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Change 2007-05-07 18:26:00 In my absence here is another quote for you to ponder: Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.~George Bernard Shaw-Irish-born British Dramatist 1856-1950It's always important to keep an open mind about every subject and be willing to change your mind. Otherwise you do not grow, you do not learn. Read more:Change
The Gift that Gives Back 2007-05-14 17:33:00 Have you ever noticed how creating something can bring you closer to God. Have you ever been in the midst of something you love doing and found yourself feeling that closeness to God? I’m not sure what it is but I suspect that it is perhaps because you are utilizing the very gift that God gave you. Doing so brings you that much closer. Have you ever been givien a gift from a lover or someone close? For example let’s say a coat. When you place it on your body and allow its warmth to enwrap you did you feel closer to that person who gave it to you? You probably did. Perhaps this is why we humans enjoy the art of gift-giving. Well the same can be said when we pull out and dust off our glorious gifts from God and put them to use. For myself it is my writing when I create any piece of written work I feel closer to God. It’s as though I open up a direct line to him and he flows through me.What is your gift? How often do you employ it? Try it, go aheaed. Like to paint? Pull out those
Soulmates 2007-05-19 06:53:00 There are those that believe two soulmates are joined together in heaven by God actually married by God and then sent down to earth to live their separate lives until such a time as they are ready to join together if that time ever comes. The belief is that if they work hard and learn the important lessons about love they can be together but only if they learn their lessons. If they don’t learn their lessons they either meet and then lose their soulmate or if they really do a bad job they never ever even get to meet one another during their stay on earth.Now I’m not saying that I subscribe to this belief but I do think that there is a lot of wisdom in it, nonetheless. After all, we generally don’t meet the love of our lives until we are ready to let them into our lives and even then if we don’t grow together with them it won’t work out and we will lose that love. True love is earned. It’s not something that we have a God-given right to although many people treat it that
Lesson on Letting Go 2007-06-02 11:03:00 I recently had a mishap that was of course another life lesson for me. I would like to share it all with you. I'll insert a part of a letter I wrote a friend. While driving on a local wooded road this past Monday as I drove around one of the bends I heard to my left a tree coming down. I thought I was going to die. I was sure it was going to land on me and I was cringing as I readied myself for massive pain to my head and of course death.When much to my surprise and delight it missed my head! Instead I heard a loud bang and my car shook and a tree bounced from my trunk to the road. Now in my pretty new sweet red car is a huge dent. Oh but that is not the worst of it, no! I can't close my trunk!I just bought this car last month at the time of this mishap I had made one car payment. What's more I had no collision insurance. I was toast! The night it happened as much as I was disappointed I was elated to be alive. I had been sure in that brief moment that I was going to die that I felt Read more:Letting
Disecting the Letting Go Lesson 2007-06-05 23:51:00 In my last post I wrote about my own personal lesson on letting go. We all get this lesson. Granted it’s different for each of us but we do get it. We humans love to hold onto things even when the things make us unhappy. Perhaps, in part because we don’t always see the truth, we may not realize that by letting go we will in essence be freeing ourselves to be happy. Often we hold on to a dream or our vision of how we want something to be. It’s our reluctance to let go of that dream or vision that keeps us stuck in our own tracks. Ironically, once we let go of our dream and our vision we inevitably find peace of mind and happiness.I remember years ago when I lived with my ex. I was so unhappy, so very very unhappy and yet when I left my ex I still had to fight my resistance to be free of him. The reason? It was the dream. We had been house hunting. We were going to buy a house together. We had two children to raise and I had the dream of providing them with a good life, you know th Read more:Letting
Caught in the Headlights 2007-06-12 10:31:00 Fear walks hand and hand with being stuck. Often we stand pinned against the feeling of a positive dream turned negative and our own fears. Together they torment our minds as we stand there looking from one to other, staring like a deer frozen in the headlights. We laugh and poke fun at deer. How silly they seem to just stand there at such a time when impending doom lurks and yet if the truth be told, we humans do the very same thing ourselves. Have you ever stood still and let whatever happens happen only to watch some part of your life crumble? Granted if you had made a move you still might have had to give up some facet of your life or something that you didn’t want to give up but you would have had a lot more choice in how it played out and it might have moved in a totally different direction if you had taken control instead of standing there frozen in the headlights of life unable to decide. This is something we all experience from time to time. We’ve all stood frozen and watc Read more:Caught
