End-of-Year Musings and Daily OM

December 30, 2010
Fulfilling Energetic Investments
Focusing Our Energy

As modern life makes a wealth of information and opportunities available to us, we may find ourselves torn between a wide variety of interests and projects. Our excitement may entice us to try all of them at once, but doing so only diffuses our energy, leaving us unable to fully experience any of them. Like an electrical socket with too many things plugged into it, we may be in danger of overheating and burning out. But if we can choose one thing at a time to focus all of our attention upon, we can make the most of our life-force energy, engaging ourselves fully in the moment so that it can nurture us in return.

Our attention can be pulled in many directions, not only in our own lives, but by advertising, media, and the hustle and bustle of our surroundings. But when we take the time to listen to our inner guidance and focus our thoughts on the goals that resonate the most strongly within us, the rest of the world will fade away. This may mean focusing the spotlight of our attention upon developing one aspect of our work, one course of study, or one hobby to pursue in our free time, but it doesn't mean that we have to stay focused on only one thing forever. We may never know which of our interests is best suited to our abilities and heart's desires unless we give it a proper chance. By being fully present with all that we are and all that we have, we can experience each choice fully and make the most fulfilling choices for our energetic investments.

Because we are multi-faceted beings, we are perpetually involved in many aspects of life in every moment. Our work in the world is necessary to attend to our physical needs, and our relationships are important for our emotional needs, but when we engage our spirit as well, we can choose the area that will nurture body, mind and soul. Staying focused in each moment allows us move with the rhythmic flow of the universe and harmonize all aspects of our being into balanced whole.  Staying focused in each moment allows us move with the rhythmic flow of the universe and harmonize our being.



 
"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly."

Buddha.

"Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have.."

Horace

"When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds."  

Paulo Coelho

You cannot do a kindness too soon, 
For you never know how soon it will be too late.  

 Ralph Waldo Emerson~

"Sometimes I feel I am everything, I call that Love. Sometimes I feel I am nothing, I call that Wisdom. Between Love and Wisdom my life continuously flows."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
~William Shakespeare

A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up.
It is the photo that takes you.
~ Henri Cartier Bresson

Poem By Someone I Know

I was going homeward
minding my own business
A rose from the side of the road yelled at me,
“Whoa, old man! Not so fast.
I wasn’t put on the side of this road
so you could run by me.
I am here to greet you.
The least you can do is slow down.
You may never see another rose in your lifetime.
What would your life be worth then?”

My knees buckled
and I knelt down to face the rose
We conversed . . .

You have to admit
it’s quite a challenge to understand rose talk
One word from one petal
Another word from the next petal
And a golden heart in a deeper level
spewing the essence of unbearable ecstasy
I was quite overwhelmed
by so much contribution
to the growth of my heart
I said to the rose,
“How could I leave you?”
The rose replied,
“Now that we have understood each other
you could take me with you
for my job on the side of this road is complete.”

So I did
Picked up the rose by its stem
and I know not how long we walked
All I know is when I came to
I became so conscious of relating
to something so small in such a big way
I become a rose
to offer my life to people who come by to visit
and take me with them

Until the next rose by the side of your path
I bid you, “Fare, well”

9/22/10 © Hosain Mosavat

Words to Live By

"Saving just one pet won't change the world, but it surely will change the world for that one pet."

Wish someone would've told my neighbor that when she killed her darling 8 year old cat (in the prime of his life) last June.  I say "killed" and I mean killed.  For, there was no reason under the sun to take Cody's life. NONE.

She is a fussy, anxious woman with a nervous system in over-drive constantly.  This causes her to think "the worst" and feel scared all the time.  She hated the thought of Cody spraying inside her house.  Never mind that she brought another strange cat into it after Cody had been there for 6 years. 

Cats are territorial, and it's often difficult to introduce another cat into their space.  He was there first, for a long time, and it was his home first.  He didn't like Leo from the start, and things just got worse over time.  Didn't she see that?  She instigated the whole mess then had the gall, no, stupidity, to have Cody killed because she was inconvenienced---her own damn fault!  MURDERER! ! ! !

So, take this saying to heart.  Be aware of who you're killing and why.  Usually, it's NOT the animal's fault--whatever the situation.  It certainly wasn't in poor Cody's case.  I am devestated and very, very sad.

Just for today. . .

