Hmmm…I wondered why it was silent today in my inbox! Looks like the system stopped alerting me to posts following mine. THANK YOU all for your support in this scary time.

I plan to reply to everyone tomorrow as I am fading fast. Just wanted to pop in and say today was better than yesterday. I am still having my moments of anxiety reaction and aftershock, if you will. but I am better. I slept better than my husband last night. He said he felt like he had to be alert to every sound. I hope tonight he will sleep better.

My keyboard and mouse batteries are also fading fast, so I will see you all tomorrow!

At the moment, I am sitting peacefully typing and listening to relaxing classical music, (Pachelbel just finished) surrounded by dogs and cat, with my husband snoozing on the sofa.

I am grateful to be able to have this moment at all since last night about 2am, someone shot a flare gun through the office window and its storm window. It hit the wall, my desk, and then caught the carpet on fire while we slept. The smoke alarms went off, which alerted us, and my husband was able to put out the smoldering spot.

We are all okay, thank God, but we are shaken.

Our bedroom is upstairs and on the other side of the house from where this happened, and neither we nor the dogs heard the shot enough to stir. The first alert were the alarms. The office was full of smoke, as was the laundry room, and it was moving outwards from there.

It could have been much worse as there was a pile of cardboard boxes just feet away from where it hit. Had they shot in the other window, things might have been much different. That room is next to the steep stairway to get downstairs. Had a fire taken hold, we would have had trouble getting out of the house ourselves, let alone with the dogs and cat.

There was a separate incident up in town about fifteen minutes before our house got hit, which they hope will lead to the perpetrators as the old guy across from that house has security cameras all over. We, however, are across from corn stubble and surrounded by fields. No witnesses.

I will admit I am alternating between gratitude that what could have been a tragedy is merely a $1000 annoyance, provided our insurance covers it, and some intense anger to have been the target for someone’s foray into what could have caused the loss of our house and lives.

I hope we can sleep tonight. I could not after it happened. I have been using all my tools to keep from having it go into physical pain.

Thankfully, the authorities are actually interested in bringing the perpetrators to justice. That is a change from our last town.

I apologize if this rambled. I am strung out and exhausted.

I am tired but wanted to check in here and visit you all. I find I think of you dear souls during my days, even when I cannot make it in here. What a blessing you all are!

Oddly enough, no one in our book group had slept well last night. I wonder if any of us will remember the discussion next time! I am grateful to have this group. The members are pretty amazingly on the same page, so it is small but a safe space.

I am grateful for our friends’ Standard Poodles, too, who help host the book club. Both are quite fond of me, so I am always greeted like a long lost buddy. I get the canine equivalent of a ticker tape parade whenever I arrive.

I am grateful to have enough health now to have a busy weekend. That was not always so, and rather recently.

What a blessing it is to have the money now to be able to say I was too tired to think of getting home after our normal dinner time and then cooking anyway. That, too, is a recent blessing. We stopped for a yummy meal at Chipotle. I love how they have write ups on their paper products that introduce you to the farmers from whom they source so we can be grateful for them, too.

I am grateful for a peaceful evening in which to wind down surrounded by love. And I shall be very grateful for my comfy bed in not too long.

Such ordinary things, but how inestmably precious!

Good night, sweet people! May your dreams be as sweet as you are!

Oh, goodness. I am currently in a time of growth in some major areas, a place where I am starting to see more clearly how the puzzle fits together.

The list right now: Forgiveness, Self-Compassion, Finances, Awareness, Trust, Courage/Finding my voice, Allowing myself to feel more loved, and the ability to take more of an Observer role of my emotions and situations. (Like I said, it is a time of growth…on the accelerated track!)

They are all a work in progress, as I am a work in progress! ????

Liebe Ursula, this quote spoke to me also.

Perhaps it may mean something a little different to each according to specific need. Here is my take from where I am:

Making ourselves right is, to me, when I engage in that inner dialogue that points out the faults of whoever I am upset as if they have no good to be seen at all. They must be wrong, they must have done it intentionally, they hurt me, they always hurt me, they have a pattern of hurting…and so on down the spiral to Righteous Misery and the coveted Victim of the Year award. ????

Now sometimes, yes, they are indeed wrong, but in those cases, it is usually pretty obvious, and not a position I need to fight to maintain with my inner harangue. If there is a humpback whale in the corner of the living room, chances are you won’t need to point it out to anyone. They will already have noticed.

Making myself right is also a way I distance from the other as a way of attempting to minimize or diminish my hurt over the situation or over what I wanted and did not receive from the person in question. To distance is, in some respects, the first step towards dehumanizing, which opens up the field of unproductive behaviors something fierce. We feel much more justified in being nasty to someone we can declare “deserves” it, even if we are appalled by our behavior afterwards.

Making myself wrong is usually a sort of twisted power play on my part — it is me making a bid for control in what feels like an uncontrollable situation. If I can make myself wrong, you see, then I can figure out what the problem is and fix ME, so then poof, no problem anymore! The only problem is that it does not work that way. And, frankly, I am not always wrong anymore than I am always right! That has not, however, stopped me from taking on responsibility that was never mine in circumstances I did not create in my desperate bids to make things come out as I wanted. ????

