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Showing posts from June, 2015

The Good Lie

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“Truth is such a rare thing, it is delighted to tell it.”                                                                                                   -Emily Dickinson I saw a movie a few months ago called  The Good Lie . It was with Reese Witherspoon and is about a group of the “lost boys” from the Sudan. These young men made it through a purging of their villages, a trek to a camp in Nigeria, and a passage to America and their indoctrination and integration into American society. It is quite a moving picture. In this movie, one of the young men had to make a very difficult decision. A young leader of their surviving villagers did something during their trek to save his life, and it jeopardized the leaders own. He and his companions thought their friend had perished saving him and felt guilty for his life over the young leader. After a year or two in America, he heard that his friend was alive and in the camp in Nigeria hopefully awaiting passage to America. He decided to

Into The Stillness

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“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”                                                                                    - Mark Twain A friend asked me the other day for some insight into why she drinks. The only thing that came to me that was both powerful and simple is that it is easier to drink than to be with the stillness. It is easier to drink or eat or go out or whatever than to be with our uncomfortable feelings. We don’t look to be still and to feel what is underneath our facades. We are taught to look for happiness and that something or someone else will make us happy. So we do that. We emulate our parents and those in our community. Does it work? Are we happy? Do we have good marriages, and do we feel truly, inside happy?  The answer is not often. The truth is we have to go into the stillness to know ourselves. I watched a 4-minute video called, Will You Marry the Wrong Person ( http://bit.ly/14EbPT0 ). It is a grea

Living In The Past

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“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”                                                                                        - Soren Kirkegaard Watching older people during the last phase of this life is enlightening. Often, not always, they lose more of their short term memories and retain many of their long term memories. You can sit with them and they will talk about an old family story, probably one you have heard many times. Yet they can’t remember what time you told them you would come by to pick them up. Does this sound familiar? Most likely we all live more in our past than in our present, but it isn't so noticeable in this way. Living in our past is noticeable through our fears and our anxieties and our anger and our need for control and need for comfort, and such. It is noticeable through our issues or places where we are stuck in our lives. When we are afraid to move forward for any reason, that fear is a guideline to an old

Sometimes Our Actions Aren't As They Appear

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“The truth will set you free; but first it will piss you off.”                                                                                              - Gloria Steinum I love how our actions aren’t always how they appear. I watched a show last night where one of the main characters, certainly a flawed individual as are we all, spoke about an event that happened in his life which shaped him. He spent years afterwards protecting his daughter from knowing a truth, which he felt would be too hard on her, and he took the blame. This was a great cost to him. He let everyone believe that he was responsible for something instead of having his daughter know that his wife, her mother, had an affair. Many of us have done things and said things which aren’t really true in order to protect ourselves or someone else. I see how over time, these lies and partial truths really do not help.  Even though my father was a very flawed man, he told me a story, which touched me deeply and rem