“Our inner strengths, experiences, and truths cannot be lost,
destroyed, or taken away. Every person has an inborn worth and
can contribute to the human community. We all can treat one
another with dignity and respect, provide opportunities to grow
toward our fullest lives and help one another discover and develop
our unique gifts. We each deserve this and we all can extend it to others.”

Christmas Day

Christmas means love.  Christmas means peace.  Christmas means harmony. 

And so, today, I chose to spend the afternoon with my favorite folks----Sweetie Sue, my pup, Dancer, my pony, all the farm animals and my lair of kits.  Here's some pix of our time together.  Enjoy!



Today's Daily OM - How Appropos

December 24, 2010When Pain Comes Our Way
Honoring All Experiences


Honoring the experiences we have in our lives is an invaluable way to communicate with life, our greatest teacher. We do this when we take time at night to say what we are thankful for about our day and also when we write in a journal. Both of these acts involve consciously acknowledging the events of our lives so that they deepen our relationship to our experiences. This is important because it brings us into closer connection with life, and with the moment. Only when we acknowledge what's happening to us can we truly benefit from life's teachings.

It is especially important when pain comes our way to honor the experience, because our natural tendency is to push it away and move past it as quickly as possible. We tend to want to brush it under the rug. Yet, if we don't, it reveals itself to be a great friend and teacher. As counterintuitive as it seems, we can honor pain by thanking it and by welcoming it into the space of our lives. We all know that often the more we resist something, the longer it persists. When we honor our pain, we do just the opposite of resisting it, and as a result, we create a world in which we can own the fullness of what life has to offer.

We can honor a painful experience by marking it in some way, bringing ourselves into a more conscious relationship with it. We might mark it by creating a work of art, performing a ritual, or undertaking some other significant act. Sometimes all we need to do is light a candle in honor of what we've gone through and what we've learned. No matter how small the gesture, it will be big enough to mark the ways in which our pain has transformed us, and to remind us to recognize and value all that comes our way in this life.

Honoring the experiences we have in our lives is an invaluable way to communicate with life, our greatest teacher.

Do You Believe?

As long as you believe in Santa . . .

Santa Claus is anyone who loves another
and seeks to make them happy; who gives
himself by thought or word or deed in every gift
that he bestows; who shares his joys with those
who are sad; whose hand is never closed against
the needy; whose arm is ever outstretched to aid
the weak; whose sympathy is quick and genuine
in time of trouble; who recognizes a comrade
and brother in every man he meets upon life's
common road; who lives his life throughout
the entire year in the Christmas spirit.

Edwin Osgood Grover, Vicki Howard's "The Book of Santa Claus"

Words of Wisdom from F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was exactly 70 years ago, on this day in 1940, that F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age 44.

The last decade had been a difficult. In 1930, his wife, Zelda, suffered her first breakdown and hospitalization. She would spend the next several years in and out of psychiatric clinics before being hospitalized for the rest of his ­— and her — life. After huge critical and commercial success in his 20s, Fitzgerald found himself in his mid-30s deep in debt and feeling depleted. He said: "A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me. … I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip." He said, "One blow after another and finally something snapped."

He wrote about it in The Crack-Up essays, published in Esquire magazine in early 1936. He wrote: "I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt." He'd "cracked like an old plate." He said: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick — the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed."

And it was in these essays that he wrote the often-quoted lines:
"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation — the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

He was deep in debt, and so he went to Hollywood to work on movie scripts. It paid really well: In 1937, during the Great Depression, MGM paid him $1,000 per week. His daughter, Scottie, entered college at Vassar, and the next year MGM declined to renew his contract. He drank a lot. He also began work on what would be his final novel, The Last Tycoon.

Throughout 1940, he wrote letters from Hollywood to his daughter across the country. They were letters filled with thoughts on reading and writing. In July, he wrote:
"This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it comes so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like English Prose since 1800. Anybody that can't read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal — and you know it."

He wrote to her about cultivating distinction in her writing style: "The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style. … I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level."

The next month, he wrote to her:
"Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist — or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore, around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations."

Later, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter:
"What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought."

He wrote:
"It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

Shortly before his death on this day in 1940, he wrote to Scottie about what he called "the wise and tragic sense of life," which he described as "the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle."

