Everything is a teacher

An understanding heart in everything is a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers,
but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling.
--Carl Jung

Jimiller Band!!!

Here is a link to Jim Miller's new myspace. There are some of his songs on the site. He is awesome.
http://www.myspace.com/thejimillerband

Innocence

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them
-- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children.
For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much-- we simply grow taller.
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less
and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults,
but beneath the costume is the child we always are,
whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
--Leo Rosten

Velcro Boy

I Like this quote below. Above is a picture of Marko at relay for life.
He is in a velcro suit and Mark threw him against that wall.
Have a great day!!!
Love,
Michele

“Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.”
Anthony Robbins

WOA!!!

the above picture is of Marko...by Marko.......and below is a link that our friend Bill sent us.
Way cool guitar player....thanks Bill!
Peace,
Michele

http://glumbert.com/media/mckee

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

The Optimist Creed

The Optimist Creed

Promise Yourself -

• To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
• To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
• To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
• To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
• To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect on the best.
• To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
• To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
• To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
• To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have not time to criticize others.
• To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
  

Many have found inspiration in The Optimist Creed. In hospitals, the creed has been used to help patients recover from illness. In locker rooms, coaches have used it to motivate their players.

Optimist International adopted this creed in 1922. It was originally published in 1912 in a book titled: "Your Forces and How to Use Them." The author was Christian D. Larson, a prolific writer and lecturer who believed that people have tremendous latent powers, which could be harnessed for success with the proper attitude.

Savoring

so much beauty at Hocking Hills State Park!!!-Michele

Savoring
........ What I discovered is that there’s a powerful impulse within me to possess everything that I desire. To own it. To clutch it. To consume it.

The media constantly teaches us that we can buy the things that are most valuable to us. You know, we’re set up to believe that if only we could purchase that hot little sports car, we’d be young and attractive again. If only we could afford a weekend at that fancy spa in Sedona, then we’d be fully realized, spiritual people. If only we could get that SUV, then we’d have the freedom to roam the great outdoors. Have you noticed that all of the ads for SUVs are shot on some Alpine mountaintop? All the SUVs I’ve seen are stuck in rush-hour traffic on the highway with everyone else. We’re sold an illusion.

But it’s a powerful illusion that we’re being sold. It convinces us that somehow we have control over our happiness. Krister Stendahl was a Dutch theologian who taught for many years at Harvard Divinity School. He once wrote: “The colonialism and imperialism of the American mind thinks that the only way you can honor something else is to have it yourself. But to really rejoice in that which you do not have, that is what we need to learn.” To be able to savor something from a distance. To love, but not to possess.

It’s as though we’re the little child who has to be taught that when she holds the ladybug in her hands, she must hold it gently, or she’ll crush it. We sometimes unwittingly crush the things that we love. We want to possess them, when instead we should be savoring them. What’s called for here an ethic of presence and mindfulness in the face of beauty, and at the same time, a kind of non-attachment. An ability to let it go. To let the beauty return at its own will, in its own time.

This kind of savoring reminds me of the lines from Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

To rest in the grace of the world. To relish the beauty of things I cannot own. To savor, and not to consume. To desire, but not to covet. Slowly, I’m learning to love with a lighter touch.

-Robert G. Hardies

Peace

Therefore be at peace with your god, whatever you conceive him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life. Keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. - Max Ehr

Relationships

Rare indeed, is the relationship in which the other is not cultivated
for what one can get for oneself.

-Anthony DeMello

Love

This is the quality we need most: gentleness,
tenderness, mercy, loving-kindness,
a love which is a little oblivious to morals,
which is concerned not with what people deserve
but with what will help them grow into their best selves.”
-Malcolm Sutherland

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

Compassion

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

~Elie Wiesel

Wisdom

Do you see the Rainbow in the picture above? Mira took that last weekend on our way home...
My friend Barb sent me this story below....it is really beautiful. Barb is such a wise old soul. I love talking to her because she knows what is important in life and is so nonjudgemental.
I used to work with her. She is a chemical Dependency Councelor...and a really good one too.....now I hardly see her anymore, but we keep in touch via email.
I miss you Barb......Hope you are having a great day everyone!
Love,
Michele





This is a nice little story by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

______________________


My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home.

If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving.

The cemetery probably was my father's idea.

"Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning.

If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio.

In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"

"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again.

"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.

"Because you're 102 years old," I said.

"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life

Or because he quit taking left turns.