Judgement 2007-06-19 11:42:00 The best thing we can do for ourselves and for our fellow man is to not judge too harshly. Forgive the actions of each other and ourselves, understand that each of us is human and that we all make mistakes. Take those mistakes and use them as a springboard into a better happier life. Never allow your mistakes to define you! You are not your mistakes and he or she is not their mistake. However, we can choose to remain there making the same mistakes over and over again until we think we have become our mistakes, an illusion that we allow ourselves to believe. It is so important that you recognize your mistakes as just that and that you understand that no one is without fault. We all mess up and make mistakes. We all make bad decisions from time to time. The only difference then between a successful life and an unsuccessful one is what we take from those mistakes. Do we learn from them? Do we grow from them? Or do we sink further down in the muck and continue on our path? The choice is yo
A Clean Slate 2007-06-23 11:36:00 As I sat and watched my daughter and her class graduate I thought about how lucky they are. I thought of the clean slate that they had and how they could write their dreams and how they had a great deal of time to fulfill them. How I wished I could help them understand that and what that really means. When we are young we are often so frivolous with our time. We think we have so much of it to squander. The truth is we don't! We shouldn't squander our time away. Then I thought that as true as that is so it is true that every day of our lives in some way is a clean slate to which we can write the story of our lives. So I thought perhaps I should wake up each morning with a different thought than usual. Perhaps I should wake up with the question of, What shall I write on my slate today? Do I want to write that I had a lazy day sitting in the sun drinking iced tea? Well perhaps that has its place on my slate but what is important to me today? What would I be happy with accomplishing and Read more:Clean
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Let it Out 2007-06-29 12:35:00 Is there a past Pain, something from long ago perhaps that every time you think about it, it makes you angry or sad? We all have something or many things in our past that have hurt us. However, all of us are not free of that pain. In fact, it shapes many peoples' lives and outright destroys some and or those that know them. Talking or writing about your past pains, hurts or sins against you is imperative to achieving a healthy soul. If you don't release the pain, hurt and anger that is inside of you it will forever dwell there! It will change your life and hurt you and even hurt others. It's your responsibility to yourself and to our very world to heal that pain and move away from it. The first and most important step is to let it out. Now once you talk about it you don't live there. You don't wallow in the pain you merely release it and then comes the next step, forgiveness but that's another topic for another day right now its just important to focus on what's inside of you. M
But I Hate Carrots! 2007-07-03 11:33:00 One of the best things you can learn to do for yourself is the art of not taking things personally. So often we mistake the intentions, thoughts or words of others to mean the worst and most often they don't mean you any ill thoughts. It's difficult at best to let go and not take things personally. It takes practice, and then more practice and then even more practice. I know people that totally mess up every relationship they have because they take everything personally. He left the bathroom light on because he doesn't care about my feelings. She chose carrots for a vegetable even though I've told her before how much I hate carrots. So she must not care about my feelings. Sound ridiculous? Well it is and yet many many people think this way and most of us do to some extent.For those that have been reading since the beginning you will remember me talking about driving and how we often take the actions of other drivers too personally. That was just one example of how we take things pe Read more:Carrots
Unlock the Mystery of Women 2007-07-02 23:29:00 A friend sent me an email forward one day. The forward was a joke about women and how impossible it was to understand them. I joked back that it wasn’t really that big of a mystery that women merely wanted to be loved more than humanly possible and want to feel that their man loves them more than any man has ever loved a woman. Well of course that’s not really true but I know that is how it can feel for men. At the same time it wasn’t far from the truth either. It isn’t really that women want men to love them more than is humanly possible but women want to feel loved. This sounds simple enough and basically it is but as simple as it is it’s very complicated. The trouble is everyone has different love needs. Men don’t know what a woman’s love needs are offhand. He has to learn them…the hard way. It’s impossible to just know because every person is different. Women
let men know when they feel their love needs aren’t being met where as men are more likely to suffer in Read more:Mystery
