P.S.

"We have a two-million-year-old brain that is not trained to be happy, but for survival." --Tony Robbins

Well, after my vent of the day before, I realized that negativity abounds, so if you look for it, you will find it.

If you expect it you can be fascinated. 

Addicting cat food? Ha ha ha. How did you do that? That is fascinating.

A business that treats their employees like crap?

That’s how they were trained.

Didn’t our first 12 years of school teach us to sit down and shut up? Wasn’t that under threat of punishment? Wow, being sent to the principal's office—that was a biggie.

When the bell rang we knew where we were supposed to be-- in our seats. No whispering either. No passing of notes.

The teacher had eyes in the back of her head.

But kids being kids--the moment the pressure was off they popped up like corks under water suddenly released. The teacher walked out of the room…Ha ha. Chaos.

If we are in business for ourselves and we don’t talk to people we won’t be in business for long.

If we keep holding ourselves under water we’ll drown.

Yesterday I almost sat down and shut up. My two-million-year-old brain had me. I was at the transition period of writing, as in childbirth, there is a time when you want to give up.

But your body wouldn’t let you, would it?

And a baby was born!

New life.

A new chance for the human race.

Someone will always muck up.

 You will muck up.

 I muck up.

Isn’t that fascinating?

I’m glad I’m not a brain surgeon.

Over and out,

Joyce

To Blog or Not to Blog?

I’m wondering if I should stop blogging.

You know that internal voice that chatters to us on a regular basis? Nine times out of ten it tells us we can’t do something. It points up our inadequacies. Chip Gaines of the HTTV show Fixer Upper,(with his wife Joanna Gaines), says his internal voice is the opposite. 

It tells him he can do it.

Even with a tummy that hangs over his belt, his voice tells him he looks great.

Mostly his voice steers him right, once in awhile it does him wrong like believing crashing through that wall won’t hurt his shoulder. Throughout his life, however, he has listened to that voice, and it has held him in good stead.

Me?

I’m listening to my voice too and wondering where to go from here.

I don’t want to abandon faithful readers.

I’m just wondering when to hold em, when to fold em, and when to walk away when to run.

I’m been blogging before the word was invented. Long ago I posted a little journal called The Frog’s Song, and I still hear about in once in awhile. Then it was unique, now blogs are more plentiful than fleas.

Maybe I should take a semantical. Stop for awhile.

I can still write whenever I feel like it, just not publish it. In a year I can choose the best content, maybe that way I will have a super blog.

Well, since I’m thinking of quitting, I can write any dumb thing I want—could anyway come to think of it. The dumb thing of the day is: what diabolical person invented canned cat food?

It has turned our two cats into monsters. Is canned cat food like cigarettes, there is something added that makes the cat want more and more?  Even our sweet little Obi with the soft voice that hardly ever spoke before has taken up mewing.  Zoom Zoom has developed a loud YOWL.

Zoom Zoom is getting old, and I noticed he was getting thin, so instead of just giving him dry food, I added canned food to his diet. Bad idea.

Even the dog lays in wait at the garage door, hoping for a chance to lick the bowls.

Here’s another gripe:  Daughter dear went for a job interview and there were eight people in the room. EIGHT.

Daughter dear has herself interviewed and hired people, and when she did, she tried to put them at ease. She wanted to find out who they were. With a formal questionnaire, you know the person is going to give you the answers they think you want, not the ones they believe.  Rather like teaching to the test.

Well, chances are the person being interviewed doesn’t really want a job—who can blame them, but they need to pay the bills, and with all the stringent testing that goes on before hiring, one would think the employees would be real go-getters. Some are. Others do the least amount of work they can get by with. (I saw that yesterday when a young man attempted to load something into the back of my pickup.)

And while I am on a rant. What about employers who insist that their employees be at their desk early to hit the computer key at the exact minute of their shift. If the employee is a minute late they get docked and threatened big-time, but they must take minutes out of their time to sit and wait. Our minutes are more important than your minutes.

