Note to self:

If one stands upon a soap box, they may get suds in their eyes when it rains on their platform.

Every soapbox should come with a warning.

CAUTION: You may be correct in your opinion and the diatribe explaining it, but this soap box may collapse under the weight of your exuberance and get soap in your eyes.

Keep away from children, small animals, and mono focused prosthletizers.

It is recommended by the manufacturer that this soap box be placed upon a stable foundation prior to use.

Victor Hugo said…

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

Is it our Deeds that make us deserving of Happiness?

Are there actually people who do not deserve to be happy?

If everybody got what they deserved, what would the world look like?

And who determines what someone else deserves?

Unalienable rights, those rights bestowed upon us by Nature, grants us happiness as a deserved part of being a human.

When does an unalienable right become an inalienable right, a right that can be surrendered, sold, or transferred?

It’s not up to me to decide what anybody else deserves.

But it is up to me to accept what I deserve.

If you feel like you deserve to be happy,

Click and print this Deed I made up to hang on your wall.

Oh, and put your own name on it.

Yeah, Own it.

Ben (not his real name) was eight years old.

He came to the residential treatment center from an abusive home with a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome.

Generally, when a new child arrived, we took his personal belongings and put them away while providing new clothes, shoes, and other necessities.

This policy kept the peer playing field even for all the children.

Somehow Ben kept a secret item in his position without being noticed by counselors or staff members.

He kept the item hidden for eight months, while he participated in a program designed to facilitate emotional stability, and find a foster home that could accommodate his special needs.

The foster home was found.

Ben completed his goals in the program and demonstrated a positive response to treatment.

The day before he left he asked if he could talk to me alone.

He stood in the counselor’s office with his hand in pocket, fidgeting a little bit and looking a bit awkward.

I started out the conversation with accolades about how well he had done in the program, and that I was very happy for him and proud of him for being able to follow the rules and graduate into a foster home.

He looked down and continued fidgeting a little.

“I didn’t follow all the rules.”

“What do you mean?”

“ I came here with a thousand dollars.

I didn’t tell anybody because I wanted to keep it just in case I needed to run away.

I thought I could buy a house and take care of myself —if this place was bad.”

I was quiet and continued smiling at him.

“ I’m sorry I broke the rule, but I was kinda scared.”

“I understand.”

“Now I know this place ain’t bad and that you really help people and you are my friend.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, and it was very brave of you to tell me about the thousand dollars even though you didn’t have to.”

“Well… I’m telling you because I want to give you my thousand dollars because then you can help other kids and because I don’t need it anymore and…you really are my friend.”

Ben pulled his closed fist out of his pocket and took my hand to place his secret life line, his thousand dollars, his safety net, his back up plan, into my palm.

My first reaction was to give it back to him, to tell him what it really was, to explain how he didn’t have to give it to me, that it belonged to him.

I  got tears in my eyes.

“This is a very generous gift, Ben. Are you sure you want to give it away?”

“Yeah, I don’t need it anymore and besides, I want to give you something big because you helped me a lot .”

I still have his 1000 dollars.

I keep it with my precious belongings, but I would like to share it with you now.

I read that the old Pesos are not worth anything anymore.

I’m here to tell you…

That is a lie.

People are like Rain.

You can observe almost every personality type, every limited belief system, every social behavior, by watching raindrops on a window pane.

You can personify each individual raindrop, name it, and watch it glide to it’s destiny.

I usually attribute my own name to the raindrop that takes the path of least resistance, zig zagging across the pane, barely touching other raindrops on it’s gravitational path.

Some raindrops get stuck.

They don’t seem to move until some other raindrop comes along and adds weight to their path.

Others hit the window pane and fall straight to the bottom, clinging to all the raindrops in their way, taking them down.

There are raindrops that stay along the edges, spending their lives being absorbed into the window frame.

There are raindrops that stand in the spot where they landed, untouched by other raindrops, separate, just waiting… for the sun to come out and evaporate them.

Once in a while there is a raindrop that seems to defy gravity, appearing to ascend, quivering in resistance, catching a random gust of wind that lifts it, upward, above the others.

