choices

this is my beautiful apartment at OSU my sophmore year. My mom cried when she came down to see it. She told me that these were not the living conditions that I was "accustomed" to living in. I was so proud of the place.....and did not know the difference.
but I don't think she thought I made smart choices.
college roomates from OSU ..........sophmore year.....Sangita, Cathi and Michelle and me.


Choices
Living the Wisdom of the Tao.

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
The chase and the hunt craze people’s minds.
Wasting energy to obtain rare objects Only impedes ones growth.
The master observes the world But trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
He prefers what is within to what is without.

Version from Wayne Dyer

if you don't live your dreams, who will.

camping at Omega Institute

Your greatest detriment to your powerful ability to create
positively in your world is the negative influence from those
that surround you. And when you allow it, you are creating
by default.

Follow your bliss and remember that unless you
feel good about yourself, you have nothing of value to offer
to any other. Choose your surroundings wisely -- this is
your own life. You have that option. In reality, you have that
obligation. If you don't live your dreams.....who will?

~ Abraham-Hicks


what are YOU dreaming of????

Life is a Ball!!

Clay eating icecream.....blue icecream

"Life is nothing to be very serious about.

Life is a ball in your hands to play with.

Don't hold on to the ball."

Ravi Shankar

On Change

When you're through changing, you're through.

- Bruce Barton

staying awake

Mira meeting Macy right after she was born.....never did get that epidural they said I would get.....that is because I arrived there at 10cm.
Anyway...it was worth the pain...Mira might agree also...
...Love, Michele




This circle of lovers
is the craziest bunch I’ve ever met.
We rant like the truly possessed,
groping with clutched fingers
to give voice to the least echo of
the Word beyond all words,
the moment beyond all time.
We probably should be locked-up
for our own safety,
except the lunacy in which we connect
is the only sane intent
in this universal dream-sequence of foolish pursuits.

So here’s our prenuptial agreement:
I’ll keep shaking you awake with my folly,
and you return the favor.
--Charles Radican

Sister Golden Hair Surprise

Mira took this picture in our front yard with a pinhole camera. It kinda looks like a dream to me or a watercolor painting. have a great day.
love, Michele




Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly
—you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
--the breath inside the breath.
(translated by Robert Bly)

gimme an "L", gimme an "i", gimme a "v", gimme an "e"

This is my friend Sherri from highschool and her husband John Lennon....yes that is his real name......he used to get free drinks on December 8th..the anniversary of the other John Lennon's death...........when he showed his ID at the bar...(also my dad's birthday)........Anyway...this is Mark and I and John and Sherri getting a pool picture for the polaroid party we were participating in. We had to get a picture in all these weird places...so we just stopped at someone's house at random and asked if they would take our picture in this pool.
have a great day...hope you enjoy the quote below.
Love,
Michele

“Live this day as if it will be your last.

Remember that you will only find ''tomorrow'' on the calendars of fools.

Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow.

This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year.

The saddest words you can ever utter are, ''If I had my life to live over again.

''Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day!

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe,

loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight.

Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact,

all the care and kindness and understanding and

love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.

Your life will never be the same again."

-Og Mandino

The Path

Me at age 3 in 1968
"I like your sleeves...they are real big."-Napolean

THE PATH
You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.

It takes courage
to do what you want.
Other people
have a lot of plans for you.

Nobody wants you to do
what you want to do.
They want you to go on their trip...

- Joseph Campbell

Everything you do makes a difference

Grandpa Benjamin and me in like 1968.



Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. --William James

Greet a stranger with a genuine "Good Mornin'" today.

Perspective

So often in time it happens, we all live our life in chains,
and we never even know we have the key.
--The Eagles

Sunshine!

This is Mr. Sunshine.....Captain Jim Kelly in my apartment at Ohio State.
He used to come visit on the weekends when he lived in Dayton.

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather,
always bring your own sunshine.
--Anthony J D'Angelo

Only Love is Real

Above is a picture of Mark and I at Omega Institute with Brian Weiss.
I did a weekend workshop with him and it was wonderful.
He wrote two of my very favorite books: Many Lives, Many Masters , and
Only Love is Real.
enjoy some of his quotes below and then the link to his site.
have a great day!!!
Love,
Michele


“Souls don’t have races or sexes or religions. They are beyond artificial divisions.”