And he said, "The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

Merry & Bright

~MERRY & BRIGHT~

"The joy of brightening other lives,
bearing each other's burdens, easing
other's loads and supplanting empty
hearts & lives with generous gifts be-
comes, for us, the magic of Christmas."
~W. C. Jones

Trees Are Special

I THINK that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree!

Joyce Kilmer 1886–1918

Be Who Your Are

Have you ever wished you were someone else? We all have at some point. But eventually we come to realize that the body, mind and circumstances we were born with - even if they seem 'imperfect' to us - can all be used to create a beautiful and meaningful life. The choice is always ours - continue to wish - or accept and improve upon the gifts we've already been given.

Ron Atchison

The Mayor of Inspiration Peak

True happiness
Is not a mental hallucination.
True happiness
Is not a complacent feeling.
True happiness
Is the spontaneous feeling of joy
That comes from knowing
You are doing the right thing
And leading a divine life.

From: www.srichinmoypoetry.com

From Today's "Daily OM"

December 16, 2010Potlatch
Encouraging Generosity


We can learn much from the Native American tradition of the potlatch. It is a tradition that values generosity above all else, and a potlatch, which is a very grand ceremony, is an exercise in giving away material possessions, food, and money. It is not uncommon for the host of a potlatch to give away so much of his own resources to his guests that he ends up with nothing. However, he can regain his wealth by attending potlatches at which he is a guest. In this way, a potlatch validates generosity and encourages the flow of resources in a community, while at the same time continually reaffirming the importance of community ties.

When we are held in a web of trust and connection, we can give generously, knowing that when it is our turn we will be supported. In this way, our whole sense of ownership becomes less individualistic and more communal. Resources are in an acceptable state of flux, moving within the community through the vehicle of the potlatch, which serves the additional function of strengthening community ties. This seems clearly preferable to isolating ourselves from one another and hoarding our resources.

Perhaps we can find ways in our own lives to create a community in which a flow of resources happens in this way, in which we support one another to be generous. We might begin by celebrating our own type of potlatch, having a dinner party and giving each guest an object that is dear to us. Or we could give everyone a little bit of money in an envelope to spend on themselves just for fun. Someone might get inspired to throw their own potlatch, and before we know it we might have a tradition that supports and validates generosity even as it creates a safety net for leaner times. In the most profound sense, that is what a community, a tribe, and family do best.

A potlatch encourages the flow of resources in a community and reaffirms the importance of community ties.

The Nature of Things

Great art picks up where nature ends.

~Marc Chagall

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commitment from Daily Om

December 10, 2010The Journey Of Commitment
Entering Into Commitment

Loving and committing to another person is a spiritual process whether it involves a wedding or any other type of commitment ceremony. Often when we enter into a relationship, we allow our emotions to lead us forward without thinking more deeply about what true commitment involves. If we can understand that sharing our lives with another person is not just based on love but also on the hard work of being able to compromise and enter into a dialogue with them, then we are much more likely to find the key to having a successful relationship with our partners. So many people have not experienced a loving relationship between their own parents and therefore have no role model of what love should feel like or look like.

Many of us have been exposed to the idea that love should be romantic and sweep us off our feet. While this is a natural part of any relationship, the true test of our love comes from our willingness to explore this world with another person; to not only share in the delights that we encounter but also to negotiate the bumps in the road together. Generally this often takes the form of a mutual exchange of ideas, but because any relationship is based on the needs and experiences of two people, we might also face a certain amount of misunderstanding. Learning to be open and receptive to our partners and to treat their wants and ideas with respect can help us navigate even the most difficult situations. One way to do this is to take a deep breath, holding our partner in a space of love, and allow ourselves to listen fully with our hearts to what they have to say. Should this become difficult to do, we can also turn toward people whose relationships we admire for advice or guida! nce. Knowing that there are resources out there to help us and being up for exploring them with our partner will only serve to deepen and strengthen our relationship.

Entering into a committed relationship is in fact a spiritual journey that we undertake with another person. By being able to love and care for someone else with an open heart, we will find that we can reach a greater level of personal transformation, evolving along our path and learning powerful lessons about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to do on our own.  Entering into a committed relationship is in fact a spiritual journey that we undertake with another person.

Going With the Flow - From Today's "Daily OM"

December 8, 2010
Life as We Know It
The Status Quo

Are you more attached to preserving the status quo than to honoring the universal givens of growth and change?

