From the ole Crap Buster.

A friends’ husband categorized me as that, and it warmed me for two years.

I’m semi Woo Woo.

I find I am often in the middle. I go to far-out groups, and say, “Okay guys, dampen it a little.”

If I’m in the mainstream group, I say, “I’m out of here.”

Motivated by Caz Makepeace's #Y Travel blog, I am adding my two dimes and a nickel's worth.

I am astounded at how many travel bloggers are out there, and how many travel full time. #Caz Makepeace is one. She travels with her husband, two young daughters, and has a highly successful blog and website.

 I am in awe.

Uh oh, serious mouse encroachment--erased material. I had to begin again.

Double mouse encroachment

Back to the blog: I have traveled a bit and loved it. I stood beside the Parthenon in Athens Greece as a golden sunrise enlivened it.

I climbed the stepped pyramid at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and stood at what was once called the “Holy of Holies,” that room at the tip top. 

From my lofty perspective, I looked out over what was once a city, the temple of the warriors, the ball court and the Yucatan Peninsula where the horizon was flat as a pencil line drawn across the page of my vision.  

I’ve been to some places, but as you can imagine there is a whole world that I have not touched. I believe as Caz puts it “Travel is not to run away, but toward.’

Perhaps our move to Hawaii was to run away, and that’s the reason we didn’t like it, but I have no regrets. To travel is to rise above and beyond who we are, to experience a new day every day, and to step out of our present conditions.

Imagine sitting in a dandelion-dotted field in Germany, the green so green it brings tears to your eyes,  and you are eating cold pizza from the night before, and it is the best you have ever tasted.

“When you travel, life around you is constantly changing. This means you never get lost in the blur of mundaneness. You’re highly aware of what is happening, how things move from one day to the next, and how to flow with change.

“It’s a mindfulness so easy to tap into, which is why I feel travel is so addictive.´--Caz

Can you remember what happened last Tuesday? I can’t.

Regarding her travel blog Caz writes: “It feels like it’s not very powerful because you’re just helping someone find a good burger, but in reality, we’re helping people create moments and memories. It’s those moments and memories that shape and impact their lives and lead them to new horizons and help them experience JOY.”

Caz went on to talk about Chakras and cleansing, and going to a spiritual medium, and said, ““Believe me when I say that writing this post brings me tears.”

She wanted to write about who she was but in doing so felt vulnerable and felt that people would judge her as being woo woo, or cuckoo and she realized that she was afraid of being criticized.

I realized, too, that here on this blog I have dampened who I was because I feared people would think  I was cuckoo, but in the process I come across lukewarm.

I do not want to be lukewarm, but then I wonder who am I. What do I believe, and what do I want to share?

And blogs can be so self-centered, but then what choice do we have, you aren’t here talking to me. It is a one-way conversation.

As I mentioned before I intend to go to a Tony Robbins 3-day event in November, and I know some people love him, while others have a strong negative reaction.  He is threatening. He doesn’t pull punches. He has been doing his work for so long he can read people and that is scary.

People are going to think whatever thoughts they want so we might as well do our thing and let the chips fall where they may.

"The possibility of having dreams come true is what makes life interesting,"--Paulo Coelho

What? It's Almost Over?

Summer, I hardly knew you.

When you were a kid, did you want summer to never end or were you anxious to go back to school?

I was on the side of wanting summer to last forever. Well, I would let winter in there, for I loved the snow too.

Then I did. Now I’m not racing down hill on a slid.

Oh but the summers, three whole months--heaven. 

Oh, later on when I was a teenager I had to pick cherries and peaches and apricots, but that was preferable to school. And I could ride my horse.

With my affection for horses, you can see why I must wish on a white horse now and again.

Want to have a conversation?

My horse wasn’t white and truth be known I prefer non-white horses, but they can be quite spectacular when cleaned up and gorgeous, and they are for wishing upon.

This is the only known surviving  picture of Boots and Joyce

Guess I’m waxing nostalgic, realizing that life changes and the body changes, and I’m not young anymore. 

Youth, you didn’t hang around long enough.

Richard Bach, author of Illusions and Jonathan Livingston Seagull said, “If you wonder if your mission on earth is over if you’re alive it isn’t.”

So here I am attempting to follow my mission, putting one foot in front of the other, and letting my fingers do the talking.

