Here's mine.
Carry on, and celebrate the Great High Holidays!
Love from Joyce
Thank you. By reading my blog you give me the opportunity to do the work I love, that is talk about life and its various aspects. I know, wandering around is one of the things I do best, so I thank you for respecting my voice while I do it. Why wish on white horses? They give us hope. I’m a seeker, and I figure that you, being here, must be one too. They say we didn’t come into this life with a manual on how to live it, but what if in our wanderings, we find one.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
The Real Scoop
A funny thing happened on my way to
my desk, daughter number one called to tell me about the cooking class she
offered at her son’s school. It happened during a storm, and when thunder
clapped louder than a train going through the building, the little ones hid under the table while
the big one’s went outside to hold onto the flag pole to see if they could get
electrocuted.
Before I could
lay a pinkie on the keyboard, I get a phone call…
"This call will be recorded for quality assurance."
Garrison Keillor (The Prairie Home Companion show on radio) did a shtick about this sort of call. He wondered why they wanted to listen to his voice, so he suggested—backed up by his sound effects guy—that each time you call use a different accent.
"This call will be recorded for quality assurance."
Garrison Keillor (The Prairie Home Companion show on radio) did a shtick about this sort of call. He wondered why they wanted to listen to his voice, so he suggested—backed up by his sound effects guy—that each time you call use a different accent.
“This is Senior Keillor , I teenk this is a
torough explanation…”
“Bonjour, this is Monsieur Keillor…”
The scoop, folks, is, they don’t care how you sound.
They are not listening to you.
They are listening to their employee.
They are listening to their employee.
Same with
email, Quality Control is watching the employee who is writing the email.
They are making
sure the responder is answering within the prescribed amount of time, that they
don’t use contractions, (Horrors), and use proper grammar with no &%4 typos.
Companies
are monitoring the very employee they background checked, fingerprinted, drug tested, and interviewed to make sure they qualified for the job. and then they don't (contraction) trust them to do it.
It boggles
my mind.
I hear #Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream is a joy to
work for. #Tom’s of Maine as well, and #
Log Rhythms, the company that built our log house is terrific.
Just think,
if we knew of companies that follow our ethical, humane, and logical way of thinking, and
gave them our business…
I’m excited
about the possibility.
Ha Ha:
What’s a perfect pitch?
When you
throw a banjo into a dumpster and it spears an accordion.
Thanks to Doug McMinn
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
NDE
Go into a Wall-mart
book section and what do you see? Mostly fiction. (I love fiction, the
exquisite kind.) But on this Wall-mart shelf we see mainly murder, mayhem, illicit
love stories, and world wracking events. The magazine rack is about the same,
as is the TV news.
Nobody wants
to be on the Red October, but we want to read about it.
Why?
Escape.
Well, listen
to this: Most people go to mind-numbing jobs, stop at McDonalds or the equivalent
for lunch, don’t have the money for a Big Mac, so opt for a Quarter Pounder
instead, go home, watch some TV, play video games, have chili and crackers for
dinner, argue instead of making love with their spouse, go to sleep, and the
next morning begin all over again.
But that’s
not us right?
We have
dreams and aspirations, and we are searching for how to achieve those dreams.
We want an exciting life. We figure we are here for a reason. We endeavor to
find that reason and realize it. We want
to be successful in life, finances, and family. Whew, that’s a tall order.
I was
inspired recently by a NDE, A Near Death Experience, sent to me by an intimate
friend. It was her experience, not mine to tell. The bottom line is, however, I
want to be the sort of person my friend felt she was destined to be--one who
makes the world a flourishing place for people, plants and animals.
And I want
to enroll others to join me.
According to
my friend with the NDE experience, when we dropped the bomb the world was in
peril, peril like total destruction, but someone, some thing, something wise,
intervened. And now it is our job to carry out the trust placed in us.
We need to
hold the planet in awe. We need to hold it with soft hands and a warm heart. We need to take care of each other. I don’t
mean we have to love everybody, heavens, that’s a crock. We just need to see
that their basic needs are met, exalt them to a higher plane, encourage them,
and stop shooting each other for God’s sake. And while I’m at it, we can stop
bellyaching about our childhood. Get over it. Millions of others are in the
same boat.