When our lives are going well, and sometimes even when they aren't, we may find ourselves feeling very attached to the status quo of our existence--life as we know it. It is a very human tendency to resist change as though it were possible to simply decide not to do it, or have it in our lives. But change will come and the status quo will go, sooner or later, with our consent or without it. We may find at the end of the day that we feel considerably more empowered when we find the courage to ally ourselves with the universal force of change, rather than working against it.

Of course, the answer is not to go about changing things at random, without regard to whether they are working or not. There is a time and place for stability and the preservation of what has been gained over time. In fact, the ability to stabilize and preserve what is serving us is part of what helps us to survive and thrive. The problem comes when we become more attached to preserving the status quo than to honoring the universal givens of growth and change. For example, if we allow a situation we are in to remain stagnant simply because we are comfortable, it may be time for us to summon up the courage to challenge the status quo.

This may be painful at times, or surprisingly liberating, and it will most likely be a little of both. Underneath the discomfort, we will probably find excitement and energy as we take the risk of unblocking the natural flow of energy in our lives. It is like dismantling a dam inside ourselves, because most of the work involves clearing our own inner obstacles so that the river of our life can flow unobstructed. Once we remove the obstacles, we can simply go with the flow, trusting the changes that follow.

Relating Honestly - From Today's "Daily Om"

A relationship, in the truest sense of the word, means relating to another. Usually when we say that we relate to someone, it is because we’ve found common ground. But part of relating is finding ways to make ideas that seem different come together. So often when we choose relationships, we try to fit another person into our predetermined ideal. When they don’t fit perfectly, we may try to make them over, creating our own vision from the raw material they’ve brought. But unless someone asks for guidance and direction, entering into a relationship with someone we want to change is dishonest. Then our relationship becomes with someone we’ve imagined, and anytime our partner steps outside of that imaginary projection, we will be disappointed. An honest relationship is one in which we accept each other as whole individuals, and find a way to share our life experiences together. Then, whenever we want, we can choose as a couple to give the relationship a makeover by renewing the way we interact.

By wanting to give another person a makeover, we are basically saying we don’t accept them for who they are. If we take a moment to imagine the roles reversed, we can get a sense of how it would feel if our beloved only committed to us because they thought we were, or would become, someone else entirely. In such an environment, we are not relating to each other from a real place, and we are keeping ourselves from being able to learn and grow from the different viewpoints that our partners offer.

If we feel that a change is needed in our relationship, the only makeover that we truly have the power to make is on ourselves. By accepting our partners for exactly who they are—the ideal and the not-so-ideal—we will create an energetic shift in our relationships, and we may find ourselves really appreciating our partners for the first time. Working from within, we determine how we relate to the people and the world around us, and when we can accept it and embrace it all, without conditions, we make every act of relating a positive one.

Thoughts for the Day

The heart is the only broken instrument that works.

~T.E. Kalem

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station,
through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
By: George Washington Carver

 

Your Choice

"Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself:
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.
I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet.
I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it."

Groucho Marx

Always seek less turbulent skies.
Hurt. Fly above it.
Betrayal. Fly above it.
Anger. Fly above it.
You are the one who is flying the plane.

Marianne Williamson

American Author, Lecturer and Social Activist

Love

A wise old friend said to me: "I would do anything for TRUE love"

One storm comes and amour is no longer there. Gone like these letters washed out by coming tide. Is it possible? What if it is? And if it is what is love all about? A friend told me if he found true love he would do anything, anything to keep it, anything to save it from storm and after storm even if it meant going to prison and revealing the truth.... obvious truth.

Very few people have this kind of courage .... Books have been written, films made about grand amour but does this kind of true love happen ever in real life? Doubt it ... there always seems to be a kind of "in terest" which becomes obvious when storms arrive .... otherwise divorce would not exist as an instiutution ....

Is love just an illusion of a a lonely and egocentric mind needing protection of the other mind and soul to ful.fill its own need of security and belonging?

