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Oh, look! We have a new year coming. 🌲🌲🌲 We live on the most beautiful planet. Darling little babies arrive every day with fresh wisdom. We have doggies to run with and kitty cats to hold on our laps. We can choose to be kind to one another. We can treat others the way we would like to be treated. We are that free! ❤️🌎❤️🌎❤️🌎❤️🌎❤️🌎❤️ Make sure the ones you love know how you feel about them. Time is precious and sacred. ❤❤❤ Appreciate your own courage, how well you handle things. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Look for the times when you were your kindest. Sit with the memories. 🌺🌺🌺 Nurture the goodness in yourself and others. 🐶🐶🐶 Expect good things. Wish that good things happen for your friends and their friends and their friends.... and soon the wish will connect back to you. 🌲🌲🌲 Learn something new tomorrow. Share it. ❄❄❄ I wish you a wonderful, happy evening and year! You are one of the best people I know! I promise. ❤❤❤ 
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Holidays are life markers in a way, moments in time that cause pause and reflection. They arrive with excitement and celebration, but sometimes the festiveness is dampened by an edginess, or a sadness, because of life changes we all go through. 😥 Wow, I am feeling the changes this year. My family lost three men since last Thanksgiving, two within the last few weeks. My husband’s cousin Onofrio lived almost 6 extra years after a lung transplant, years rich with life. My stepdad Budsie, we had lost little by little in roughly the same 6 years from Alzheimer’s. And the father of my children left as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightening out of the blue; or kidnapped by aliens; clearly placed in the “much too young to die”category by most. It is also our our first Christmas in sixteen years without our dog, Skippy. We, as humans, are all going to have holidays that tug at our hearts. No one gets out of here alive. Sometimes we leave suddenly. Sometimes we have a diagnosis we dance with for awhile. Some live 100 years, skating through life’s challenges with aplomb. And we do not know which one we are, or will be. Line up here everyone, and be depressed! No. Line up here and feel the richness. Line up here and find the beauty. Line up here and live just in this moment. Line up here with the family and friends who are here, knowing those gone are safe. Line up! Do not miss a day, or a moment. Feel the joy and feel the sadness. This is your life, after all. Don’t waste a minute of it. Grab it by the lapels. Laugh if you spill the gravy. And grab onto someone and hold on tight if you need to cry. Permission to dip low sometimes; just for goodness sakes scramble back up. Love the world while we are here together. Mary Oliver says it in another way: LEAD Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing? This winter the loons came to our harbor and died, one by one, of nothing we could see. A friend told me of one on the shore that lifted its head and opened the elegant beak and cried out in the long, sweet savoring of its life which, if you heard it, you know is a sacred thing, and for which, if you have not heard it, you had better hurry to where they still sing. And, believe me, tell no one just where that is. The next morning this loon, speckled and iridescent and with a plan to fly home to some hidden lake, was dead on the shore. I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.  My stepdad Budsie at age 89: “I am praying for a good haircut.” So sad this afternoon peeps, over the events of today. I spent occasional weekends in the simple town of Sandy Hook CT many times in my 20's. Beautiful little New England town. We cannot begin to understand how this could take place. This is much more than a gun question. This shooter did not gain access to guns and become crazed; he was crazed and gained access to guns. What can we all do? Once upon a time the young man who shot so many today was a kindergartener himself. I wonder what happened to him along the way. As a society, did we miss something? Was there something we could have done differently? Were there signs we should have noticed as he grew, signs that he was different or distressed and needed extra care? Was there a neighbor, or a parent of a friend, or a coach on a team that noticed something was "off" for this growing boy but squashed the feeling and forgot it? Did his parents need help dealing with him? Did they need help on how to parent? If he did get lots of help and interventions, let's look at them critically. If he was on medication, let's seriously look at side effects and follow up. Right now, all we can do is feel the grief. Then in honor of those lost, let's take a bounce from it. What do we want our world to be like? Let us be that world. In our tiny little lives, lets be the best we can be. Maybe we can love all children. Support all children. Reach out to all children. Donate to causes that help children. Support Planned Parenthood that helps people determine when they are ready to have children. Be a big brother or big sister. Set the best example for our own children. Set the best example for everyone else's children. Maybe we can all be a little bit better, a little bit kinder, a little bit more careful in what we say. "This monster who shot 20 children" (just heard on the news) was not always the monster. I am not at all defending him. I just want to make sure if we could have done anything to stop this years ago, we start doing it. Each and every one of us in our own little corners of the world.  |
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