And, there is always a threat hanging over their head. They aren’t fast enough, formal enough, they misspelled a word, mail is stacking up, we need overtime. And don’t talk to any person on the floor. You can during a break, that is if a person you want to talk with is also on a  break.  

And the employer says, “You are a team.”

You must answer emails within 8 minutes, starting with the oldest, even if it is long past solving whatever it was the writer asked. On top of that, there is no one higher up that can handle sensitive issues, you must wing it, (while someone critically checks what you have written). You must satisfy the customer, that is, get them to shut up.

And sitting there for 8 hours is murder on the body. Oh yes, there are breaks—right, 15 minutes, guess you can go to the bathroom.

This company worked on getting best employer of the Year and got it. Whoopee do.

And what about the Amish getting their egg delivery shut down because they weren’t mailing their eggs refrigerated.

Anyone with any know-how about eggs knows that eggs do not need to be refrigerated for about three weeks. That gives time to ship them. I wouldn’t expect the mail delivery to know that, but an egg an expert would. I bet the Amish people do, did anyone ask them?  People, think about how you are affecting little businesses.

Get a heart.

These are small things I’m talking about, yet, there are little irritants that sap the quality of life.

We can be all airy fairy and spout quotes, and motivational mumbo jumbo, and say we can be, do, or have anything we want, while people are suffering.

Suffering doesn’ have to be at the starvation level. It can be like the splinter in the finger. It’s small, but it hurts like hell, and it won’t leave you alone. It saps your energy and governs your outlook on life.

We have developed such a system that we can’t die without spending money on doing it.

And if you do, the government will swoop in and see what they can take.

#Seth Godin mentioned #Henry Ford in his blog this morning. Ford knew about wages. Every time Ford increased the productivity of car production (in one three-year period, he lowered labor costs by 66% per car), he also raised wages.”

Smart move. People with more money spend more, even on cars.

People who do not feel strapped all the time have a more lightness of being.

What if Universities didn’t force parents into a limited lifestyle so they can educate their kids? What if universities were free or at least, financially tolerable, paid for by all of us?  People graduating with a ton of student loans is unconscionable.

And taxes…if everybody paid 10% would that supply our needs? And why make it so damn complicated?

It’s a cynical day.

 I’ll be better tomorrow.

 Maybe.

While You Were Gone

“What happened while we were gone Peaches? Sorry, I had to leave you, but it was 107 degrees in Las Vegas.”

I know Mom, I forgive you.

You might think I lay around and slept, but you see, this happened:  I was skulking through the garden when I came upon a rodent bigger than a house. It had teeth the size of a T-Rex’s and slobber dripped—it was disgusting. Well, do you think I was scared?  Yep, I was, so I called Bear. Now Bear is big. Bear’s a Newfoundland, and they are big, but that rodent was bigger. Maybe it was a T-Rex. 

It was red and yellow, and its eyes shone even in the daytime.

Bear and I hid behind the rose bush and planned what we could do about this invader monster rodent. We couldn’t let it wander around the property, it would scare you when you got home.

Did I tell you steam spouted from its nostrils? And it was bigger than Big Rock Candy Mountain across the road?

Well, it was.

Bear and I hatched a plan: we would sneak up behind it at night while it was sleeping. We would tie a rope around its feet, and hook it to the truck. When Dad drove away—bye bye monster rodent.

Our paws really can’t tie a rope, but we can bark. So we barked as loud as we could. We even barked into a garbage can which made our voices sound like 100 dogs. And you know what? That rodent ran right over the fence into the next yard. Now neighbor dogs have big hairy monster.

And we have none.

Yep, that’s what we did while you were gone.

I just checked Peaches’ blog  dogblogbypeaches.blogspot.com and decided she was a better blogger than I am, so here she is. She hadn’t written for awhile—being in heaven, she’s been having fun, but she checked in last week.

Me?

Oh, I’m supposed to write something?

Well,  “Ha ha ha ha,” [Maniacal laughter]. I checked a publishing site for my novel, Song of Africa the other day, and they want the author—that would be me—to have three books. Three! Three! Three!  I spent forty years on that one. That means I need to live another 80 years.

Okay, to speed things up a bit, I did think of an opening line for a possible sequel:

 “You killed my mother you low-down son-of-a-bitch!”

Do you think that one would fly?

For any who have read or are reading Song of Africa, in that book, a baby is born in Africa to an HIV mother who dies giving birth to her. Her name is Star, and in the sequel, she is thirteen years old and confronting the man who gave her mother AIDS.

Only 99,989 words to go.

As you may know, I began another blog on #Wordpress, as I heard one ought to use that venue. Well, unlike the traffic on the freeway, on that blog the traffic is like a country road in the middle of winter. However, the comments that come to it are choice. Except for the fellow who wants to boycott American Women because we are too independent, not marriageable and don’t want to have babies. [More maniacal laughter.]

The comments tell me that people do want to learn about themselves. I had hoped for that when I began the traveling-thru-life.com page. Not that we don’t connect in a personal way here, it’s just that WordPress has more opportunity to be boosted.

But what words of wisdom can I impart? What answers can I give? How can I help the human condition?

I didn’t say I had the answers, I said we would travel through like together, but if you are walking along the edge of a cliff, you want a sure-footed person walking beside you, not someone who will trip and pull you over the edge.

Therefore I will look for sure-footed people. I have mentioned #Tony Robbins many times, for I believe he is a sure-footed person.

Sure-footed people do abound, and they weren’t always so sure footed.  (Look to Joseph McClendon). Often they had troubled pasts, rotten childhoods, and miserable financial failures, but they sprang back. I get a kick out of Jack Canfield who says “Everybody had a rough childhood, get over it.”

That does surprise me about childhood for I see parents taking such loving care of their children. I see them sacrificing to provide for them. I see them searching for the best possible nutrition for their body’s souls and minds.

Yet, on the other hand, we hear from adults who are stuck in their past, and how horrible it was.

Is it because the mistreated ones have louder voices, or is it that there something in the human being that is never filled?

I believe we are hard-wired to have fears, (A primary marketing tactic—use fear.) We want love—another way to market.

Our fears lead to the extreme. When friends get divorced, we fear for our own marriage. When someone we know goes bankrupt, we worry about our finances. When friends get sick, we fear for our health, and heavens, when a friend dies…

Not logical.

And we search for meaning.

 In Greek lore that desire was called “Pathos,” the yearning for home.”  And what is home? Is it the physical place, or is it a connection with the divine? Is it a connection with one’s inner being? Could it be a connection with Spirit?

Perhaps the lack we feel was not so much damage that was done to us by our parents and family, but that ache that is the human condition.

It means we must fill it ourselves.

"With a little help from our friends.”

Join the group.

Now, look out your window and see the glorious spring.

What Shall We Talk About?

Talk about #Out of Africa, this picture is too good to pass up

What shall we talk about?

The state of the world?

Nope.

As it relates to politics…that is verboten here.

As it relates to the world in other ways…okay.

I have been tied to the keyboard of late, and not in a good way. In previous months, I was having fun working on my manuscript. Over the past few days I have been as frustrated as a cat with four mice.  

I've been trying to fix  my computer. Not only that but I have killed more websites than shooting ducks at a gallery. My many words have crashed them.

As a result I have not been taking in as much of the grandeur that is outside. the flowers, leaves, grass, green, green everywhere. 

Driving up the Columbia River Gorge a week ago I saw green dripping from sheer cliffs.  There is a tree in our neighborhood that has little sprouts coming from its trunk and they, too, are in blossom—little puffs of pink stair-stepping up the trunk. It just couldn’t help itself.

 Now, if people would do that—that is, bloom in every area they could, wouldn’t the world be transformed into beautiful people?

All photos are from our property--look at all the flowers the wonderful previous owners planted for us.

I wonder sometimes why people don’t get it that we are all in this together. We are all floating around on a big blue planet in an immense universe. We ought to get along, however, many people hardly acknowledge that their fellow travelers exist. But when you meet that friendly live-wire doesn’t it just warm your cockles?

