POTH #5

Oh, I am SO flunking this assignment!  No HAPPY photos for a few days. 

Can't even say the dog ate my homework.

In my defense, I DID take photos at our big Celebration of Life party on Friday, but they were taken with a disposable camera which we had out on the table for the purpose of capturing awesome celebratory moments.  Those photos are still hiding inside their plastic housing, waiting for the time when someone will take them to the store to be freed and put onto a disk. 

Other than that, nothin', nada.  No photos taken all weekend.  But here's today's Photo of the Happy:

6-25-12:  At the party, I put out a couple of big pieces of poster paper where people could write something.  This one was for "Happiness Inducers". I love hearing what inspires happiness in people.

Our Celebration of Life party was a huge success.  Amazing people and stuff-yourself-till-you-can't-stand-it food.  Oh, my god... the food...  We had one of our favorite restaurants cater the party.  Ali Baba's has THE BEST hummus in, well, in the U.S., at least.  I haven't been to the Middle East to see how it compares.


Everything was perfect, and I'm still smiling at the fact that our home and yard were filled with some of the nicest people in, well, in the U.S., at least.  I haven't been to many other countries to see how they compare.

The two days after the party were spent napping and going through a lot of emotions that have been stirred up by a healer we're working with.  Intense...

And yesterday... now, this would have been a perfect moment for a POTH opportunity, but did I bring my camera?  Nooooooooo!  Yesterday, I got to meet with two women who I haven't seen for FORTY years!   That was food for my soul.  Oh, the sweetness of it all.  I don't have photos, but I have memories of the sight of their smiles, the feel of their hugs, and the love in their words.  That's enough.

Looking at the things that inspire happiness in some of our friends, I see that they are all very simple, and most don't cost a thing.  Isn't that the way of things?

Summer POTH #4

My Photo of the Happys for the last four days:

6-18-12:  The evening light shining through the trees and on the bushes.  Most evenings, we eat dinner on our back porch and watch the light show.  I love it!

6-19-12:  My hands (both hands, even though we can only see one here due to the fact that the other one was busy with a camera). When I was still practicing massage therapy, while working on a client's hands, I would often be taken back to when that person was a small child.  I would see their hands as those of  the baby they once were, and then I would see many of the things that those hands had done throughout the years.  The stories their hands would tell!

6-20-12: Finches nesting under our eaves.  This is the fourth finch family to be incubated and raised at our home this year.  Pardon the poop - Ms. Finch is not a good housekeeper.  We're thinking that this batch is being raised by Momma as a single parent as there haven't been any sightings of Dad for a while.
Update:  Tonight while we were eating dinner out on the porch, Dad flew up and landed on the curve of the drainpipe (which you can't see here, but it's close to the nest).  He sat there for about a minute, looking at Mom.  Then Mom flew out of the nest to some unknown location where moms go for respite.  As soon as Mom flew out of the nest, Dad flew into it.  It was so beautiful to watch!

About half a minute later, Dad flew away, too.  Here Mom was thinking that the kids were safe with Dad, but nooooooooo.
He and I have got to have a talk.

6-21-12:  Me.
Happy Birthday to me!

Grace

On Father's Day, we took my mom to Boulder where we hung out on the Pearl Street Mall.  The Pearl Street Mall is a great place for people watching, and there are always buskers playing the piano...

...or dressed as a raggedy dog

...or showing off their super-human flexibility.

It was a sweaty day (how did that person tolerate the heat in that dog costume???), and we took a few breaks to stand or sit in the shade.

At one point, we sat on a bench under the umbrella of a well-placed tree.  Cool air flowed out of the open doors of the store to my left - not the best use of energy, trying to cool the great outdoors, but I have to say it felt really good.  As I sat there, I could watch some of the people crossing the street about 1/3 of a block away from me.  I noticed a man in a wheelchair who, as he started to cross with a green light, was having a hard time getting his momentum.  The orange hand beneath the stoplight that tells pedestrians they'd better get done crossing or they'll be squished bugs was flashing its warning, and the man was only halfway across the street.  There was a young man in front of him who kept looking back, obviously wanting his fellow human to make it but, for some reason, he couldn't bring himself to do anything about it.  Before the light turned red, another man, who had been crossing in the opposite direction, turned and pushed the wheelchair-bound man across the street.  MY HEART FELT SO BIG IN THAT MOMENT!

