Clearing away the noise...

Yesterday morning I decided to put in my cd of The Lovely Bones to listen to while I was in the shower. Usually I listen to Paramore while I get ready, but I have 3 cds left of the story and only two days before it's due, so I put in cd 8 and turned it up, stepping into the shower. I noticed that I could only hear it above the sound of the water if I really really concentrated on the words, but it was too difficult so I turned it off. I guess because I have the words to Paramore memorized, I have no problem making them out. But to comprehend new information takes much more focus and determination.

It made me think of other things that we hear everyday, things that fall into the background, things we continue to sing along to because we know them so well, things that require no thought because we've built a comfy little nest in them. But then one day a shift occurs. It's like the inner core of Earth moving at a different speed than that of the outer crust. Eventually the outer layer can't move with the core any longer and instead it splits, and eventually falls away.

In the story, The Lovely Bones- and, please don't read ahead if you plan to see the movie or read the book, the murderer of the main character is never caught. I liked this part. In listening to an interview with the ingenious author, Alice Sebold, after finishing the book today, she explains why she chose to let justice go unserved. "Because that's not the point." Exactly.

So many things that are commonly considered as "the point" are merely crumbled paper surrounding the point. They distract us, giving the impression that life is complicated. But, really, it's very simple. As Sebold says, there is good in everybody. As an author, and I think as a person, you have to have compassion for all characters, otherwise they become one-dimensional. Sometimes we make things or people in life one-dimensional to better understand them. Pay attention to that melody you're continually humming, and stop and ask yourself, is it the point?


Today my new camera lens arrived in the mail! It. Is. Wonderful. It is made to take amazing portraits in low light and motion. I practiced on my pup tonight, and I can't wait to practice using it at my husband's concert tomorrow night! Happy New Year!!!!

Allowing for revisions...

Today I celebrated my best friend's birthday with a visit to Hontoon Island State Park. But that wasn't the plan. When we arrived at the park, we quickly realized that we had only found the parking lot. To reach the island you have to take a ferry ride across the river. So, in line we got. As the boat approached, my eyes attached to two beautiful little girls riding toward us. I was so caught up in this and the itinerary already formed in my head of 1. get on ferry, 2. cross river, 3. arrive at park, that it didn't occur to me to step aside and let them off the boat. This reminded me of when, at the hotel, or anywhere for that matter, people waiting for an elevator crowd in front of its doors, leaving no room for the current riders to depart. In fact, many people continue to try to get on the elevator without the others getting off. I felt dumb for not moving out of their way and asked myself why I didn't move without being asked. My answer came to rest on this idea of agenda.

Every single millisecond of every day our brain is putting together, and constantly revising, our agenda. Our plan today, made weeks ago, was to revisit Blue Spring State Park, see the manatees there, and go canoeing. Well, after a 30 minute wait in line, we were turned away from the park due to overcrowding. Luckily, I had looked up a nearby park as an alternate this morning, and so our agendas instantly changed, and we headed to Hontoon Island. We expected to get there, canoe, and head back over to Blue Spring to see the manatees. Well, the winds were too high, so canoeing was out. Instead, we decided to check out their hiking trail. It was a beautiful walk through to the waterway filled with dead and dying trees. I called it the tree graveyard. We saw some armadillas and birds along the way to visit the shell mound of the indigenous indians who once called the island home 12,000 years ago, I believe it was.

After this, we hightailed it out of there top-speed in order to make it back to Blue Spring before it closed. But, when we got back to our car and called to be sure, we found Blue Spring had been closed due to loss of water. So, our once firm agenda got tweaked and retweaked several times today, resulting in not one of our three main goals being accomplished. But, did we have a great birthday celebration? Yes.

Trying to just not have an agenda is a pretty ridiculous task. Our brains, I realized today, do it without so much as our signed consent. But recognizing that it's ok when this agenda gets changed and recognizing that it will are two huge ways to release your grip on them. And, maybe if we weren't so attached to our unconscious agendas, we would be more likely to step out of the way and let others follow through on their own agendas without us running into each other.


So many agendas, so little consideration. Behold the "Shell Mound". Apparently the indians really liked escargot. Anyway, I have decided I have been depending too greatly on my Mexico shots. In fact, when I picked up my camera to take Christmas shots last week, I had to retrain myself on it for a second, it had been so long. No more. I got a new lens for Christmas, and I am ready to get back to shooting, and hopefully to more regular blogging. I miss my little blog.

Learning to float...

For me, it's my desire to see my name on a book, to see my photos in a magazine, to see my art on someone's wall, to have more blog followers- the desire to be famous, to be known, to be special. Two things recently got me thinking about this push that so many of us face in our own unique ways. Only they were examples of the opposite- the desire to be anonymous.

