I’ve done a few Christmases in my time, and the ones that stand out in my memory were the ones where people were happy and what was exchanged had meaning.
Due to my Christmas Procrastination, this post should have been written several weeks ago, but much of what I am about to say will still, I hope, have value.
Here are my thoughts on how to have the most mindful, meaningful Christmas ever.
PRESENTS
Like it or not, in our materialistic world, presents are important—the ones you give and the ones you receive. First, a disclaimer. There is no perfect present. Sorry! There just isn’t one.
So to ward off disappointment, be flexible. Act surprised. Plan to like whatever is under the wrapping paper. (And if you don’t, you can always regift it next year. More later on this point.)
Toys
I like toys. I like playing with toys, imagining how kids will play with toys. [click to continue…]
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I had to laugh at myself. I finished that long post on fear yesterday and carefully tapped danced around the ultimate fear, our fear of death. So if you will stay with me, I’d like to address that fear today.
We have lots of euphemisms for death. A recent movie, in fact, alluded to one, “kick the bucket.” Please! Are we cows? Cancer becomes the “Big C.” We don’t bury someone, we “inter” them.
It is no wonder that kids get a little confused. “Grandpa has gone on a long trip.” Where? When is he coming back?
We joke about death with Gallows humor. I was working for the brokerage industry when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. I don’t think it was five minutes before some really irreverent jokes were up on our internal wire service, flying back and forth across the country.
Why do we do this, I wonder? [click to continue…]
A loud, jarring noise woke me. I couldn’t fit it into a known category, and the hair on the back of my neck start to rise. Was it a burglar in the night? Was my life in danger? My heart pounding, I lay there frozen with fear, listening.
Hearing nothing further, but fully awake by now I reached over and switched on the light. And discovered that my cats had tipped a Mag flashlight (3 battery size) against a ceramic pot. Nothing broken! Reassured, I scritched a few feline ears and gradually settled back into drowsy sleep.
I had experienced primal fear. We are born with it. Babies instinctively fear falling and loud noises. (Their fear of strangers waits until they can differentiate between self and others, typically about 18 months or so.)
Teenagers, ruled by the emotion-laden amygdula have fear—and pronounce to the world that they don’t. They sport T-shirts blazoned with ‘No Fear’ and wear Goth and death’s head rings. They look fear in the eye, just to feel the rush.
By the time we become adults, fear is a familiar, if unwelcome companion. In this post I’ll be examining our uneasy relationship with fear—why we fear fear, why it is sometimes healthy, and how to minimize its effects when it is not.
[click to continue…]
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I believe that we all have different gifts, some that we use, some latent, that we could use, if we only believed in their existence. And all such gifts have both positive and negative elements to them.
Take perfect pitch, for example. I’ve talked to people who have it and for them, listening someone singing off key feels just like fingernails on the proverbial blackboard.
Photographic memory is another special gift. But I understand that it is hard to turn off–that people who have it end up with memorized cereal boxes and insurance flyers, in addition to the formulas for chemistry finals.
I also believe that some individuals are more sensitive to energy flows than others. I do feel it on occasion and I imagine that you have, as well. Ever visit an empty school room, or perhaps a church (those with lots of stained glass are the best) and feel a good energy flow that spices the air with quiet and peace? [click to continue…]
The following interview was conducted with Lauren Parsons, a gifted psychotherapist who is now recovering from a stroke that put her world and her dreams into an unanticipated tailspin.
In this discussion she talks about how the stroke changed her own perspective on life and offers some words of encouragement for others who might be experiencing the aftermath of stroke.
Interviewer: Lauren, how would you describe what your life was like before the stroke occurred?
Lauren Parsons: Prior to the stroke, I was a month away from celebrating 39 years of marriage with my college sweetheart, and three weeks away from celebrating my 60th birthday. I have five children and 13 grandchildren. I was also “closing in” on fulfilling my dream of completing my PhD in Psychology. The closer I got to completing my degree, the greater the balancing act of being a wife, mother, grandmother, collegian, and employee became.
