Author Archives: lifelessons

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About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

Happily

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Happily

Nothing in this world can exist happily ever after.
A house is built of lows and highs: foundation before rafter.
Up and down’s the truth of it, the brilliant and the dark.
No week is composed totally of Sunday in the park.

Existence is a pendulum that sweeps across our lives.
Worker bees die every day in service to their hives.
Good seems finely balanced by a constant lurking evil.
Roses have their aphids.  Cotton has its weevil.

There is so much that’s wonderful in the world we live in,
but no one wins at every game. Sometimes we have to give in,
playing with the cards we’re given–flush or straight or fold–
sometimes in the heat of luck, sometimes out in the cold.

Ups and downs create the whole of our amazing world,
its surface formed by contrast of the knitted and the purled.
Sometimes we’re given what is sweet, at other times the bile
as we choose moment by moment to live happily for a while.

The Prompt:“And they lived happily ever after.” Think about this line for a few minutes. Are you living happily ever after? If not, what will it take for you to get there? https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/happily-ever-after/

Animals: Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge

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Centerfold

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Grumpy

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Waiting for Mom

These pictures of all three fellows were taken yesterday. Good timing, Cee!  The pugs were the guardians of a nursery we went to. Yesterday’s post showed some of our “finds.”  The third little dog was our friend Jackie’s little guy, at the window, watching his Mom walk away down the front walk.

http://ceenphotography.com/2015/06/04/cees-black-white-photo-challenge-animals/

Stink Think

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Stink Think

Scotch broom makes me nauseous. Roses make me sneeze.
I abhor the scent of jasmine on an evening breeze.
Room deodorants should be banned, as should scented candles.
I’d rather smell my brother’s sneakers or a vagrant’s sandals.

Now that we want each thing to smell like something it is not,
there’s a different odor on everything we’ve got.
There’s perfume in detergent, in dryer tabs and soap.
Scented toilet paper makes we want to mope.

Unscented’s getting almost impossible to find
It leaves allergic folks like me in a real tight bind.
Gardenia in my hand lotion or chamomile or peach.
Hairsprays  smell as fresh as air or like a summer beach.

Floor cleaners smell like forests of freshly gathered pine,
as though without this pungent scent our floors would smell like swine!
These odors leave me gasping and running for some air.
Their vapors make my eyes run, causing much despair.

I do not want my table waxed with lemon or “fresh scent.”
I believe that everything should smell as nature meant.
I’ve done a lot of research, and  I’m fairly sure
that perfumes out-stink everything they’re meant to obscure!

The Prompt: Smell You Later–Humans have very strong scent memory.  Tell us about a smell that transports you.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/smell-you-later/

 

Bee There Now–Weeks after the Last Snow

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My friend Patty’s garden in Wyoming.

Ocean Koan

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I woke up early this morning and while I was waiting for the prompt, a dolphin swam into my consciousness and prompted this tale.  While you are waiting for me to write a poem about the sense of smell, (today’s prompt), please be content with this one written about another sense:

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Ocean Koan

Ocean Koan

The dolphins ride in on the music,
but why did they come here?
Did they seek to lend their harmonies
to a music new and queer?
Did they soar in on its melody,
come  in on a riff,
drawn by its dissonant whistle—
a mere beckoning whiff?

Whatever the dolphins are hearing,
whatever they’re trying to reach,
we don’t understand their language
as they lie stranded on our beach.
Perhaps we divert them with towers
that speak in a tongue their own,
and though it’s not our intention,
our messages form a koan

that they are driven to answer
as we’re drawn to outer space,
pulled to find our others
in an alien clime and place.
We believe we are harmless and loving,
at peace with their watered dreams;
when in truth we are drying their world up—
ripping it at the seams.

We send out the signals to pull them
to where they should not be,
like fairytales told to children
that draw them to our knee—
We turn our backs to the seaward window,
seal our ears to their keening tones
as the dolphins swimming landward
pave our beaches with their bones.

 

I am not an expert on sonar or other communication technology.  If you want to hear more on the subject, go here:  http://www.earthportals.com/beachedwhales.html

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/smell-you-later/

Retire in Mexico!!!

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DSC08910I’ve been looking for an excuse to share this cartoon so guess I’ll just use it as a recruitment device.  In spite of all the bad publicity, Mexico is a great place to live, not to mention the price of beer!

Great Blue Herons

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Nested in a giant tree on Little Goose Creek in Sheridan, Wyoming, we found these amazing Great Blue Herons, complete with chicks.  I was using a X30 optical zoom and still some of the cropped ones are fuzzy.  I’ll try to get back there before I leave, but with no tripod, I probably won’t get any better results. Still figuring out my new camera.