Let’s Talk About Sex Baby 2007-07-21 10:02:00 It seems lately that everywhere I go on the blogs I’m reading something about sex be it about someone starting an erotic blog to someone thinking sex is bad to someone addicted to sex. All of these posts and comments have led me to write this post. Sex is such a funny animal, isn’t it? It is so much of who we are and is deeply ingrained in our being. In many ways it often colors our choices and more often than not without us even realizing it. Each of us has our own individual sexuality, like our very own fingerprint. Different things excite different people. I’ve always found this interesting. Some of the things that excite some people get them into big trouble. Some are more demure and relatively harmless. Some are completely shunned by society. No one really knows for sure how our sexuality forms. We hypothesize that it forms as very young children and of course this would make sense, but the bottom line is we don’t know. It could be there like a blueprint before we are ev
Trust 2007-07-20 11:02:00 Trust is one of the most difficult things to give another person. After a person proves themselves trustworthy sometimes we still struggle with it. When we struggle it comes from within. It’s most probably not about them and more about us. Past hurts is the most likely culprit. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing that means our minds are doing their best to learn their lesson and learn a lesson they did. However the funny thing about life lessons is that once we learn them in one extreme life often offers us the other extreme. Life is about balance and our job here on earth is to learn that balance, like it or not that is what we are doing here for some reason. So you’ve learned your lesson about untrustworthy people and now here you are suddenly needing to learn to trust again or for some maybe for the first time ever. How do you do it? How do you reach inside and allow yourself to believe in that other person? You’re hoping I’m going to hand you some easy answer on that one
The Chicken or the Egg? 2007-08-02 17:38:00 So the question becomes are women not communicating effectively with men or are men not listening or do they feel nonchalant about women’s needs? Well it’s easy to sit and point fingers and blame each other. Obviously both sides have valid points. However, all that finger pointing wont solve anything, will it? It would seem to me that if both parties have these different issues then it seems that women have to try harder to communicate effectively and men need to try harder to listen to what she is saying. Wouldn’t it be nice if we came with a needs checklist. You just hand your little checklist to your prospective partner and have them check off all the needs they are capable of filling. Then you approve or deny based on their answers. Yes if only life were so easy eh? However, it’s not. We all have to withstand a certain amount of heartache and confusion about out love interests.In the end it’s often the little things that make the biggest difference. And like it or not it Read more:Chicken
Dirty Floors 2007-08-01 13:00:00 I was reading an article online today about relationships or more to the point the ending of relationships. Apparently in relationships going sour the man seems to be the last to know in most cases. The author suggested that perhaps because men usually still get the better end of the deal in relationships overall that they aren’t noticing what their partner is going through. According to this article women will try to express their needs at some point but often men are either unwilling to compromise or don’t seem to realize the seriousness of the issue. Perhaps because they are happy with things just the way they are so why change anything? Then later they are shocked when the woman leaves and left wondering, how did this happen? This makes sense to me and I’ve seen this happen many times. I think it happens on both sides of the fence but it is true that men are happier in most relationships and therefore less likely to understand how serious the problems are when they arise.We h Read more:Floors
Baggage 2007-08-03 08:31:00 Relationships are quite possibly the most complicated things on the earth. We do our best to break them down and simplify them but there are so many variables that it extremely difficult to do.Love is such a small part of it all. Love in many ways often serves as a complication. You love someone and want to be with them so you allow yourself to stay regardless of the things that are wrong, the needs that are left unfulfilled. Your dream is that they will suddenly want to fulfill those dreams. Things will change. You will be happy with them and love will prevail. This thinking gets many of us in trouble. Yet it's because we love. The conflict eventually arises out of love for ourselves and love for this other person. This is when we do one of three things, we leave, we ask our partner to fill our needs, or we do the unthinkable and find someone else on the side who will fill our needs. You see we are all human. All of our "relationship sins" can be easily broken down and explained. Ev Read more:Baggage
Be Your Best 2007-08-08 08:33:00 Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.and John Lennon said: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.These two quotes seem to sum things up very nicely. You can't go through life not making plans or you will never get anywhere. However, you have to be flexible enough to realize that plans change or plans change form. You have to be willing to bend with life while still staying focused on your ultimate goal.Life will happen regardless of whether you plan or not but without a plan you are free floating and most probably not offering your God-given talent to the world. Free floating is a waste of your talents and abilities and a sin against yourself and the world. Now, unless your plan is perhaps to travel and paint pictures while selling them as you float around the country then I suggest you have a plan. Even then in that situation you have a plan, a plan to travel freel