I had recently completed my Master’s Degree in Psychology and entering into the research portion of my PhD in Psychology. I had been working as a Adult Mental Health Therapist at a local community mental health clinic. At the clinic I provided individual therapy sessions for at least twelve different persons each week. I also facilitated six different therapy groups dealing with grief and loss, self-esteem, communication, and PTSD. I was busy!
I: It sounds like it! But all that changed in an instant. How serious was the stroke? [click to continue…]
Image by Camera Slayer via Flickr
Barbara Swafford, in her exceptional blog, Blogging without a Blog has honored me with her award, NBOTW (New Blog of the Week).
For those of you arriving here from Barbara’s Blog, Welcome!
For those of you who have not yet visited Blogging without a Blog, the journey is rewarding.
Barbara, in addition to providing recognition to new bloggers like me, has an excellent and growing collection of blog posts on such topics as: making money, increasing blog traffic, poetry, blogging ettiquette and buddies, and ultimately living life to the fullest.
A great read!
Thank you for the honor of including me in such august company.
Photo credit: Kris de Curtis
Never have I found such a division between the sexes as I did when I perused the magazine rack this December.
GQ was highlighting how to dress for success when interviewing, Wired pondered the Future of Food, Discover interviewed Stephen Hawking, while Fine Woodworking communed with drawers. The CLOSEST any men’s magazine came was a cover teaser for Best new Gear, Gadgets and Getaways on Men’s Health (done in tasteful blue and black).
Moving over to the women’s section, every cover was emblazoned with green and red…and numbers. Paula Deen gave us 105 recipes, tips and ideas to Celebrate the Season, and House Beautiful had a tasteful green circle with an understated 101 Stocking Stuffers.
Better Homes & Gardens upped the ante with 249 easy ideas for the holidays, but was trumped by Rachel Ray who gave us 368 recipes and tips for FUN, FAST & EASY holiday (hey, whattadeal!) Not to be outdone, Woman’s Day won the cake with 385 ideas to Afford the Holiday You Want.
That did it. I couldn’t resist. I got 10 of the longest lived Women’s magazines, and here, 1916 pages and 17 blow-ins later, are the best and the worst of this season’s holiday ideas, brought to you with the complements of my friend and yours, Madison Avenue. [click to continue…]
Image by tim ellis via Flickr
When I was little the circus would come to town, and if my folks had the money we’d go see a performance. I liked the horses, didn’t find the clowns terribly funny, and gasped at the tigers and lions. But my absolute favorite were the artists who walked the tightrope.
They had this long floppy pole for balance, and I would hold my breath as they made minute adjustments, sometimes stepping back, then teetering precariously before they walked ahead slowly, testing each foothold. Only when they reached the platform at last, did I breathe again.
Life is like that, too. In difficult situations, the future seems precarious. [click to continue…]
Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons
Sometimes ideas arrive in your life at exactly the time you need them. Tonight I was reading Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich by Duane Elgin. He describes how the commercial medium of television has profoundly shaped our culture.
Television stations make their profits by selling advertising, and advertising is bought by corporations to sell their products. And where does that leave us?
Elgin says that it creates an impossible double bind for viewers:
“People use the consumption levels and patterns portrayed in TV advertising to evaluate their levels of personal well-being, while those same consumption patterns are simultaneously devastating the environment and resource base on which our future depends.”
Strong words. But they led to me ponder my own relationship with television. [click to continue…]
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Christmas decorations have been up this year since before Halloween. I feel sorry for the retailers. After all, we are all in this together. But I also find a strong resistance inside to start on the holidays just yet.
As I often do when I resist, I discover I am procrastinating. Today it came in the form of metacognition, just watching the thoughts as they passed through my brain.
Here is a bird’s eye view of what was going on in there:
I cleaned my office the other night because I had a new file cabinet. I stuffed all the piles of paper into the cabinet. I straightened the books and hid the extras away, double rowed, in a linen cabinet that no longer held linens. My office is clean. I still cannot find anything. Maybe I never intended to. [click to continue…]
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At first I thought it was a bird. Just a shadowy movement beneath the fall-dying sage, a shape that darted forward cautiously, then back behind a rock. But I knew it wasn’t a bird. Birds don’t move backward.