A friend of mine whom I work with and I are both lovers of the Britney. So, yesterday at work to pass the time, we did a google image search. The results were disheartening. Although half the photos were legitimate press shots, the other half were from the paparazzi- many pictures of her crying in various public places. This disgusted the both of us.

Then this afternoon as I was running errands and listening to the amazing and beautifully written story, The Lovely Bones, I encountered it from a different angle. The story takes a close look at a family in the years following the murder of one of its members. The sister of the victim, while attending a camp away from home, does not reveal her last name for fear of the other kids recognizing her as "the dead girl's sister". She wants to feel normal. Britney wants to feel normal. The desire for anonymity.

So, thinking on these two things, I started to wonder why we are pressed to be singled out as special. The weird thing is that as soon as I got home and opened my email, I found one from Oprah.com that featured an article on that exact topic. So I read it.

The article was actually inspired by the acts of the "balloon family" and the party crashers that have been overwhelming the news lately. The author, Mike Robbins, attempts in his writing to dissect this facet of human nature. He points out, not just the obvious, but the more subtle ways that this urge presents itself, i.e. wanting recognition at work, desiring more "friends" on facebook, etc. And, it made me ask myself the question, why is the pleasure of taking the photograph not enough? Why is the act of writing not enough? Why the need to be published?

According to Robbins, it is our deep-seated fear that we are somehow inadequate and inherently flawed. Perhaps. For me, I think part of it may also be that I feel the need for some sort of physical goal in life. If I have that concrete picture of a book in my mind, I have the carrot to chase, thereby giving myself, and my life, meaning and purpose. I think my biggest fear of all is the idea that we are just "floating accidental-like on a breeze". Why that bothers me so I have no idea. Worse, I have no idea how to let go of it.

Admiring truth...

I watched the most amazing movie last night about a brave man, a kid really. He dared to give up all of his connections in search of truth. I can't even imagine what that must be like to release all your sources of meaning. Everything that has defined you- your relationships, your status, your education, your money, your every possession, your name. How frightening it must have been. This kid relinquished all of that and escaped toward God, toward our one doorway to the eternal- nature.

Afterward, many people said he was foolish, self-destructive, and, worse, selfish for his choice to abandon his family and friends and disappear into the wild. They said he had a death wish, because there were so many things he could have done to make his trek easier. And, that was the part that struck me the most about this movie. Life, as seen through the main character's eyes, was too easy. He wanted it to be hard, to be a challenge, to be more meaningful to him. He didn't want to swipe a card and get a meal; he wanted to hunt, prepare, and cook his food. He didn't want to drive to where he was going; he wanted to climb mountains, cross raging rivers, and hike through desserts to move forward. He didn't want to grow comfortable and lazy in his relationships; he wanted to meet new people and learn new things.

It's no wonder we are all such fakes. We all live our lives for each other- and not in a healthy way. In the end, he determines that relationships are what brings meaning to life, yet not relationships based on pleasing other people. Not even that, but based on societal expectations of what people should be. We follow. Most of us are just regurgitated xeroxes of what our childhoods created. Most of us can't even tell you who we are, let alone why we are that way. Most of us stay stagnant in the comfort of who we are. Most of us never challenge our paint-by-number lifestyle.

Christopher McCandless was not selfish. He understood something that almost no one throughout all of human history ever has. That we are here to live a life that is by definition our own, of our own making. There is no right way. And, people who find that selfish are only scared.


The Tule tree. It is 2000 to 3000 years old, and has a circumference of 160 feet.

Beholding love's abilities...

You know that feeling when you hear or read someone describing exactly how you feel about something, but you never knew you felt that way until you heard it? I love that feeling. I got it this morning as I was reading my latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. It goes like this...

"When one is loved without boundary or merit, one finds life emerging into new dimensions never before contemplated. It was the experience of being loved that opened my eyes to see the love that is all around me, something that I had never been able to see before. It was the presence of love that empowered me, to be able to receive love and then required me to give it away. Love expanded my life to new dimensions. Love enabled me to risk, to be vulnerable, to cross boundaries, to interact and to grow to the point where I could actually be free of those survival fears that caused me to victimize those who are defined as "different". The more I gave, the more I seemed to have to give."

I quote this passage in an attempt to discuss love as it really is, and not as this season (along with all others actually) likes to see it. This time of year we are bombarded with jewelry commercials where diamonds and words are tossed about as some kind of proof of feeling. But, love, to me at least, is not a feeling at all, not an emotion, it is something deeper and unexplainable. Feelings come and go, they are just about the least stable thing in the world. No relationship can maintain on feeling alone. And, the funny thing is, the way love truly is, is so much ridiculously more beautiful than the way the Celine Dion songs make it out to be. Feelings will always come and go. But love can change your life.