My reason for being tied to the keyboard is that my computer has been having fits. I restored it back to a couple of weeks ago, and all hell broke loose.

For one, I lost my PDF files from Pictures where they had been stored for years. I finally found them but couldn’t attach a file, until many hours and swearing later I found an answer—it had been Rube-Goldberged.

And with my technology challenges, before driving to Portland last week, I wanted to photograph a little house and send the pictures to my daughter. What? A red dot? I can’t take a picture?

The sun was slowly setting, time was of the essence. This was my new phone, and I didn’t know it would set itself. Found the solution, simple if you know how to do it. It was on timed photos. Okay that done.

As husband dear drove up I-5, I texted, except my new phone likes my fingers better than the stylus, as my other phone did, and my fingers lap over onto the next key. 

I got that done in time to set the GPS to find our hotel. Well, we were there by the time I got that set.

And then falling into a bed the size of an acre, (We have a King sized bed at home that isn’t that large) I had a postage-stamp sized area. My husband said, “I’ll move over.”

 “No," I said. "This is funnier.”

My complaints are only the minutia of traveling through life. And that’s how I see us, as Fellow Travelers. Thus, that was my intention in starting the blog www.traveling-thru-life.com, although we are doing fine here on www.wishonwhitehorses.com.  

My perspective is that we are all traveling through life, and I believe the one thing people want most is to master life. They want to know how to manage their emotional states, how to get along with their fellows, how to have a loving relationship, how to have a spiritual connection that is meaningful to them, and fits in with their belief systems.

That is what I wanted to address, and I hoped that readers would chime in.

A fascinating aside is that #Mauro Biglinos, who was a Hebrew translator for the Vatican before they fired him, said that the Old Testament of the Bible was never meant to be a spiritual guide. It was the story of one family, the Israelites. There was no mention of God. It was The Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah, not God. There was no word for God. This was not what the Vatican wanted to hear.

You see, as we are traveling through life, all sorts of tidbits come up.

And now for the Whoopee! 

Just this day I got my manuscript Song of Africa onto a website. With enough tries even a technologically inept person can do it. For the ones who asked, and those interested I am offering Song of Africa Free to my blog readers only. (Forty years in the making, cast of, well a dozen or so.)

You guys have stood by me through good times and bad. I thank you.

To read please go to song-of-africa-complete.blogspot.com

Oh my goodness, I just found it goes to the place left it..
I wonder if that work for you.

If you have problems, please let me know.

I don't know how long I will leave this site live, so if you want to read it at your leisure, please grab it. If you prefer a PDF file email me.


P.S. Peaches checked in on www.dogblogbypeaches.blogspot.com

Ramifications

This morning I  sat in my pick-up truck with my little Sweetpea dog beside me.

Those who read of my Hawaiian experience know that my truck is my second office.

So, here in Oregon, on some days when my daughter is home with her son, and I am free, I take the truck, order coffee, and read, write, or go somewhere.

This morning I sat and read the manuscript of my novel Song of Africa.

You may be tired of me talking about this book, but please bear with me. When you begin something 40 years earlier, it is telling to read what you wrote then, and what you think now.

Some 40 years ago when I began writing Song of Africa my protagonist Miss Sara Rose, asks some of the questions I asked myself then. "Is there a God?" "Why do people say that God harmed people so He would be glorified?”

Those questions bothered me then, but no more.

I have come to an understanding.

And so does Miss Sara Rose my protagonist.

Forty years ago I didn't know how it felt to be a 65-year-old woman. I made it up.

Now I understand more.

Have a dream and go for it.

For Sara Rose, it was to ride a river in Africa.

She set out, and as told by her Goddaughter, "Once we begin weaving the gods will provide the skein," Sara finds a new life, new love, and an event that leads to the next generation.

We never know the ramifications of our lives, do we?

The first chapter of Song of Africa is boldly displayed on

www.song-of-africa.blogspot.com

Tame the Brain

Listen to the marketers and they tell is things are not so good, and they are going to get worse.

