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“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think it was in Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins where he describes a house in the Pacific Northwest being slowly taken over by the bushes and brambles. I think my neighbor’s house is going the way of Tom Robbins.

And Cooper thinks our neighborhood is going to the ducks.

I swear I spent at least a summer or two as a child riding everywhere on my bike with a swimsuit on. So I felt the delightful pull of nostalgia as I rode behind my kids in their swimsuits on the way to the neighborhood wading pool.

Mr. D learning to paddleboard. And Cooper grateful because he believes that we finally got him a bigger water bowl…

The welcome committee.

“Miracles happen only if you believe in miracles.” – Paula Coelho

Miracle One

The other day my mom came over to do some yard work while I was gone, and the kids were at school. Completely gracious of her.

When I came home, I put Cooper the dog and his friend Ziggy in the backyard to play while I had an online meeting. A few minutes later, I realized I could hear Ziggy barking – from the front porch. Hmm…

My mom had left one of the yard gates open. The dogs ran out into the front of my house. While I don’t live on an extremely busy street, it is a street in the city of Seattle with modest traffic, and plenty of places to wander off to. But when I opened the front door, they were safely on the front porch INSIDE a little gate that I have to keep them from running out the front door.

How did they both end up on my front porch on the SAFE side of the gate? If a neighbor did it, they didn’t knock on the door. And to my knowledge, Cooper can’t jump that little gate. And how did they stay together? I’ll never know, but I’m grateful.

Miracle Two

I have a hot tub on my roof deck. It hasn’t heated water in the last couple of years and I’ve assumed this is because I need a new control board. I think it’s not a hard fix but a pretty expensive part for a hot tub I’m on the fence about.

The hot tub is 20 years old. I can’t get a new one because it requires a crane to swing the hot tub up there. So, I’ve gone through some years of replacing parts, many years of not using it, and other years of using it as a cool off tub for the kids.

The other day the kids and I were cleaning it and getting ready to fill it with cold water. I opened the place where the filter goes. Miss O peered in and noticed the head of a kids toy jammed into where the pipes come together.

She got a fork and pried it out. After we finished cleaning it, I filled it up. Guess what? The hot tub works again.

The Giggle

I’ve written in posts about the stories I tell my kids about Simon the bad cat who died six years ago. Like last week’s post, The Archetypes of Story, where I told some favorites about the times he’d run away, break into other people’s houses, and even died on the operating table, only to be revived by kitty CPR.

He’s a favorite character in the house. Even for four-year-old Mr. D who never met him.

So when Mr. D noticed our plastic laundry basket was missing a handle, he said, “What happened to that basket? Did Simon do it?“

It is so good to have someone to blame for everything…

“Happiness is the feeling you’re feeling when you want to keep feeling it.” – unknown

It’s Spring and we are out and about!

Things we put in our mouths. It’s a long list for Cooper.

Cooper at ease

Our new passion

Thumbs up and riders up

The dandelion in the first picture actually grew in the middle of a boulder. How’s that for toughness?

And Miss O was out with her grandmother, then asked to borrow her grandmother’s phone, and snapped a picture of the sign of the week knowing that I’d want it.

“Let go or be dragged.” – Zen Proverb

When I walk Cooper the dog in the morning, our cat, Simone, usually follows along. She is masterful at blending in or when other dogs come along and then appearing out of the shadows to keep pace with us when all is clear.

Yesterday, another neighborhood cat started aggressively running toward Simone as if to say, “How dare you cross that patch of sidewalk?”

Sensing the movement, Cooper turned to face the neighborhood cat. It stopped in its tracks. It seemed to be weighing whether confronting our cat was worth risking Cooper’s involvement.

After a long moment of stare down with Cooper and Simone, the cat ran opposite the way we were going.

I chuckled and thought to myself “Life is about wisely deciding what to let go.”

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my brother this past weekend. He said that he used to teach people how to make a to-do list.

• List everything out.
• Put it in order.
• Draw a line in the middle and just accept you were only going to get the top half done.

Then he glanced around my kitchen with the unread newspapers, the mix of dog toys and kids toys on the floor, and the school art projects waiting to be hung and said,

“Maybe only the top third in your case.”

Yeah, but I made a delicious dinner. I’m getting better at letting go of the rest.

(featured photo is mine: Simone on the family walk)

“People change when we are cherished.” – Father Gregory Boyle

This was previously published on 8/31/2022 – heads up, you may have already read this.

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When my inquisitive daughter was about 3 ½ years old, we had a conversation about perspective. We looked out our back door at the houses around and I asked her to count how many she could see. Three. Then we went to the second floor and I helped her count – seven. And then we went to the roof, looked at all the houses we could see and concluded it was more than she had numbers for. I told her something like “This is what perspective looks like when you get older, you know that everything fits into a larger picture and you are able to see more of it.”

Even for my very verbal daughter, this was mostly lost on her but I could see her trying to think about it. When I recently heard a Ten Percent Happier podcast with Father Gregory Boyle and he presented the most expansive view of love and its power to change that I’ve ever heard, I felt a little like my daughter trying to understand perspective. His view is so big and powerful, that it might take me years of practice to fully understand.

 Father Gregory is a Jesuit priest whose work as a pastor in the poorest parish in Los Angeles that was also in the area with the highest gang activity led him to start Homeboy Industries. It’s a number of different businesses than serve to employ and train former gang members and serve the community.

Even though Father Gregory was talking about love in terms of gang intervention, a topic that has little intersection with my experience of life, his expansiveness offers a whole-hearted practice of love that I found mind blowing in its potential to change us from the inside out. Here’s how he described it in a nutshell:

“The practice – Catch yourself before you are judgmental. How do you stand in awe at what people have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it? You are catching yourself all the time.”

Father Gregory Boyle

And when he was asked if he ever messes that up his reply was, “Only all the time.”  

Providing more detail on the practice, Father Gregory described,

“So part of the invitation is to catch yourself. Our hard wiring would direct us to demonize. Demonizing is always the opposite of the truth. You are about to do it with the shooter in Uvalde. At no point are you cosigning on bad behavior. You are just saying two certain things. Everyone is unshakably good.  We all belong to each other.

“Now let’s roll up our sleeves. How do we help people? How do we pay attention? How do we notice people before they buy high-powered weapons? How do we include people? How do we move people out of the isolation that depletes their sense of hope? How do we infuse people with hope for whom hope is foreign?”

Father Gregory Boyle

 Father Gregory just buried his 255^th kid that died as a result of gang violence. And yet he still is touting this incredibly hopeful vision of how we belong to each other. The work he’s done over 40 years is phenomenal, heart-breaking and transformative. His take on burnout and how to avoid it was fascinating.

“You go to the margins not to make a difference, you go to the margins so that the folks there make you different. If you go to the margins to save the day, and rescue people, fix people or even to make a difference, it’s about you and it can’t be about you. So you burn out. You burn out not because you are so compassionate but because you made it about you.”

Father Gregory Boyle

Like any athlete that has practiced his or her jump shot so many times that it looks easy in their hands, Father Gregory makes loving people no-matter-what sound simple. I know, as I suspect we all do, that it isn’t easy. But maybe that’s something that perspective teaches us – that simple ideas when practiced over and over again have amazing power to change.

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For a light-hearted post about loving whoever shows up, please see my Wise & Shine post today: The Inspiration to Write: A Short Vignette