I’m enjoying taking holiday photos for my iStock account like the one above. Tomorrow Mr. bookbabie has agreed to play doctor with me. That is…he’s agreed to dress up like a doctor so I can take some stock doctor pics. (Then again if he’s a good doctor model maybe I’ll be his patient afterward and let him examine me!)
“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”
Stephen Covey
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Menenhetet, in Ancient Evenings (concluding sentence)
Norman Mailer 1923-2007
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Henry David Thoreau
May your own hospitality inspire others to greater generosities, and forgiveness be your silent secret gift. Take responsibility for your own life and for your own actions and you will know the freedom of self-reliance. Walk softly and enjoy.
The photo and the blessing are from a neat site that generates a blessing and three random spiritual photos. Who can’t use a few few words of wisdom now and then? Check out the Worldwide Blessing Generator.
“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
The sun was bright but there was a chilled nip to the air that surprised Maxine, even though the calendar was about to turn over to December. She somehow always pictured the south of France to be a place that was perpetually glowing and warm, inhabited by partying royals, carousing celebrities, and half-naked sunbathers. She could see why Susie and Julia had decided to open their retreat center here. On the half-hour drive over from the train station she stared out the car window and watched as the country terrain began to roll gently under a lovely postcard blue sky, the fields and meadows changing color like the patterns on a quilt, moving from pale greens to muted golds to faded browns, dotted here and there with grazing creamy white sheep and striped with sleeping grape vines strung out like martyrs between five foot posts.
Cpl. William A. Long, an Army honor guard member who helped bury about 600 soldiers before deciding that he wanted to aid the military effort in Iraq, died in a grenade attack while there and was buried at Arlington National Cemetary on June 27, 2005. Brig. Gen. John MacDonald presents the American flag that was on Cpl. Long’s coffin to his mother, Susan Cordner. (Photograph by Jay Talbott/Scripps Howard News Service)
“Our heroes are those who act above and beyond the call of duty and in so doing give definition to patriotism and elevate all of us…. America is the land of the free because we are the home of the brave.” David Mahoney
This Sunday is Earth Day. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone did something this weekend (and beyond) for our planet? You could plant a tree, change your lightbulbs to those weird curly florescent bulbs, buy canvas bags to use at the grocery store, vacuum the coils in your refrigerator, recycle your trash and buy recycled products, adjust the thermostat at night and when you’re not home to use less heating and air conditioning…if we all do a little we can make a difference. Earthday Network has a lot of good info on how we can protect our planet and our children’s future. I just ordered some canvas grocery totes from St. Jude’s, they’re on sale for only five bucks, you can’t beat that!
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road, the one less traveled by, offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. ~Rachel Carson
bookbabie 