Have We Lost Our Joy?

Did we ever have it?

This question came up for me when I saw the documentary #Kedi, about the cats of Istanbul.

For thousands of years, cats have roamed the streets of that ancient city. Cats sit on the sidewalks to be petted by pedestrians, some come and go into the home of their chosen person, some weave their way around the ankles of people sitting at outdoor cafes, some wander in and out of fish markets, or paw a restaurant window asking for food. One cat found a wallet for a man who lost his boat in a storm. “If you don’t believe this story,” he said, “you’re a heathen.”

A woman on the show commented that cats bring the joy people are dangerously in danger of losing.

The movie Kedi documents seven cats from the thousands that roam the streets of Istanbul. The people say they do not pen them up so they can pet them, but allow the cats to come and go. They feed them, care for them and tend their wounds. One man said, most of us have a running tab with the vet.

Where they had giant rats, the cats took care of them. A former psychotic man said the cats saved him. He could not laugh but now finds joy with the cats. He tends them and brings his bunch of cats about 20 pounds of chicken daily.

“It is said that cats are aware of God’s existence, while dogs think people are god.”

You guys have heard me go on and on about the #Tony Robbins Event I attended in November, and now I see that the Los Angeles 3-day event such as I attended in San Jose, is sold out, even the high-fa lutin' expensive tickets.

That tells me that people are attracted to joyful events. That tells me that people want to know themselves better.  It tells me that they are seeking something, whether it be motivation to go faster and farther in their businesses, or to go faster and farther in their life experience. 

Some go to the event to heal old psychological wounds. Some go because they are desperate, some are depressed, some are suicidal. (Of the more than 100 suicidal people Tony has counseled, he has not lost a single one.)

People are attracted to high energy people who want an exciting, meaningful life.

That is what I wanted on this site, and why I began  www.traveling-thru-life.com to connect with other seekers.

Remember what I said about out psychological holes not matching the other person holes? Because of that phenomena, we can help each other.

Yep, come on in, state your gripes, complaints, Kvetch a bit. We will slap you with a pillow and tell you to get over it.

I don’t mean to belittle your life issues, but to add a little lightness to them, and to state that maybe instead of problems, we could call them challenges. Challenges spur us forward; problems weight us down.

I have heard it said that “If we focus on crap, we will become a crap magnet."

Don’t have any problems? Great, share that too. I want to hang out with high-flying people. 

If you aren’t flying high now, you soon will be.

Have You Ever Wondered...

1.      Why women get excited about having a pot filling faucet over the stove when after their spaghetti or whatever is cooked, they must then carry that hot heavy pot to the sink.

2.    Why we have televisions in restaurants.

3.    Why the obsession with cell phones.

4.    That we find what’s wrong with others and indeed within ourselves instead of finding what’s right.

5.     That we live on a water planet and have a water shortage.

6.    That we fight.

7.     That we let the media decide for us, and we believe the pundits. (Pundits were originally wise respected people, now often they are hacks. They are a commentator, one person’s opinion.)

Here’s a thought from Shark Tank investor, and Real Estate mogul Barbara Cocoran:

“Last spring, I tweeted a thought, which brought on an avalanche of criticism. The backlash was intense, and I was accused of giving “retro” advice. But I haven’t backed down from what I said, nor will I, to this day.

Here’s my tweet (and brace yourself):

I find running a #business in a man’s world to be a huge advantage. I wear bright colors, yank up my skirt + get attention. #womeninbusiness.

Get a grip folks, doesn’t a man use every advantage he can think of.

I love it.

A Little Voice Spoke to Me This Morning

"Stop being such a smuck," the voice said. "Put Song of Africa, your novel's excerpt, out there and let the chips fall where they may." (Actually, the voice was nicer than that.)

No signing up. No exclusivity. 

Just click on song-of-africa.blogspot.com 

and Viola' you're in.

I want this to be as though you are in a bookstore: 

You are attracted to a book titled Song of Africa. (By me, Jewell D or Joyce Davis, of those, I haven't decided who I will be yet.)

 You pull Song of Africa from the shelf, 

go to the coffee counter, order a good strong brew, fix it to your liking, and sit down and read the first 37 pages. 

Oh, you say, "I forgot to drink my coffee. I was so engrossed in what happened to the two Saras, their lovers, to Patrice, and to that infamous painting,’ The Girl on The Pier,’ that I forgot to drink it.”

You gulp down the now cold coffee, go to the checkout, plunk down your credit card, and after purchasing Song of Africa, you tell the clerk:

"Order more of these. This book will sell like hotcakes."

You Know Better Than That

 “Books are old fashioned,” my eight-year-old grandson told me this morning.

That hurt my heart.

I think of #Ray Bradbury’s book #Fahrenheit 451 where books were burned and how the people each memorized one book to keep it alive.

