Tag Archives: Life

Stella’s Honeymoon On Hamburgers, Milkshakes And Love

Posted in Brides, Life, Love, relationships, Romace, traditions, Women by

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

After Stella graduated from high school, she couldn’t afford college, so she went to nurse’s training school at the general hospital in her home town.

One day one of her patient’s son told her he was really crazy about her friend Betty, who was working on the ward with her, and asked if she could get him a date.

She said, “I’ll try. Betty said, Okay, but that she would not go out on a single date. “So he asked two guys, and I Stella asked another girl, and they went on a triple date. On the day of the date Stella had spent all afternoon at the beach sun bathing, she was red as a beet, her hair was a mess, and she really didn’t want to go.

At the last-minute Stella managed to pull herself together anyway and as she was walking down the stairs she saw the three guys sitting there, and she said to her friend, “Look at the hick; I’ll bet I get stuck with him.” And she did. She knew that he didn’t have any money. They wanted to stop for a hamburger, french fries and a milkshake, and he just frankly told her. “I can’t afford it.” Somehow or other that seemed honest to her. She said, ” Let’s just sit in the car and talk.” And talk they did. They talked themselves right into love and marriage. The next day she called him, they decided they wanted to see each other again and made plans to have lunch together.

When Dave went to the hospital to pick her up and unfortunately Stella wasn’t there. Dave waited for her longer that day than he had waited for anybody in his life. He wasn’t mad, he was disgusted  and wrote Stella off. After all no one did that to him, so he went back to work. 

Three days later Stella called him and explained to him that she had to attend a nurses luncheon and had left a note for Betty to give to him and Betty forgot to. Dave accepted her apology. Dave and Stella had the next Thursday off. He suggested that they go to Turkey Run State Park, which is about sixty miles from Indianapolis. That day turned out to be one of the most idyllic days of their lives.

Friday he took Stella out to the farm to meet his parents and on Saturday they spent the day with Stella’s parents. That was when her mother said to Dave, “I hope you’re not thinking about marrying my daughter, because you’ll marry her over my dead body!’  

He told her, “If I can find us a minister, we’re getting married tomorrow and no you wouldn’t die and she didn’t die!  He went out and found the same minister that had married his parents twenty-five years earlier. He pulled the minister right out of the revival meeting. His mother was an avid gardener, and had what seemed like thousands of gladiolas in full bloom.  His mother cut practically al of those glads, and the house was absolutely gorgeous with flowers everywhere they looked.

So they were married with their parents, grandparents, two best friends, his brother as his best man, and her four sisters and that was the wedding party. After the wedding ceremony Dave had twenty dollars in his pocket and borrowed forty dollars from his dad for the honeymoon, but in the rush and excitement of the wedding, he forgot to get it. They where half way to Lake Shafer on their honeymoon when they discovered that he only had a twenty in his wallet. 

So they honeymoon on twenty dollars. They found a motel for three dollars a night. They discovered a beautiful garden overlooking Lake Shafer and if they ate at the soda fountain they could order a hamburger, french fries and milkshake for seventy-five cents. So their honeymoon was for three-days and nights and they spent Dave’s twenty dollars. When they returned home Dave gave his father in law the forty dollars back.

Stella and Dave have had fifty-seven years of marriage, and never once regretted their short courtship and honeymoon on hamburgers, milkshakes and love. Stella worked as a nurse for twenty years and Dave became a doctor and they had four children but every Saturday night was hamburger, french fire and milkshake night.

Stella and Dave’s love story carries us from the excitement and anticipation of courtship to the deep connection of lifelong commitment, their story just goes to show that love is found in the most unexpected of places and in the shortest amount of time. And if you’re wondering yes this is a true story love story.

Hip, Hip, Hooray It’s A Girl

Posted in Babies, Chidren, family, Grandparenting by

Hip, Hip, Hooray! There’s a baby girl coming in May and she is my granddaughter.  There’s something about interacting with a baby that ignites something magical in all of us. isn’t there? 

They stare at us with inquisitive eyes and they are curious about everything that is happening in their world.

We look into their eyes and we remember a time before, when we where sure we had seen everything meaningful in life. They are like their parents only in miniature size and when we look at their tiny features and their cubby little bodies and we can’t help but smile as we realize that interacting with a baby can be truly miraculous. Can’t it?

I started writing this baby announcement in October and up dated it in May and continued up until today. In two weeks or less my grand-daughter will arrive and I am over the moon excited. All I can say is Hip, Hip, Hooray its a Girl! I want to thank all my friends who have shared in my excitement and prayed for this little darling. She is differently a gift from heaven and there are two awesome little brothers who are looking forward to meeting her.

When I think about my grand-daughter I think about the color pink and all the girly things that the color pink represents and this hasn’t happened since my daughter was born. I can’t wait until they put her nursery together so I can see all her girly stuff. Once again thanks for all my friends for your prayers these last few months and I can’t wait to introduce her to you.

                                                                                                                                                                 Hi every one this is a photo of my grand-daughter Julie isn’t she a beauty? This photo was taken shortly after she was born and as you can see she’s a blessing from heaven isn’t she? 

When you think of a baby girl, the mind conjures up images of satin ribbons, pink frilly frocks, dainty shoes, and delicate tutus. But be warned! Girls can be full of surprises too. A baby girl can be sweeter (badder) oftener than anyone else in the world. She can jitter around, and stomp, and make funny noises that frazzle your nerves, yet just when you open your mouth she stands there demure with that special look in her eyes. A girl is innocence playing in the mud. Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot.

I started writing this birth announcement in October of 2011 and today I up dated it after Julie was born. It is my way of thanking everyone for their prayers, love and support thanks a million you guys.

Let Go And Surrender

Posted in Dreams, Life, Love, relationships, Romace, Spiritual by

Letting go is an emotional and spiritual surrender. It means willingly jumping out of the lifeboat of your preconceptions of reality and taking your chances out in the open sea of anything-can-happen.

It means that even as your definition of reality is dissolving before your very eyes, you willingly relinquish it, instinctively comprehending that the state of surrender itself will be a creative condition. It’s hard to let go, to live in a formless, destinationless place. All our lives we’re taught to hold on, to be the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls. Letting go isn’t comfortable; it can feel like anything from laziness to utter loss of control. It’s not aggressive and self-assured. It’s not the American way.

But letting go is, in truth, is a most elegant kind of daring. It is vulnerability of the highest order, an emptying out of self, of all the clutter, chatter, ideas, attitudes, schemes, and plans that, ordinarily, we all contain. In this emptiness, there is room for so much; in this vacancy, anything can happen: breathtaking transformations, changes of directions, miracles that will purely astound you, love that comes out of a spiritual conversion. But only if you are willing to truly let go of it all: as the tree dropping her bright leaves for winter, the trapeze artist, suspended in midair between two bars, the diver free-falling from the high dive, have all unequivocally, wholeheartedly let go.

Letting go is being alive to the power of anything is possible. It is living in surrender, trust, and the belief that emptiness is at once the perfect completion and the perfect beginning. So let go. And remember that if you hang on to even a shred or try to make a deal with Gods meaning of letting go you might not experience all the wonderful things that are ment happen to you.

Writing Is A Process Like Aging

Posted in generational changes, Life, relationships, Women by

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening. When I was in my twenties I belonged to a writers group. We would meet every other Wednesday and share our short stories, plays, mysteries and memoirs. Needless to say we did a lot of talking and listening. As with any group of women, our conversations ranged from what our children were doing to what was going on in the White House.

Every word spoken was important to us. One day, the conversation centered on their litany of complaints over getting older. One woman described her hot flashes in great detail and told us how in the middle of night she got out of bed and took a cold shower to calm her night sweats.

 I was a new mother and all I could think about was how many dirty diapers I had changed and was suffering from all those sleepless nights. Needless to say, I remained silent, while sipping a cup of tea as the rest of the women shared their complaints about aging. I started to wonder if I was in a writers group or having lunch with my mother and her girlfriends.

Finally the group returned to the business at hand which was to decide if we should start to critique each others writings. A few of us decided that it would be helpful to have someone critique our latest writings. After that there were frequent red marks all over our pages. To make the process easier to take, we started each critique with what was good about the piece. Then with the writer basking in the glow of hearing how skillful her writing was, the not so positive stuff could be discussed. Many of the women went on to become succesful published authors.

 The good stuff doesn’t just apply to critiquing writers it also applies to aging. Now many years later most of my friends are helping take care of their parents. They are dealing with problems about aging, fading memories, fatal illnesses, scams to cheat the trusting. At times they become overwhelmed. 

It’s time to start thinking about what we gain from getting older, not what we lose. When we start to appreciate all the good stuff that we have and can do, we become happier people. Like a new sense of time. Like times when we were perusing an education or a career or raising our kids, we always looked ahead to each new stage.

 It may have been when our babies would crawl, talk, walk, feed themselves, get out of diapers, get into school. Maybe it was when you finished collage and received your collage degree or when you were in pursuit of fulfilling your career goals.

 All of those situations require looking ahead to the good stuff. Getting older doesn’t have to mean that you can’t look forward to having good stuff in your life. It means you have to think out of the box and move out of a few comfort zones. You can do it!

Now we know how fast the chipmunk-cheeked face of the nursing baby sharpens into the schoolgirls’ studious look. Don’t we? And we realize that, with each change, how special our time is and how fast it all disappears, too. Writing, like life, is not a goal but a process. And, as in life, it is easy to give up.

 The excuses are legion. It’s too difficult to write; the storyline isn’t working; I don’t know where it’s taking me. But if we don’t trust the possibility that it will all work out, we’ll never get it written. And if those who read our work don’t look for possibilities, their doubts can discourage us from finishing it. So, we look for the possibilities of each idea, each piece of work.

Growing older in our society isn’t easy. The emphasis on staying young no matter what it takes or costs is strong. It’s sometimes hard to find the up side of getting old. But as mature women we have endless possibilities, from the sublime to the silly: never wearing panty hose again; wearing big, dangling rhinestone earings with jeans; eating dessert first or eating dessert only; going back to graduate school for the sheer joy of learning; taking up glass blowing or skydiving.

We can do what we want. It’s all possible. The process of writing is like aging they are both full of possibilities. The longer we live, the more we know about hurts and sadness in our own lives and in the world. But we know more too, with a recounting of what went right in our lives. As we have aged we have learned that each time we leave those we care about, we can leave them a positive word, a gift of good stuff, until we see them again. Life and writing are full of possibilities aren’t they?

Teachable Moments

Posted in Uncategorized by

Ever since I read about “Teachable Moments” I’ve believed they’re the easiest and most enjoyable way to teach a child anything. And grandparents, have more teachable moments with their grandchildren, than even their parents do, because they have the time and the desire to pass on snippets of information.

Grandparents like to take advantage of every opportunity to explain something to your grandchildren it might be an idea, how something works, why something is important, how we do things, and answer to a question, pointing out something interesting a new word, a new sensation, a new feeling.

A teachable moment arises out of an ordinary everyday activity or situation where you feel that there’s an opportunity to explain something. Unsurprisingly children love those moments. The setting is informal, it doesn’t feel like teaching, and best of all its piecemeal, which is how children learn anyway. It’s appealing to a chid because a teachable moment has it own logic. Here are some teachable moments that I’ve experienced with my children when they were growing up or even more recently with my grandchildren.

  • You’re “Gardening” together and you see a worm. You can talk about how worms aerate the soil and turn it over (as worm casts), and how a worm  has no eyes because it’s always in the dark.
  • You’re crossing a street with traffic lights. Hers’s a good opportunity to talk about the light sequence and how RED means STOP and Green means Go. Extend this to talking about how you should look left, then right, then left again, then cross.
  • It’s bath time, and as your grandchild gets into the bath the water rises, then when she stands up, the level drops. You explain why and you could mention Archimedes and “Eureka”. You explain how some things float and some things sink.
  • You use a word that might be difficult for a toddler or young child to understand, for instance, words such as recognize, reflection (in the mirror), camouflage and immediately explain what it means and give examples of how to use it.
  • Use every opportunity to explain a concept this is hard, but this is soft; a cat meows but a dog barks; birds fly and so do airplanes.

You are an expert as a grandparent, because of your experiences, the life you’ve led, and your range of interests and hobbies, you can stimulate your grandchild in a way that a parent can’t. Your grandchildren will learn very easily from you, and I’m sure that. like me, you will get huge satisfaction from the hours you spend playing and learning together.

You have a caring interest in him or her, which they can sense because it makes them feel special, the perfect setting for new games and skills. You have the time to play until your grandchildren get bored. You take obvious delight in their tiniest achievement and make them feel confident. Nothing is too much trouble for you so games can extend his concentration and foster his curiosity.

You are endlessly patient and show him how to try, try, try again until he succeeds, and then praise them. You love him them enough to let them fail on their way to their success’. Remember to let your children and grandchildren fail instead of trying to rescue them from failure all the time.

