Hello Awesome!

For you.

"What would you name your dog?" Eight-year-old grandson called to us from the car's back seat.

 "I'd name mine Naked," he said, "that way when we had a party I could say, "I'm going outside to get Naked."

An hour and a half later I stood inches from a glass wall watching silver fish doing an endless Ester Williams pretend.

Fish by the thousands swished past the window, swimming in unison, circling their enormous tank. A shark swam into the mass of fingerlings--no problem—they glided aside, then elegant as silk, flowed back into formation.

Another shark swam through a hole the fish had created. They closed the gap with the same precision. A dimensional tunnel came next.

I was mesmerized.

They had it right in the movie, "Finding Dory." Schools of fish could probably spell.

We were visiting the Oregon Aquarium in Newport Beach Oregon. A must see if you are ever in Oregon. It is exquisite, the best I have ever seen, and I have visited a few.

All the aquatic animals at the Aquarium were vibrant and healthy.  corals were abundant, anemones large as dinner plates, starfishes with "eyes" on the tips of their "arms"—I didn't know that—water clear as glass and cold as ice.

See, we were traveling.

Now we're back home.

It's been a busy two months. With Christmas behind us, New's Year's day, done, five family birthdays in January and February, done, new house moved into, its gray bathroom, gone, transformed into mango and lime green, the dark green dining room and gray living room doused in cream-colored paint.

Daughter painted the fireplace white; I painted walls and myself.

My little Fixer Upper:

Bath Room before:

Bath Room after:

























The house isn't sad anymore.

But I have noticed that a lot of people are…

Why is that?

They don't know how awesome they are. See, like my grandson, I answer my own question.

To read more, go to www.traveling-thru-life.com It is only a click away. What if an abundant life was only a click away?

To Fellow Travelers

About twenty years ago when I first heard of the Tony Robbins firewalk, I said, “When someone offers a seminar on walking on water I’ll take it.  I am not walking on fire.”

And then, in November I faced the burning coals, and said, “I’m doing this even if it burns my feet off.”

When the seminar assistant said, “Step on the grass—a strip of grass just before the coals--I stepped on the grass and looked at a glowing strip of red-hot embers before me.  Without hesitation, I gave my chest a thump and stepped out.

It was as easy as walking on popcorn.

As it is with most fears, the hard part is worrying about doing it. It is taking that first step, wondering if you will make it, shall I face my fear or retreat into my comfort zone?

And then you do it, and say, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad. That was easy.”

You are jubilant. 

With the firewalk, you are greeted on the other side by welcoming arms and congratulations, and the ones who have completed their walk are happy as a bunch of otters on a creek bank, laughing, hugging each other and greeting the walkers.

I saw a boy, about twelve years old, and asked, “Did you walk on the fire?”

“Yep.”

The idea of the firewalk is to teach that you can change your state of conscious in an instant. You are afraid, you do it, and in the process, you change your physical state, your emotional state, and your belief system.

Isn’t that the way it is with most unknown scary events? When a challenge presents itself, you wonder if you are up to the task.  Shall I take the first step? Shall I begin that business?  What if I fail?

 You won’t burn your feet off.

Why do we do what we do?

To read more, Please go to www.traveling-thru-life.com  scroll down to the picture of stairs.

 To You,  fellow traveler.

Make it work!

Ready?

I can see it. It’s about to happen.

The cat is eyeing my desk from his perch, and about to make the leap.

Here I am using, for the first time, a little desk built into the laundry room of our new home.  If the cat decides to recline in sublime comfort on it as he did on my previous desk—now in the garage--we would feel the constricted space similar to 16 people in a phone booth.

After sleeping about 12 hours night before last, I awakened this morning at 4 a.m. So, here we are, or here I am, in the early morning quiet visiting with you.

Prop your feet up, have some coffee, soon we will get dirt between our toes as we travel-thru-life. 

Right now, for me, my title, Traveling-thru-life, is more like Staggering-thru-life. Not that I am inebriated, but with cleaning the other house, moving, and painting this one—I am in a state of emotional inebriation. I have to aim carefully to walk through a doorway.

Read more: www.traveling-thru-life.com

Are you ready?

Good Medicine coming your way...www.traveling-thru-life.com

Join the Party

Craig and Caz Makepeace's little one greeting a friend.