And So It Is

It's the birthday of the man who said, "I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art." That's writer James Agee, (books by this author) born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1909). During his lifetime, he was best known as one of the greatest film critics of his era. And he was not afraid to disagree with what was popular. He wrote a passionate, three-part defense of Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was panned by critics when it was released. Agee wrote: "Chaplin's performance as Verdoux is the best piece of playing I have ever seen: here, I cannot even specify the dozen or so close-ups each so great and so finely related and timed that withdrawn and linked in series they are like the notes of a slow, magnificent, and terrifying song, which the rest of the film serves as an accompaniment. […] Chaplin's theme, the greatest and most appropriate to its time that he has yet undertaken, is the bare problem of surviving at all in such a world as this." Agee was also a successful screenwriter and book critic.
But today he is best known for two books: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and A Death in the Family (1958). After he graduated from Harvard in 1932, Agee was hired by Fortune magazine, which had just started up two years earlier. He wrote some articles on hydroelectric power and flood control in Tennessee, and Henry Luce — the man who created Fortune, TIME, Life, and Sports Illustrated — was impressed with the young writer. A few years later, Agee was assigned to do a story about sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama, with a photographer; he insisted on Walker Evans, from the Farm Security Administration. They lived with three farm families for about two months — Agee took notes and Evans took photos. But after Agee got back to New York, he couldn't figure out a way to put everything he had seen into a neat little article that would fit in Fortune's "Life and Circumstances" series. So it was never published in Fortune. Instead, he spent several years writing the book that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was a long and difficult book, more like poetry than journalism in parts, and by the time it was published, the country was more interested in World War II than in the Great Depression. So the book was a total flop, selling only about 600 copies and quickly going out of print.
Agee moved on to his career as a critic and screenwriter. He published a novel, was married three times, and had four children. He was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker, and he died in 1955 at the age of 45, from a heart attack. His second novel, A Death in the Family (1957), was published two years after he died and won the Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued and came to be considered a classic, one of the great books of the century.
In it, he wrote:
"A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children:
First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children:
Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents:
This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars:
It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end:
While they are still drawn together within one shelter around the center of their parents, these children and their parents together compose a family:
This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself:
[...]
So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship."

Things Can Change in a Flash

Tonight as I was driving home from Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a friend I recently found on Facebook, after 40 years, I thought how blessed I was to have found her.


Kathy and I played together, often, as children.  And, tonight she had me for dinner with her family at her lovely home in Franklin.  I met her daughters and their husbands for the first time.  And her granddaughter, Hailey 14 mos old.  Everything was perfect.  Her house.  The food.  The company.  Our renewed friendship. 

What joy, what bliss, how my heart sang.

Until. . . .    I was driving home thinking how happy things could be.  How life can turn on a dime, and suddenly everything's better.  I was invited to a family Thansgiving.  Put at the head of the table, shared homemade cooking with warm company all around.  I was in heaven and grateful we had found each other, again, after 45 years.

Suddenly, while driving 70 mph on the freeway, a soft bunny hopped out of nowhere.  Darling, sweet, innocent bunny rabbit.  Right in front of my car!  I couldn't slam on the brakes, couldn't swerve, couldn't do anything but keep going, praying I wouldn't hit him.

Hippity-hop, hippity-hop, silence-----smash!

Thud under my car.  Throb in my heart.  Tears in my eyes.  Numb-struck.  Everything light turned to dark.

The end of my Thansgiving.

AND:

It's the birthday of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, (books by this author) born on this day in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). When he was two days old, an uncle nicknamed him "Sparky," after a horse in a comic strip. Young Charles loved the comics, and every Sunday he and his dad read through all the funnies in six different newspapers. He was a shy, awkward kid, he skipped two grades, and he didn't have many friends. He got a C+ in a correspondence school art class, and even his high school yearbook wouldn't publish his drawings. But he decided to be a cartoonist anyway.

In 1947, when Schulz was 24, he started publishing a weekly comic strip called Li'l Folks in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It featured a boy who loved Beethoven, a beagle dog, and a boy named Charlie Brown. He got $10 a week for his comic. In 1949, he asked the paper for two things: a pay increase, and to have Li'l Folks moved from the women's section to the comics section. The Pioneer Press denied both his requests, so he quit. He hadn't gotten any of his original artwork back, but he regularly cut out his strips from the paper, so he took his best clips and sent them to the United Features Syndicate. And on October 2, 1950, Peanuts made its national debut, complete with Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Beethoven-loving Schroeder, along with Linus, Lucy, Sally, and Woodstock. In December of 1999, Schulz announced that he was going to retire for health reasons, and his last Peanuts strip was set for February 13, 2000. He died on February 12th.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

November 25, 2010Being Truly Thankful
Beyond Counting Blessings

Often when we practice being thankful, we go through the process of counting our blessings, acknowledging the wonderful people, things and places that make up our reality. While it is fine to be grateful for the good fortune we have accumulated, true thankfulness stems from a powerful comprehension of the gift of simply being alive, and when we feel it, we feel it regardless of our circumstances. In this deep state of gratitude, we recognize the purity of the experience of being, in and of itself, and our thankfulness is part and parcel of our awareness that we are one with this great mystery that is life.

