Rhythmical flow,
movement of rolled stone,
rocking my world.
Waves crashing,
ocean gifts of stones and shells
rocking my world.
Peaceful waves
pounding, resounding,
rocking my world.
Searching shoreline,
plucking treasures from warm sand,
rocking my world.
Reconnecting stones,
nature’s pattern reinvented,
rocking my world.
Susie’s Rock Mosaic January 2016
Susie’s Wave Mosaic January 2013
Recently a dear friend of mine passed on a book to me entitled, Four Word Self Help, Simple Wisdom for Complex Lives. Don’t get me wrong. My life isn’t all that complex anymore, but this is a sweet book. I have chosen the four words: JUMP UP AND DOWN as my four words today.
Life has provided many opportunities for jumping up and down. I was a cheerleader in high school and did a fair amount of it. Don’t laugh. It was the only “sport” that girls were allowed back in my day. Title IX came long after I graduated from high school. Congratulations to all the girls and women who have been entitled to play sports since then. I’m jumping up and down for you.
It’s funny, but even as a 69 year old woman, I still jump for joy often. I’ve never stopped doing it and I highly recommend it to you. Let go! Show your happiness.
Here’s a photo of my 48 year old son and his 36 year old wife when they went on the whale shark trip in November last year with us. I didn’t ask them to jump up and down. They just did it.
Happiness is catching.
Makes you want to jump up and down, doesn’t it?
A friend of mine posted “I AM” on Facebook today.
It got me to thinking about what I am, but more importantly,
what I want to be.
How we see ourselves is important, no doubt. I’m no philosopher. Not even close. So I’m not going to get all philosophical on you. I do believe that we can create ourselves. We have options. I do love options.
What am I? Just like you, I am many things. Just like you, I may not always like the “me”I am in a given moment.
Two days ago I was angry with a capital A. Pissed off is more like it. Hurt. Confused. Disillusioned. I don’t want those things to define me.
So what does define me? Right now I think I would like to see myself as transforming, vivacious and strong.
I think I’ll choose those three things for my mantra today.
I am transforming, vivacious and strong.
Who knows what I’ll choose tomorrow.
The key is to choose wisely.
This can be a metaphor for life, even though it pertains to baseball. Don’t put the cart before the horse, don’t count your chickens…blah, blah, blah.
Timing is everything and while I’ve known this for a long while, today I was given a smack upside my head as a nice little reminder.
The story: We sold our beautiful VW van to a friend. She said she wanted it. We trusted that she did. On her word we felt it was a done deal and we considered it sold. She drove it, we showed her everything about how to care for it, gave her our bazillion extra parts, and she was excited. She went home with the plan to get us our down payment by tomorrow (Tuesday) and we would keep the car till it was paid for.
At this point, I deleted the ads I’d run and told two other prospective buyers that it was sold. A gentleman in Seattle had offered to buy the van for its full asking price, as well as give us $1,000 more if we delivered it to San Diego, but yesterday I told him we had it sold. So sorry, I told him.
We bought another vehicle for $10,000 with the idea that we had sold the van. We’re all set now, right?
Apparently not. Our friend, who will remain nameless, just called and said she changed her mind. “It’s just not a good idea for me right now,” she tells me.
“What? What?” I exclaim. “I already told the other people it was sold.”
“I know, I’m sorry. But I couldn’t sleep last night and I don’t think this is a good idea for me right now.”
You have to catch the ball before you can throw the ball. Don’t put the cart before the horse and don’t count your chickens until they hatch.
Don’t buy a new car until you have the money for the one you sold.
And don’t trust ANYBODY.
I don’t want to be bitter. So I’ll work at getting over it. In the meantime, I have learned:
I.
When I come to you
with tears that fall and
splatter to the ground,
you hold me close
and declare to my sorrow
“Devotion is your armor.”
When I come to you
with worries that break
the spell of our love,
you whisper love’s remedies
and declare to my concerned heart
“Imagination is your armor.”
When I come to you
with panic that resounds
in your world miles away,
you calm my fears
and declare to my faraway heart
“Stillness is your armor.”
When I come to you
with hopes and dreams of us
together for eternity,
you hold me close revealing
intimate secrets of assurance
“My love is your armor.”
II.