Little raindrops, cleaving to the glass, creating patterns that will define their existence, running into each other, resisting the fall, growing larger when they unite with others, creating new paths of direction in their connections, influenced by the winds of fate, making beauty.

The only way for a raindrop to get past the pane is through an open window.

My body does not fit into a lot of categories as some women’s bodies do.

I will never see it in an ad for weight loss or on a bill board in a bikini.

It is not what our culture designs clothing for, not what you’d find on a runway, or in one of those before-and-after photos at the back of a magazine for cellulite cream.

It’s not buxom, not full, not anorexic, not curvy, not what teen age girls aspire to, or plastic surgeons use in their promotional brochures.

My body is a little plain, a little innocuous, nothing really stands out or screams “hey look at this part!”

My body is not a Renoir, nor a fractured Picaso but it is definitely long, strong, and able to accommodate my needs.

It responds well to demands without complaint for the most part.

It protects my brain and offers refuge to my heart.

My body does not have too many aches and pains (which is really good on account of I got a real low threshold to pain).

My body is the warehouse that I keep all my precious stuff in;

my memories

my creativity

my comfort

my pleasure

experiences

and coffee and chocolate

I don’t always remember to feed it on time or let it rest when I should.

But it still keeps going and carrying the rest of me around to add more good stuff to it and put it through luxurious baths, exhilarating walks, exposure to warm sunshine, touch, smell, and a whole lot of nerve tickling, belly laughing, tasting, and synapse sparking adventure.

It communicates in code; goose bumps, yawns, sweat, heartbeat changes, all this stuff to let me know when I’m doing something wrong or doing something really right.

Yeah, me and my body, we’re good pals.

And even if I don’t agree with everything it tells me, I know…

My body got soul!

It’s all about what’s on the inside, eh?

Enigma by Juginder Lamba

Some friends and I have started a Tuesday get together called Pie Night.

We take turns bringing a different pie every week.

It’s a kind of a Bellhemian Salon, where nobody speaks French or gets intoxicated — it’s a night of creativity, philosophical exploration and personal sharing.

We get a room full of musicians, artists, writers, and friends together in a circle around homemade pie and a semi structured philosophical discussion, in the spirit of pie and the metaphor of Pi .

We have a great time for new millennium modernists who are not absinthe minded professors.

Yeah, mostly we just talk a lot and eat pie.

Sometimes we just sing and be silly.

Hey, what else are we gonna do in the rainy winter of the Northwest?

Pie makes everything feel like sunshine.

THANK YOU FOR PIE

Click the Pie below to see why I like  Pie…

Being a critical person does not take critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is an intellectual process, used to decipher meaning and glean truth from observations and communications.

Critical people tend to obliterate truth and fracture meaning by imposing limited personal power into a situation designed to make them seem important.

The only weapon a critical person has is the illusion that they are smarter when they throw around verbal bulllets to blast holes in others.

Most of their bullets are blanks, but when they are aimed, they sure can bring out the worst in others, and make negativity bleed into the environment.

The only ammunition available for a critical thinker to dodge these bullets, is to question the clarity, credibility, accuracy,  relevance, and significance of the critical person.

Critical people are generally compensating for something.

Probably a lack of critical thinking skills.

Critical thinkers can usually circumvent the bullets of critical people without too much trauma, but I wonder if any of these critical thinkers ever got their feelings hurt by critical people…

Fear can scream at you, it can paralyze you, it can take possession of you, or it can whisper to you with an intuitive little nudge that is designed to make you walk away from a dangerous situation at an expedient pace.

This was probably useful to humans when we could allegedly be devoured by carnivorous dinosaurs.

I have been in a few precarious situations in my life wherein fear has kept me from harm.

I have been in some situations where I did not adhere to the intuitive nudges of fear and found myself having to repair damage to my person.

I have also been in situations where fear had no purpose in keeping me safe, it just lingered around like a nuisance, telling me to run when there was nothing to run from—fear gone bad, out of context, stuck on replay from some other time when I was supposed to run from dinosaurs and did not listen.

Sometimes this “out of context” fear sneaks up on me in layers, like an onion with an invisible core.

It requests that I examine the source of it’s appearance and unfolding.

It whispers “Remember when this happened?” or “Don’t trust that because…”.