Take a moment and think about a time that you failed and turned that failure into a success. Would you have conquered it if your parents, teachers, mentors, or grandparents had rescued you out of it? I remember when my son was learning to ride a bike I can’t tell you how many times he fell down and we just ignored him and he got right back up on that bike and finally mastered riding it. Later in life when he learned to drive a motorcycle there was no room for failing.  He had to do it right the first time and he did.

I remember when I started playing baseball at first I couldn’t hit the ball and my teams mates were not happy about that. But I can tell you no one told the couch to rescue me or even how to handle it. All my mom said, was you’ll figure it out just pay more attention to the way you are holding the bat. I kept trying and then one day I hit a home run. It’s good thing too because girls didn’t play baseball back then. Enjoy all those teachable moments and let the kids learn to turn their failures into success’.

Everybody Has A Story To Tell

Posted in Uncategorized by

When we’ve been connected for a long time to someone, we think we know each other. We do, of course, know a whole array of things about one another, but it’s really only when we tell our stories.

Those touching vignettes that embody our struggles, sweet moments, disappointments, or wild hopes and dreams, that our most real, most vulnerable selves are revealed. Indeed, if we don’t tell each other our stories, we’re all one-dimensional, blank screens on which we project our assumptions about one another.

Everybody has a story, and because we all do, when we hear each other’s stories, we feel suddenly connected. Story is the great river that runs though the human landscape, and our stories are the little creeks that flow through us all to join the river at its source. When you tell your story, however you open yourself to the level of fragility that, as human beings, we all share; for no matter how different our stories, at the bottom of them all is the well of pain from which we have each dipped a drought.

Tell him or her your story, tell them the most exciting moment, the greatest regret of your adult life, the most painful event in your childhood and you will discover, in-depth, a self you never knew. That’s because between the sentences of our stories the gist of things slips out, not merely the facts, but the feelings that have shaped us, the point, in anyone’s journey, from which there was no return.

For example, although you may be aware of your husband’s  fascination with architecture, you may not understand why he never pursued it, until you hear the story about the night their father got so angry at him for staying up late drawing that he broke all his drafting pencils, threw them in the trash, and raved, “Since you’re waiting time like that, you’re never going to get a cent to go to college.” or, you may know about your wife’s interest in the big dipper but not know where it came from, until she tells you the story about how when she was a little girl and she heard her parents downstairs arguing at night, she would lie in bed looking up at the Big Dipper until it seemed like the stars beamed their white light right into her room so she could finally go to sleep.

When you tell your personal tale, spinning and spinning, telling, retelling, the tight thread with which you have wrapped up your pain will gradually start loosening. and when you listen to her or his story, he or she will become, in the process of your listening, a fully formed human being. So tell each other your stories. They’re more than entertainment for the dinner table or a long ride in the car. They are your true selves, spelled out and spoken, brought forth in time and in your own language, a loving gift you give to each other.

Rediscover Harmony And Belonging

Posted in Uncategorized by

Belonging is the spiritual beauty of any intimate relationship. It is elegant coexistence, peaceful compatibility, a similarity of frequency. It’s knowing that you share the same view of the world, that what you want out of life runs along parallel lines. It’s looking at your beloved and being able to say to yourself, “We stand for the same things, don’t we? We may encounter some rough spots, but at heart we both share the same values and we always find our way back to harmony.” In relationship, belonging and harmony is a gift of the spirit. It is a mystic similarity of essence that allows you to operate both separately and together from the comfortable wellspring of knowing that between you there is a sacred resonance. In a sense, it’s the very reason you chose each other in the first place. If there weren’t a certain degree of belonging and harmony between you, you wouldn’t have thrown you lot in together and established a relationship.

When there’s belonging and harmony, you can feel it; it will add grace to all your undertakings, the rearing of your children, the way you conduct the actions of your daily life, the way you handle conflict, and what you perceive to be the underlying deep direction of your life.

Unfortunately to many demands can undermine the pleasant ground of any union’s harmoniousness and we can lose sight of our belonging feelings. Schedules, children, unexpected little assaults from others can make all us feel at times as if there’s no harmony or belonging between us.

Conversely, harmony is nurtured and restored by being lovingly remembered. So if the harmony is out of balance in your relationship, ask yourselves the following questions:
After all the fuss and fray, when the kids are in bed, when the disagreement is over, is the stream of our life together most of the time good? In general, can I give thanks for his or her presence in my life? Do I still know that I still belong to her or him?

