Category Archives: quotes

123…just be free

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Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people. (I think every book blogger I know has already been tagged with this one!)

I’ve been tagged by Fighting Windmills and Books on the Brain with the page 123 book meme. My teetering To-Be-Read pile had a copy of The Untethered Soul, by Micheal Singer in it and these are the sentences I found on page 123: You see that you’re too self-conscious to freely express yourself. You see that you have to stay on top of everything in order to be okay. Why?

Those lines got me thinking. A lot of people don’t care for Rosie O’Donnell. They say that she could do with a little less self expression, and I will give you that occasionally in her need to have her say she may have crossed a line that was hurtful or offensive to some people. On the other hand, I’ve sometimes envied her freedom to let it all hang out, to say “Hey, this is who I am and what I believe and I don’t care whether you like it or not!” Even in this land of the free and home of the brave most women are still raised to be good girls, and good girls are polite and helpful and taught to always put others first. While highly successful women who are outspoken and assertive are often portrayed in the media as being bitchy shrews. Politics aside, Hillary Clinton is an example of that right now. She’s either being slammed for being cold and overly aggressive, or for showing too much emotion. A girl just can’t win…or can she? The greatest gift we can give our daughters is the freedom to find their own voice, to believe that it is not only their right, but their obligation to express themselves and stand fearlessly in their own lives.

Oh yeah, the Rosie portrait up there, I did that with Mr. Picassohead!

super duper tuesday

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Ms. bookbabie has been all blinged out and is ready to sit back and watch the returns come in tonight. No matter what your political leanings happen to be, no one can deny that this year’s presidential primaries feel almost like the election itself. I’m 48 years old and I have never been as interested, as excited even, about an upcoming presidential election. I love that people everywhere are talking about the candidates, watching the debates, and I’m especially pleased that this enthusiasm seems to be spreading to a younger generation of voters. If your state is part of Super Tuesday, get to the polls so that your vote will count and your voice will be heard.

If you’d like to add a little bling to a photograph for your blog or MySpace page, go to blingee.com. When you’re done creating your masterpiece they give you several sizes, including an avatar that does not have their annoying logo on it!

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it. ~Alexander Woollcott

happiness unplugged

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I’ve been thinking about happiness today, trying to put a finger on what it is and how to hold on to it when you have it. Yesterday, I suddenly realized that I was quite happy, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. When I went to the grocery store people kept looking me in the eye, smiling, and saying hello. It was strange because I usually feel somewhat invisible. Not in a bad way, more like in an undercover, superhero kind of way. Like I can move stealthily through my day and not garner a lot of attention. Perhaps it’s the writer and artist in me, wanting to blend into the background so I can observe and gather bits and pieces of people’s lives for later use. But there was no hiding yesterday. I felt like I had a spotlight shining down on me exclaiming, “Hey, look at her, she’s a happy friendly person!”

The interesting thing is, I woke up yesterday with the same blessings and the very same worries that I had the day before. When I did a search for books about happiness on Amazon I got 260,732 results. That’s a lot of books, most of them proclaiming that they can teach people how to be happy. Which is probably a good thing because when I searched for depression I got 263,382 hits. A close race, but unless the results are tallied in Florida, I would say that depression wins hands down. Where am I going with this? I honestly don’t know. Just like I don’t know why I was feeling bummed on Wednesday but woke up happy on Thursday. But I do know this much, even though I lost my cloak of invisibility it felt pretty good to be happy, so I’m simply going to enjoy walking in that spotlight for as long as it keeps on shining.

The photo above is of my daughter-in-law Meagan, my niece Aryielle, and Mr. bookbabie at a family dinner. Every time Meagan smiled at her, the baby totally cracked up, it was so funny and sweet we had tears streaming down our faces from laughing so hard. I wanted an image that illustrated happiness and every time I see that picture I can’t help but smile:)

Some people never find it, some only pretend, but I just want to live happily ever after every now and then. Jimmy Buffet

snowflake zen

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This past Christmas my seven year old niece danced out on to our deck while it was lightly snowing (she rarely runs or walks anywhere, she twirls and flits about like a little pixie). Suddenly, she came back into the kitchen shouting, “Look, look, I caught a snowflake and they really do look like snowflakes!” Balancing on the tip of her index finger was a single white snowflake that was so big you could see its intricate shape with the naked eye. The adults laughed gently and went right back to their conversations, but Laurel continued to stare with awe at the snowflake as it melted and disappeared. Of all the gifts she opened that day, none elicited the same amount of excitement and joy as seeing the divine design of a snowflake with her own eyes for the very first time.