The poetry of your love
its sonorous effects
tied with a string or
set free on the windowsill
Like any moment in a dream
provoking questions of love or
transferring definitions to seek
alignment as a signal to my heart
Your intimate approach
a shape emerging gently
as a stroke of your fingers
touching the skin of my skin
The density of expression
its lyric energy singing
a rhetorical rhythm
revealed to mine ears alone
Neither kindness of a compliment
or heat of sexual pleasure
supply the magic ointment
as does the poetry of your love
Each morning and each evening we are given the gifts of sunrise and sunset,
but they are especially full of nature’s song when you live by the ocean.
I greet each day with soft eyes, sometimes placing my hand on my heart. Sunrises will do that to me.
With each new day, we are offered a cessation of anxiety–if we take in the show.
Here is an offered gift from Nature telling us to be calm.
Moon set, early morning.
Sunrise means a pink sky and a pink ocean. How can you not be happy?
Lovely view from the beach to the mountains through the palms.
~~~
On the East Cape, Baja Sur, the sun rises over the ocean.
It’s hard to wrap my mind around that fact, as I’m originally from Southern California where the sun rises over the mountains.
But, it does indeed rise over the ocean on the East Cape.
It’s a glorious, full show of color with the morning birds looking for breakfast.
~~~
When the day leaves us,
I experience an overwhelming joy
that almost makes my heart ache as
I watch the sun fall into the ocean.
And then there’s the green flash.
We see it all the time from our deck. We see it more as a green glow, but the photos below were caught with our GoPro.
It does, indeed, appear as a flash in these shots.
We had it set to shoot every five seconds.
~
These are from different days. A green flash? Believe.
Things I learned about the green flash:
In my Baja world,
join me as
I take a deep breath
and
savor the moments of sunrise and sunset.
I have some questions about creativity.
Currently I seem to be antsy. You know, where you can’t sit still without wanting to engage your hands and your mind? Some may wish to engage their feet too…dancing is creative. You use your whole body for that.
It is my belief that my Baja desert-ocean-mountain surroundings trigger some of my own wish to be creative.
So, that might be one answer for that question, right? One’s surroundings inspire creativity. Do you find that to be true for you too?
I have no skill for drawing. I have to look at something and work really hard to make a drawing turn out the way I want. My middle son just sees it in his brain and out it comes from his hand. He’s an artist. He even makes a living at it. People ask where he “got it” and I have to say it certainly wasn’t from me. It was a gift from The Creator.
My first born son plays guitar. He excels at it. It is something he loves and has worked hard at. He uses his gift for music and finds fulfillment that way.
The youngest son is a runner and loves all things outdoors. He finds himself drawn to learning too and is getting his doctor of physical therapy. When he finished in April he’ll find a new way to demonstrate his gifts.
All of us have been given gifts and those are the things we are naturally drawn to doing. I feel sad for those who say they have no gifts. I just don’t believe that for a minute.
I want to find my creativity in any way I can, and not worry that it’s not up to some standard of excellence. It’s just a way of experiencing life in a fun way. Life should not be all work. If I want to dance in the living room with the music blasting, or sing at the top of my lungs, I can do that. As long as the neighbor’s aren’t bothered. On second thought, forget the neighbors. Let them sing and dance too loud and long too. As a matter of fact, my neighbors have been known to do this. It’s all good.
Let’s all paint, and walk, and write, and climb, and run, and surf, and swim, and sing, and dance…let’s all create something fun for ourselves. It’s healthy. Pay attention to what’s around you. I’m sure you can find your muse.
I’m playing with watercolor. Is it art? Hell no. Is it fun? Hell yes!
“On June 6, 1995 the President of Mexico, Mr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León declared the waters of Cabo Pulmo as a National Marine Park.”
“In a study by Octavio Aburto, a scientist at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, the biomass of sea life has increased over 460%, [since making it a reserve] making the Cabo Pulmo National Park the most recovered marine reserve in the world.”
from Oceanhealthindex.org
play hard
smile big
laugh loud
but don’t take the rocks
(it’s a marine reserve…Cabo Pulmo in Baja California Sur)
bring the dog
a couple of sandwiches
some oranges and a soda or two
but don’t go taking the shells or the coral or the rocks home with you
from Cabo Pulmo, a marine reserve in Baja California Sur
Check it out:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/most-successful-marine-reserve-cabo-pulmo-110812.htm
Did your parents tell you about The Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus? Did they serve up these characters for you as if they were real? Imagine what it’s like to be a child and find out these are all lies. Maybe we think are doing children a favor creating a make-believe world. But sooner or later they will learn of the deception.