#Seth Godin (blogger) wrote: “Turn back the clock just 60 years. If you lived in 1957, how would your life compare to the one you live right now? Well, you have access to lifesaving medicines, often in pill form. You can choose from an infinite amount of entertainment, you can connect with humans all over the Earth, for free, at the click of a button. You have access to the sum total of human knowledge. You have control over your reproductive cycle. You can eat sushi (you've even heard of sushi). You can express yourself in a thousand ways that were forbidden then...

That's in one lifetime.

Strange isn’t it, with all the access to goodness we have now, we focus is on our belly buttons.

You know what I mean, worrying about the next stock crash, the next mortgage crash, worrying that we’re not happy, worrying that some crazy kid will shoot up a school.

If we think back 60 years the worse things did kids did in school was chew gum or smoke behind the bleachers. Well, pregnant senior girls attended my graduation—but they graduated.

As the daughter of a sixteen-year-old mother, I’m not condemning anyone, bless my mother’s heart, she had me.  The pill would have eliminated me. I‘m grateful to be born. Not only that but she was a good mother—got married, divorced, remarried, wanted babies, didn’t have them for 21 years.  See, I had to come into the world when she was sixteen.

If you’re frustrated with what you hear now, don’t listen.

I am a believer that what we focus on brings more of what we are focused on.

It’s a weird Quantum Physics thing.

You’ve noticed that on crappy days more crap comes your way?

On the flip side, you are bopping along, feeling good, and good appears to drop from the ethers.

Some say that positive thinking doesn’t work, but it feels a heck of a lot better than the alternative.

It’s not easy to “Accent the positive and ignore the negative, as we are evolutionarily programmed to look for danger.

Being on the alert worked in the past when stepping outside the cave was risky—risky in the cave too if we stumbled into the hovel of a bear.

Bears inside, Saber-toothed tigers outside, and animals that would carry off your toddler if it ventured out into the night.

No wonder we got hot-wired for worry.

Ever notice how if you are basking in the beauty of a peaceful hillside, the grasses are lush, little yellow flowers dot the hillside, and something moves…

Your eyes dart to the moving object. Maybe it’s as small as a mouse rustling the grasses.

But we see it.

Clearly, that is a protective mechanism.

Notice though, that we don’t live in a cave, and there are no Saber-toothed tigers.

We have other things to worry about, true, death, taxes, finances, our health, our education, a successful endeavor. I admit it’s not simple. But we can begin by deciding for ourselves and not let the fear proclaiming voices of the world decide for us.

They know that fear gets attention.

Tame the brain!

You own that beautiful object, your brain, it doesn’t own you.

I thank God I don’t have to peel potatoes three times a day.

And I can order out for Pizza.

Obi Likes It

A friend started a course for a job selling a Remedial Reading program. Well, she liked reading, and she wanted to help children read, so she signed up, only to find herself so bogged down with the training program that she told them to take their job and, well, she’s a nice person, so she probably said, “No, thank you.”

If they released my friend to her own devices, she probably would have sold reading courses, the company would have benefitted, she would have made extra money, and the children would be good readers.

Do I listen to a different drummer?

Once I volunteered at Terry Cole Whittaker's Church in San Diego California. I was on a hotline. They pointed me to the phone and said, “Go for it.” I didn’t’ know what I was doing, but took the calls, gave advice when I could, the callers and I had a great time. The staff told me I had done a good job, and that was it.

I felt I had to call upon my inner resources, and they answered my call.

Today I hear that old How-to books are dying on the vine. The reason is, they are still addressing the corporate rule on how to fit in. As did the Remedial Reading Company.

Are you living life on your own terms?

We hear a lot about that these days.

Thus is born the entrepreneurial spirit.

I do wonder about marketing and selling. And how we must to “talked into” things that aren’t fun, like Life Insurance that won’t keep us alive, and Health Insurance that won’t keep us healthy. Things we “need,” and are mandatory like car insurance. We hate to spend the money on things that don’t show and aren’t fun. And so enters the salesperson, talking us into buying from them instead of a competitor.

