In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, a photograph with plenty of green in it to remind those of us in northern climates what’s to come. Three more days until Spring!
Walk tall as the trees,
live strong as the mountains,
be gentle as the spring winds,
keep the warmth of the summer sun
in your heart, and the great spirit
will always be with you. ~American Indian Proverb
I haven’t posted a generator in a while, or a Clooney pic, so here’s two for the price of one! Big Huge Labs has a fun photo generator that let’s you make motivational posters with your own photographs. It’s easy to use and you can link directly to your Flickr or Photobucket stream for fast and easy creations and saving. The quality is good enough that you may want to print them out and tack them up over your desk for inspiration. Click on either of my creations for the link and go have yourself some fun:)
I did this painting some years ago when I was sick. I really wanted to be out there on that beach, out of my body and away from the life that I was living at that moment because it was filled with loneliness and illness. Not aloneness, but loneliness, there’s a difference. I was married and had two beautiful young children, so I wasn’t alone. Yet as my health failed and weeks became months and those months dragged into years of living in a body that had become a kind of prison, I felt isolated. I was like one of those mimes in an invisible box, I could see the life that I wanted to be part of happening all around me, but I couldn’t quite get to it, it was just out of my reach.
That is what chronic illness is, what it does to those living with it. If you’re lucky and have a supportive family and good doctors some of that burden is lifted, but even still, it is a journey that wears on the body and on the soul. Nietzsche once wrote, What does not kill me makes me stronger. I would sometimes think about those words back then, and the truth is, I sure didn’t feel like I was getting stronger. I think that what life’s trials really teach us is that we can survive. We can do what we never thought we had the strength or the courage to do. Are we stronger? Maybe, maybe not. But as we step out of that box, battered and scarred from the crossing, we take with us the wisdom that no matter how dark the day the wings of hope can take us anywhere we want to go:)
For I am bound with fleshly bands,
Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
And catch at hope.
~ Christina Rossetti
Dr. Joan Borysenko, a Harvard educated pioneer in integrative medicine discusses “the dark nights of the soul”, that place we sometimes find ourselves during times of transformation and growth. I’m posting it today because it relates to the quote by M. Scott Peck in Wednesday’s post. I haven’t make a conscious decision to blog on this subject, I’m just going with the flow as they say, and for some reason this theme seems to keep popping up lately:)
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. ~M. Scott Peck
When I downloaded Paul McCartney’s song Let it Be the other day from iTunes, I also found the version in the video above from the movie, Across the Universe. Sung by veteran stage actor Carol Woods and 15 year old Timothy Mitchum, the song is set against a scene depicting a family losing their son in Vietnam and the Detroit riots of 1967. I grew up in Detroit, only six miles from the epicenter of the riots. As a seven year old child at the time, I thought that the riots happened “downtown”, far away from my own quiet, tree lined street. And in many respects I suppose it was far away. As a white family, our experience of life in Detroit and in our country during the 60s was very different than that of African-Americans living only a handful of miles away.
When I look at Detroit today, I’m saddened to see that racial, social, and economic separation and isolation continues to have devastating effects on neighborhoods, on schools, and most importantly on children. And as I watch the nightly news and listen to the never ending debate over the political and military issues of the Iraq War, I can’t help but wonder if there ever really will “be an answer” or if mankind is destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. But you know, when I listen to beautiful music like the song Let it Be, when I see exquisite art and watch inspiring movies and plays, when I look up at the night sky and see the glory of a lunar eclipse, or when I look down and into the eyes of a newborn baby it gives me hope, and isn’t that what keeps us all putting one foot in front of the other most days?
One of my favorite quotes is by the poet Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Isn’t that lovely? Have a peaceful and hope filled weekend dear readers:)
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
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.
bookbabie 