-- Brian Weiss

Love is eternal, forever. Love does not stop when relationships end.

Love does not stop even with the physical death.
--Brian Weiss

Link to website

An Assignment for You

… Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world.
Anything.
You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity can cause to be set in motion.
Be outrageous in forgiving. Be dramatic in reconciling. Mistakes?
Back up and make them as right as you can, then move on.
Be off the charts in kindness. In whatever you are called to, strive to be devoted to it in all aspects large and small. Fall short? Try again.
Mastery is made in increments, not in leaps. Be brave, be fierce, be visionary. Mend the parts of the world that are "within your reach." To strive to live this way is the most dramatic gift you can ever give to the world.

Consider yourselves assigned.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., from An Assignment for You from Dr. Estés

The Heart

The Heart is like a compass on a large boat on a stormy sea. It will always bring you safely home if you trust it.

The Mind: nice to open and close doors, cook your food if you watch it closely and to dress you and walk you around and to do chores.

The Heart must lead in life, not the mind. The mind is many roads down the track, all dead ends. The mind jerks you around like a wild stallion with the bit in it's mouth.

For most people, the mind is in charge and is the poorest driver in the world and will wreck your car soon after it takes over. Then the heart fixes the damage and drives you safely home: IF YOU LET IT.

The following is a nice reminder to stay in your heart, if you wish peace. We all are fighting wars "out there". But the great war is within us all, whether to flow in the Heart or the mind.

Great is the general who conquors countries; greater yet he who conquors his own country; greater yet his own town and greatest of all is he who conquors his own self. To me that is when we surrender to the Heart love energies within us all.

Yes! It is free and always there. Like life, let it unfold; it always does. No use to push, pull, plead and beg. Surrender is the best way to be at peace within.

Loving acceptance of everyone and everything exactly as they are in this NOW moment is the key. You won't ever change anyone but yourself and that takes a surrendering to the Heart within us all.

Bottom Line: We are all ONE right here and now. you never meet a stranger, you only meet yourself in disguise.

Have a happy day, week, month and life.

Love,
Jim MacKimmie

Sometimes When You Realize

Sometimes When You Realize

Sometime, when you realize
in your deep despair
how use to the stagnant waters
of this normal madness
you have become,
you may descend
into a deeper cellar
and drink from the dangerous liquor
of your own most ancient vintage.

Head bursting from that pure proof,
you must find the heart
to throw the thick log
of whom you thought you were
onto the living flame
that you truly are.

And you will be in wonder
Amid all the escaping light, amid
the scattering embers,
stampeding like wild horses
into the edgeless dark of heaven,

where you may take your place
among the constellations of the gods,
and finally realize
you are on a journey
you have no power to stop.
-- Charles Radican, Seattle, Washington

Bellies With Stars

THE SNEETCHES
by Dr. Suess

Now the Star-bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars.
The Plain-bellied Sneetches had none upon thars.
The stars weren't so big; they were really quite small.
You would think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.
But because they had stars, all the Star-bellied Sneetches
would brag, "We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches."

With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they'd snort, "
We'll have nothing to do with the plain-bellied sort."
And whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
they'd hike right on past them without even talking.

Warmth of a smile

We are all wounded inside in some way or other.
We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or another.
Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another.
Healing in words, healing beyond words.Like gestures.
Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always
Be like a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described
As the shortest distance between two people.

Ben Orki, “Healing The Wounded Learner or the Pygmalion Complex”

Money and the Meaning of Life

This is an excerpt from Jacob Needleman's book Money and the Meaning of Life.
It is an inspiring and moving statement of Life's purpose.

"There is an action, an allowing, a surrender within, that has always been the birthright of every man or woman. The ego experiences it as a kind of stoppage. It is a special quality of silence. In that moment, you know why you are on earth and you know that as you are you cannot serve. You know you must change your life and that this can only happen by searching for companions and conditions that will support the appearance of this moment of opening. On the basis of that moment, a new intention enters into one's life, a new morality. It is the morality of the search. Whatever supports that search is good; whatever hinders it is evil. One begins to understand that it is only through that opening that one can love as one wishes to love and as we have heard of love in the teachings of the masters. Then, truly, the world and life in this world, with all its pleasures and pains, with all its obligations and difficulties -- just this world that you and I live in now -- this world becomes my monastery."