In what ways are we at the core a complement, a mirror, a balance for one another? What things still give us pleasure together? What is the higher purpose of our relationship and what is our common undertaking?

If you have a hard time finding answers to these questions, take a good look at what’s compromising the harmony and feeling of belonging in your relationship. Is it something you can change? Is it circumstantial, your husband has been on the road for a month or is it an emotional issue that needs to be dealt with? What is the one thing you could do or say that would be a first step toward restoring harmony and the feelings of belonging?

Harmony and creating the feelings of belonging is the spiritual balance in any good relationship. So give thanks for the harmony you have, develop the harmony that’s missing, and nurture the harmony that ensures the feeling of belonging to your love.

The Notion Of Love As Service

Posted in Life, Love, relationships, Romace, Women by

Most of the time we think of love in terms of what love can do for us, imagining that when we “fall in love,” all our dreams will come true.

We want so badly to have our own feelings recognized, our own needs met, our own insecurities handled, and our own desires fulfilled that the notion of love as service is almost inconceivable to us. We can get so caught up (or bogged down) in the notion of love as a what will I get out of the experience that the idea of serving another is extremely distasteful.  At a deeper level, we’re afraid that by serving we might lose the sense of our selves we’ve worked so hard to attain.  But in its purest state, love is service,  a wholehearted offering so satisfying that it doesn’t feel like service at all, but rather self-fulfilment of the highest order.

Most of us still need practice for this particular outreach of love. We’re not sure how to serve or what our true service might be, and we haven’t  practiced serving  to such a degree that it feels second nature, graceful, or effortless to us.  The truth is that we’re all already serving in one form or another. If you’re a parent, you’re serving your children.  If you’ve cared for an invalid neighbor or an aging parent, you have also served in love. If you’ve bandaged the wing of a wounded bird, given a homeless person a dollar, saved a stranger from drowning, given up your set on the bus, then you too have served in love. These are the seedings of service , the places where our hearts have started to open, but should you choose to have your service grow into a huge and sheltering tree, you will be given many opportunities to mature your gift  of true service.

Begin by asking yourself the following questions: What does it mean to serve? What would my true service be? How can I develop my service so it can truly become a gift of love?  Service in love is temporarily sitting aside your own needs, wants, and priorities and allowing the needs, want and priorities and allowing the needs of another human being to become radiant, so vivid, and so pertinent that, for a moment, your own are dissolved. This gracious moment is love, and the more we live in the practice of service, the more we create this love. For when we serve one another, we also serve the great cause of Love with grace.

When We Accept What Is

Posted in Dreams, family, Family Values, Life, Love, relationships, Romace, Spiritual by

We usually mosey into relationships seeing their obvious possibilities, imagining specified outcomes, cocooning them with our own expectations.

But what actually occurs is often shockingly different from what we expected.

 The person you wanted to marry has a phobia about commitment. The woman you knew would make a great mother decides to go off to law school.

The suitor with the bottomless trust fund decides to give away all his money and live in a cave. Surprising revisions can happen on even at the simplest levels: “When I fell in love with him, he was wearing a black cashmere sweater and a pair of black dress pants; but after I married him, all he would wear was sweatshirts, his favorite sports hats and jeans.”

Expectations come in two forms: general and specific. General expectations have to do with our dreams and plans for a specific relationship that it will lead to marriage, that it will bring you children, that it will make you “happy.” Specific expectations have to do with what we think we can count on day-to-day – he’ll take out the trash, she’ll handle the kids in a way I approve of. On one level, these expectations are all quite reasonable;  it’s appropriate to have long-range plans and goals, and it’s legitimate to expect specific kinds of participation from your partner.

But when your relationship becomes a litany of failed expectations— what you hoped for but didn’t get—– its time to look at what’s happening from an entirely different perspective. Perhaps, instead of needing to “communicate better” or “negotiate your differences” on an emotional level, you’re being asked, on a spiritual level, to learn to accept what is.

Accepting — finding a way to be comfortable with things as they are—- is actually a very developed spiritual state. It means that you’re relinquished the preconceptions of your ego and surrendered to what’s been given to you. Maybe he’s not the provider you hoped for, but his spiritual strength is a constant inspiration; perhaps she’s not the housekeeper you wanted, but the way she nurtures your children is absolutely beautiful.

