My inaugural post. From the legend himself:

"Your beliefs become your thoughts.
Your thoughts become your words.
Your words become your actions.
Your actions become your habits.
Your habits become your values.
Your values become your destiny."

~Mahatma Gandhi~

~Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...
It's about learning to dance in the rain.

Forgive me for the length of this essay, but I thought you all might enjoy it.

Love, love.

_________________________________________________________

On Being the Mommy
by Anna Quindlen

If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever
existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black
button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow
ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower
lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin. All my babies are
gone now.

I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in
what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one
closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have
learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of
them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke
and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to
keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the
bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by
themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber duckie at
its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible
except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling
rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education,
all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things
Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you
flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the
playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations -- what they taught
me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising
children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes
multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an
endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to
positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice
and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on
his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my
last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on
sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever- shifting
certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to
trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

First science said environment was the great shaper of human nature. But
it certainly seemed as though those babies had distinct personalities,
some contemplative, some gregarious, some crabby. And eventually science
said that was right, and that they were hard-wired exactly as we had
suspected.

Still, the temptation to defer to the experts was huge. The literate
parent, who approaches everything; cooking, decorating, life as though
there were a paper due or an exam scheduled, is in particular peril when
the kids arrive.

How silly it all seems now, the obsessing about language acquisition and
physical milestones, the riding the waves of normal, gifted,
hyperactive, all those labels that reduced individuality to a series of
cubbyholes. But I could not help myself. I had watched my mother
casually raise five children born over 10 years, but by watching her I
intuitively knew that I was engaged in the greatest and potentially most
catastrophic task of my life. I knew that there were mothers who had
worried with good reason, that there were children who would have great
challenges to meet.

We were lucky; ours were not among them. Nothing horrible or astonishing
happened: there was hernia surgery, some stitches, a broken arm and a
fuchsia cast to go with it. Mostly ours were the ordinary everyday
terrors and miracles of raising a child, and our children's challenges
the old familiar ones of learning to live as themselves in the world.
The trick was to get past my fears, my ego and my inadequacies to help
them do that.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful
books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts
of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet
codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong
with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little
mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I
insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can
talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes
were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did
Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language,
mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I
arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible
summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the
classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you
get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the
McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it
up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow
them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I
thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while
doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly
clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There
is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in
the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish
I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they
sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had
not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath,
book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the
getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and
what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought
someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I
suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in
a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be
relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over
the top.

And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like
best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my
essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn
from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts
were.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

~ Joseph Campbell

"Luck is when preperation meets opportunity"

I blogged this, but it is good here. And a quick read. ;)


"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others." - bell hooks from 1994 Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations


Live in Love, my friends. :)

Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

If you want to make someone angry, tell him a lie; if you want to make him furious, tell him the truth. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. – Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher, 1788-1860

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that to be alive is a grand thing." ~Agatha Christie

"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tail." ~Hans Christian Anderson
"Every man’s life is a fairy tail written by God’s finger." ~Hans Christian Anderson

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." ~C.S. Lewis

"Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." ~Anomous


Big Love and Gratitude,
~Fun Sway .•:* _.•*•._ *:•.
.•:*¨¨`*:•.*•. .•* .•:*´¨¨*:•.
.•:* /. •*• .\ *:•.

New Program
Guarantees Life
Till End

- Tamnut, fictional character

"When you develop the courage to live without relying on Reason or Fear to guide you, nirvana will be your reward."

awnoka

From Rev. Awno:

"When you identify yourself as *only* your conscious mind, you are locking yourself in the bathroom of your mansion."

One who is never wrong, is often ignorant.

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is akind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner
security."

Albert Einstein

"I choose what I see, and I see beauty."
-sulshyne

"Witches are the best bitches."

--Awno, 9/28/08