And yesterday, a friend who lives in Washington State told me that she had had to stop because the car in front of her stopped to let A RAT cross the road.  The rat couldn't make up its mind for a moment, so my friend and the amazing person in front of her had to wait for a short while in order to avoid killing the little guy.  My friend said that the whole thing brought tears to her eyes.

So many moments of grace in this life.  They are happening all around us all of the time.  We can watch the news and not believe that this is a very friendly place or we can watch what goes on around us and know that life is chock full of grace and beauty and kindness.

Summer POTH #3

Where operator error changed the course of the post...

6-15-12:  My HAPPY feet! 

(They even made a movie named after them.  Only the star was a cartoon penguin instead of me.)

6-16-12:  My HAPPY leg

On this day, using my cellphone, I took a photo of one of our Women in Black vigilers.  That photo would have gone here.  The story of this POTH post was supposed to be that 1) I'm happy for my feet which, 2) allow me to stand on the corner with a sign of peace every Saturday.  (I hadn't figured out what the third photo would be yet.)  Anyway, I forgot to save the photo on my cellphone, and when I looked this morning, it was nowhere to be found.  Which means that I am cheating by posting two photos from 6-17-12 in order to compensate for my booboo on 6-16.  :-( 

6-17-12:  Michael's HAPPY hair

In keeping with today's theme of Carol body parts, I did take a photo of another body part of mine, but, well, let's just say that I need to work on my artistic skills a little more in order to enhance the photographic beauty of many of my parts.  I'll let ya know if that happens.

Summer POTH #2

I feel a theme a'brewin' in my head.  Only one of these photos offers a hint of just what that might be. 

For now, I offer a hodgepodge of Happy photos.

My hair.  There are days when I think the untameable cowlick on my forehead is a curse, but mostly I am grateful for a head of hair that keeps me warm in winter and sunburn-free (at least on my head and neck) in summer.

Me and the mister (ha!  I love that! Can just see us out there with our corn cob pipes and our spittoons) sit out in these chairs and watch the goins on around these here parts.

It used to be that all you had to do to create a happy day for me was to give me a bunch of daisies.  As I have gotten older, I still feel happy when I see them, but nowadays, I feel happy when I see any flower.  Or tree.  Or bee.  Or creek.  Or...

Summer POTH #1

Ah.  I'm cracking myself up.

My cousin, Larry Blackwood, Master Photographer, sends out a POTD (Picture Of The Day) each day.  In response to my summer assignment, assigned by one, Ms Goodnight Gram (how's that for laying the blame on someone besides myself?), I have created the POTH (Photo Of The HAPPY.  It could also be Photo Of The Beautiful, but since for me Beautiful = Happy, I'll stick with my original plan).

I love the idea of a POTH!

I'm a little behind on this.  I have taken a photo every day, but I haven't posted any of them yet.  The assignment indicated that I was to keep them for a Power Point at the end of the summer.  That won't work for me.  I need to post them every once in awhile as I go along.  It takes patience to keep them all hidden until the end of the summer - patience that I don't seem to have.  Plus, I'm old enough to make up some of my own rules.

Let the unveiling begin.  Here are my HAPPY photos for the past four days:

  6-8-12 ~ On my front porch

 

 6-9-12 ~ In my office

 6-10-12  ~ My daughter suggested that I photograph my cellphone, because it makes us happy that we can talk with each other A LOT.  (I just happened to catch Mr. Lion sneaking a call in on my phone.)


 

6-11-12 ~ I am a Swiss Chardaholic (and don't tell me I need Swiss Chardaholics Anonymous - I'm happy this way!).  We have a whole 20 foot x 3 foot garden dedicated to this delectable vegetable.

The easiest part of this assignment will be to find things inspire happiness in me.  The hardest part will be remembering to photograph those happy things every day.  

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.  - J. D. Salinger

Incomparable Sweetness

Can't ya just smell 'em?

When I put my nose in them, my whole body turns into one, huge, Kool-Aid giggle.

Where the Rainbow Touches the Ground

My blogging career (ha!) began when I was knee-deep in social activism.  I had a point, a purpose, a focus.  Since then, I've been morphing and bending and twisting into what, I don't know.  With Michael's diagnosis, the need to spend a lot of time with Mom, and other assorted chocolates, I am less active in the world out there.  Still, I stand in silence for peace every Saturday, as I have for many years, and I participate in an interreligious group.  I feel that the interreligious group contributes to world peace as much or more as any vigil or march or letter to my congressperson could.  Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that.  How can anyone know?