Amor siempre. Yes, I am still posting photos from my Mexico trip and probably will be for a while. I worked on them for approximately 10 hours this week, and still have about 1200 to go. It'll be a while before I post them all on my flickr site. But when I do, I will definitely post a link here!

Seeing anew...

My friend once generously gave me a huge bottle of vitamins when she switched brands, as I hadn't been taking any. Well, to make sure I remembered to take them, I left them on the side of my sink. The first couple nights I forgot to take them and after that, I was so used to seeing them there that they blended right into the countertop. Until about three months later, when I thought- hey, I haven't been taking my vitamins!

This story crept into my mind the other day when one of my students had what hit me as a very clever observation. In the program I use to teach sounds, there is a symbol for one sound that looks like two letter o's connected by a line on top. I haven't gotten to this sound yet with this particular student, but he still sees it on the tiles we use. It's good motivation because he is very excited to learn the sounds that have the strange looking symbols, and he always asks me about them. Then, yesterday he came in and told me he had seen the symbol. I gave him a disbelieving look and asked him where. He told me people write it sometimes after prices. I didn't understand what he meant until he wrote it down for me, and wrote the sound as the final 2 zeros in $10.00. Then, I saw it the way he did, and I smiled.

I had trouble seeing what he saw because I had always associated the symbol with letters, and not numbers. It's really funny how our eyes and minds get so used to seeing things our one specific way that we have trouble seeing in new ways. Just imagine how many millions of other cool ideas, inventions, and solutions exist out in the universe that we don't see. We just have to hit the refresh button on our eyes. And, a great way of doing that is listening to children. Oftentimes, they really are seeing things for the first time. They don't have the same assumptions etched in their souls by thirty plus years of living.


This is my homage to the American Express commercial, because I think it's awesome. For me, it represents the fact that happiness is hiding everywhere. We just have to actively be on the lookout for it.

Here's the link if you have no clue what I'm talking about...
American Express Commercial

Climbing a ladder of greatness...

I'm trying something new tonight- something I am calling a quote ladder. I found one quote in a book I'm reading that caught my eye, and then each of the following quotes spawned from the ideas in the preceeding one. Since I wasn't having any particularly interesting thoughts of my own, I figured I would borrow some from the greats...

"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve." Erich Fromm

"The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." Alan Watts

"There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values." David G. Myers

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.” Leo Tolstoy

"Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results." James Allen

"If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results." Jack Dixon

"Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive." Mohandas Gandhi

“Sometimes we strive so hard for perfection that we forget that imperfection is happiness” Karen Nave

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Standing up...

1. The two times I worked in daycares with practices I didn't approve of, and I quit without leaving notice.

2. The time I took my first professional job, pretending I was capable.

3. The time I told a friend to her face that she'd made me mad and I didn't want her in my wedding.

4. The time I stood up and screamed in the middle of a restaurant when my rights were violated.

5. My first art show when I put my work out to be judged by others whose opinions could not be swayed by their personal feelings for me.

Those are the five times I stood up to my fear. Five times that were the most uncomfortable times of my life. Even when you stand up against fear, you're still fearful. But it's like you're saying so what. Yeah I'm scared, so what? They say that the strongest samurais study with monks to learn how to lose their fear of death. Because anyone who does not fear death cannot be beaten, is in effect invincible. In fact, one of the survivors of Flight 1549 that I read about said that for a time, he felt he could walk out into the middle of traffic and the cars would stop. Opposed to what an outsider might think, they were no longer afraid of flying, they no longer feared death because they'd seen it, most had made their peace with it, some even looking forward to it.

The one thing, aside from knowing my husband, that has taught me the most in my life was my three years working at Hubbard House, a domestic violence shelter. You learn fast that everything is not black and white, or even gray. It's more of a kaleidoscope of colors. Procedure required me to call in several reports to Children's Services in my time there, many of which I didn't want to make. You come in thinking if a child is being abused, the best thing is for them to get out of that situation. But you learn that it is rarely this way. Ripping a child out of his or her own family can be traumatic. Sending a child to foster care or a youth center can be dangerous. Children, like all people, cling to what they know.

Death is the ultimate definition of the unknown. We can talk in detail about what we believe will happen, but behind that lovely picture is a void. We don't know, yet it looms in front of us. The worst part of the event, many passengers said, was the feeling of being out of control, strapped into this doomed machine with no way out. From the moment of birth, we have only one way out. But we stand up to our fear every day by moving forward. By living. Though we may be fearful underneath, so what?


One of the decorated graves at the graveyard we visited where people were just chillin and hanging out with their loved ones.