The Art of Being Human

None of us are perfect except for maybe cowboys, and I'm probably biased about them. It’s easy to forget that as much as we all want to be good and try to be good we occasionally fall short of the mark.  Then what happens? In a healthy community you don’t have to be perfect. You can be yourself, flaws and all. There is an out pouring of trust in the basic goodness and inherent loving kindness that is in all of us. People are supported and thrive and the community flourishes as a result. That’s easy to write sitting in the corner of the local coffee shop. There are times however, when knowing and doing the right thing is a moral conundrum with no easy answers. I live in a neighborhood with tree lined streets and sidewalks that are used regularly by the young mothers with strollers and teenagers on skateboards.  Emory, CDC, and the VA hospital are nearby and the neighborhood reflects this. It is a nice mix of young professionals and original home owners from the time it was con...

  We human beings are interesting creatures. We look over our shoulders at what was and wonder what will be.     I don’t know about you but, when I leaned in that direction it because I was trying to figure out how I got where I was so I didn’t do it again.   In the immortal words of Captain Picard, “I’ve made some fine mistakes.” I have to be honest though; there are some mistakes that I would just as soon I’d skipped.   Drummers will seriously make you question God, yourself and the universe. And I am not exaggerating. Then there was a divorce and thinking that I could die a time or two.   Each incident brought me to my knees and made me take a hard look at who I was and how I got there. That seems to be an inevitable part of the human experience. I‘ll tell you something though, who am I is a lot more interesting a question than who was I especially as you get older. There’s a lot less angst involved for one thing. An even better question is who could I ...

My generation asks, “Where were you when you heard about Kennedy or about King?” The generation before mine asks, “Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor ?” This generation asks, “Where you on 9/11? ”  Those events ripped apart the fabric of our lives. After each of them we had a choice to embrace the transforming power of love or to use them as an excuse to broker hate.  Lately I’ve been given ample opportunity to be part of hate mongering and its wreaking havoc on my soul.   There is a woman in my circle who has back stabbed and alienated most of us. None of us like Rachel much, but instead of forgiving her and moving on we talk about all the reasons we don’t like her. That would be fine and dandy if didn’t war on my soul. Every time I have an ugly thought or conversation about her it feels like someone has taken a fist full of nails and raked them on a chalk board.  That doesn’t stop me from shutting up though, go figure.    I hate how I feel...

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...