The Art of Being Human

People tease me about my aversion to drummers. They think I’m joking, trust me I’m not. One was more than most women experience and three were just waay too many. All I can say for myself is that some of us have forgotten what love looks like. That’s part of the problem and in my case accounts for the drummers I’ve known. It took me a while to learn what love looked like. I will say this for the experiences; they turned me on to some really good music. It’s nobody’s fault that there wasn’t much love when I was growing up. Life happens that way sometimes. I knew the love was always there though and I just kept moving toward the light. There’s a lot of light in my world these days and I hope I’m creating more of it. That’s my intention. What am I creating in the world? Am I creating what loves me back? Where do I create love for myself and the world? These are the questions I find myself asking these days. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I create love by being in community ...

    I saw for myself that negativity wasn’t working and went on a 90 day challenge to eliminate it from my life. I learned a lot about what causes negativity and the adverse effect it has on our lives, our wellbeing and our world.  I write this blog because I need the reminder of that time. It’s a way of keeping the negativity that has become so pervasive in our world at bay.  And it’s everywhere.  Well, maybe not every where. There are pockets of light in the world. The Daily Good by Charmaine Coumbra  is one of them. The Daily Good is always worth reading but, occasionally one of them is real gem.   The last two sentences in this post from The Pacific Voyagers   is a particular jewel.            “There's a theory that was developed for cultivating gardens, it's named after the old lady who used the idea. I can't remember it's name or hers, but the guts of it is that she had a garden overr...

Rodney was eight when he changed my life.  Eleven years ago I was hired to teach third grade at my current school in a smallish town outside of Atlanta. During back to school night I noticed a mother hovering in the corner by herself looking sorry eyed and mournful. I made my way across the room said, “You look distressed. How can I help you?” She took a breath and looked hard at me, taking my measure the way mothers do when they’re worried about their child.  “Miss,” she said, “I just want someone to love my boy.”   Now, for the record, no parent should ever have to say that to a teacher. Loving the children who are entrusted to our care is the least that we should do for them and for ourselves for that matter. I promised her that I cared about her child, that he was important to me and I guaranteed her that he would be happy and successful. Then I promised myself that I didn’t care if he was Jeffery Dalhmer with blood dripping from his hands. I was, by God, goin...

   My mom used to say, “It’s all fine and good until you get hurt.” She was usually referring to some hair brained scheme my brothers and I dreamed up.  She might just as well been talking about gossip though .  It’s all fine and good until someone gets hurt and someone always gets hurt.  If you’re saying something behind someone’s back it’s gossip. I don’t care what your intention is. It’s mean. It’s bitchy. It’s two faced. So, why do we do it? For one thing gossip is what passes for entertainment these days. Just turn on any entertainment show and even a few news shows for that matter.  Gossip sells. That’s the bottom line.  It feels justifiable to talk about someone we don’t like and gossiping makes it easy to dislike people. There’s a vicious cycle for you.  We whisper innuendo about people we barely know to make ourselves look better. Snide half truths are exploited to take people down a peg when we think they’ve gotten too full of themselve...

  The first thing I did when I went on my 90 Day No Negativity Challenge was to stop complaining.      When I complain or am around people who complain I feel snarky and dissatisfied with everyone and everything.   I am not diggin’ myself and loving my life which is a complete and total bummer because I like diggin’ myself and loving my life.   Complaining puts a damper on happiness. That includes complaining about what someone didn't do that I think they should have because I had an expectation about how they should behave.   I got blindsided by that this week in a relatively minor way. Andy plays the banjo at a jam I go to. He has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t like it when there is a lot of singing.   He likes to play fiddle songs, you know songs without words and I like to sing, that would be songs that do have words. The last few weeks Andy has been kind of nice to me and by nice I mean not rude. So, when I ran into him at a ...

Someone told me that angels envy humans because they get to choose to love God. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know that the act of choosing empowers that which is chosen. I always thought that was the point of the story of Job, but I could be wrong. I’m not wrong about the importance of making conscious choices about our attitudes and responses though. The Law of Sacrifice by Brett and Kate Mckay tells the story of James Fredette and the choices he made. If you don’t read anything else today read his story and what the Brett and Kate Mckay have to say about choice and sacrifice. “If you are unhappy in your choice, it is because you chose something that you do not really believe to have higher value than that which you left behind.” Some of you are reading this and saying, “Yeah, but I didn’t have a choice.” Your husband left you, your job got downsized or outsourced, your daughter ran off with the village idiot. You’re right; you didn’t have a choice about what happene...

One of the hallmarks of people who are negative is the mistaken belief that things have to be a certain way in order for them to be happy.   The waitress should have refilled their coffee sooner, that person in front of them shouldn’t be on their cell phone, their husband should have bought roses instead of carnations.   It’s as if they are living their lives according to a script that no one else has. And they’re quick to come to a conclusion about it all means. Who needs Dr. Phil when they have all the answers.   The waitress didn’t fill their coffee sooner because she doesn’t care about her customers.   The person on the cell phone is selfish. Their husband doesn’t think about what he’s doing.   It is a vicious cycle of unhappiness that contaminates everything around them.   One of the ways I’ve been able to avoid that particular type of thinking is to care less about stuff that I either can’t do anything about or that just isn’t that important to begin...