My sister Carrie took that photo of a snowflake on our mailbox at Thanksgiving with the macro setting on my Canon G9, it seems to be a year for giant snowflakes here in Michigan. If you’d like to make your own virtual snowflake, click here and start snipping!

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake… Francis Bacon, Sr.

weekend playdate

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If you happen to be a jigsaw puzzle fanatic there are some great websites you may want to visit and bookmark. JigZone has a ton of online puzzles. You choose a picture, like the Vincent van Gogh painting above, select the difficulty level and then left click on the pieces to move them into place. They even have an Auto Solve button for lazy people like me! Click here to work a neat moving puzzle, and at Jigsaw Planet and Photograph Puzzle Maker you can quickly and easily create your own puzzle from a photograph that you upload from your computer. Even if you don’t do puzzles in “real” time, these online puzzle sites are a lot of fun!

There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle. Deepak Chopra

MLK

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This is an angel photo-manipulation I did last week. Her name is Nyah, which means purpose in Swahili. I thought the name suited her because she looked so confident and wise. When I think about Martin Luther King today, the life he led and the legacy he left behind, that word comes to mind. Purpose. Whether you describe it as a calling, a sacred contract, or a personal legend, Dr. King followed his path despite the hardships he knew he and his family would endure, despite sensing it would bring about his own early death. In his last public speech made on April 3, 1968 he said, “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land!”

Dr. King set an example of living a life of purpose. But you don’t have to inspire a revolution, become a Buddhist monk, care for the poor in India, or start a megachurch to lead a life of purpose. Each time you make a decision that is unselfish and giving you create a ripple, a moment of goodness that will join others and become part of a swell, a wave in an ocean that will ultimately make the world a better place.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968)

this too shall pass

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The first thing I do when I get my O Magazine is turn to the last page to read Oprah’s letter. This month she talked about how repeating the mantra this too shall pass helped her get through the recent scandal at her school in South Africa. Those four words have brought solace to many people over the years, myself included. I put the quote on a couple of T-shirts and it was written on the blackboard in my kitchen for many months. I wasn’t familiar with it until I got very sick one night last year. I had a nasty reaction to a new medication that not only made me physically ill, but at one point made me feel like I was losing my mind. Not a good feeling. So I was curled up on the couch (after getting home from the doctor who said I would just have to wait until the drug got out of my system), feeling like I was about to become unstrung as they say, when suddenly I got those four words: this too shall pass.

The strange thing was, they weren’t part of the confused illness spawned soup that was swirling around in my head. They were written on four sheets of pure white paper that floated up and out of the craziness that was engulfing me. I almost felt like I could reach out and pick them up. Which was weird enough in itself, but the really cool thing was that I immediately felt such a sense of peace wash over me that I was able to relax enough to go to bed where I slept off the remainder of the medication side effect. The next day I googled the quote to try and find it’s source. It seems its origin is up for some debate. It’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, poet Lanta Wilson Smith, and to a proverb about King Solomon. In the end I decided it didn’t really matter where it came from, it helped save me from what could have been a long, frightening night of illness. I still slip on those T-shirts now and then when I need to remember those four simple words. Gam zeh ya’avor…this too shall pass.

the greatest lie

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“What is the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked completely surprised.

“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

When I read that part in The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, I stopped and reread it several times because it seemed to hold such an important truth for me. When we are children, the future is a never ending smörgåsbord of possibilities. What we will do for a living, where we might travel and live, the people we’ll meet and the adventures we’ll have are laid out before us and all we have to do is choose: this amazing future or that one, which will it be? But when many of us grow up we lose the part of ourselves that believes in those possibilities. We feel consumed by the basic needs of life. We have bills to pay, illnesses to beat, children to raise, husbands or wives or aging parents to care for, and before we know it we’re buying into the idea that we have lost control of our own fate. That life is something that is happening to us, the buffet is closed.

I remember getting an e-mail once from a family friend. She caught me up on what was happening in her life and then suddenly at the end of the note she wrote, “My life hasn’t turned out like I thought it would.” That ten word sentence stayed with me for days. I understood what she was saying, after years of poor health I sometimes felt that way myself. Yet her statement sounded so final and sad and she was younger than me, her life was far from over, our lives are far from over! In The Alchemist, Coelho writes that every living thing has a Personal Legend, or life’s purpose. The author Caroline Myss calls it your Sacred Contract. I believe that’s true. I think that the fearless child we once were is still inside us, still dreaming the dreams that hold the answer to the question, “Why am I here?” We simply need to be still and start paying attention to it again. I enjoyed reading The Alchemist. Written in the form of a fable, it’s a wonderful little gem of a book that really gets you thinking. Thanks for the recommendation Ann!