Let's All Do the Gratitude Dance!

What fun!

Quien Sabe?

Quien Sabe

Who knows?

Who knows what this day will bring?

Who knows what this life, this year,

This minute will offer us?

But here in Boca de Tomatlan

There is a rich sweetness that only

Seems to show up at the fringes

Where one field bumps up against another.

River and sea, jungle and beach.

Cement pourers shape a living room floor

Eighty-five steps up the side of a mountain while

Touristas pour space-age dollars into a timeless past.

Diversity flourishes at the edges.

Here there are many edges –

A man in an orange t-shirt casting a

Turquoise fishing net;

A grandmother pounding clothes on river rocks;

A child playing with a mountain mongoose

Under the multi-colored criss-cross of drying laundry …

Scenes captured through a ten megapixel Canon

That would feed a family of four for months

By a visitor whose vacation dollars

Will help feed the multitudes.

Bountiful nature does her part also with unlimited

Red snapper, grouper and shrimp from the sea,

Sweet jack fruit and papayas as big as pebbly footballs;

Backyards filled with banana and coconut palms.

Nearby, Los Arcos shows off its underwater diversity

As white-striped angel fish writhe in a purple and orange 

frenzy for bits of bread dropped into the water 

by giggling children of all ages.

Multitudes of striped jacks join the fray while a stately pair

Of Moorish Idols glide disdainfully at a distance

Their long, graceful plumes waving above them.

In the bay, fishermen pole their boats around the shallow

s-curve sand spit that divides river from ocean even as bells 

announce the first Sunday mass over the chorus of roosters

while in the distance mariachi music pulses into the morning.

  

Soaring inches above the flat, green water, brown pelicans  

Scout breakfast then return from their fishing forays 

To make their stands on the silent, rocking outboard motors 

While a snow white heron stretches its long thin neck

In a rhythmic sun dance to the sound of the surf.

Across the river at Casa de los Artistes,

Paints, canvases, brushes and dozens of gel mediums wait

For another day of immersion in the creative spirit.

Here even more edges mix and mingle as

The hard edge of Photoshop blends into the soft edge of collage

While an arrogant rooster demands a place in every art piece.

Quien sabe?

Who knows?

Who knows what life will bring us?

Sometimes an answer, more often a question,

But always, always and in all ways,

A reminder to live each moment and

Grow where we’re planted.

Goals or NOT!!

For years I've harbored a secret ... setting goals doesn't work for me.  I've tried over and over, invoking the SMART acronym (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) and reminding myself frequently about the gold standard story.  You remember the story I'm sure.  The Yale study that showed that the 3% of the class of 1953 that had specific, written goals twenty years later had greater net worth than the 97% who didn't have written goals ... combined!

But, my inevitable result with goal setting was failure.  I decided it was a character flaw and just put the whole goal-setting thing in a box labeled "maybe someday" (landing right beside New Years Resolutions) and threw a tattered quilt over it.  Funniest thing ... after I quit making goals and just started doing what I wanted to do, things started falling into place.

Every once in awhile however, I'd feel like a slug and bring out that goal thing, dust it off and try it again.  The result was always the same.  When I started thinking about "intention statements" and trying to figure out how they were different from goals, that old Yale story bobbed back to the surface creating a ripple of confusion.  Then I made a discovery.

THERE WAS NO YALE STUDY!  The whole thing was a concoction.  Fast Company magazine (perhaps the best thing to ever happen to business education) debunked it in one of their earliest issues.  It never happened.  They couldn't find the original source of the story but they did go to the source and determined that there was never such a survey of the Yale class of 1953.

So what now? will be the subject of a later post.  In the meantime, do more of what makes you truly happy and less of what you think you "should" do.  (You may have to ask whether or not that third jumbo triple chocolate cup cake would truly make you happy.)

Fast Company article.

About the image:  About this time last year I was at Kiawah Island with my friend Suzanne so I'm reliving the trip through some of the photos I took.

Finding the Purpose Intersection

Our purpose is not a secret written inside a fortune cookie or a secret branded deep in our soul that requires years of searching to find.  It’s actually not a secret at all.  It’s more of an intersection, plainly marked once we can see the signs.  

For years I’ve had this refrain in my head that states, “If you were a really good person, you would go tend the starving orphans in Africa.”  Then I’d wonder if that were truly my “purpose.”

The plight of the orphans in Africa is a world challenge that touches my heart.  I could drop everything in my life and go find a way to serve that challenge.  I’m sure there would be many ways to use my skills of writing, communication and willingness to do whatever is called for.  I could make that my intersection, my purpose.  

But, there are many intersections and choosing that one would be like signing up to do a triathalon if I didn’t know how to swim, ride a bike or run more than a short block.  I need a purpose closer to home, closer to my current skills and talents.  Then, perhaps someday, I will approach that intersection and know that it is now the right purpose.  

Or, perhaps not. Perhaps that little voice is just a distraction that creates inaction.  By focusing on a purpose that is too big, too far beyond my current scope, I just feel overwhelmed and quit looking altogether.  Far better to find a humbler purpose that I can do now, today and tomorrow.

The perfect purpose for any of us is the intersection of a service opportunity and our own unique talents, skills and passion.  We can go searching the world for the shining intersection or we can look around and ask, “What needs me?  Who needs what I am uniquely able to give?”  

Purpose is about service ... serving the world, serving those we love, serving ourselves, serving the creative force we sometimes call God, Allah, Yahweh, or, simply, the Universe.  We too often think our PURPOSE has to be noble, selfless, and sacrificing when actually our purpose is to simply put our gifts into action in a way that creates benefits for the world and our self.

Oh, That Old Thing

Threads come together; form a braid, form a pattern; form a new awareness.

Last night an amazing woman shrugged off her brilliance like it was a scratchy sweater.  A few hours later, I turned a page in Dawna Markova's insightful book,  I will not die an unlived life and read:

What are your inner gifts and talents?  Most of us are reasonably articulate about our deficits and weaknesses--how many we got wrong on our spelling tests, how many things we have failed to accomplish during any given day.  We become fluent at explaining our incompetencies, but look straight at our gifts and talents and then mutter, "Oh, that old thing?"  This leaves us awkward and confused about how to bring our assets and resources to the rest of the community.  Too many of us believe we don't matter, and that what we do doesn't really make a difference."

The truth of that stunned me.  That is what we do.  It may be a stereotype but it seems that women do it more often than men.  We go back to school and get one more degree to prove that we have the right to say what we know to be true.  We hide our brilliance because it might be perceived as "showing off."  We call it "that old thing" because it hasn't earned the golden coin that validates it in the eyes of the world.

What treasures we leave moldering in a "maybe someday" chest, afraid to take them out and show them to the world.  What will it take for us to realize that life is a giant jig saw puzzle that needs our piece to be complete ... the authentic, whole, brilliant self each of us is?  Perhaps that's the only real purpose in life ... to live each of our gifts and share them back with the whole.  

Otherwise, we may never know what the glorious picture is on the cover of the box we call life.

Levitating through StumbleUpon

There is so much ingenuity in the world ... it just bubbles up and creates the most amazing things.  StumbleUpon sent me this image and story about Natsumi Hayashi, a young Japanese girl who loves to levitate.


Don't miss all the great shots of her ... my favorite is a street scene where no one is paying any attention to the beautiful young woman levitating right in front of them.


How fun!

One Day You Finally Knew

The combination of Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey" read by David Whyte to his dog Ginger is a charming and powerful version of this poem.