This “stuck on replay” fear says “You will fail.” or “This person will hurt you if you love them.”

This kind of fear can keep me looking backwards at dead dinosaurs and prevent me from moving forward.

Fear in itself is not a bad thing—like I said, it does have it’s place and it can keep us alive.

I am thankful for that aspect of fear.

But fear that is self generated from associations, distorted memories, or lack of information can harm us more than that from which fear was designed to protect us.

The fear that is generated by authorities or others who wish to control us on some level, is the worst kind of fear.

This can destroy whole cultures with invisible dinosaurs.

It is insidious and we must walk away from it at an expedient pace.

This paralyzing, authority generated, fear will keep us looking backwards at dead dinosaurs while we purchase every kind of insurance established to keep us protected, buy into every kind of war that defends us, and perpetuating social isolation to keep us from looking into the face of nonexistent carnivorous dinosaurs, lest the system fail.

The only thing to fear is fear mongers.

What would happen if we had one day set aside to be free from fear mongering?

We could spend the entire day eating dinosaur burgers while we emphatically agreed to only fear things we could actually see.

You know, like sharks swimming next to us or physical threats to our existence, like fires or hurricanes.

We could close the gun shops for this holiday.

We could turn off our televisions, stop the newspaper presses, put the armies to bed, dismantle the entire system that perpetuates bullying, xenophobia, consumer panic, and mind manipulating marketing tactics.

You know, for just ONE day.

How about Tuesday?

That which you fear the most could meet you half way. – Pearl Jam

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the irrational fear of Friday the 13th.

It has nothing to do with that terrifying movie.

Though, I do have an irrational dislike for horror movies—I just don’t have a word for it.

It is said that our associative superstition about Friday the 13th started back in the 1300’s in France, when King Philip IV arrested thousands of Knights Templars and charged them with heresy.

Well, we know the unlucky fate of anyone charged with heresy, so it became an unlucky day.

Triskadectaphobia is the fear of the number 13.

Some say that one probably originated with Vikings and Loki, or Crucifixions in Rome, or various Biblical-bad-math that got attributed to Fridays, not so Good Fridays.

I don’t know much about all the hubbub around Friday the 13th, but I know I can make meaning out of all manner of numbers and days, if I am inclined.

We all got a little “meaning maker” in us…

THANK YOU FOR MEANING

Hazardous Waste Site Map:

We are sensual and sexual beings.

We are beings who’s sexuality can be influenced by genetics, chemistry, environments, and personal experiences.

Our associations and contacts with others, male or female, contribute to gradually developing our experience of ourselves, our bodies, and our perceptions of intimacy, sensuality, and sexuality.

So many factors go into influencing the definition of our selves and developing  the characteristics that connect us or separate us from another human being.

We establish boundaries with one another —those boundaries are sometimes determined by things we cannot control or which we are not consciously aware of in a given moment.

Proscribed sexuality and culturally dictated rules around sexual expression can create all manner of confusion, self negation, and rigid judgment toward others to defend concepts that may not serve or enhance understanding and accepting ourselves or one another as a the sexual beings whom we are.

Today, I am wondering why we still segregate ourselves into categories of sexuality.

Any sexual act that victimizes or exploits another repulses me, and I contend that these acts have more to do with broken people than sexual beings to which I refer .

But healthy sexual beings are created through complex physical, emotional, and psychological influences.

We are all the same in this regard.

Again, we are all the same in this regard.

I can understand why some of my friends have created a lifestyle around their sexuality.

I think anytime a fear induced majority persecutes a perceived minority, the minority must find strength where they can, just to survive—sad as that may be, we have participated as a society in creating this defense mechanism through our own ignorance.

I believe every one of us has the capacity to experience our sexuality with someone of our own gender or otherwise, but our preferences and responses are not always consciously chosen.

Our sexual experience should not be a determinant factor in our roles as members of a collective or society.

Yet, we perpetuate separation, into sexual categories, and continue to behave as though an individual’s sexual preference defines all of who they are, and how we respond to them on so many levels, openly or otherwise.

I am not the only human to notice this, I’m certain.

Marketing companies, consumer research groups, extreme religious groups, and people who are afraid of reflecting on their own sexuality,  benefit much from our adherence to separating humans into categories to compartmentalize, manipulate, dominate, or deny.