Odd that I didn’t like school, for I love reading, and learning, but being penned up for 6 hours a day, plus preparation and riding the school bus or walking to school—that shot the entire day.

I have mentioned before that one of my pet peeves is homework which ought to be called school work, but isn’t, because it is school work brought home.

Let kids be kids.

While I am on the subject of learning I found that the Barnes and Noble bookstore is kept afloat by selling adult coloring books, a new craze.

Walking through Barnes and Noble the other day I noticed that they are filling the tables with the classics—Hemingway, Steinbeck. Great, read those, but I wondered where the new Steinbeck's are. 

Ray Bradbury said, “If you can read you have an entire education.”

I'm Dumb

But not this dumb

#Jon Morrow said if I’m not getting massive traffic on my blog I’m dumb.

He gives away massive amounts of free stuff. If I want it, however, I must sign in with my email address. He must have me on his counter at least 20 times. Sneaky.

And then driving my ten-year-old grandson (eleven in October) to our house today and hearing about how he could make a paper thin computer keyboard proved Morrow right. I am dumb.

The paper-thin keyboard could be made with graphite. Graphite is an electricity conductor, pencil lead is graphite. It’s a little more complicated than that if one draws a circuit board with a pencil, and with wires, clips, a ground—human fingers work as the ground—and a  USB port one could type on the paper. That bit of news was followed by states of matter of which people think there is three, solid, liquid and gas, but he said there are four. The fourth is plasma, that is a state of being. And Star Wars Light Sabers are not made of light, he said, but of plasma. Next, he told me how they made the robot BB 8 in the latest Star Wars movie.  BB 8 is round and rolls, and if his head fell, my grandson says, he would still work. The body and head work together with magnets. And Tesla could create earthquakes, and stop his own…

My brain is fried.

Except, somewhere in the recesses of that brain, I am smarter now.

.

This week we found five acres and a cute little house we liked, decided to put in an offer the next day figuring it would go fast. The following day the owner chose one of the three offers that came in that day. And it was not us. What? One buyer came in with half the money for a downpayment. The nerve.

And here I had already mentally put in a brand-new kitchen.

I grieved for about 10 minutes, then said, “Okay great master, you have something better in store.” And I am relieved. I can breathe easy again. Sometimes the Great Spirit just has to watch out for me.

  

What did I want to talk about today?

Oh yes, I wanted to ask about this conundrum…

Happiness.

Most everybody says they want to be happy.

People search for happiness.

They pray for happiness.

They read Oprah about it.

Many write about it.

Our constitution says that everyone has a right to pursue happiness (not necessarily to have it) which implies that it is something everybody wants.

Why then are most stories about suffering?

If someone is just happy they are boring.

Give someone a dreaded sickness, allow them to overcome it, and people lap it up.

The hero must struggle.

The hero must overcome obstacles, he must work for it. If he just went with the flow and life was good, nobody would want to hear about it.

Well, we might ask him this: “How did you do that?” But if it came easy it would be suspect.

Please explain this to me.

I’m dumb.

I Don’t Know How I Feel About This

It’s complicated.

When my kids were growing up we lived in San Diego California, home of one of the largest Zoos in the world, and home of #Sea World.

Being residents, and with yearly passes, we frequented both places.

Some of our most poignant times were spent at Sea World. It was not as commercial in those days. It felt wilder then, with more of a natural setting.  It had aquariums, the dolphin, walrus, and sea lions shows, and the featured attraction #The Shamu Show.

We watched as the Killer Whale show aka The Shamu Show advanced from simple to extravagant. I never liked calling them Killer whales, and now people are calling them Orcas, their scientific name.

Before they built the large tanks of today we sat in Southern facing bleachers and burned our noses as we watched Shamu leap from the water and touch a pole so high the whale’s entire body was out of the water.

He circled the tank racing at high speed, splashed the audience, who chose to sit in the “splash zone,” and part of the show was to have a  volunteer, sometimes a child, stand on a platform and have the Orca “kiss” their cheek.

Not anymore.

We stared in awe and fascination as the shows advanced from “dancing” with the whales in the water, to watching as the whale and trainer disappeared under water only to appear seconds later, the whale leaping from the water with the trainer standing on its nose.

