I shot this photo at Old Salem one day when my husband and daughter and I were on an outing. I was supposed to be taking photos for a class campus safety project but couldn’t resist the beautiful and bold flowers growing along the edge of a high stone wall.
I shot this photo on a recent outing with my daughter and husband. This lobster caught my attention with characteristics of strength, control, determination and strong armor.that guards his heart. I think it is important to convey those same positive qualities in daily interactions with others. Keep appropriate boundaries in place to benefit all parties.
What kinds of things have you waited on in another season of your life or are you waiting for now? To reach career, financial, educational or personal goals? For resolutions to circumstances? For the gestational period of 10 months and ultimately a child to be born?
Like most kids I found it difficult to wait for school to get out for the weekend. I anticipated social events with excitement and enthusiasm often saying that I couldn’t wait until… whatever it was. Children have a larger portion of their life ahead of them to anticipate and look forward to. Do we need to teach them how to enjoy the moment? I think they already know how to do that and adults can learn from them.
Many adults suffer from a lack of ability to live in the moment, knowing where they have come from but often don’t know where they are going in the distance future and sometimes unsure of the steps for the next day. Not savoring the moment causes the loss of that moment forever. In dwelling backwards or forwards one cannot focus on the present.
Does society value the virtues that are produced as a result of waiting? What about the saying “good things come to those who wait”? Is this an accurate statement? Does society consider patience and perserverance desirable characteristics? Patience certainly makes a person easier to get a long with or more tolerable. Perserverance is produced by learning patience during difficult circumstances. The one common denominator in waiting, patience and perserverance is hope. It is the expectation that something bigger and better will happen just over the horizon.
How many times do we get overly focused on our own troubles and overlook the people who have our back? Friends are the fabric of the world. When we need help with a project or to talk about what is troubling us they are there. We need to reciprocate when their time of need arises. So many people have written poems about friendship with the very principle grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Mark 12:31″Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these” (NIV 1984). One of the people who wrote about friendship was Helen Steiner Rice. Friendship is a bond that occurs through social interaction and places concern for others above self. This could be compared to firefighters’, police’ and soldiers’ selflessness, though not exactly the same, yet still a similar attribute of true friendship’s sacrifice. Some phrases that come to mind are “Friends Forever”, the technological language abbreviation”BFF”, and “What are friends for?”. Perhaps a negative connotation would be when a relationship with the opposite sex is referenced as not committed, but as ”they are just friends”. We want to teach our children the neighbor principle since friends can be good or bad influences and need to be chosen carefully. Our kids need help learning how to be good friends where they are and know which ones to hang around with.
Who needs friendship? I do.
These yummy creations were a spur-of-the-moment undertaking this afternoon. My mom and daughter had no luck with the sticks. Some of the batter was leftover. No cake batter of mine is going to waste! These only take 4-5 minutes to bake. Even better.
Abraham Lincoln said “It’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years!”
With the increase in connections through social networking and media it would seem that humanity has advanced in its communication skills. In reality we are neglecting the “life in our years”. The sense of community that comes from face-to-face interactions with neighbors- the support in the form of a listening ear during difficult times, the celebration of good news and answered prayers- cannot be recreated in online conversations. It is apples and oranges comparing the two.
When I was a little girl I sat on the front porch with my grandparents late at night talking about everything and walking on the wrought iron rails. It was so simple yet so much fun to watch the stars and ask a hundred questions. My neighbors sat on their porch next door and I would go over to their porch and ask them questions and we would talk. Kids love to be nosy and want to know stuff. What a great memory I have of doing that. Those neighbors are no longer in their homes but are deceased or in nursing homes. My grandfather is still with me, but my grandmother passed away in the 1980′s. It is my hope that I can maintain community relationships with the neighbors I have now so that my children can see the importance of those connections.
As a non-traditional student I get the short end of the stick when it comes to the impact of my accomplishments on scholarships. My activity resume includes church choir, an occasional volunteer day or two during a break if I have time and volunteering for an hour at school once a semester. Compared to when I was a traditional student over twenty years ago it does not seem to matter much to those who are looking for extensive service on a regular basis. Taking care of children includes cooking, planning events, prioritizing activities, shuffling schedules, making appointments, haggling with ex-husbands about visitation schedules, consulting with teen daughter on how to make up time missed from her visitation, planning meals, grocery shopping late at night because you are at school all day, hours spent with math tutors, organizing paperwork for financial aid, loans and grants and getting those in at the appropriate times all while you are juggling your kids’ homework and routines. So being a manager, workflow coordinator, cook, housekeeper and stress/psychiatric/counselor don’t amount to anything that will make for important contributions as a future employee or to the community?
This afternoon I took my daughter to play outside in a field. We took a ball, foam dart guns and snacks. The toys in the bag did not interest her, instead she carried her yo-yo and picked up a large stick to go with it. She wrapped the string on the branches and began swinging the yo-yo like a pendulum, knocking the seeds off the dandelion stems. We were in a shady spot and only found a few to knock off and we saw how many dotted the sunny part of the rest of the field. Many white fluffy orbs dotted the grass and we ran out into the field towards them. I think we hit almost every one of them! We saved the two biggest ones we could find and went back inside to get a purple flowerpot to fill with dirt so we could plant our own dandelions. We didn’t have a shovel so we used a spoon to dig, getting our dirt from a moist area near the creek bank. There are potentially thousands of new dandelions that will come up in that field now because of our fun!
They are hardy and healthy when the leaves and blooms are eaten. Here is a quote from an article on E-how.com explaining the benefits of eating dandelions:”…dandelions are super-food: low calorie, nutrient-rich and cleansing.Just one cup of raw chopped dandelion greens is 25 calories and contains 112 percent of the daily recommended value of vitamin A, 32 percent daily value of vitamin C and more calcium than a cup of cottage cheese. Dandelion greens also contain lutein, which is good for keeping your vision healthy.”
Don’t know if we will like them. I have a feeling that the pot we put them in is way too small. Maybe we can transplant them at some point. It will be a fun experience for the us and the yard man in the fall when all the new flowers come out!
I have officially been riding on the crazy train for a week now. The day’s tasks are a blur and free time is non-existent. It is the same time every semester that this happens. It is a time of eating canned ravioli for lunch while standing next to the bathroom only to run back to the library again. It is spending all weekend doing homework after I’ve stayed up late every night finishing up and preparing for the next day. It is spending hours filling out papers for scholarships and financial aid in order that I can afford to go to school next semester. So the biggest thing I am looking forward to is eating in the school cafe instead of packing the usual canned soup. All hail the life of a student!
In the one corner is the shiny, happy fun-filled weekend full of activities such as brisk walks, leisurely shopping at thrift stores, and lunch with friends at Arby’s. The weekend is a rookie. Not ready to take on the menacing beast in the other corner of the ring. In the other corner is the homework. The horrible, grotesque stuff that oozes out of your backpack- projects, essays, test reviews, analyses and book exercises-spilling into every aspect of your life. It can’t wait. It is the emergency waiting to happen just when you want to spend time with family and friends, go out to eat dinner or just relax in front of the tv because it is the only chance you get all week.
Round 1: Weekend and homework are in the ring, homework pulls a right hook, and misses. Homework pulls back and knocks weekend out cold. Homework wins the match!
