Author: Bev

Julie Andrews sang about some of her favorite things in The Sound of Music.  Well, I have favorite things too and some of mine, are sounds.

“Silence is golden, golden,” rings in my head.  It’s a lyric from back in the day (1967, Tremeloes).  About the sentiment, not so much, for me.  Nothing creeps me out more than hearing my own heartbeat.  Analyze that, ha-ha.

Andra Day sings “the silence isn’t quiet,” in an awesome song called Rise Up.  And in one of my favorite songs, by Heart, These Dreams, we hear in part, “every second of the night I live another life… the sweetest song is silence, that I’ve ever heard.”

So, songs, silence, and sounds are understood in paradox; one moment one thing, and the next moment another meaning presents itself.  I do enjoy silence from talk, periodically, and I work best in silence.  When I’m working, there is enough rolling around in my brain, that any other sound is overload.

White noise, however is a must in order for me to entertain peace.  Peace and quiet from peopley noise, yes; but nature noise or industrial noise is a must-have.

I’m a big fan of white noise.  As a teenager, the clothes dryer created that white noise in my household.  I’m good with dishwashers too; and any kind of fan is a delight.

On an early spring, cool evening, after a long day, one of my favorite sounds when resting on the sofa, is the fan from our fireplace insert.  When it stops, needing fed, I’m disappointed.

I’m somewhat averse to pet birds.  But I love to see and especially hear birds chirping outside in the springtime.  It’s cheerful, not to mention hopeful.

Probably the most frequent subtitle my husband and I have observed while watching foreign TV shows and movies is, “birds chirping.”  In fact, we laugh now, every time it appears on the screen.  “Those birds are back at it.”

What seems like a scene straight out of one of my favorite movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Birds, used to play out in our bamboo grove every fall.  Now that the bamboo is gone, the generic black birds which number in the dozens, maybe hundreds, roost across the road in the very tops of scrubby no-name trees.  They all talk in unison as if it’s a bird convention.

Winter seems to me a silent season, we’re insulated indoors by intense quietude.  Somebody surely invented the saying, “cabin-fever,” in winter.  On the contrary, spring speaks life, new beginnings – “life springs eternal” says more about the season than a water-fountain.

Peepers, spring frogs, overwhelm the air with their song, along tree-lined paths nearby.  Before I knew any better, I thought they were extremely loud crickets.  Keen observers of their surroundings, they cease their chorale when I approach parallel to their habitat.

I’m not unhappy with mechanical white noise, thus the clothes dryer, dishwasher mentioned above, but a white noise machine doesn’t fall on deaf ears in our house.  Mine is set on an industrial fan sound.  I’d probably sleep like a baby in an industrial warehouse or some such place.

A luxury tree house in the woods next to a flowing stream would suit me just fine.  I’ve got a recording of such a rushing stream on my phone, for emergencies.  Even a screech owl would be a welcome visitor.

I’ve never been one to dislike city noise: honking horns, cars buzzing along, sirens, etc.  In contrast, the silence of a country night can be very unnerving.

In fact, my first night, living deep in the country after moving from the city, was sleepless because something was missing, sound.  When the power goes out at night, my eyes pop wide open in direct response to the extreme quiet.

The “chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga, woo-woo” of trains on television, to the sounds of the real rails is a fairy-tale come true for me.  Train noises, just like walking onboard a moving train is probably an acquired taste, but it’s my kind of flavor.

I like all kinds of music but the best for me is classical, with no words.  I don’t want the distraction or to expend the effort to process the message.  I like just letting the sounds elicit whatever reaction they elicit, without the help of someone else’s interpretation.

I’m not thinking I could do the vow of silence required by some religious orders.  Me and my kindred spirits that got bad marks in elementary school for “talks too much” would suffer inordinately, to stay silent.  We’ve got stuff that needs saying.

This is not to say that the sound of my own voice doesn’t get annoying.  I’d much rather hear a baby babbling, doves cooing or the pitter-patter of rain on a metal roof.  It’s all relative, the sounds we like and the ones that grate.