Forgiveness

The weak can never forgive.
Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
-Mahatma Ghandi

A Precious Human Life

A Precious Human Life-

Every day, think as you wake up,

today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive,

I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it,

I am going to use all my energies to develop myself,

to expand my heart out to others,

to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings,

I am going to have kind thoughts towards others,

I am not going to get angry or think badly about others,

I am going to benefit others as much as I can.

H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama

Appreciation Montage

You are precious
With a preciousness that cannot be computed
Nothing, absolutely nothing,
Can separate you from the Source of all life.
Nothing...not disease, not suffering, not even death.

You are precious.

You are embraced.

Able to go forth with a courage that is not your own.

And that is because its Source is the Source of all that is good, that is beautiful, that is true
-Desmond Tutu

On Silence

God, whose love and joy
are present everywhere,
can't come to visit you
unless you aren't there.

-Angelus Silesius

Extra Ordinary Encounters

Morning Dew



"Love, like cardinals that suddenly appear from the wild blue yonder,
always seems to be a gift we do not deserve.
Love is the opening through which we have the best
chance of glimpsing an abiding presence of the sacred within Being itself.
In the degree that we are cherished as children or adults,
a loving conspiracy is woven around us that undergirds our lives
with a sense of the sacred. Love, as Gabriel Marcel,
the French philosopher, says, is 'a concrete approach to the mystery of being.
' These days, gathering the memories of the important people in my life,
I am reminded that the love freely given to me, no less than my DNA,
has informed my trajectory through life, my destiny."
— Sam Keen in Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds

On Growing Old

Our old basset hound, Dudley. Rest in peace big boy!!!

Jury Rigged

by Carol Potter

It’s a farm fact. How we grew up.

Funky equipment failing and

my father doing whatever

he had to do to put it back together

again. Hammer. Tape. Wire. Give it

a good slam. No time to mess

around, newly baled field

and a rainstorm coming.

You make it go. Which is why

it was no surprise

this past weekend to see

this get up my parents have rigged

to help my father get up

the stairs so they can go on

sleeping in the marital bed.

Mother is steadying my father up the stairs by a rope

hooked to his belt

one step at a time. You can hear him

say pull, then the creak of his weight

as he reaches the next step, then the silence

as he pauses, then pull, he calls out

and she does. My sister and I visiting

for the weekend stand in our old

bedroom. We don’t go out in the hallway

because it seems like something

we ought not to watch, or even

listen to any more than you’d listen in

on someone in the next room making love,

both of them with their failing hearts

but his barely working now.

Books piled at strategic steps to make

half steps. My mother

and father tethered on the steep

risers him balancing

on the step, her with the rope

taut in her hand. Are we supposed

to stop them, come parent like

around the corner and demand

they put the rope down, go sleep

in the pull out couch

in the living room, go check

into a motel, a nursing home

wherever you get to go, but trained

to do as he says, we stay

back. We try not to listen

to the sounds they make

on the crooked stairs

we children fell down one by

one, the corner with the brick

abutment and the metal

radiator at the bottom of it all.

-Carol Potter

Which Grateful Dead Song Are You?

I am dark star...(see below ) comment me and let me know what you are.

Click on the link below to take the quiz.
http://tinyurl.com/395mvb



YOU ARE...
Dark Star - A song with space imagery and creation of a "dark star",
it represents the birth and death cycle of the world.
It also shows a kind of mystery about the universe that you probably agree with.

"Dark star crashes/pouring its light/into ashes/
Reason tatters/the forces tear loose/from the axis/
Searchlight casting/for faults in the/clouds of delusion/
shall we go,/you and I/While we can?/
Through/the transitive nightfall/of diamonds/
Mirror shatters/in formless reflections/of matter
Glass hand dissolving/to ice petal flowers/revolving/
Lady in velvet/recedes/in the nights of goodbye"
- Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"

Where will you dwell?