Acceptance allows your spirit to grow. When you’re able to recognize the little  miracles and great lessons that replace your expectations, you suddenly discover that what you hoped for— was pitifully puny compared to what was actually held in store for you. And in a way far more complex and elegant than you could have imagined, your life is following a sacred design. 

 So if you want a life that is larger than life and a relationship that is finer than even your wildest hopes, peel back your expectations and start to accept the good in what is.  (This only applies to mentally stable people.)

Escaping Memories…

Posted in Dreams, Life, Love, relationships by

 There is no escaping the memories of our life even if we want to or at least no escaping them for long, even the times when we don’t want to remember. In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us.

 Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us somewhere whether, we like it or not the memories are there waiting for us.

 Sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring them back to the surface in bits and pieces. The words in a song that was popular years ago. A book we read as a child. A stretch of road we use to travel. An old photograph, an old letter, an old hallmark card. And don’t forget the good, bad, and ugly ones that come rushing back like an uninvited guest who just won’t leave.

There is no telling what trivial thing may do it, and then suddenly there it all is something that happened to us once. And it is not just as a picture on the wall to stand back and gaze at but as a reality, we are so much a part of still. Sometimes we feel a memory with the feelings something close to the original intensity and freshness of it. 

 Remember what it felt like to fall in love for the first time? It doesn’t matter how many years ago it was the memories come rushing back and our senses come alive again. We smell the smells, hear the sounds of laughter, we feel the love and feel the tears that ran down our checks when we remember how that love ended so many years ago. Times too beautiful to forget and too terrible to remember. 

 Memories come at us helter-skelter and unbidden, sometimes so thick and fast that they are more than we can handle in their poignant, sometimes so sparsely that we all but cry out to remember more.  Sometimes a dream seems to say more than that, to speak of a different kind of memory and to speak of remembering in a different kind of way. The kind of memories I have been naming are memories that come and go more or less on their own and apart from any choice of our own. Things remind us, and the power is in the things’, not our power. On the other hand we can gain power over our memories and how they affect us.

 We are all such escape artists you and I we don’t like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for our own lives, except for what is going on in our own skins. We pass the time of day with endless chat, chat, chat, (emailing, texting, and, messaging).

We hold people at bay, keep our distance from them even when we know it’s not what we want. And it’s the same thing when we are alone. Let’s say it’s late evening and everybody else has gone away or gone to bed. The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where you have come from and where you are going to, for sifting through the things you have done and the things you have left undone for a clue to who you are for better or worse. 

We turn on the television and check our emails or read a book.  We find some chore to do that could easily wait for the next day. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. You may be thinking, ” Nobody know the trouble I’ve seen,” and of course nobody knows the trouble you’ve had. Nobody knows the hurt, the sadness, the bad mistakes, the crippling losses but you.

Don’t forget the happiness you’ve seen too. The precious times, the precious people, the moments in your life when you were better than you knew how to be. Nobody knows that either, but you do.  We are to remember it. And then, if your dream was really a true dream, you will find it,  beyond any feelings of joy or regret that one by one the memories give rise to, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that is some unfathomable way all is well.

 You have survived and maybe that is at the heart of your remembering after twenty years, forty years, sixty years or eighty, you have made it to this year, this day. Each of us must speak for ourselves, you may have seen so much sorrow and enough pain to turn your heart to stone. Who hasn’t?  Many people can tell you that they have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason.

You may have loved the people in your life too much for either their good or yours. You might have loved with the devices and desires of your own heart, as the old prayer goes, yet often when your heart called out to be brave, to be kind, to be honest, to be loving, to be generous, you may have not followed this prayer and lost at love.

To remember your life is to remember countless times when you might have given up, gone under, when humanly speaking you might have gotten lost beyond the power to find you but you didn’t. You haven’t given up and with all the memories you have and the tales you could tell, you are a survivor and are here. And what does that tell us, about surviving? It tells us that weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least to this day.

Foolish as we are, a wisdom beyond our wisdom has flickered up just often enough to shed its light and show us the right path through the forest, at least to path that leads forward, that is bearable. Faint of heart as you can be, a love beyond your own power has kept your heart alive. Is there away to escape memories? I wonder…

Leave The Kitchen Sink In The Kitchen When You Fight

Posted in Life, relationships, Women by

When you fight leave the kitchen sink in the kitchen. What that means is don’t just gratuitously throw in things that don’t belong in the current fight. Such as every complaint you’ve ever had since the history of time began something corroded and calcified from ten years ago, or the meanest below-the belt thing that you can possibly think of saying.