But I for one am grateful for sound, and silence for that matter.  I’m glad to have heard the hum of a full beehive, thunder on a summer night, and even the gentle but resolute snort of a fleeing black bear.

I have too many favorite songs, I think, but this one hovers near the top of my list (Bing Crosby; writers Regney Noel/Shain Gloria Adele); “Do you hear what I hear? …a song, a song… Pray for peace people everywhere….”

I thought of calling this column, War and Peace, but reconsidered since that one’s taken.  Surely War and Peace, written by Russian author, Leo Tolstoy between 1805-1869, among the longest novels ever written and with over 500 characters, could be resoundingly considered by some to be “purple prose,” in lay terms, wordy.

So, why Forest and Trees, rather than War and Peace?  There’s a well-known saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees.”  If peace is the forest what are the details (the trees), that we can’t get past, in order to reach the goal?

“Can’t see the forest for the trees,” is essentially considered an insult, not unlike “stop overthinking,” or “you must have OCD.”  It’s hardly diplomatic nor tactful.

Notice that I’m speaking about a twist on the saying.  Instead of forest or trees, I’m proposing a theory concerning the forest and the trees, taken together as a middle ground.  I think we need not stamp out one or the other, as inconsequential.

Are there many peace treaties being negotiated in Congress in America?  Or is there just one skirmish after another in a constant battle of wills; opponents fighting it out for who’s more powerful?

The basics of diplomacy require an exchange of details, a negotiation between elements of what I want and what you want.  What diplomacy is not, is one powerful opponent taking the other by force, that’s not diplomacy it’s war.  And, war may end in victory, but rarely, in peace.  War totally eclipses the goal of peace.

Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, China’s threat of similar aggression in Taiwan and our homegrown aggression between liberal and conservative, powerful elite and the rest of us, started this train of thought.  Here goes me turning international diplomacy around to something personal.

I have had a problem with being stuck in the trees within the forest.  You’ll notice I put this in the past tense.  One can hope, eh?  I don’t know about you but I’m a work in progress.

When a person such as myself likes words so much, it’s a temptation to use them all at once lest I forget one of the good ones.  In one of my jobs, I am an editor, a person who cuts the extraneous.  What a paradox and conundrum.

Word count limits have helped me enjoy the forest.  Prioritizing the details helps; which tree is the best? Using the first one or two details on the list and deleting three through twelve, helps.

A desire for clarity helps me to see the whole forest.  Rules, boundaries, and limits help.

Genuine understanding and acknowledgment from others – feedback helps.  Which trees do other people find fascinating?

Becoming annoyed at your own voice helps.  Stop, already.

Being ready to throw out the old, to stop rehashing the past and embracing the new and fresh helps.  Self-compassion and forgiving your own mistakes help.  Sitting down and getting real, helps.

Back to Putin and Ukraine, a bunch of leaders from around the world have approached Vladimir Putin, attempting to balance his demands against the sovereignty of Ukraine, to no apparent success.  The theory is, that when diplomacy fails, you don’t give up and concede to war. 

The late, former Secretary of State, Colin Powell once said, “incomplete victories that give an opponent a way out are often the best solutions.”  Diplomacy requires persistence, optimism, and imagination.

Praying that “somebody kills the man,” is just plain nonsense.  But we can pray for a tapestry to come together by weaving together an agreement between Putin, NATO nations, and Ukraine, with the threads of our mutual interest.  This requires concessions.  We might pray that the misconceptions which abound in the world become unraveled, and set up a new loom.

I feel like diplomacy in the world is rife with distractions and misunderstanding.  We truly need to get our heads out of our you-know-what and start to see the forest and the trees.

That’s what I call this time of year.  One day we need our woolen wardrobe of winter and the next day it’s, “where are my shorts?”

In Pennsylvania, we’ve been known to have up to a dozen weather seasons, which some have labeled: Winter, Fool’s Spring, Second Winter, Spring of Deception, Third Winter, The Pollening, Actual Spring, Summer, Hell’s Front Porch, False Fall, Second Summer, Actual Fall, and so on.  Others have said we have just two seasons: Winter or Pothole Season and Construction Season.

