My focus Today

Facebook Home: "'I am passionate about eating in a way that nourishes this lovely body of mine.'"

Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events

Homesick at home.

What do you do when you are feeling homesick, yet you are home?

I mean, I am in my house and I have my amazing, loving, entertaining, keep-me-constantly-on-my-toes grandkidlets sleeping close by. That is wonder-full!

... and yet they are sleeping, and I am not.

I guess that too much of my heart isin't home.

Barbara and Donn are in Wyoming, Amber and Kirt are in San Fran, Bob and Ryan and Matt and Elli are in Dallas at the TX-OU game, and last, but very much not least, Brad is in Boston.

I am feeling like the feeling you get when you hear the BoDeans sing, "Far Far Away From My Heart".

Sigh.

Hook 'Em TV Dinners

In honor of TX-OU game this weekend.

TV Tray Folding Table Texas

Immensity of the Purpose

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Norman Mailer

In Search of Masahide's Moon

Barn's burnt down --

now

I can see the moon.

~Masahide

KINDNESS

KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Excerpted from Ten Poems to Open Your Heart by Roger Housden. "Kindness" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Little Altars Everywhere

"We are swinging high flying way up, higher than in real life. And when I look down, I see all the ordinary stuff--our brick house, the porch the tool shed, the oil drum barbecue pit, the clothesline, the chinaberry tree. But they are all lit up from inside so their everyday selves have holy sparks in them, and if only people could see those sparks, theyd go and kneel in front of them and pray and just feel good. Somehow the whole world looks like little altars everywhere."

~ Rebecca Wells

Worry leads to atrophy.

What real courage is ....

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee