Embrace JOY!

Just for today, don’t go to the “school of hard knocks” again.
Instead, enrol in a class on dance, joy, play,
forgiveness, letting go, or new beginnings.

Words to Live By - Especially for Pets

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

Be Who You Truly Are

Shift Happens!

Daily Inspiration 22 June 2012

The key to happiness is not to make yourself into a
different person; it is to let yourself be even more
of who you really are.

Animals Are Sacred

This week, Brigid Brophy would've have celebrated her 83rd birthday. We remember her today for her wonderful animal advocacy and for being one of the leading animal rights forces in the UK.

Live in the Moment

Living in the “not now” is a chief cause of unhappiness.
The strain of not being present in your own life
is simply too great. When you miss out on the
present, you miss out on so much.
No now; no life.

Tolstoy

On this day in 1881, Leo Tolstoy (books by this author) set off on a pilgrimage to the Optina-Pustyn monastery.
He was 52 years old, and his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), were behind him. He had found himself in a crisis—he was famous, had a family and land and money, but it all seemed empty. He was unable to write, had trouble sleeping, contemplated suicide. He read the great philosophers, but found holes in all of their arguments. He was amazed that the majority of ordinary Russians managed to keep themselves going every day, and he finally decided that it must be their faith. From there, it was a short time until Tolstoy took a walk in the woods and found God. He wrote: "At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me. Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the moment I stopped believing, I also stopped living."

His wife Sophia was not so thrilled with his conversion. He renounced meat, sex, alcohol, fiction, tobacco, and the temptations of a family. He dressed like a peasant. He wanted to give all of his money away, but Sophia wanted to live what she considered a normal life, not to mention raise their 10 children.

Tolstoy made his first visit to Optina-Pustyn in 1877, a visit in which he apparently exhausted the chief starets—or community elder—with his questions. On this day in 1881 he set off on a second visit, and this time he decided that to be more like the common people, he would walk all the way there, dressed in his peasant coat and wearing shoes made out of bark. He was pleased with his spiritual guidance, but he wasn't used to walking in bark shoes, so by the time he made it to Optina his feet were so covered in blisters that he had to take the train back home.

Getting Older

Seventy-Two is Not Thirty-Five

by David Budbill

I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter's house
helping her expand their garden by at least ten times.
We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as
best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the
pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over
again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch
and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well
that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.

I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I'd done
enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on
the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.

All this made me remember my father forty years ago
helping me with my garden. My father's dead now, and
has been dead for many years, which is how I'll be one
of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child,
who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching
and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.

So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.

"Seventy-Two is Not Thirty-Five" by David Budbill.