And since the company requires that they sell on commission they must hustle. That gives them a less than stellar reputation and us a bad taste in our mouth.

.  

I’m not a salesperson, but don’t tell that to a Publishing House. They would then drop me like the proverbial hot potato.

 I am, however, wondering what to do next with my book, Song of Africa.

 It should be good to make people want to read it.

People should know about it.

They must like reading.

They must like what I am offering.

They must find value, learn something, have fun, or be entertained.

Both cats love my manuscript. One day one cat is sleeping on my printed out version. The next day the other cat is.

See, it has good cat vibes.

Sigh

On Thursday night I turned off my cell phone in a movie theater and it took off for tall timber never to be been seen again.

Well, that sucks.

On top of that my website Wish on White Horses also sucks according to one analyzer—the readership is so low I don’t count.(My other site traveling-thru-life.com has been found by Smut people, so I'm taking the comments off although I got a couple of good compliments from "Mental Health.")

Sigh.

Of course, if I pay the analyzer, they will amp up Wish on White Horses for me.

Well, I don’t believe you would be reading a really sucky blog, so it can’t be too bad.

You make my day.

Rewind back to Thursday before I reached into my purse and found my phone missing. I came home from a movie that had so much violence and CGI, I felt slimed, and so wanting to relate to a film that had sweetness and light,  I asked my daughter if she knew the lyrics to the Muppet song,” The Rainbow Connection.”

A portion of that song had been cycling through my mind for the last couple of days—you know how that can be, a song goes round and round in an endless loop:  “Have you been half-asleep, have you heard voices, I heard them calling my name…

“It's something that I'm supposed to be
“Someday we'll find it
“The rainbow connection
“The lovers, the dreamers, and me.”

The following morning after asking my daughter about the lyrics, I found a note sitting atop my computer:

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

“That’s part of what rainbows do.

“Rainbows are memories, sweet dream reminders. What is it you’d like to do?”

That was the refrain from the Muppet Movie.

Jason Mraz wrote the song, not Jim Henson as I thought. Henson aka Kermit the Frog sang it.

Isn’t it odd how when we get into a state such as I was after watching that Thursday movie, that we allow ourselves to go into a slump, and enter into its state instead of maintaining our own?

You don’t?

Well, I did.

It happens.

And then to add a big exclamation point at the end of my mood, I lose my cell phone.  What was that telling me? (“To not to?”)

Okay, all’s well. I ordered a new phone from  #eBay, and bought an intermediate TRAC phone so my grandson and I wouldn’t be without communication as well as no vehicle for a week.

I guess after insulting my phone by calling it a smart alec phone instead of a smartphone (it had stuttered and disconnected in the middle of a conversation), it decided to take off and leave me standing in the dust.

Back to the Muppets: Do you remember the old Jimmy Dean Television Show? Or was that before your time? You know of him, for you can still buy Jimmy Dean Sausages in the grocery store. Jimmy Dean first introduced Rowlf,  “I’m Rowlf, Rowlf the dog.” Rowlf was a wise-cracking big brown hairy dog who sat on a piano stool tickling the piano keys. 

Jim Henson created Rowlf, and he and Frank Oz, performed the puppet on The Jimmy Dean Show. (The picture above is of Rowlf.)

Henson was so grateful for this break that he offered Dean a 40 percent interest in his production company, but Dean declined on the basis that he did nothing to truly earn it and Henson deserved all the rewards for his own work. For the rest of his life, Dean made it clear that he never regretted that decision of conscience^.”

Henson took his love for puppetry and created an empire. See, people do love love, humor, and sweetness.

Muppets:
All of us watching, and wishing we'd find it;
Fozzie:
I've noticed, you're watching too.

I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm supposed to be
Someday we'll find it
The rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Love,

Joyce

I must have seen a really good movie the day I came out of the theater to see this. The rainbow is in the eastern sky. The western sunset behind me is reflecting on it. 

Jimmy Dean and Rowlf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pbKHDpOmYU&list=RD-pbKHDpOmYU&index=1