Kitchen-sink behavior isn’t profitable. It doesn’t do anything except fan the flames of contention and open an abyss of panic and pain for you partner. Once you’ve gotten the satisfaction of watching the kitchen sink fly by and crash into a wall, you may have a hard time cleaning up afterwards.

So no matter what you’re so furious about try to resist the temptation to let it all out or to let the devil take the hindmost. It’s important to stop and think before you let the other person have it. You might want to stop and ask yourself these questions.

 Do I really need to say this? This is, does this horrible, angry, vituperative, and character-blasting thing really need to be said?  Will it improve the immediate situation? Is there anything useful to be gained from saying extreme statements?  Such as your sex life is awful now and it has been for the past ten years? Will this or similar remarks speed up the other person’s growth and maturity or your own, or is saying it just the indulgence of revved-up emotions that want release?

  Do I really need to say that now?  The diatribe you wants to indulge in some very valuable points that really need to be expressed stop and think is this the time to make them? Will you set off a furor or engender a useful response?

Before you fire your verbal machine gun it’s important to investigate the maturity of your emotions output.  Just because you feel like saying something doesn’t mean it has to be said in the way or exactly the moment that you feel like saying it. Remember your relationship will last rather than erode or be destroyed it’s all in the words that you speak it’s up to you.

Stay Available To Mystery

Posted in Life, Love, Romace, Spiritual by

Love of the heart and soul is mysterious. It takes chances . It believes in miracles. It is breath, movement, magic, music, the evanescent moment, the blissful surprise. 

 To be available to the mystery means that you are open, expectant, waiting continually poised on tiptoe, ready to be illumined not locked in your own expectations of how you think it should happen.

In life and in love, this means living free, with your mind-set loose from its gears, not endlessly chattering inside, “But it has to be this way” or “I thought it was going to be that way.” Our own ideas, those tidy little constructions of the intellect and psyche, just to serve to limit our reality, shut down the possibilities, create a universe only as complex, and rarified as the busy minds that invent it.

 Indeed, if we’re too invested in the concepts of the mind, we will only recognize the things and allow into our lives all kinds of experiences that confirm what our minds have already seen.

When we set out to prove our presumptions, we can end up blocking our chances of falling toward the miraculous. That’s because being available to the mystery means being wiling to believe that something more or a different something we literally cannot imagine could be lying in wait for us.

 Indeed, when you surrender, you may step into an experience so huge and splendid and grand that, truly, you may feel as if you have stepped right out if this world. Yet miracles await us at every corner, in every dimension of our lives.

We fall in love: our children are born, we stand on a street in a foreign city, and meet the friend of a lifetime. Falling asleep, we dream, and in dreaming are given solutions to some of our perplexing problems. Whether in the unexpected and beautiful elevation of our daily lives as we ordinarily live them, or through the destined and magical introduction to a deeper life of the spirit, we are all being invited to come to the larger world, the bright light, the truer home.

Indeed, as we move through life we are continually presented with events and encounters that, in defying our expectations, quietly nudge us to change. The degree to which they can change us depends on whether our minds dismiss them, or whether we stay beautifully open, to receive what they are offering.

To be available to the mystery, therefore, is to be willing to be surprised. As a child discovers his face in the mirror; as a lover, undressing his or her lover for the first time, discovers the secrets of their love. To be open to the miraculous is at last to be bountifully blessed. It is to move with grace, as you sweetly conduct your life, from the mountains of the mind to the rivers of the heart.  ” Happy Valentines Day“

You’ve Got To Have High Hopes

Posted in Life, relationships, Spiritual, Uncategorized by

Is the human heart the only source of its own healing?

Is the human conscience the only voice that whispers to us, when we are feeling bitterness and estrangement? 

Have you ever experienced an emptiness that happens when someone you loved and needed died?  

Did it seem like from somewhere, something came to fill your emptiness and mend you where you were broken?

 Was it only time that mended your broken heart?  Was it the resurging busyness of life that filled your emptiness and mended your heart or was it your faith in something other than yourself?