This past Thursday National Achiever’s Congress, the presenter, Michael Burnett, told a similar story.

When Nelson Mandela was in prison, the prisoners had to do hard labor, and that was to break up sandstone rocks. Sunlight on sandstone creates quite a glare, and it is hard on the eyes. Mandela asked the guard if they could have sunglasses to shield their eyes.

You know the answer. “No.”

Later on, when they had nothing to do in their cell, Mandela asked the guard if they could have books to read.

“You aren’t here to have sunglasses and books,” he said. The answer was, “No.”

So the prisoners devised a plan. They would have a one on one, each sharing what they knew with the other, and thus when they were, at last, released from prison,  each was smarter than when they entered it.

We are all living books filled with experiences, insights, and garnered wisdom. If we shared it, just think where we would be.  I guess that’s what the internet is, but I still want books.

We have this extraordinary quality of desiring to create beauty,  love and learning around us, but with our two-million-year-old brains—evolutionarily speaking—we are, instead, on the watch for danger. There are fears all around us, internal and external. We hang back, afraid to go for our dreams, afraid to go into uncharted territory, afraid to speak up, and afraid of our own shadows. We often think, we aren’t good enough, loved enough, or smart enough.

You know better than that.

If you agree, laugh out loud.  If not, keep quiet.

High five,

Joyce

P.S. The Peacock is back:

There must be one feather that is in focus. I was in a hurry to catch him, I had to show you that my totem animal is real. After two months of a no show, he appeared yesterday. He drove Layfette (that’s one dog) crazy.

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.

The Peacock and The Frog

A long time ago I did a visualization to find my totem animal.

In my mind’s eye, I traveled down a path and stopped before bushes that rustled telling me that something was hiding within them. I coaxed, expecting to see some cute little furry animal, “You can come out now."

To my surprise, the animal that strutted out of the bushes was a peacock.

A male peacock in all his finery.

Fast forward: We bought a house in Riverside California. When my little daughter and I visited the empty house, I looked up through a clerestory window, and there on the roof was a peacock.

I figured it was an omen—my first encounter with my peacock.

We lived up a hill from a park, and he was a frequent visitor. From our roof, he could survey the countryside.

A few years later we bought property in Marcola Oregon, and upon visiting the property, what did we see?

A peacock!

 Later on, we would see him running with the wild turkeys.

And then last week I visited our new house, and looking out the bedroom window, what did I see on the fence?

 A peacock!

I couldn’t believe it. I was yelling for the dog to come see.

In the sleepy little town of Junction City Oregon, in the middle of winter, in a neighborhood, I never in my wildest dreams would think I would see a peacock, but I did.

Is this telling me something or what?

If I roll back the time to shortly after my first encounter with the visionary peacock, I visited the bushes again and asked the peacock, “Why do you stay hidden here in the bushes?”

“Because,” he answered, “Here I am the only peacock.”

It’s time for me to join the other peacocks.  In light of this, I am publishing my Island book on Kindle Select. Just a tad bit more editing and it's good to go. No peacocks in it.  It’s not about the peacock. The peacock is grace, vision, a kick in the pants to get with it. I don't know why he is associated with houses, perhaps because I have houses and writing mixed up with each representing significant potential.

I accept his visitation with gratitude.

We saw no peacocks during the year we spent in Hawaii. That year was a hiding-away place, not a be-seen place. It was a time of contemplation, of re-grouping, of finding oneself.

 The peacocks we saw on an earlier trip to Hawaii lived in a fabulous hotel, wandering in and out at will, meandering over expensive carpeting and roosting in the beams of the amazing foyer.  No hiding away for those peacocks—and they had a person to clean up after them.

I wonder what it would take to be the most read book on the month on Kindle. Most read books receive a bonus, and that's the reason I'm asking. I don’t believe it is as strange as seeing three peacocks associated with three new houses.

My book will be called The Frog’s Song. “The frog calls the rain that settles the dust for our journey.”

The Frog’s Song is about the voyage.  It’s about time away to contemplate, to learn that sequestering oneself off on some remote tropical island, living in the jungle off the grid, and down a mile and a half of lava encrusted road gives you time to find yourself.  Sometimes one must go off and regroup, and to learn to forge ahead. Pele called this little family of one husband, one daughter one seven-month –old grandson, two dogs and two cats, and one narrator, to the island, and then, in her wisdom, she kicked us off.

(And the Coqui frogs sang to us, and called the rain.)

P.S. About Kindle Select:

Kindle Select has done a tricky thing. They are paying authors for pages read, not for just having someone purchase the book. Authors of long books were complaining—they spent years writing, and then to be in competition with some little 99-page booklet didn’t seem fair. Thus Kindle Select is implementing the pages-read policy.

Gone are the days when a writer can say, “It doesn’t matter if you read my book, just buy it.”