Security Vs. Living 2007-08-06 12:53:00 Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.James F. ByrnesI like this quote and find it to be so true. All too often we focus on how we can be secure as opposed to how we can really be happy. Don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with security. However, if you base your life on that you'll soon discover that security is all you have and you wont even be able to enjoy it! No, you have to be willing to take some risks. Life doesn't bring you joy without risk! You have to be willing to give up, and to sacrifice, and be willing to let go of the security trap. Never let fear stop you from taking advantage of opportunity! Never let your fear of letting go of your security keep you from living life to the fullest! You only get one life! Read more:Living
Life's a Swim Upstream 2007-08-10 15:26:00 Whenever you try to better yourself life will throw you challenges. Nothing ever comes easy. It's almost as if we have to prove ourselves in order to get what it is we dream of having or doing. Well this throws a lot of people off. They may think, Oh this is too difficult. Other's may think it's a sign that they're just not meant to do it. Others still will try for awhile but give up before they reach the intended goal.A good friend told me years ago that life is a river and we either swim upstream or get swept away with the current and float downstream. That conversation changed my life. Well perhaps not that very day but over time because it was that day when I first realized that life was work and that no one got anything for nothing. No if I wanted to succeed I had to take some swimming lessons and start swimming. Before that day I thought I just had rotten luck. So if you are trying hard to accomplish your dreams and you keep meeting obstacles in your path than thank your luck
Picking Yourself Up By the Bootstraps 2007-08-18 08:38:00 Sometimes while on your chosen path you get stuck or you lose momentum, things fall apart, things change, things happen and the only thing you can do at that point in your path is pull your self up by the bootstraps and go forward. Sometimes you might feel so bad that you just want to sit there but then you find the longer you sit there the more it hurts or the more bad it makes you feel. How do you gain the strength to go forward? What are the tricks you use to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and move forward? Sometimes pulling ourselves up means letting go of dreams or things or even people we love. How do you convince yourself to do what is right for YOU? It would be interesting to hear all the little tips and tricks you all have for such events. Read more:Picking
, Yourself
My Baby 2007-09-26 11:28:00 A very bad thing happened to my daughter this week. I'm not going to divulge any details because it's her business but it was a very traumatic experience both for her and for myself. I'm working through it as is she. I feel like crying every moment of every day. I know this pain wont last forever but right now I'm in the dark tunnel working my way through toward the other side. I'm sure at the end of all of this I'll have learned many lessons though at this moment they are not very clear. My heart is very heavy and in many ways I feel helpless. As a parent I have spent many years protecting my daughter from all of the monsters of the world. It's so much easier to protect them when they are young and you can keep them within your sight. Once they grow older you are so limited at what you can do and in many ways you just have to hope for the best. It's painful and frustrating that I can't protect her. It breaks my heart that I can't shu away the monsters the way I could when s
Quick Update 2007-09-16 10:03:00 Hey Folks, Yes, I'm still alive and well and everything is going great! So sorry that I've made no posts lately but real life has just been consuming too much of my time. I hope to write a new post soon. Thanks to those who inquired as to my where-abouts you can rest assured I am fine just very very busy. Hope all is going well for everyone! Miss you all lots!!! Read more:Quick
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, Quick Update
The Need to be Needed 2007-10-10 13:36:00 My last post has turned out to be a lead in to this post. This mostly because it inspired me to think about a specific part of this quote. That quote touched on an element of our humanity that doesn't get talked about all that often. Our human need to be needed. Our need to be needed is stronger than many of our needs and touches all of our relationships from our parents to our children to our partners to our bosses to our friends. We need to feel needed and useful and of some importance. It makes us feel good. We need to feel important and needed in all aspects of our lives. For if we are not needed what are we worth? Which is why abused children grow up feeling worthless. See in most families parents need their children just as much as children need their parents only in different ways. Perhaps you haven't thought of it that way but the child brings so much to the parent and the parent needs for the child to do well and be well and to grow up and be well and do well. Think for a m
2007-10-08 11:14:00 I ran across this quote and thought it was beautiful and inspiring and so I wanted to share it with all of my blogging friends. I'm sure you'll all love it too! Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.~Storm Jameson