“I wouldn’t live next door to a US citizen,” said a lady from Iceland.

“What? Why not?”

“Because they don’t take care of each other," she said. "They don’t care.”

This was from the Michael Moor movie, Where Shall We Invade Next?

Michael said, “I care.”

I care too.

How about you? I believe you care. All around us people care. However, we have become fractured from each other. People don’t know their neighbors. And sometimes it appears we need an invitation to be friendly.

One time in London, I was looking for a glass blowing shop I had seen advertised in a shop window downtown.  I asked a distinguished-looking elderly British gentleman for directions, and he transformed from his apparent conservative nature into an animated direction pointer. He went out into the middle of the street to direct me.

Here is an invitation.  Join the party.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had dreams of traveling.  I’ve done a fair amount of it, so, I can speak with some authority on how the Acropolis shines at sunrise and how the sound of the cicadas of Greece drift on the breeze and appear to vibrate the air as you approach an island.

I have wondered how it would be to travel with a daughter and her child (I have a seven-year-old grandson). What sort of education would that provide for the child? Would he become a child of the world? Would he learn to understand and be tolerant of various cultures? Or would he be bored out of his skull, and whine to go home?

#Caz and Craig of #YTravelblog.com travel full time with their two girls, around four and eight years of age.

It's hard to form lasting friendships Caz says, but their girls are quick to make friends and are open and eager travelers. Caz provides a wealth of information on their site, and she encourages travel bloggers.

“If it encourages a few people to broaden their mind due to the stories and photos they post then please, let’s have a few more of them.”

--Caz Makepeace

However, I am not one who travels full-time, Nor am I one who travels much anymore for that matter. I say that. I think I am home-bound, then I  take off for four days to San Jose California to attend a live event with Tony Robbins.

That was traveling.

That was a broadening experience.

 I travel.

A mini-vacation can do wonders for the spirit.

Getting away, having time to one’s self—time to broaden your horizons, to learn new coping skills, that is often the reason we leave home and hearth to settle into someplace new, or remote, or different. 

I think of Anne Morrow Lindbergh going off to a beach cabin and since, she said, she thinks better with a pen in her hand, she began to write. The result was her book Gift From the Sea. Now there is a  50^th-year-anniversary issue, and Morrow’s book is as pertinent now as the day she penned it. Women try to find balance in a chaotic world, they try to juggle a home husband, children, finances, food, cooking, home repairs, taxiing the young ones to various events. Whew. And all along they are trying to find grace.

No wonder people are busy, and find is difficult to connect.

That is my purpose here. To connect, and to offer a reprieve from the hamster wheel.

It is my purpose to offer inspiration to go for your dream whatever that might be. Is it to travel? To begin a business? Write a book? Take painting lessons, or would you like to take your easel out to the beach and paint the birds? Perhaps we can find, that maybe, just maybe you can unplug and live the life of your dreams.

We are, after all traveling-thru-life.

And as Caz says:

  

“Life’s ultimate goal is to make money doing what you love in a way that serves.”

When I came home from California, I realized that whether we travel far or near, we are still traveling through life. And life is what we came here to experience.

Life is something we all have. It is something we struggle with or celebrate daily. And whatever we can do to lighten the daily load, for ourselves and others, that would be a contribution.

In that light, I have started a new blog. It is http://traveling-thru-life.com

Caz’s travel blog inspired me, and she encouraged bloggers to use Siteground, Wordpress.org,  

So I decided to join the big kids. The result was, I ended up on the playground yard bleeding.

Apparently, Google loves Wordpress as it has many functions. However, for a cyber inept person like me, it is a challenge, and not intuitive—as though they expect their players to know something about computer programming. Ha.

http://traveling-thru-life.com is a simple site, but alive. (That is if I’m not working on it.)  See, I’m playing with websites instead of packing, for we are moving to our new house on Thursday of this week.

Please check it out my new site. Blow the audience numbers out of the water—that is hit the ceiling of my allotted hits, and I will sign up for the next level.  

We all search for meaning, for balance, for grace. We all deal with the mundane of life. Some of us dream of that little beach cottage where we can have the solitude to think, to be alone, to understand why we are here and where we are going.

Writing, some say, is thinking through the fingers, and that is what I am doing here. Thinking and connecting.

Thank you for joining me.

Let’s travel-thru-life together.