I think, but am not quite sure, that I gave my kids (three sons) these as stories…fiction, but fun. Growing up is hard enough without having to figure out when something is real and when it isn’t. Life is tricky.
Are we always there for our kids? I’d like to think so, but the truth is we are human beings and we make mistakes and fall short sometimes. I know I have. In my heart of hearts I always wanted to be the best mom in the world, full of energy, knowledge, patience, kindness and able to care for my kids even when I was exhausted from work and suffering from the trials life handed me.
My boys are grown men now and my hope is they appreciate what kind of a mother I was/am. The things I learned along the way are valuable to me. I not only learned about how-to-parent (sometimes successfully); I learned a lot about myself, my belief system, my shortcomings, and what I was ultimately capable of.
As a mother and a teacher I learned a lot about the stages that kids go through. I remember taking a developmental psychology class before I became a teacher, but AFTER I had mostly finished the mothering of my young children. All I could think of was, “Why wasn’t I taught these things before I became a parent?” It would have been a lot easier and maybe I could have avoided a lot of heartache for them and for me. Being a parent may be a joy, but parenting can be painful and difficult.
You have to take a driver’s test before you can drive. Most people get a lot of education before beginning their professional careers, be it as a mechanic, engineer, plumber, attorney, whatever. But you don’t have any formal training for the toughest job you’ll ever have. Why is this? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
As for those teen-age years, one thing I know is that teen-agers are still children in their hearts. I believe that they want to be seen as grown up, but they also miss their childhood when they could be carefree—when they did not have a lot of responsibility and they didn’t know about the sometimes evil ways of the world.
When I taught high school I worked with 150 students a day. Teen-agers, every one of them. And I loved (almost) every single minute being with them. They wanted to be respected. They wanted to learn. Maybe they didn’t like the subject I taught (English), and they didn’t come to me with a burning desire to read all those books I required them to read. (I would be kidding myself if I didn’t admit some of them did not read those books.)
But we grew together and learned to love each other and at least some of what I presented in my English class. I cherish my memories of their excellent senses of humor and their abilities to let some things roll off their backs. They survived in the crazy world of high school. Well done, students!
Many people think teen-agers are all about caring only about external appearances, experimenting with sex, drugs and alcohol, and pulling away from authority. Sure it is a time when they are focused on their looks, their peer groups, and they may experiment and make some bad decisions. Who as an adolescent can say they didn’t? Adolescence is a time of disorientation as well as discovery. These young people are working to claim an identity that fits their ideal at a time when they don’t have a lot of personal experience in what adults term “the real world.”
Most of my students, at least 90% of them, were polite to me, showed respect to each other in my presence, loved to banter with me and were quick to laugh at themselves (and me). We managed to navigate some pretty difficult times together—the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, school shootings, and earthquakes, among other tough challenges. If they were willing, and many of them were, a lot of learning happened in the subject I taught (or was trying to teach). Teen-agers are not to be feared. They need boundaries for sure, but they need safe ways to push those boundaries as well.
My musings about dealing with kids wouldn’t be complete without three more tidbits:
My first year teaching–6th grade!
Me with some of my high school girls.
my dear my friend my love my heart
do not waste your mornings
frying bacon for me
let us climb in our boots pull on our hats
we will run up the hill behind the house
360⁰ visions of painted silken skies
wind ices deep into our bones
tossing salty shivers of rewards
…our wide eyes delight in more than mountains
let us hold the joy we share for escapades
and dreams long enough to spill onto
the dirt road behind the corner store
that begs for us and waits to be explored
might as well pinch the cheeks of babies too
no innuendo no hidden thought propped
up to stand in the middle of the room
with wild abandon let’s grab our coats
and wind our way to the main street
store where they sell everything from
pick-up sticks to Levis and lace where we
also drink herbal tea with noisy slurping sounds
we do not waste our days on the insignificant
my dear my friend my love my heart
instead we ride on carousel camels laughing
so much and loud it pains our ears
when permission to sing is granted
the lyrics long on soul and sadness
they touch for us what went before the
promises for tomorrow’s steadiness
do not waste your evenings
frying chicken for me my love
let us stuff logs into the stove instead
…and kiss the night away
Maybe we Americans have given up thinking completely. Maybe we’re a bunch of empty headed folks going from one day to the next without considering what we’re doing to our country, and our planet and the people on it.
