Life & Spirit | mulberryshoots

February 9, 2012

“make my day” . . .

I don’t know if you watched the Super Bowl last weekend but we did. And because of the notoriety of the Super Bowl Ads, we didn’t even mute them out. It was bad enough to watch the Patriots stumble through the game with Tom Brady’s error on the first play casting an ominous tone over his teammates and the rest us for the remainder of the game. Gronkowski wasn’t there even though he went through the motions, it seemed.

Halfway through the agony, the animated animal cartoon ads and the dumb beer ads rolled on. Then, the 2 minute spot by Chrysler with a familiar raspy voice narrating, “It’s halftime, America,” caught our attention. Wow! an ad not for THINGS for people to buy. It wasn’t really even about buying cars. The message was about VALUES, for pete’s sake. And it created a hullabaloo afterwards too.

I thought they got the perfect guy to make this perfect pitch: Clint Eastwood. He’s almost eighty-two and still going strong, doing his thing, his way. His politics are Republican and fiscally conservative AND he Read the rest of this entry »

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February 3, 2012

small victories. . .

You know how sometimes in the middle of the winter, you get a little stir-crazy and wonder what you’re going to do to be creative or productive? This week, I watched a show on “Anderson”–(the best daytime TV show on earth, in my humble opinion–and I’m not a daytime TV person at all.) Cooper manages to get issues before us with real life people and helpers who give advice that can be useful for a lot of people.

Take the fridge, for example. The show was about how to motivate yourself to eat more healthily. Turns out that one of the things you can do is to rearrange your fridge so that you put the most healthy, appetizing Read the rest of this entry »

February 1, 2012

boiling an egg. . .

Most mornings, I have been making green smoothies for breakfast. I’ve been drinking them for about two months or so. Into my blender goes some almond milk, pomegranate juice, a fresh banana, a good handful of baby spinach, some green algae supplement called Pure Synergy and either frozen mango, peaches or wild blueberries. Blend it all up and drink while I begin reading the day’s New York Times newspaper.

Then, if I feel like it, I’ll boil an egg or two to round out my breakfast. I’ve always wondered how to do this in order to get consistent results–a white that has formed, a yolk that is still warm and runny, and Read the rest of this entry »

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January 28, 2012

happy endings. . .

I remember reading fairy tales to my kids when they were growing up. You know, the ones by Grimm Brothers about the glass mountain that the knights rode up on their steeds to rescue the princess from the dragon. Or the search for the three golden apples, one after another in order to win the hand of the princess. Each quest seemed to be more impossible than the one that had come before. Often, heroes and heroines prevailed against all odds and the story closed with a happy ending.

For many of these stories, a lad full of innocence and pluck would win the day and the princess’s hand in marriage. These stories have imbued us from an early age with the notion that hard work, luck and a sense of destiny results in the possibility of happy endings, (similar to the ‘american dream.’)Through incredible hardship, those with their hearts in the right place get their due. Many of us still hope for Read the rest of this entry »

January 25, 2012

fear. . .

blocked by fear

I’ve always had a sense of fear.. . ever since I was young and set in a place where I was alone, not knowing the language of this new land; set apart from the rest of my family once my siblings were born, one after another. It wasn’t just because I was alone a lot of the time. But because it seemed there was no one who understood that I might be afraid, nor asked me anything about it. At the time, I don’t remember thinking or feeling that I was fearful. That recognition didn’t come along until a long time afterwards.

Later in life, I was faced with so much to handle that I knew I had to give it up to a higher power and ask for help (see “eggs in one basket.”) After my divorce and jobless, living in a town where I hardly knew anyone, my Read the rest of this entry »

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January 21, 2012

one wish. . .

I was in Porter Square yesterday for a late lunch and saw something that caught my eye in a shop specializing in Japanese pottery and decorative things. They were papier mache dolls of Daruma, used in a practice to focus one’s intention on a wish, place it into the Universe and follow it to completion.

Since Monday is the Chinese New Year, the year of the Dragon, I bought two of these dolls, one for me and one for George–and have been thinking about what my wish would be. Apparently, you’re supposed to make the wish and fill in one eye on the doll (see Wiki Daruma doll photo above.) Each time you look at it, you Read the rest of this entry »

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January 20, 2012

true or false? . . .

I’ve spent most of my life alone. Oh, I’ve had people around me at times, but for most intents and purposes, I’ve led a pretty solitary life. Perhaps that’s one reason I like the Taoist hermit model. It feels comfortable to me. For that, I’ve learned how to trust myself and my instincts.

Something happened a little awhile ago that surprised me. I could have questioned it to death, but my instincts told me that my intuition was correct about what happened and probably how it happened to come about. So was it in fact true?

With this long and carefully honed sense of things for myself, I think I can also tell what’s false. At least for me. Some might say that I’m just very opinionated, thinking that I am right about things all the time. I don’t think I’m right all the time, in fact. I think that most of the time, I’m just right about things for myself. That’s all. There is no real right or wrong or true or false. It’s how we perceive things in the end. Or at the beginning of things. And what feels right to my inner self.

This post seems kind of rhyme-y to me. That is, there’s no real rhyme or reason for it. Is there?

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January 18, 2012

timeless. . .

I’ve been too serious lately and my head feels like it is about to drop off from so much heavy thinking. So, I thought I’d share this photo taken over the holidays of little Josie, standing at the plate glass doors of the cottage, patting the window, with a red lobster boat checking for traps, the twin lighthouses on Thacher Island in the background (click on the photo to enlarge.)

At the time, I was messing around on the Yamaha Clavinova that George had provided at the cottage, playing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. The lobster boat eased in, and then calmly left this little scene just as the chorus came to an end. It was like a movie script.

Life is much better, though.

January 18, 2012

currency. . .

If you watch TV, movies or listen to the news, you might get a sense that what makes the world go ’round is making money. Or having money. Or having enough money. There are the big Wall Street financial bandits like Madoff, Enron, etc. who have made off in the last few years with not only a lot of money, but also with the trust and goodwill of the public about our financial institutions. Even the politicians seem to have been had (Obama.) Where is this going, you may ask? Not this post–but the economic world we live in?

I think about currency too. What kind of energy we expend in the name of making money or even saving it. How much of our waking hours are taken up with these efforts? What about the currency of time? Or the amount of currency that we trade for boredom, for example? It’s easy to go “shopping for sales” when Read the rest of this entry »

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January 16, 2012

expectations. . .

What did we expect with our lives? Are you one of those who had no idea what you wanted to be or do when you were little? I’ll bet most people didn’t. Many of us are still trying things out and figuring out who we want to be. It doesn’t end.

Or maybe if we didn’t know what we wanted to do, we at least had an idea of how we wanted to live later in life after working hard at doing either what we wanted or what we had to do to get our kids grown up, educated, married and settled in their own places, with or without mortgages of their own. Or, if we didn’t have kids or didn’t have a career, we still wanted something in the end, didn’t we? Our own house Read the rest of this entry »

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Category: Life & Spirit