excited, loving, positive energy that is a “win-win” for all of us. As Nimmo says, find “your thing”. “Preserve it. Nurture it. Build it. Sneak back to it. Invest in it.” Do it for yourself. Do it for all of us.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’ve been trying to understand my own obsession with following this awful situation in Ukraine. I’ve come to the conclusion that it reminds me of the various difficult times in my own life when I have felt pretty helpless watching loved ones struggle in their own lives, whether it be with disease or with another physical affliction, or with addiction, or with mental struggles, or with a toxic relationship, or any combination of the above, and I have been unable to “fix it” for them. I have been unable to be the dashing lifeboat, that I so desperately want to be. It is a devastating feeling. And most of us have felt this stabbing pain of powerlessness at one time or another, once we have reached this middle stage in our lives.
The heartache is particularly fervent and desperate and sad, when like Ukraine, the loved one, whom we are trying to help, is doing everything that they can to help themselves, too. The person with cancer, is taking their treatment and their health as seriously as possible, the depressed person is earnestly trying with therapy and medication and exercise and prayer, the addicted person is working the 12 steps and keeping in regular contact with a sponsor, and the person in a toxic relationship is taking serious steps towards safety and independence and self-worth. Like most of the nations in the world are feeling and expressing about Ukraine, we naturally want to help those who are earnestly trying to work themselves out of tragic circumstances. We are so inspired by their bravery, and their resilience and their belief in themselves, in the most trying of circumstances, and this inspires us to do everything that we also can do, in order to support their cause. However, in the end, we can’t be their saviors. Sometimes they can’t even be their own saviors. For those of us who have religious and spiritual beliefs, we know that something greater than us and this world, will save those whom we love and who are struggling, but it may not be in the form that we think it should be in, or in the pretty little Hollywood ending that we would like it to be. Our limited minds can’t see the highest views of eternity. That’s why we call our highest virtues besides love, “faith and hope”. We have to believe in something greater than what we are witnessing with our extremely limited human experience. If we don’t believe that all of the many, many good things in life are worth fighting for, and are worth living for, then we will all just despairingly give up, and we will quickly perish. And that’s just not in our collective DNA. Our Higher Creative Mind hasn’t programmed us to give up. So sometimes, we stop and we take a moment to feel the feelings, even the darkest feelings of helplessness and anger and anguish, but then we rise and we put on our boots and we soldier on . . . .
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Like so many of us, I have been completely in awe, and incredibly inspired by the courageous Ukrainian people and their magnificent real-life hero of a leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. I read somewhere that never has the majority of the world felt so united since 9/11. Doesn’t this feeling of unity feel so good? It’s been too long. Why must it take evil and violence for the world to wake up to how good solidarity feels to the majority of us all? A Tweet from Julius Kim (@Julius_Kim) says it best, I think:
“The war in #Ukraine touches the world so deeply because the little guy everywhereis so sick of being pushed around by bullies. Ukraine is us, and we are Ukraine.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning. What I love about most of my weekends these days, (now that my children are mostly grown and independent) is that I can live these weekend days through my most spontaneous nature. I feel free to live moment-by-moment, following my whims and my fancies and my curiosities more than I have been able to do (or more honestly, allowed myself to do), for most of my adult life. So much of today can be unstudied and unplanned. I can let my most inner impulses and inclinations lead the way. This is why Sunday is devoted to poetry on my blog. Poetry is a more spontaneous form of writing than other forms of communication. Poetry reminds me of those mystery grab bags you buy for a set amount of money with “???” written all over them. The delight in these bags is the excited, anticipation of what may be inside. There is no expectation of what could be in the bags, so curiosity and a sense of fun are the main emotions of the experience. In Japan, many stores offer these mystery bags at the beginning of each year. These “lucky bags” are called fukubukuro. Poetry is the fukubukuro (even this word rhymes!) of our written communication! Indulge in poetry today. Delight in the ways that you discover yourself more fully, by seeing what comes out of your heart, in written form! Here’s my poem for today:
This day is your painting,
your poem,
your living NFT.
It is uniquely yours.
The emotions, the observations, the experiences, the prayers, the meditations, the creations, the relations, the rest, the activity, the obsessions, the possessions, the delicacies, the piquancies, and the frequencies that you tune into today, are all of yours.
This day is your poem.
Your living, breathing poem.
What does it say?
What does it mean?
What will it bring to tomorrow’s on-going poetry in motion?
Our daughter got into her university of choice last night. She will attend the same university that her beloved brothers have attended. Not one of my children has worked harder at this goal of being admitted to this university than my daughter. (and I know that our sons would heartily agree with this statement) We are all so proud of her, excited for her and we are shedding our family’s protective love armor all over her, as she takes these first big steps into the adventure of her fast approaching adulthood. My heart is swelled with pride, love, and awe for the precious gift of my little girl, and her blossoming into a vibrant woman of value and excellence and determination.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