It was positively awesome. It made your heart sing. It brought tears to your eyes.

I thought the whales were goodwill ambassadors, showing the people that what had previously been called “Killer Whales,” were now interacting with people as friends.

And the whales seemed to be enjoying themselves.

My two girls learned to swim by having “Shamu rides” that is they would hold onto my back, hold their breath, and I would dive deep under the water, and we would come spurting up to the surface.

Those were glad times.

The last time we visited Sea World, about four years ago, we saw their new big glorious tank with close circuit television screens, a story on screen, but no trainer in the water with the whale.

It was disappointing.

I wondered if the whale having played with people for so long wondered why they no longer played with him.

A whale—not the original Shamu, one named Tilikum, had killed someone.

The whale was known to be aggressive, so why they got into the water with him is a mystery to me.

In my opinion, these smart people acted foolishly.

I once heard of an old man being killed by his “tame” ostrich. The ostrich had attacked him earlier on, but what did the man do? He went into its enclosure again and was kicked to death.

There was fervor over the whale killing incident. The whale had killed someone at his previous establishment, then at night at the Sea world facility he had apparently drowned a homeless man who got within grabbing—or falling into the tank, distance of the whale.

People forget that a wild animal always has wildness in him and that Killer Whales in the wild regularly pull seals from the rocks and eat them.

While driving down the Oregon coast one day my husband and I heard the loud barking of seals, we pulled off the road and looked down into a bay below us. There floated a big black and white Killer Whale. The seals were smart enough to warn the others.

If an animal is known to be a killer, stay out of the water. But, I wonder, should we then pass a law saying that no human ought to go into the water with a whale. Maybe no one ought to go into an enclosure with an ostrich either.

Should Sea world have captured whales from the wild?

I don’t know.

Much was learned from their captivity, and many people fell in love with them and came to realize that animals, previously thought to be vicious can be docile as kittens given the right environment.

After the outcry regarding capturing wild whales, Sea World stopped capturing them, and began breeding them in captivity.

Now that has stopped.

When the present whales die that will be the end of whale shows at Sea World.  There was a documentary made titled “Black Fish,” that my daughter watched, I didn’t, and it changed her mind about keeping the whales in captivity. People were outraged at their treatment.

People ought to be outraged whenever an animal is treated badly, yet many people have championed their cause. They rescued Keiko from a tiny tank in Mexico (Yes, I saw a dog in a crate in Mexico too, but people still crate their dog.) The people who rescued Keiko somehow got a large gorgeous tank at Newport Oregon built for him. During his years there he gained over a ton of weight.  Later he was released into the wild. Where I believe, he was without a family, for he had bonded with people.

It was a tough decision. People wanted what was best for him. I hope he forgave us our ignorance.

It’s tough isn’t it, knowing what the “right” thing is?

People who only know wild animals or livestock, see them as either dangerous, or lacking intelligence, or use them as machines, or for work, food, or entertainment.  I always hated it when as a child I heard that humans have "Dominion over the animals." People took that as a license for power. 

A wild animal can be dangerous when threatened or encroached upon. But to live intimately with an animal shows the human partner how loving they can be. How they form bonds with species other than their own, and that animals, like people, they have individual personalities.

Once I adopted a 5 ½-month-old mustang from the Bureau of Land Management in Burns Oregon. True she had been born at their facility as her mother was pregnant when removed from the wild.  But she was a wild animal.

Within a week she was eating out of my hand, and allowed me to remove the lead rope she had been dragging since we loaded her at the facility. When I released her from her round pen she ran around the paddock at such a speed, I thought, Good heavens, am I ever getting on that animal?

She was the sweetest horse, and so curious. She loved to play with plastic Pepsi bottles in a box.  She was a darling pet, but never a trustable riding horse—but not that well trained either.  I did saddle her and ride her a bit, and she never bucked with me, but she could act a little cuckoo. I remembered the trainer Pat Parelli said to always remember that they were once wild, and still had wildness in them.

Sierra

People train whales, lions, etc. and once in awhile someone gets hurt. Seeing an animal in such a loving situation people forget they aren’t pussycats. (Have you ever seen a feral cat? Try to hold that animal.)

I was motivated to think about this after I saw #Rachel Jones blog “#Hippie in Heels,” ask the question: “Should We Visit Sea World?”