It is difficult for most of us to access this level of consciousness as we are very caught up in the ups and downs of our individual experiences in the world. The thing to remember about the world, though, is that it ebbs and flows, expands and contracts, gives and takes, and is by its very nature somewhat unreliable. If we only feel gratitude when it serves our desires, this is not true thankfulness. No one is exempt from the twists and turns of fate, which may, at any time, take the possessions, situations, and people we love away from us. Ironically, it is sometimes this kind of loss that awakens us to a thankfulness that goes deeper than just being grateful when things go our way. Illness and near-miss accidents can also serve as wake-up calls to the deeper realization that we are truly lucky to be alive.

We do not have to wait to be shaken to experience this state of being truly thankful for our lives. Tuning in to our breath and making an effort to be fully present for a set period of time each day can do wonders for our ability to connect with true gratitude. We can also awaken ourselves with the intention to be more aware of the unconditional generosity of the life force that flows through us regardless of our circumstances.

When we are in the state of thankfulness, we are in a higher state of awareness, gratitude at our doorstep.

Here's what I have to be thankful for:

 

No communication
Total silence, a black hole, an endless abyss.
It hurts my ears, it hurts my eyes, it hurts my heart
I yearn to hear, to know, to feel.

Where are you? Where have you gone?
What are you doing, thinking, dreaming?
I used to know.

There is such a void where the words used to live
A loneliness only you can fill.

The words have gone, but the connection still lives.
You're in my thoughts, my dreams, my heart, my soul.
We may be silent but forever connected.

By: Diane Blue

I have this feeling with so many people in my life.  Some, now but a vision of the past, others still floating on the shores of my heart but keeping distance between us.  Hurts.  So needless. 

In this life, time goes by faster than the speed of light, and before we all know it, the curtain will fall and darkness decend forever.

So, why keep me at bay?  Let the light and your heart in.  Connect!  Talk, hug, FEEL the magic between us.  I think of you often.  With smiles and sentementality, warmth and wonder.  You won't let me in, yet I play with you every day.  Our connection still strong.  Forever.

Dreamin'

I Am Going Away
Away For The Day
To A Land Of My Imagination

A Place Filled With Splendor
Splendor And Wonder
Of Enchanting Beauty No Where Else Would You See

Where All Trees Could Talk
Talk As They Walk
What Tales Have They To Tell Me?

Where Fairies Would Sing
Sing Songs Of Spring
As They Dance A Dance Just For Me

Where Golden Dragons Fly
Fly High In The Sky
And White Unicorns Run Wild , Run Free

So If You Would Like To Go Too
All You Have To Do
Is Use Your Imagination

By: Erwin Quah

Some people give the gift of peace and tranquility...
to every life they touch....
they are always who they really are...
they are blessedly reliable....
dependably good....
predictably pleasant....
loved and treasured by all who know them...

--Annonymous

Do What You Love

“When we feel a passion for something, it is because we are remembering what it was that we came here to do. The more passion we feel, the more in alignment with Source we are, allowing this energy to pour through us with no hesitation. This is the way it was meant to be.”

 - Karen Bishop

Sometimes success is better measured in smiles received, giggles heard, and hands held, than in dollars earned, deadlines met, and kilos shed.

Mike Dooley

Inspirational Author, Speaker and Friend

Interesting Trivia

It's the birthday of the playwright George S. Kaufman, (books by this author) born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1889), who inherited a terrible case of hypochondria from his mother. She wouldn't let him play with other children, for fear of germs, and she wouldn't let him drink milk either. The only beverage he was allowed was boiled water. By the time he was an adult, he was terrified of being touched and he never shook hands. He was so afraid of dying in his sleep that he often didn't sleep for days. He once said, "The kind of doctor I want is one who when he's not examining me is home studying medicine."