The binoculars threw it into sharp relief. A pocket gopher, who kept a careful eye on my cat crouched behind the patio door watching him as well. The digger’s nose pushed a small mound of finely sifted garden soil ahead, and then with a curious pounce he would flatten it. The next push would be to the opposite side, almost as a prisoner carving a tunnel blends in the dirt to hide evidence of the digging.
I must have watched for a half an hour as the mound gradually grew in a semicircle about the rock. Then all activity froze, and into my binocular’s eyeview rose the velociraptor shape of a roadrunner. [click to continue…]
Image by manfred-hartmann via Flickr
It is Sunday, and although I will not be going to church today, I got to thinking about things sacred and unseen.
I’ve been wondering about what happens to the truly holy man (or woman) is our culture. By “our”, I mean the Euro-American one, dominant in the place I live. And by holy I do not mean religious, for example, ministers, who are for the most part good people, but not always holy.
No, what I mean by holy is talent above and beyond the ordinary. The ability to heal. The ability to move from place to place without (metal) wings. The ability to change shape and form, and being able speak without tongues—among other things. That kind of holy. Sacred. Able to move above day-to-day existence into another shade of being. [click to continue…]
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I love words! And the only thing better than words are quotations. When I first started to write, my dream was to have a whole shelf full of quotation books. And now I have. It’s called the Internet.
When I Googled ‘quotes’ it promptly delivered 250 million sources in .12 seconds. Amazing! I didn’t look at that many, but I did drill down through about a dozen pages, and then surfed through other entries I found. Here are the sites that looked the most promising to me.
I used ‘Albert Einstein’ as one topic and ‘Creativity’ as another, to discover what the sites might deliver. Most had additional features such as forums and bios of authors and these are noted. The good ones gave you an attribution source as well.
Finally, a big beef of mine are over-commercialized sites. You know the drill. Lots of ads, annoying pop ups, and thinly disguised retail tie-ins to connected products, online stores and Amazon.
Sounds just like some of Blogs that I visit. 
But I’ve annotated these for you, too, just in case.
OK, here goes. [click to continue…]
Image by mbgrigby via Flickr
When I moved the country, I gave up a newspaper and check news on the Internet. I don’t do shopping much, either. WalMart somehow does not inspire the same window shopping mania for me that Williams Sonoma or Neiman Marcus did.
Our restaurants are more modest here, and the homes are, too. When we see a Porsche in town, it is usually because there’s a road rally over our favorite mountain.
And life is good. I wrote recently about enjoying the sunshine and the flowers and the birds in my back yard.
But I was tripped up yesterday, and realized that having the ‘wants,’ may be just like malaria, a reoccurring illness. Rather than being cured, an episode may be triggered by external cues, just like habitual overeating or smoking.
This is what happened to me that makes me think this is so. [click to continue…]
Image by notanalternative via Flickr
When I lived in the city, the ’something new’ that I noticed going to work was always HUGE—an immense hole in the ground for a new skyscraper, cornrows of ‘dozers for the freeway construction, square acres of asphalt for a new parking lot. The fall season at the shoe store featured acres of new heels, and the football stadium encircled tens of thousands of screaming fans.
My TV blared out sound bites of simultaneous world crises: One in pictures, one in voice over, another with breaking news, each an crawling ant banner of fear.
My local movie theater had 24 screens. One featured an adult cartoon in garish colors 50 feet high. Next door an action film ratcheted from spectacular car crashes to building destructions to bodies and blood spattering the far corners of the mega-screen.
My night symphony opened with the cacophony of car alarms and police helicopter searchlights overhead. Periodically the ba-room of neighborhood boom boxes mixed with the underlying hum of 18 wheelers and RVs on the freeway nearby.
And always, the predominant color was gray: smoggy sky gray, parking garage gray, freeway wall gray.
I got used to it, and accepted that was the way of the world, and thought nothing of it.
Until I moved to the country. [click to continue…]