 

The Peace Of Wild Things – Poem by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/on-the-way/

Be Cause

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                                                                    Be Cause

I felt such a resistance to today’s prompt that I decided I probably should write about it to determine the reason why.  The prompt was: “If your day to day responsibilities were taken care of and you could throw yourself completely behind a cause, what would it be?”

The truth is that I already have day to day responsibilities taken care of.  I am single, retired, and live in Mexico where it’s possible to hire people to clean and do yard work; so there are really no responsibilities I have to do except the normal ones of hygiene, taxes and day-to-day life.

I have reached out with volunteer activities and do vote in every U.S. election, as difficult as this sometimes is, living in a foreign country.  But as for “throwing myself behind a cause,” I’ve gotten to the stage of life where I balk a bit at this.  What usually happens is that I get caught up in cause after cause and eventually start finding my life squeezed to the point where I resent not having enough time to devote to writing and art.  Then I draw back, drop activities, and get back into a more hermit-like existence.  After a while, I feel as though I’m sealing myself off from life too much and I emerge again to become too “busy” with scheduled activities that again squeeze out my other needs.

I’ve always had this problem with balance in my life.  I don’t know how to do things simply, with no fuss. This is why projects and volunteer work tend to consume my life when I get involved.  I’ve tried to remedy this by not volunteering for activities that require a rigidly scheduled demand on my time.  After years of operating to a schedule of shows and exhibitions, this is just what I have to do to keep from feeling that panic of approaching deadlines that were my life for so many years. I volunteer at the information desk of a local cultural center, but only as a fill-in for those who need a substitute.  At times this has led to weeks of volunteering, but it is still not an obligation I know I’m going to have to fulfill forever.

In like manner, I’ve suspended a weekly arts workshop I did last year at a girls’ orphanage. Here, the reason was not because I needed the time back (although I really felt I did) but because time after time I arrived to find they’d scheduled another activity without telling me and the time spent planning the projects, assembling materials and driving to the next town was all for naught. Since they did not answer phones, I couldn’t even call up to check myself. Then I realized these girls, as abused as they’d been, now had so many people volunteering to provide activities that they actually had more advantages than most of the kids in the village, so my efforts have turned toward helping in a summer camp for the most underprivileged kids in two villages this summer and continuing with little art workshops in the pueblo where I live.  It isn’t much, but it is something that I can fit in with my own needs taken into account.

I taught school for ten years and although I have no children of my own, I’ve been involved with children, to varying degrees, my entire life. My husband had 4 small children when I married him and all of them came to stay or live with us for varying lengths of time during our 15-year relationship; but since he’d already had 10 children when we met, it was his desire to have no more. Although at the time I would have loved to have had children, I complied with his wishes; but I’ve thought since that perhaps the fact that I no longer can handle weekly scheduled volunteer activities reflects a selfishness that also contributed to my decision not to have children.

I have given up feeling guilt over this. We all do what we can do in this world in the manner that we can do it, and this is what makes us individuals. I do bit by bit, as it occurs, living my life and trying to be of benefit to others in situations as they occur naturally in my life.  If someone asks, I help. If I see a need, I fill it, trying to leave room for my own needs as well.

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In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Blogger With a Cause.”

Dry: One Word Photo Challenge

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http://jennifernicholewells.com/2015/06/02/one-word-photo-challenge-dry/

Please read Anglo Swiss’s post before mine.  You may find it in the Reader or HERE.

A Leader Reader

Politics distress me. They send me to my bed.
I prefer the nightmares that I conjure in my head.
For to get over nightmares, it is a piece of cake.
I simply give up sleeping and remain wide awake.

But the world situations that most bother me
do not disappear when I turn off the damn TV.
They just go on mouldering when they’re not in my view
while all our fearless leaders just do and do and do.

I think that the solution might just be to tell them, “Stop!!!”
Every nation on the earth trying to be cop
for all the other nations seems somehow not to work,
for sometimes the one supervising is the biggest jerk!

Though I don’t know the answer, perhaps the Swiss are right.
Perhaps yearly elections would do less to incite
pork-barrel legislation when each man has a vote
the needs of common men might replace needs of men of note.

The only problem we might face, doing so much voting
is that it just might interfere with our TV remoting.
It might be necessary to replace “reality” shows
with just plain reality–where everybody knows

each bill that’s passed and all the facts of governing our nation,
so we would grow up wiser each succeeding generation.
Voting done on cellphones or Android application
might bring out the vote at last, much to the consternation

of politicians dependent on propaganda’s lies,
hoping that the real facts never come before our eyes.
All this campaign financing a phantom of the past
while we’re presented with the truth–finally, at last!!!

(I cite poetic license, folks, as my excuse for this poem. I realize this is a simplistic solution to the world’s problems.  Our government in the U.S. is perhaps too large and too complicated for the Swiss system of governing, so it is  best this world is not governed by such as I!!!)

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: Dear Leader–If your government (local or national) accomplishes one thing this year, what would you like that to be?