 Is it the human heart the only source of its own healing?  Is it only the unpredictable fluctuations of the human spirit that we have to thank? Can you think of a time when a strength and wisdom beyond your own kept you feeling hopeful? Despite your own withered heart.

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. And what does that mean about the future? What do we have to hope for? Humanly speaking, we have only the human best to hope for: that we will live out our days in something like peace with the ones we love; that our best dreams might come true. 

To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope, is to have what we hope for has already began to come true in us through our hoping. Every once in a while, life can be very eloquent. You go along from day-to-day not noticing very much, not seeing or hearing very much. And then all of sudden, when you least expect it, something speaks to you with such power that it catches you off guard, makes you listen to it, if you want to or not. It seems to know you and wants to mend your wounds. It seems to know that what you are doing isn’t working for you. What is that voice?  I wonder… 

Love Is A Spiritual Enterpise

Posted in Dreams, Life, Love, relationships, Spiritual by

A relationship is always far more than we imagine or expect it to be. It is more than a living arrangement, more than being together in a social circumstance, more than the bright-colored kite tail of romance; it is the coming together of two persons whose spirits connect with one another, beautifully and painfully, in the in the inexorable process of their individual becoming.

In this respect, relationships are like relentless grinding stones, polishing and refining us to the highest level of our radiance. It is this radiance that is the highest expression of love and why a relationship is a spiritual enterprise.

When we look at the person we love with the expectation that he or she will or should solve all our emotional problems or make all our worldly dreams come true, we reduce that person to be a pawn in our own self-serving plot, seeing the relationship as an experience of “What can I get?” or “What can I become?”

When we view a relationship from a different vantage point, one that acknowledges it as a spiritual incubator we start to see the person we love differently. We see him or her as separate from our hope, from our demands that he or she be a particular way now, for us. Rather, we recognize our partner as a spiritual accomplice that we hold in the spiritual light.

Holding your partner in the spiritual light is seeing the other as a soul in a constant state of becoming, encountering your partner in all the radiance of his or her own being and strivings to be. To hold the other in the spiritual light is to seek the pure spirit that lies behind the limitations of individual psychology and social circumstance, to apprehend the full essence of your partner, as he/she was since time began, as they will be for all time after.

To do this is to reach beyond the petty and even gigantic disappointments that you experience during your time together, to apprehend the divinity of this single unique and exquisite being who has been given to join you on the journey of your own becoming. To hold each other in the spiritual light is to see one another’s souls perfectly engaged in the process of love.

Sing and Lighten Up

Posted in Life, relationships by

What lights up your life? Is it the sweet things, the beautiful small things that bring stinging half-tears to the edge of your eyes. What lifts your heart in the moment? What are the beautiful things you remember from two hours ago?

Such as a touching conversation with a stranger, her voice is like a the thin, broken feather of a bird. You feel her courage as she cried a little, when she told you about a song she wanted to write. It was about ordinary things, she said…like love. You find yourself caught up in her passion. Your emotions lightened up. You find yourself singing your favorite love song and remembering what you were doing the first time you heard the song. Before you know it you are not feeling as up set.

Sometimes life can seem miserable, serious, boring, and awful enough that you don’t have to be so uptight, logical, organized, responsible, and on-time-all-the time. Lighten up!  You might be thinking. Yeah, but what about… the dwindling dollar, the falling Dow Jones average, dog tags, medical problems, children’s shots, family, dirty dishes, cooking, children and their homework, marriage counseling, your aging parents and their problems, income tax, dental problems, the rent or mortgage payment, your teenaged children and their problems.

 Some people are wondering how they are going to survive the empty nest syndrome, divorce and the 2 million problems left over from your childhood that you still haven’t solved, not to mention  the answers to questions like; Where did we leave our shoes?  Where did we leave our car keys?  How do we remove that ugly stain on the carpet? The questions are endless aren’t they?

We never run out of things that have to be handled in life. And they will never give you joy. There will always be a few more clothes to pick up at the cleaners; the checkbook will always need to be balanced. Before, during, or after doing any of these things, you will not feel particularly happy, they won’t light up your life.  Take time and think about what you can do to lighten up during these times.

 During these times one way to lighten up is by taking a moment to remember how it feels when he, she, or your grandchildren did something silly, priceless, foolish, and made you laugh.

Remember to plan something fun after taking care of those boring responsibilities singing and dancing is a great way to lighten up. If your driving in your car you can’t stop to dance but you can turn the radio on and sing your blues away.