Is the world crazy or is it me? I cannot fathom Americans regarding Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.
I am happy I don’t have a TV. I don’t have to listen to any of the candidate babble and I am as far removed from the barrage as possible. What little I am privy to makes me sad and leaves me feeling incredulous. Maybe a lack of critical thinking is hurting my/our country.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up and hear the sound of people speaking with kindness and to see people acting with understanding? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that we all made good decisions for the right reasons? That greed was gone? That wars would end? That we could learn to be happy with what we have and stop wanting more?
We got ourselves into the shape we’re in. Let’s put our heads together and change the shape of things. Instead of a Christmas list, I’m going to make a list of things I can personally do to make things better.
It will be something like this I saw on FB, but I’ll come up with something my own.
Wait for it.
I pull over as far as I can onto exit 14, heading east on the 52. I’m as far to the side on the onramp as possible so that cars can make their egress without crashing into my car. Well, it’s not really my car. It’s my mom’s 1999 Lincoln Continental. It’s going nowhere on its own from here. I am as certain it has a blown transmission as I am of my own name.
Just when you think you’ve been given enough trouble, stress, anxiety—WHAM!! A new problem presents itself, and you must pull on your nearly empty reserves in order to deal with it. That’s what happened to me yesterday. A day with lots of promise, but yesterday went back on its promise.
That’s okay. Happens all the time to all of us, right? Sometimes, though, it just gets old, dealing with one thing after another.
In the moment it took to make it to the side of the freeway, relatively out of harm’s way, I felt myself buckling and I had to reach down into whatever it is that sustains me and grab some pluck. That’s exactly the word for it. Pluck.
Fearlessly, I went into problem solving mode, knowing that the outcome would be a good one if I could hang on to my courage and my thinking skills. Do not panic. Easy to say, but there are cars whizzing by at high speeds and I have to time opening the car door carefully.
Earlier in the day I had tried to open the hood of this vehicle to no avail. I didn’t expect to have a problem with the hood release lever, but it didn’t do its only job to release the hood latch. Damn. How can I check the fluid in the transmission if I can’t get the hood open? Simple answer? I can’t.
I wasn’t having any trouble with the car’s transmission at the time, but the fluid leak had me concerned. I wasn’t positive it was the transmission fluid, but it was my best guess. I went ahead with my plans to drive the car. Bad decision, as it turns out.
In some small way it was gratifying to know later that my supposition about the transmission was correct. Having all the fluid leak out was not what I expected. No way.
My main concern at that moment the transmission stopped doing its thing was that my 99 year old mom was alone and expecting me. Oh, sure, Abby was with her. But Abby is a dog. She’s a good dog too, but she can’t make Mom dinner and keep her from wheeling herself out onto the ramp and then right out the gate to the neighborhood sidewalk. Mom’s been known to do this.
The caregiver is good about putting up the little child gate so that Mom can’t go down the ramp, but who knows if she remembered today? Maybe this will be the day that my inventive mother figures out how to remove the barrier. Squashing these thoughts, I scramble for the AAA membership card and dial for road service.
I’ve been taught (by said mother) to be honest in my dealings with others. In this case, it didn’t work out very well. Telling the woman on the phone that I was the member’s daughter wasn’t getting me what I needed. Instead, she wanted my mother, the AAA Club member, to be the one to request the towing service. Oh, this AAA representative would gladly sell me a policy right then and there, in which case they would gladly get the car off the road for me.
Thanks anyway, Lady. Plan B. I dialed again, hoping to get a different rep, and impersonated my mother. Sounding distraught I explained that my daughter was driving my car when it decided it would no longer run. “My daughter is stranded on the freeway. Can you please send someone?”
Honesty is the best policy, but it didn’t get me a tow. My deception got me the tow. And a ride to Mom’s with a very kind and competent tow truck driver.
Today the old Lincoln Continental is sitting in a shop where broken cars get fixed. I’m thinking it will need a whole new tranny. (That’s guy talk for transmission). I’m going to rent a car for a couple days so I can do some errands. AAA got me a discount on the rental car.
I admit I am sick of problem solving. There has been too much of it going on in my world lately.
However, I’ve learned that it’s not what happens to me that ever really matters. Rather, it’s how I deal with what happens to me. In this case, my life’s mission isn’t a failure. It is merely the car’s transmission failure. This too shall pass.
