No Hurting Allowed

(This isn't great insight......This is simply the last post in this blog.  An end to this part of my journey)

Everyone has a story.

Everyone has a right to tell that story, to finish living their story, to live their life, peacefully.

Life Is A Gift simply wants to remind all those who are trying to balance grief with life to use your sorrow to create great joy.  To use your "lesson learned" to prevent others from similar heartache.   

Do not become one of the many who strike out because they have been struck.

Become one of the bold, the brazen few who help because they were hurt.  Your pain, sorrow and grief could fuel more heartache and loss for someone else.  Or it could heal your own wounds while watching others find peace. 

I wish you the strength to find peace and joy in yourself, your home, and your world.  One small decision, one small step that can have life giving ripples in the ocean of humanity.

We are the world.....

We are the change we want to see.....

We are the first step in the right direction......

Life is not perfect, Life is A Gift. Enjoy your gift!  

(Thank you 95.1Shine for the great photo)

Grief, Clarity and Guidance are Helped and Sometimes Healed by Writing

If you are looking for healing, you should journal & write.

If you are looking for peace, you should journal & write.

If you are looking for comfort, you should journal & write.

Writing cannot take away the cause of your pain, sorrow and grief.

However, Journalling can create a visual awareness that you are better managing your sorrow and grief each day, week, month, season and year.

Do not waste a lifetime consumed by grief of past events

As I have said so many times: take those thought, write them down and move along..

Here is a little visual help to encourage you.

Thank you UNC-TV You Tube and Facebook Page for this video!

Have you found a time in your own life where journalling

 helped you? 

Writing, Photography, Painting, Sewing, Knitting, Carpentry, 

Tell us how creating may have released you from sorrow.

Be Well, My Friend.

MLK Day: children and a doctor teaching the Golden Rule

When my youngest daughter was in preschool, she was enrolled in a Tots Class that was taught by our local high school students.

This is the Martin Luther King Day lesson she brought home that January......

This is the outside of a white egg

This is the outside of a brown egg

                            

what all eggs are like inside

                               

At four years old, she grasped the learning objective of the lesson.   Since she is a visual/kinetic learner, she still remembers that one lesson.  Forget the objective of the wordy Scholastic News Articles, what has stuck with her  is the "egg story" and the visual reminder that:

**No matter the outside appearances, we are all the same on the inside**. 

Whether the egg is white, brown or green or yellow-- the shell may be hard but it can break.  So, she has added this to her lesson: 

**handle all eggs well so they do not break**

The Golden Rule- which she now knows and Dr King followed, believed and hoped for, too.

And that's what she tries to remind herself, whether her friends wear different colors, wear glasses or use wheelchairs, whether they live on "theeee side" of town versus "thaaaaaat side of town" and whether they are the rising football star or the child that never gets picked for a team on the playground, she tries to treat everyone the same.

Sometimes, she does amazing at it and other times she needs a reminder and still others times, when she has been judged for her own exterior rather than her own interior, well, she would rather just hang out with the furry "eggs"  :) 

After all, she is still a child, not perfect--  and very busy learning neccasary human life lessons.  She is way ahead of a lot of the adults I know, though:

One day she said, "momma, why did that  lady ask you what daddy does?  Does she work for his company, too?"

"No, she doesn't honey"

"But momma, she didn't ask what you do......"

"I know, baby."

She doesn't like your egg color, does she?"

"Probably not, intuitive one"

"Im not sure what in-tune-tive means, momma, but that lady just walked away from the best friend she could have ever had"

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you taught me to care about the inside momma, you don't really care about all the outside stuff. And because I taught you how to be a good friend.  I'm good at being a good friend, too"

Little one, I thought, that lady, she didn't want "a friend", she wanted a means to an end. 

I didn't explain "all of that" to her because Middle School is two years away and
that lesson is coming soon enough. 

Someday, I will have to explain about the frying pans: agendas and mind sets and personal motives, bigotry, racism, greed, and all of that where eggs end up cooking.  

For today, I let her still believe that the world can all be friends, that people actually want to  be friends.  I let her believe that because I believe in Dr King's dream, too.   Actually, I believe passionately in it because I grew up with a man who made racist remarks and segregated speeches.  Who thought he was better than Dr King, because of the color of my father's skin.  My white racist  (-no name calling, only identifiers)  father did not that when I first read Dr King's speech, I wished (with all my might-to myself) that Dr King could have been my father instead.  (Yes, there was one of the most important persons in my life who was far from perfect.  One of the primary reasons my heart is scarred, but not broken.  The man who probably thought he was teaching me to be better than the world, but instead, I took it upon myself to let the world teach me to be smaller than it).

Just a little reminder of Dr. King's dream and of the little children in our care.

How to do New Year Resolutions, Every Day is a Clean Start

How is the NewYear for you?

Remember, you don't have to wait until 2016 to start something new!

Every new dawn is your gift, your blank slate, your chalk in your hand.

Consider this analogy: in the pioneer days, a child first learning to use chalk and a slate. They dropped and broke the chalk, they scribbled and scrawled. Eventually, experience  taught them that if they treated the chalk gently, it would remain whole. If they practiced their letters, then scrawls would become sentences.  (Still not sure how long it took to replace that chalk if it broke though- can you imagine not having a superstore within driving distances, or Amazon at your fingertips?)

Back to the pioneers. when the young child was handed a slate it was surrounded by a protective wood frame to prevent it from breaking. The child learned to clean their slate by running a wet cloth onto the surface, erasing away the mistakes and starting fresh to practice again and the lesson was leaned eventually.  Maybe it was how to make a letter, or it was a mathematical equation. With their cleaned slate and their experience from their previous work, they could have a more knowledgeable answer for the next problem or test. 

Each day offers a similiar experience for us. Have we forgotten in our modern existence that as the day draws to a close, we can wash our mind clean of any mistakes we may have encountered, we can lay the day to rest, making peace with the negative experiences. (If we aren't falling asleep while staring at the TV or surfing the web or playing candy crush- we can)-- everything has its place in our day but the end of the day is important for laying to rest what we can and cannot change about the day, and making peace with it, so we may rest well.

After which, we awake to a new day, a clean slate, a mind at peace with the experiences it has learned.  Our rested minds and bodies are then prepared to write the next day's experience with as much peace and strength as possible. 

Our minds and hearts and souls are fresh slates every new dawn.  

We are hardly handed chalk and slates anymore but the same is true of our screens.  They are our modern day chalk and slates.  No one in the pioneer days would have brought a heavy slate or messy chalk to a comfy clean bed. Why then, are we bringing our tablets and phones?  Why do we not want to lay ourselves to rest but to fall asleep with our mind in the middle of something.  It is important to acknowledge that the day has come to an end, when we ignore that simple fact, that simple unwinding, that internal laying to peace the complications of the day, then we may find ourselves waking during the night, restless with worry or with the heavy load of all our yesterdays right there, on our minds, at the beginning of each day.

What a heavy way to start, no wonder we need so much cofffee! 

Resolutions really start with treating ourselves gently, not harshly.  Just like the chalk and slate--we will remain whole, we will improve, we will be more peaceful, (notice we aren't saying perfect). Promise to prepare yourself for tonight, your human, you need to rest easy tonight, thereby preparing yourself for tomorrow's dawn.