The Magic of Thinking Big 2007-10-29 06:16:00 You have probably heard about thinking big. It's great advice except for its wrong. Oh no its not wrong to think big, don't get me wrong. However, you can't just wake up and start thinking big and expect to get big. Like anything you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Big is the goal at the end of succession of baby steps and medium steps that lead to big. So many people get confused there. They are thinking big so why isn't it working? Simple you can't usually jump that high! You have to build steps to the top. To get to big you have to start small. In our society today we want everything yesterday and we want bigger and better every time. We are a spoiled society and in this we often lose sight of the good old fashioned values of working your way to where you want to go. So even in our thinking we are trying to skip steps. Just remember: Think big but take lots of little steps to get to big! Read more:Magic
What's Stopping You? 2007-11-16 08:43:00 Yes it's true sometimes we can be so busy chasing our dream that we sabotage our dream without even meaning to. Sometimes we want it so much a certain way that we forget that we might have to opt to do other things that we don't dream of doing just to obtain the dream. We can spend a whole lifetime not even grasping that concept or recognizing that we are doing that. If you have a dream that you just can't seem to accomplish. You need to look at what's stopping you. Are you afraid to do what you have to do to get it. Isn't doing that dirty work worth it if it brings you closer to your dream? Of course it is and in the end you know you'll agree! So put on your boots and walk through the muck. It's the only way to the other side!
That Old Christmas Spirit 2007-12-07 08:02:00 So you want to change the world? Of course you do! Don't we all? The funny thing is that we often fail to notice that we actually have the power to change the world. Now can we change the world drastically all by ourselves? No, probably not but what you do today will affect the world and change its course. What you do could make or break a life even if you don't realize it nor see it. What you do will reverberate out into the world and will effect the world. So with that you must ask yourself at the end of the day. What did I put out into the world today? Was it good stuff? Or was it negative vibes? Recognize the power you hold in your hands and understand that with power you need to exercise responsibility. You are responsible for what you place out there in the world. Now, the odds are that no one on this earth is going to come calling on you about what you do provided its not so bad that you get arrested or that someone retaliates against you. No the truth lies within your own hea Read more:Christmas
Merry Christmas-Lets Not Forget its Origin 2007-12-25 08:30:00 There are those that insist that Santa doesn't exist. Yet don't we see proof of him everywhere? Santa, the spirit of Christmas
is perhaps God's joy spread down upon us. Santa can be seen everywhere. He can come in the form of a jolly old elf as we all know or perhaps in Asian eyes or brown skin or blonde hair or pierced faces or pretty smiles or big strong hands or delicate girlish giggles. The thing with Santa is that he doesn't just dress in a red suit and he isn't always fat and he doesn't always deliver gifts on a sleigh driven by renideer. No sometimes he shows up in one of those economy sized cars or even a big ole truck. What's mroe Santa comes in every color imaginable and you never know when you might meet up with him or where. Yes my friends Santa is alive and well and still spreading good cheer. You have only to look to your own living rooms for proof of this! Santa is a jolly old elf indeed sprinkled with magic dust, the dust of God's joy. Some say Christmas is too Read more:Merry
, Merry Christmas
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Lessons 2008-02-29 20:16:00 If there is one thing I can say about life it is that it will never take it easy on you. It gives you lessons and its up to you to learn from them and grow stronger and better or be a wimp and cower away from what you know you should do. My daughter and I still struggle. She is doing better. I learned something about myself this last month. I am so much stronger than I ever thought I was. There were moments this last month where I just wanted to give up but I knew that I couldn't and somewhere inside of me I had to reach in and gather my strength. It surprised me then just how much I managed to grasp! Where did it all come from? It came from love. Love for my daughter and my desire for her to be well. And in all of this madness and pain my daughter and I grew closer and we gained something Read more:Lessons
My Apologies 2008-01-27 13:02:00 I must apologize to all who read here. I have not been a very attentive blogger. And for the time being I can't promise that things will get much better. I have been going through a lot these past few months between very hard financial times in spite of working my butt off and very rough times with my daughter. My attention has had to stay focused in those areas and the blog has stood neglected. I will still need to keep my focus elsewhere. Hence it will still be some time before I can really put the attention into this blog as I would like. For that I apologize. I will be back as soon as life allows but for the time being. I have to keep keeping on....
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