One of the members of our interreligious group asked me to write something about the group.  I had no clue about what he wanted from it, but as I stared at the blank canvas of the page, this is what came out of me:

A Jew, a Muslim, and a Catholic walk into a bar…

No, actually, they walk into a room where they meet with a Sufi woman, along with a man whose spiritual path is a smorgasbord of varied, but, on many levels, interrelated beliefs. 

Every two or three months, I join a handful of men and women from different spiritual traditions in coming together to deepen our own spiritual paths while learning about the paths of others.  None of us are clergy or any other type of leader in our faith community, and our meetings are not focused on the academics of the teachings.  Instead, we speak to how our spiritual paths inform our personal experiences.  Over the last two years, we have investigated numerous topics ranging from holidays to prayer to death. 

Why would we take our commitments to this group so seriously?  I can only speak for myself when I say that these gatherings have made me a better human being.  The more I participate in our group meetings, the more I learn about myself and the more I can understand just a little of what others see as they practice in their spiritual traditions.  I find the many ways that we are alike and the few ways in which we see the world differently.  I do my best to set aside judgment while noticing that these friends are doing the same for me.

Each time this interreligious group meets, we use a different topic as a starting off point.  The topic keeps us focused, and it ensures that we cover a variety of aspects of our lives.  At our last meeting, our topic was “pain and suffering”.  At the time, I had been experiencing a lot of sadness and confusion over the recent cancer diagnosis of my husband as well as the even more recent death of my dad.  The opportunity to delve deep into the teachings of my tradition regarding pain and suffering, and then to share those and hear the view of others, was a salve on my perceived wounds.   

We humans tend to gravitate to “our people” – either family members or people who align with our views of the world.  That is normal and comfortable.  But our growth comes from either the stretching that life asks of us or our willingness to choose to go beyond the comfortable.  I believe that by making the effort to connect deeply with people who we consider to be “other”, we become more of ourselves and we help to create peace in this world for our children and their children.

Through finding the Divine behind our facades of differences, the above joke may evolve until it becomes, “A person of the Jewish faith, a person of the Muslim faith, and a person of the Catholic faith walk into a room where they find people of every faith that exist on Earth.  There, a woman from the Buddhist tradition asks the host to “make me one with everything”, and every mind in the room suddenly recognizes that, no matter what path we travel, we all come from the same creator.

May it be so.

The Secret of Life

I love this:

You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids. They said, "Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of the fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life." And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instruction. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out.

 
- Anne Lamott writing to her new grandson in her book, Some Assembly Required

I stole it from here.

And then I went to my library's website and ordered the book.  

A Great Gift

On my Healing into Life blog, I recently posted a list of things to remember as I go through this incredible journey with Michael and the diagnosis of Mantle Cell Lymphoma that he has been given.

A few days before I wrote that post, I had visited with a friend – a good friend, one who I look up to for many reasons – and that friend had said things about cancer and Michael’s choice of treatment.  I took it all in and by the next day, it was throwing me into a tailspin. 

It was not pretty. 

I felt scared and confused and totally depressed.  I don’t know how much the decision to decrease my hormones at that time had to do with my extreme black mood.  I wasn’t suicidal, but I did warn Michael that I was going to work my way through all of this, and if I did get to be suicidal, I wanted him to do something to stop me.

After two days, a good nap, and the release of negative ions that a gentle rain offers (we don’t get those moments often here in Colorado), I came out on the other side.  I was still not happy about what the person had said, but I could once again see the sun shining.

Still, I set up an appointment for today with a therapist I had worked with in the past.  I realized that the next time I spoke with my friend, I didn’t want to lay my stuff on him as he had done with me. 

But last night, everything changed.  I suddenly saw that my friend had only been holding a mirror for me so that I could see my fears regarding Michael’s diagnosis.  If I hadn’t been afraid already, my friend’s fears would have only been…. well HIS fears.  I would have felt compassion that he was so scared.

He gave me a wonderful gift!  The gift of having my worries all spread out in the open, on the table like a breakfast buffet. I could either keep living with them or clean up that table. 

I don’t want to live in fear.  This moment is absolutely wonderful, precious.  I have no idea what the future holds, and I don’t need to make up stories that probably won’t even come true.  I choose to show up fresh, clear, and loving RIGHT NOW.  THIS is what I have.

I was an easy study for my therapist today.  I had already done most of the work.  We took a few minutes to see if anything on the buffet was even real food - it wasn't.  It was all made up stuff about what might happen in the future.  So we threw it away. 

We never know how our friends will help us out, do we?