It's Never Too Late to Become a Gardener

One of my favorite passages from Ray Bradury's Fahrenheit 451:

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

In Need of Lots of Luck

About a month ago, I enrolled in an online poetry class through Stanford University.  I need to force myself back into the world of poetry and reconnect with one of the great loves of my life:  the written word.  I am looking forward to this journey and words cannot express my excitement and fear.  But fear is good, no?  I find it to be the very foundation of any great success.  James Arthur is my instructor, and I am quite a fan of his poem, "On Day and Night."  A link to the poem:  http://www.versedaily.org/2006/ondayandnight.shtml

Please wish me lots of luck and inspiration.  I have a feeling I will need it!  I have received my first reading and writing assignment and am giggling with pleasure.  This blog will accompany me on my new poetic path.

"I write for the same reason I breathe: because if I didn't, I would die." - Isaac Asimov

All You Need is Love...

A new friend (@Miridunn) shared a compelling quote on her Twitter page today:  "The world feeds lust and lets real love starve." - Paul Potts  My response to her was, "The world is obsessed with lust, and most certainly because they do not recognize love."

We turn on the news in the morning or the evening and are bombarded with stories of crimes committed in cold blood...we often turn off the television thinking to ourselves that the world is getting worse every day. We allow ourselves to become desensitized and disillusioned about life, love, the meaning of family, friendship, faith, and the list could go on.  What we fail to see because we have been programmed not to notice it as much is all of the love that surrounds us.  We fail ourselves by not taking even a mere five minutes out of our day to look at the people around us and witness real acts of love.

I chose to take this five minutes today and make it a gift of love for myself.  I took time to notice things I would not have noticed otherwise had I not had a purpose behind my quiet sitting.  I told myself, "Open eyes, close mouth."  The couple sitting on my right could not keep their hands off each other, and I lost count of their seemingly endless kisses.  After tending his tables, my waiter kept walking over to the girl behind the counter and tenderly touching her swelling tummy, so happy for the life growing inside of her.  A Harold-and-Maude couple came in, arms around each other as if they would never hold each other again.  He kept his eyes on her and I wondered if I even saw him blink.  She asked him if her Indian headdress was a little much for the restaurant, and he confidently reassured her that no one else would dare to wear such a piece because no one would be able to pull it off the way she did.  After I had paid my bill and started my walk to my car, the girl behind the counter told me to have a great day, I wished her the same, and she responded by saying that she appreciated me saying so.  I decided has exceeded by five minute allocation for observing love in whatever forms I would come across, and satisfied by this time I had spent, began my drive home.  I then realized I could not stop with the experiment.  I was looking in car windows, observing interactions in parking lots, watching people walking out of stores or standing in line at the snow-cone stand.  There is so much love in the world to see if you focus on it.  I renewed my faith in love today.  I renewed hope in my heart.  I will give this to myself every day from now on.

Five minutes...five minutes is long enough to turn a day around and kindly remind you as John Lennon so perfectly penned, "All You Need is Love."

Find love others, find love in yourself.  Love yourself because you have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. ;)  Share it and see it multiply.