In my mind are many dwellings.
Each of the dwellings we create ourselves
- the house of anger,
the house of despair,
the house of self pity,
the house of indifference,
the house of negative,
the house of positive,
the house of hope,
the house of joy,
the house of peace,
the house of enthusiasm,
the house of cooperation,
the house of giving.
Each of these houses we visit each day.
We can stay in any house for as long as we want.
We can leave these mental houses any time we wish.
We create the dwelling, we stay in the dwelling,
we leave the dwelling whenever we wish.
We can create new rooms, new houses.
Whenever we enter these dwellings, this becomes our world until we leave for another.
What world will we live in today?

From the page: "I walk in and out of many worlds."
by Joy Harjo, CREEK/CHEROKEE

Live Well

All those unexpected surprises

Dusty going for a ride....and loving the breeze.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by the these.

-Susan B. Anthony

Route 88 West

Mira and Maxine



wow.....love this poem below.....can't even picture how I will feel when Mira goes to college. Love, Michele



Route 88 West
----------for my daughter
I am driving you 350 miles away from home

and I am going to leave you with strangers.

I am driving you into your next life,

and I am going to leave you there.

You are snoring while I drive;

I feel like shaking you awake.
I would think one might sit tall in her seat,
memorize each tree,
each field, each farm.
For hours it's been one green field after another,
the silver tops of silos like blunt steeples.

What book is this in, Amy, which dream?
Since when am I simply supposed to take you places,
turn around, walk away?
Exhausted, your lips move
in your sleep. I tell you

it's one strange town after another-

names I can't pronounce.

-Carol Potter

Blessings

on living

Be kinder than necessary,
for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

Live simply,

Love generously,

Care deeply,

Speak kindly.......

Leave the rest to Fate.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...

It's about learning to dance in the rain.

How does your brain work????

http://tinyurl.com/2u6nqa

Hey,
check this link out above.
Our friends Shirley and Bill sent this to us.
Leave a comment below on how you see it....click on anonymous to leave a comment if you don't have a blog.
Mira and I only see it clock-wise.....(explains a few things)
Mark , Macy and Marko can see it both ways.
Weird because Mira and I are both left-handed.
also...any guess about what the picture is.....it is not a potato

Life is short

Hi, Michele and Mark,
We are in Tokyo now awaiting the next leg of the journey.
My E-mail on the ship did not work.
We are looking forward
to getting home now.
Dad just learned the team lost today.
One more chance.
I want to see you on Tuesday to catch up,
and get dates for girls' activities and Marko's.
Love, Mom

big butt???

life's journey

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of

arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to

skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly

proclaiming- WOW what a ride!"

-unknown

Learning to Fly

Seize the day

status

At the end of the game the king and the pawn go into the same box.
-unknown

companionship

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand,
nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship;
it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one
when he discovers that someone else believes in him
and is willing to trust him.
-ralph waldo emerson

Hug coupon

Inherently Good

On being you.

Well my parents left Singapore and are in Cambodia now.
My dad text messages Macy during all of the Indian's games. It is like 7am Cambodia time and my dad is texting during the game to find out the score like every 20minutes.
He must be beside himself.
Have a great day.
Love,
Michele

quiet mind

All man's miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.

BLAISE PASCAL
(1623-1662)

Choose Joy

I recommend to them to let their wounds show.
We’re all wounded.
We’re all in some pain.
If we share the pain and work together and learn from each other,
then some beautiful things happen.
That is what life is about.
Joseph Campbell said,
"We’re here to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world."
And that’s pretty much the way I feel about life.
It’s full of pain, difficulties, and sorrow, but there are also wonderful moments of joy.
And if you choose joy, you can have far more of those moments.
-Bernie Seigel

Tears

"Tears are an expression of lack of control.
They are prayer because prayer is communion with
that which is beyond our control: God.
A reporter was once interviewing an Indian guru about his work
in giving spiritual instruction to Americans.
The reporter asked the spiritual master,
'What is the first thing you attempt to teach Americans?'
The old man replied, 'I try to teach them how to cry again.' "
— Edward Hays in Pray All Ways