And stop that
mind-numbing stuff.
We aren’t
lazy people. We just want to be challenged to greatness, to feel that we
matter, to be acknowledged for our contributions, to have a job we rush to in
excitement.
Some of the aborigines
of Australia believed there were the keepers of the Earth, but because the
resources are not supporting them in their preferred wild lifestyle, they are
leaving. They are not reproducing themselves, and they are leaving that earth’s
care in the hands of others.
We are the
others.
Why we must start taking
a stand against
the system that’s designed to make us despise our work, and start being part of
a new movement where work is centered in joy, contribution, and community—Jonathan
Mead
#Paid to Exist
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Let's Sift Through the Sludge and Find the Gold
There are
many areas where that title applies.
One would be Thanksgiving. Remember
how the pilgrims survived their first winter in the new land, raised their
crops and with a bountiful harvest shared a feast? They needed a feast, the poor
people were half starving. And so the story goes, they gave thanks, and invited
their neighbors. Some of their neighbors happened to be the native peoples who
lived on the land before they arrived. The Natives brought wild turkeys and
corn, and thus introduced a tradition.
Few of us
need a feast, but we do need to give thanks.
And now with
Christmas coming up I want to find the gold, not follow a grumbling scenario: “Oh yeah I need to cook for eight hours, eat
for fifteen minutes, and clean up for seven days.”
I’m not doing it.
I want to
find the gold.
The gold is
to celebrate the great high holidays in a spirit of joy, gratitude, and glad
tidings.
The winter
celebration goes back Pre-Christian. The Winter Yule, the Solstice, marked the
shortest day, longest night. Trees that
stayed green all year held in high regard, and so people took evergreen
branches into the house to remind them that life would spring again.
The peoples
of Germany introduced the Tannerbnaum, that was they brought an entire
evergreen tree into the house. Before that peoples built wooden pyramidal shaped
frames and decorated it with branches. Martin Luther, inspired by the twinkling
stars, is credited with placing candles on the Christmas frame.
Imagine the
delight of a Christmas tree beaming with candles? I can feel the awe in my bones.
Stockings
hung by the chimney with care. So the
story goes, a poor widower had three daughters. Because he could not afford a
dowry, he believed his daughters would never marry and thus never be taken care
of, but he would not accept charity. Saint Nickolas heard of his plight, and on Christmas Eve he slid down the chimney, and seeing the girl's stockings hanging by the chimney to dry, he filled them with gold coins.
Imagine Christmas
morning.
The winter
celebration has a long tradition, embellished often, and special to the peoples
around the world. When Jesus was
introduced into it, it brought new meaning to the faithful. A child is born.
The angels sing. And what did they sing? “Good Tidings to all, and Goodwill to
all men.”
"Dear Mother, I am writing from the trenches. It is 11
o'clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a 'dug-out' (wet)
with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen
elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe
is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the pipe is German tobacco. Haha,
you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh dear, no! From a
German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the
British and Germans met and shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, and
exchanged souvenirs, and shook hands. Yes, all day Christmas day, and as I
write. Marvelous, isn't it?“
(Future nature writer Henry Williamson, then a nineteen-year-old private in the London Rifle Brigade, wrote to his mother, 1914)
Captain Robert
Patrick Miles, King's Shropshire Light Infantry, recalled in an edited letter that was published in both the Daily Mail and the Wellington
Journal & Shrewsbury News in
January 1915:
We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day
imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly
understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in
front. Of the Germans he wrote: "They are distinctly bored with the
war...In fact one of them wanted to know what on earth we were doing here
fighting them." )
One
Christmas Eve night, a man riding home in his sleigh, emblazoned the story of
Saint Nickolas aka Santa Claus, into our minds and hearts. This father wanted
something to give his six children, so he scratched out the poem, ”A Visit from
Saint Nickolas.” That was Clement Moore, and his poem has become known as “Twas The Night Before Christmas.”
In Moore’s
poem, St. Nicholas was a “Right jolly old elf.” “He was dressed all in furs
from his head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and
soot.”
“He went
right to his work and filled the stockings, and laying a finger beside his nose
and giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.“
And what did
he call out as his sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer sailed off into the
night sky?
“A Happy Christmas to all and to all a Good
Night.”