A Word Aptly Spoken

I enjoy giving gifts. No, it’s more than that.  I love giving them.  Throughout the year, but at no time more than Christmas, I get a thrill when I am going through a store or wandering a craft show and see something that will be perfect for a loved one, a friend, or an acquaintance. […]

In December of 1999, I was getting ready to move into my new home. We moved the week of Christmas. Needless to say I wasn’t about to decorate a house for the holidays when I was in the middle of packing it up! In fact all of my holiday decorations were in a storage unit […]

This is the time of the year when so many good wishes and lovely thoughts abound.  Happy Thanksgiving!  Count your blessings!  Enjoy the time with family and friends just being thankful for each other. Happy Chanukah!  The festival of lights!  Seven nights of celebrating freedom and participating in joyous traditions.  Merry Christmas!  Feliz Navidad!  Joyeux […]

We often find that things aren’t as they seem.  Things in the mirror are closer than they seem.  Your eyes can deceive you.  In my case, it isn’t my eyes or a mirror deceiving me.  It’s my own mind.  There is a big dichotomy that has developed in the last few years between my mind’s […]

I was reading a Facebook post that enumerated things someone liked or blessings they could count.  I liked the list, and it got me to thinking about how we can really be influenced by our surroundings for the good or the bad.  Of course we are probably most aware of how some things in our […]

Browse through social media and you are bound to come across many posts bemoaning the state of the world and wishing we could go back in time to a simpler era.  The posts vary greatly showing that the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were all much better times.  They have pictures of people walking […]

After celebrating the end of a year on December 31, it’s easy to see what the new year is supposed to bring — a good luck menu for dinner which varies depending on where you live and, of course, resolutions.  Every magazine screams from the cover ways to lose weight, get in shape, save more […]

When I started my blog I said that it would be “ramblings and musings — on reading, education, mindfulness, mental health, kindness and whatever other things are tumbling through my mind.”  Wow.  Focus much?  Kinda shows you what a pinball game it is tracking my thoughts!  However, I really believed it would be mostly about […]

I grew up in the church.  I don’t remember a time that I wasn’t in church.  Even if my parents weren’t coming that day, they would drop us off for Sunday school.  Every time we moved, one of the first orders of business was the search for a new church to attend. An essential part […]

I’m going to post this quickly before I change my mind. I haven’t written in a long time.  I haven’t really done anything productive or creative in a long time.  There’s an emptiness right now where the creative muse usually sits.  There is an ennui that has settled on me that keeps me sitting in […]