But despite his quirks, Kaufman managed to co-write more hit plays than anyone else in the history of Broadway, including Animal Crackers (1928), Strike Up the Band (1930), and You Can't Take It With You (1938). His various partners through the years all said that he was a meticulous rewriter and polisher, that he was never satisfied with a script even up till the last minute. Even on the most triumphant of opening nights, he could always be found backstage, pale and terrified that the play would be a flop.

Happy Equals Healthy

According to Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of  California, San Diego:

“When an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only his friends, but his friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends. The effect lasts for up to one year.”

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life - whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

Elizabeth Gilbert

American Novelist and Short Story Writer

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

Soren Kierkegaard

Happiness is an Inside Job

“In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.”

“You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used”

O. Holmes

Life in the Country

A Day In The Country

"If the sight of the blue skies fills you
with joy, if a blade of grass springing
up in the fields has power to move
you, if the simple things of nature
have a message that you understand;
rejoice, for your soul is alive."
~Elenora Duse

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated"?

Mahatma Ghandi

Open Heart

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

Jean Cocteau, 1889-1963

French Poet, Artist, Playwright and Novelist

Observations

It's the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1903), who wanted to be a writer but suffered from terrible writer's block. He said, "I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word." He felt like a failure until one day he picked up a camera and realized that with a camera he didn't have to create things, he could just capture them. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He said, "If the thing is there, why there it is."

Evans photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat. He especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers' bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He'd photograph what people had on their dressers and in their dresser drawers. In 1933, he was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art.

In the summer of 1936, he collaborated with the journalist James Agee on a book about tenant farmers in Greensboro, Alabama, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book included Evans's photographs of the Burroughs family, the Fields family, and the Tingle family at work on their farms and in their homes. Those photos are among the most famous images of the Great Depression. Walker Evans said, "Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

Lady Chatterley's Lover

It was on this day in 1960 that Penguin Books was acquitted in an obscenity case. D.H. Lawrence's (books by this author) novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was the book in question, and Penguin had attempted to publish a paperback edition of the novel, which had been published in 1928 and banned in England ever since.

Obscenity laws had been in place in England since 1868. The definition of obscene was anything that might "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." Lawrence knew he didn't stand a chance with Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was the story of a Constance Chatterley, the wife of a paralyzed, impotent lord; she has an affair with the gamekeeper on her estate. So he self-published the novel in Florence, and died in France in self-imposed exile two years later, in 1930. At the time of his death, few people took him seriously as a literary figure. One exception was the novelist E.M. Forster, who called him "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."

In 1959, England's obscenity law was redefined, with more leeway for material that could be proven to have artistic merit. Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, saw his chance to include Lady Chatterley's Lover in a D.H. Lawrence series. Penguin announced its intention to publish the book, and the government announced its intention to take them to court.

The press lined up at 7:45 a.m. on the morning of October 27th to get into the first day of the trial, and Penguin's lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, handed out illegal copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover with the covers of a different Lawrence novel, so that they could follow the proceedings better.

Dozens of writers had volunteered to defend Lawrence's novel, among them Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Doris Lessing, Irish Murdoch, and Laurence Durrell. But in general, the defense chose safer, more mainstream witnesses — priests, professors, schoolteachers, journalists. Some of them had been asked to testify for the prosecution but instead had volunteered their services for the defense. The most famous novelist was mild-mannered E.M. Forster, who once again publicly stood up for Lawrence.

The defense called 35 witnesses, all of whom strongly defended the novel. Despite the prosecution's aggressive questioning and reading of particularly lurid passages, the defendants all strictly maintained that it was a good, moral novel. One young graduate repeatedly insisted that the novel was "puritanical" at heart. A bishop claimed that Lawrence was portraying sex as sacred, and when he was asked if he thought it was a book that Christians should read, he said yes, it was. One of the headlines that evening was A BOOK ALL CHRISTIANS SHOULD READ.

In the end, it didn't matter how many obscene passages the prosecution read aloud, or that the judge suggested to the jury that they deliver a guilty verdict. The trial wasn't even about Lady Chatterley's Lover as much as it was about a new era, a move away from old Victorian values and toward a society in which sexual matters could be discussed freely.

It took the jury less than three hours to reach their verdict, acquitting Penguin Books. People lined up outside bookstores before they opened, and the first edition of 200,000 copies sold out in the first few minutes. Many booksellers said they could have sold thousands more that day. Within a year, Lady Chatterley's Lover sold 1 million copies.