Why are we still participating in this?

Why are we so afraid of our own flexuality that we allow ourselves to be put into categories that limit our experiences and undermine such an integral part of our humanness—the physical exploration and innate pleasure and development of our sexual being?

While we seem to be making social progress by passing condescending initiatives and patronizing laws, we have yet to understand that it is not about us and “them”.

It is about all of us that are sexual, flexual, and human beings.

Today I have decided to visualize other humans as androgynous beings with the capacity to love, feel, think, and behave exactly like me.

Today, I will create one less degree of separation between my own body and my own mind.

I give back the boxes and cages to those who have labeled me a heterosexual according to the needs of a church, a society, or a community designed to propagate followers, consumers, or self haters.

Today, I am experiencing my own flexuality as a human being and honoring others who, like me, have been influenced by complex factors into becoming who they are.

Today I am experiencing my natural flexuality and it feels good.

I don’t usually pay much attention to the world of stocks and mergers and hostile takeovers, or anything that requires a financial investment of more than $4.99.

But this is serious. It affects me personally.

Somebody is trying to put on the Ritz and dip it into my chocolate nest egg without a shredded wheat of decency, oreo an intention to share .

What a cheesy thing to do.

Kraft Makes a Hostile Takeover Bid for Cadbury

Easter may never be the same.

What’s next, cheddar jelly beans?

PS

Do you know who owns your food?

Divination: noun

The practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means.

Folks love to explore their future and learn about themselves through various forms of card, chart, stone, body, and  psychic readings with mystic interpretations.

We love to know the unknown.

But here are a few ironic facts that Psychics will not tell you unless you specifically request statistics…

People that report out of body experiences and detachment from their physical bodies do not spend less on groceries and clothing.

Economic growth impact for out of body experiences =0%

Walking the Astral plane is not like Walkin’ in Memphis,—one’s feet are generally more than ten feet off the ground in the former and there are no guitars.

Odds of writing a pop country tune from the Astral Plane =0%

Odds of seeing the ghost of Elvis there: 50%

You can not see germs or the inner activities of a colon under a Horoscope.

Medical research contributions from the invention of the Horoscope =0 %

Oracles and Mediums can’t channel spirits with laryngitis.

The odds of a spirit guide getting bronchitis correlates directly to the number of germs seen under a Horoscope.  0%

Statistically, when a palm reader tells you that you are going to experience financial losses, she is always right.

Paying her fee proves her predictions — 100%

Statistics for Past Life Readings telling you that you were an insignificant slob in history, instead of an Egyptian Princess =98.7%

I did not have to research any of these statistics.

They came to me in a dream.

If you are willing to die for these, and other things…

Love

Loyalty

Freedom

Beliefs

Family

Righteousness

Patriotism

Humanity

Truth

The Greater Good

Exploration

…are you also willing to live for them?

And which is the more difficult act?

Gustav Klimt   Death and Life

Today I give myself permission to accomplish little things, and let go of the things I can not control.

I give myself permission to forfeit self judgment.

I give myself permission to do something fun in the midst of taking care of my responsibilities.

I give myself permission to eat whatever I want today.

I give myself permission to feel this day without rushing to get to it and through it.

I give myself permission to meet my obligations without letting them run over me.

Today I give myself permission to be creative without having to be organized about it or prove anything.

Today I have a note from myself to skip gym class, and I have permission from an authority figure to go outside and play.

Today, I give myself permission to be the authority figure in my own life.

Here, you can have permission too:

What do you need permission for?

If you can drive a stick shift, drink coffee, smoke a cigarette, talk on the phone, and tune your radio, simultaneously as you fix your hair in the rear view mirror and search for a map under your passenger seat, while brushing the crumbs from an Egg Mc Muffin off your center console and maintaining the speed limit…

You are probably reading this from your laptop on your dashboard.

Hi.

I’m the lady behind you, in the Jeep Cherokee, with red hair, grasping my steering wheel with both hands, wondering if this 4×4 Jeep is tough enough to swerve around a traveling sideshow without tipping over in front of oncoming traffic.

Yep, that’s me in the corner of your rear view mirror, behind your perfect hairdo.