Making myself wrong or making myself right can both be a way of stepping into the role of victim, and we all know that path leads nowhere good!

The polarizing Either-Or, black and white effect of making oneself right or wrong simply puts us farther away from solutions that actually WORK, but we do keep trying it, don’t we? ????

That shaky tender place allows for us to feel our feelings while maintaining a position of grace towards ourselves as well as the other. It leaves room for us both to be human, to get hurt, and to work it out more effectively, I think.

I am not there by any means, but I find that the more often I can visit this place of gentleness with myself and others, the more I like it…and the more I visit it. Maybe one day I will live there, after all. ????

I hope that explanation helps. It is just from what I have been noticing in myself.

Blessings to you, my friend. A nice hug…and have some more linden tea! Very calming!

Dear Diane,

I offer you a hug and some hot tea, and the warmth of shared grief.

One more heartbreaking loss. How are we ever to find the right answers to such tragedies when our leaders cannot even seem to ask the right questions?

In the face of such overwhelming situations, I think you and THenry and Mother Teresa are right. I think that all we really can do is the next right thing wherever we are.

We are not called to make every place better; the job would be too huge, and we would quit in frustration and despair. Rather, we are stewards of where we are, trusting that every positive act we put into our part of the web will reverberate to all the other parts as well, in ways we cannot imagine.

Every act that works toward calm and peace, justice and mercy, compassion and kindness benefits the whole. Every prayer, every meditation session, every bit of work we do on healing our own hurts counts as well. Every bit of volunteering, each smile extended to a stranger, every compliment, held door, or clasped hand, all add up to more loving energy in the world. The healing touch of your massage therapist as well as your taking gentle care of yourself that way also work for the greater good because then you have more energy and ability to share more love in tangible ways.

In Christian terms, it is being Christ’s hands in the world, reaching to all in love. In more general words, it is simply loving the world. And goodness knows it needs more of that.

What kind of pup was your Pepper, THenry?

I first found John Weiss’ artwork through the Lang calendar For the Love of Dogs. As I am a longtime dogoholic, I had to have it. ???? I once took a picture of my husband patting our old Labrador’s head whole sitting on the porch of a cabin in West Virginia. The dog had his head back, neck reaching in pure pleasure for more attention — such love flowing between both. It has been just over eleven years since we lost that pup at nearly fourteen, and we still miss him. Now the Lab mix pups he sent us are just turned eight. Wow.

I am so glad to hear you are feeling better and got a walk in! Boost those endorphins!

Thank you for such a beautiful wish, THenry. I was just having this discussion with Him the other day while sitting in a sunbeam, saying I am willing to tackle these new, and often confusing, tasks but also expressing how very tired I am. The reassurance was similar to your lovely words, in essence that God is not into trying us above our capabilities, and that He did indeed know.

Have you ever run across the verse in Psalms that speaks of how God will not break a bent reed? Such a lovely tender image.

Oh, Manda! I bet the smell in your snow globe was amazing!! I have spent so much of my life with dogs that I find I often interact with the world using my nose. That is one of the elements of our visit to Big Sur that has stuck with me despite it being nearly twenty years ago. What a smell! ????

Where we used to live we used to walk a mile track around a pond where there was residential housing as well as office nearby. I once decided to walk around one circuit with my eyes shut so I could experience it with my nose. Wow. The world changed! I smelled someone doing laundry and could tell what dryer sheets they favored. Another person was having chicken for dinner. Someone else wasn’t a very good cook. There was asphalt, duck, goose, fish, pond plants and trees, and lots of mud!

Thankfully, both my trusty dog and my trusty husband helped make sure I was safe. ????

You are very welcome. I have recently had some experiences that have been helping me feel that sense growing in me. It caused me to realize how different the world can seem to those who never had to question if they were loved, or would be safe, or to live on the eggshells of an abusive environment.

That said, it is not a life sentence! As the Soothsayer in Kung Fu Panda tells Po, “Your story may not have had a happy beginning, but that is not who you ARE.”

Focusing our gaze and our energy on the relationships we have with those who value us and nudging ourselves out there to create more healthy community around us can craft for us a Family of Choice. We are not alone. We are deeply valued. We are loved. ❤️ Blessings to you! ❤️

You are very much not alone!!

One of my dear, very peaceful friends, wrote to me several times of her struggles to accept this President and what we see as his often baffling and blatant disregard for so many things we hold as essential. Eventually, she wrote and told me the Spirit had told her very clearly that she already knew what to do with her enemies and she must pray for him! She grumbled a bit but decided to do so.

There followed a funny bit about the specifics, how she was to pray FOR him and his personal welfare –rather than that something horrible would remove him from circulation and stop him from doing more damage. (No losing Air Force One in the Bermuda Triangle or praying a giant sinkhole under the Oval Office…)

She said it had not changed him one bit, but it had changed her, and that this was enough. She hasn’t changed her mind one bit, but she has changed her heart.

As you might guess, she is one of my “heroes of faith.” ❤️

You might enjoy reading some Anne Lamott. In her book series on grace (Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and Grace, Eventually) she speaks of her similar struggle over President George W. Bush. (I think it was the second book, mostly.) Her wrangling over being told she was to love soneone she could not stand was quite funny and illuminating!