This Journey

I have been missing Literally Letty. Her stories have taken backstage to the history research on the old country club. Searching my blog for unfinished stories sometimes helps me create new ones.  Interesting how reflectivity takes one's mind and weaves it through a maze of emotions and moments. 

"This Journey" began in January of 2021, during Covid when I often thought about life. 

I am thankful in my heart every day for the life I lead every day and the grace that God has given me to enjoy it. To my daily regret, my words and actions do not always demonstrate my gratitude and love. Then my thankfulness turns to God and my Higher Power, from which I find faith and understanding.

Such sweetness in this pillow top. 

I keep two books by my side in my studio. A small blue book called One Day at A Time, Al-Anon which guides me with understanding of what I can and cannot do. "Let Go, Let God," is imprinted in my heart as a reminder of what I face.

 "Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood looking back." 

Looking back is what I do when I write the   Miami, Ok Golf and Country Club History. Oh my, what insights I have gained from this journey back in time. 

The second book, which I keep nearby, is so large it deserves a shelf by itself. The New Oxford Annotated Bible helps me understand the words of God as spoken through his disciples and followers. I bought the Bible about six years ago when our Sunday School class took on a project to study the entire Bible. Thanks to Curtis and Michelynn McKnight we have studied books from the Old Testament, MMLJ, and now Corinthians. 

A curious thing happened to me when I stepped in Mardell's Christian Book Store to buy the Annotated Bible. The man at the bookstore told me they didn't carry The New Oxford Annotated Bible because it contained the Apocrypha. "What!" I explained, "that is exactly why I want this book."  He calmly and monotonously explained to me that Christians did not follow the words of the Apocrypha because they were not in the accepted canon of scripture. 

I love to read "banned books" or "unaccepted books" and that fired me up. I ordered the book online and began reading, you guessed it, passages from the Apocrypha. 

Whether Susanna, or Bel and the Dragon stories are history or fiction matters not. What is important, as we often say, is the "take away." Why write those words or share the stories through oral traditions if no one can understand the reason for the story to exist. 

After reading a few of the stories from the apocrypha, and the story of Ester in the OT,  I smiled. Our lives may be longer and healthier and our daily tasks easier than a hundred or a five thousand years ago, but oppressed people still must be creative, like Brer Rabbit, to teach the world acceptance of all peoples. 

Perhaps this answers another question I have considered over the years, as to why it helped me so much to share, to tell orally with audiences "Folktales." They carry such simple messages of how best to live. 

What I have found along this journey, in the Bible, is how to live by Faith. The Golden Rule helped me understand God when I was a child, when I didn't know about storms and chaos entering my life, but faith I learned is everyday.   

Looking back, this is not all entirely true. Besides the Al-anon book and the Bible, I often go for brisk walks to allow nature to comfort me, or turn to my collection of quotes, that I keep on the "cloud" for quick reference.  When I don't know what to do, what to think, how to feel about this or that I discover through quotes that others have felt and feel the same way that I do. 

Allow me to segue to a moment when I stood in my parents bedroom and my mother handed me a pamphlet by Dale Carnegie on how to get along with people. I cannot imagine what I had said or done, but from that time on she quoted Dale Carnegie to me on a regular basis. 

And so, a thought by an old sage, Dale Carnegie, sent to me through my mother's heart.

Every day do a good deed. That will put a mile of joy on someone's face. 

I am thankful that Salvia will grow in abundance in our clay soil because their blooms attract a kaleidoscope of butterflies.