You probably can’t hear me, but I can hear the music coming from your car— even with that diesel truck passing us both on the left.

Can you see me in your half turned rear view mirror, with my mouth wide open, yelling at the top of my lungs?

“Hey!  Your coat is hanging from the bottom of your car door!”

I hope you are getting this on your laptop, because that looks like an expensive coat.

Oh good, you’re opening the car door with your coffee hand at 60 miles per hour.

Ah, that nice coat is tucked safely back inside the door.

Now that I know you’re reading this, here’s what I really wanted to tell you….

I like your bumper stickers…

My Other Car is a Broom

and

Jesus is My Copilot

That other car is probably going to come in handy later—for your insurance company when they sweep you off the highway.

You probably should have let Jesus hold your coffee while you were reading this.

Two disabled senior gentleman had a very tough week.

They were roommates in a lovely apartment complex.

Both are in wheelchairs—one is a double amputee, the other is paralyzed from the waist down with muscular dystrophy.

Both men have legal prescriptions for medical marijuana.

Marijuana helps with severe pain for the double amputee who is also diabetic with serious health complications.

It helps the other man cope with medical conditions which other pharmaceuticals cannot safely address.

These men had individual prescriptions for medical marihuana and grew it in their apartment with special lights, with the acknowledgment of local law enforcement.

Last week, while these two men were in the hospital, one visiting the other who was admitted for serious medical complications, the police raided their apartment.

Law enforcement confiscated their medicinal indoor garden along with their expensive equipment that can not be replaced by minimal disability incomes.

The police raid inspired the landlord to evict the men immediately from their home.

They have put in a request to the police department to retrieve their confiscated belongings on legal grounds, but since they are already evicted and presently homeless, there will be no place to take it, if it is returned to them.

Neither of these men are being charged with any crime, but they are being punished in a terrible way.

Their medical conditions prohibit them from independent activities that we take for granted during a crisis of displacement.

A handful of friends helped to organize what was left of their personal effects and clean up the mess left behind in the police raid.

One gentleman must now move in with a relative who does not have wheelchair friendly access.

The other is in a motel which he can not afford.

It will take time, a lot of paperwork, and arduous visits to the police department in a wheelchair to clarify how and why this happened.

In the meantime, ambulatory paper shufflers and landlords have not given these men a leg to stand on with complicated laws in regard to medical marijuana.

TRICK OR TREAT!

Singin’ in the rain…

Posted in Life Tagged: cute animal photos, Halloween costumes, Halloween in the Northwest, humor, Rain, Rainy Halloween ]]> http://leakelley.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/thank-you-for-the-best-halloween-costumes-in-the-northwest/feed/ 2 leakelley umbrella rain gear raincat scubadog trick or treat singin-in-the-rain http://leakelley.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/thank-you-for-all-the-holes-in-my-head/ http://leakelley.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/thank-you-for-all-the-holes-in-my-head/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:19:22 +0000 leakelley http://leakelley.wordpress.com/?p=2869 ]]>

Okay, the average person has seven holes in their head.

I have an extra one and it is a magic hole that makes things disappear.

This extra hole is not like the mouth hole, which also makes things disappear, but more like the black hole in outer space.

You could barely detect it—even if you parted my hair in a hundred different places.

Yeah, it’s invisible to the naked eye hole.

So, this extra hole is causing me a lot more trouble at the half century mark of my life.

It has a magnetic capacity to pull all information from my environment into the center of itself to be annihilated and lost forever.

I sometimes stand on the rim of this vast hole in my head and call into it like it was an echo chamber…

“Helloooo! Where did I put my keys?”

“Yoohoo! What was the name of that guy that played Manix in the seventies?”

“Heeeeey! What was I supposed to do at eleven o’clock?”

“Pssst, Was that a left turn or right turn back there?”

“ Yodel ay hee hoo! What is the name of this person in front of me whom I have known for three years?”

Then…

Nothin’

Not a single response, no murmur of memory, no echo of Aha comes back to my ear hole.

I think the magic hole is growing exponentially with every fact I try to remember. The more I try to remember, the bigger the hole gets.

It’s very Star Trek.

I think the magic powers of that extra hole in my head is way beyond my capacity to navigate —even at warp speed.