Live!!!

Mama Deer and her babies showed up in our back yard the other morning.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. ... It is so easy to exist instead of live.
-Anna Quindlen

On Being Alive

"Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live."
- Anna Quindlen

Someday

Jim Kelly (or uncle Jim Bob) as the kids call him .....and I at a Grateful Dead Concert a few years ago. (BLH.....before long hair.) Have a great Day! Love, Michele

that someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, maybe on a day like today--a berm overlooking a pond in Vermont, the lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something you wanted to succeed at very much.

And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for that core to sustain you. If you have been perfect all your life, and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where your core ought to be.

Don't take that chance. Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world.
-ANNA QUINDLEN

How do you like the view???

This is a frog that Marko and his friend Matthew caught in our lake. They named him Kermie......he is back at home now in our lake, but spent some time with the boys....Hope you like the blurb below......have a great day! love, Michele

Well, you can learn all those things, out there, if you get a real life, a full life, a professional life, yes, but another life, too, a life of love and laughs and a connection to other human beings. Just keep your eyes and ears open. Here you could learn in the classroom. There the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15 years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless survive in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule, panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amidst the Tilt a Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other
seasonal rides.

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them. And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view."

And every day, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the view. And that's the last thing I have to tell you today, words of wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere to be. Look at the view. You'll never be disappointed.
-Anna Quindlen

Life is good...just ask Marko

It's ironic that we forget so often how wonderful life really is. We have more time than ever to remember it. My grandparents had to work long, long hours to support lots and lots of children in tiny, tiny houses. The women who worked in factories and sweatshops and then at home too, with two bosses, the one who paid them, and the one they were married to, who didn't.
It was tough life. I still remember the narrow groove worn into one of my grandmother's front teeth, the groove that appears there when you've used that tooth for years and years to bite off your thread from your sewing machine.

There are new generations of immigrants now, who work that hard, but those of us who are second and third and fourth generation are surrounded by high tech appliances, nice cars, family rooms, pools-the kinds of things our grandparents thought only rich people had. Yet somehow, instead of rejoicing, we've found the glass half-empty. Our jobs take too much out of us and don't pay enough. Our children are an awful responsibility. We're
expected to pick the kids up at preschool and run the microwave at home.

C'mon, let's be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. I don't mean in cosmic way. I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: daffodils, the azaleas, the feeling of one of my kid's hands tucked inside mine, the way my husband looks when he reads with the reading lamp behind him, fettuccine alfredo, fudge, "Gone With the Wind," "Pride and Prejudice."

The fuzz on the edge of my daughter's ear. Everyone who has ever read to an AIDS patient, or cuddled a boarder baby, or taken flowers around to someone who hasn't had a visitor that day, knows that this is true.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of silver amidst long stretches of tedium. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the one most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to live, really live.
-Anna Quindlen

GET A LIFE!!!!!

Mira took this picture....I love her pictures......that is why I borrow them!!

I love this commencement speech. I wish I would have been told this when I graduated.....but I doubt I would have listened.
Anyway, it is a beautiful speech....and makes me think how many times I am on "cruise control"
and missing the beauty of the here and now.
Have a great day.
love,
Michele


Commencement Speech
--Anna Quindlen

So here's what I wanted to tell you today: get a life.
A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion,
the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Do you think you'd care so very much about those things
if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water
pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights,
a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over the water gap
or the way a baby scowls with concentration
when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
Get a life in which you are not alone.
Find people you love, and who love you.

And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.
Each time you look at your diploma, remember that you are still a student,
still learning how to best treasure your connection to others.
Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail.
Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad.

Get a life in which you are generous.
Look around at the azaleas in the suburban neighborhood where you grew up;
look at a full moon hanging silver in a black, black sky on a cold night.
And realize that life is the best thing ever,
and that you have no business taking it for granted.
Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.
Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity.
Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.
All of you want to do well.

But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes.
It is so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas,
the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue,
the color of our kid's eyes,
the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and
rises again.
It is so easy to exist instead of live.
-- Anna Quindlen's Commencement address to class of 1999 at Villanova