There are the “dog-days” of summer; “Indian Summer,” fake fall, mud season and all kinds of seasons in between; all of which have been around as long as there have been observant folks with a sense of humor.  This is not to say we are not experiencing climate change nor that it has to do with human behavior.

But Spring in these parts has always been true to its nature as a transition season.  Let me show you a typical weather week in Spring:

Sunday 31 degrees with plow-able snow,

Monday 59 degrees and partly sunny,

Tuesday 81 degrees with severe thunderstorms,

Wednesday 67 degrees with “where’s Toto winds,”

Thursday 84 degrees with scorching sun,

Friday 55 degrees and cloudy, and

Saturday 29 degrees and an ice storm, or not.

Yep, transitions are just that – not quite one thing and not quite the other, but something in between, or not.  Transitions might be the extreme of one thing or the extreme of its opposite. 

One thing we can say for sure about transitions are that they are unpredictable.  Therefore, we can little prepare for transitions.

Transitions are passages from one stage or phase to another.  Any birthing woman can testify that the transition phase between labor and delivery is welcome but shocking.  For most women it has been hours of your uterus entertaining spasm after spasm toward the goal of stretching open the cervix in order to birth a giant from inside to outside of your tiny little body, or so it feels at that moment.

So, transitions are good, they help us prepare to cross over, eventually to the next phase or stage of existence. But they’re also difficult because we don’t know exactly when we’ve arrived.  By the time the perennial question of the child-traveler, “are we there yet?” is answered, it just feels irrelevant, duh.

As the Goldilocks story goes, to my memory, she visits the house of the three bears while they’re away.  She has been on a sort of long journey and is quite tired.  Her hunger draws her to porridge which is too hot, too cold, and finally “just right.” 

Goldilocks ventures upstairs to the one-bedroom loft and tries out papa-bear’s bed and finds it too hard, she gets lost in the fluff of mama-bear’s bed, and finds baby-bear’s bed “just right.”  But darned if she doesn’t get found out by the returning three bears, who dismiss her into the forest.

What does Goldilocks teach us about weather seasons?  First of all, I believe we can all agree that the transition seasons of Spring and Autumn or Fall as we say here, can be “just right” one day and altogether wrong the next, too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry.

Next, I think the Goldilocks story correlates with weather seasons in that somebody else’s bed is never going to be “just right” like our own bed.  In other words, the weather that is “just right” for me is more than likely not “just right” for you or your brother, or cousin, or neighbor. 

Or does Goldilocks really mean that we cannot be pleased no matter what the weather does.  Some people like rainy days, and for other people, “rainy days and Mondays always get me down”, so sang the Carpenters.

I’ve heard folks say “we need rain,” while others say the ground is saturated.  And how do we reconcile that some people pray for more snow and others petition for a cease-and-desist order on snow until next year?

You’ve heard it said that, “you can’t please ‘em all.” So, whatever your pleasure, this Spring, I’m fairly certain that you’ll find a day that is “just right” for you.  Happy Spring.

 

I’ve said it before that we’re aging from the minute we’re born so if you can’t identify with any of these H-words of aging, wait for it….  Ha-ha and Hallelujah.

In our crowd, instead of showing off our hip and happening lives, there’s increasing talk of hip replacements and how is that working out for you?  We’ve learned that it’s just courteous to ignore the obvious sprawling hips from years of sitting, or just years.

Hair is a concern, as in wash away the gray or you can’t get it to go away, from all the wrong places.  Or you don’t have enough of it.  Hair can be a problem either way.  In all of our years of accumulated wisdom, we know that one lives through one heartrending hairdo-fail after another and we have pictures to prove it.

Hernias and hemorrhoids appear out of nowhere when you forget to lift with your knees.  Then there are knees which need supplemental oiling or you begin to move like the tin man.  Get this, when exercise is the treatment for knee pain but in order to do the exercise, you need pain medication.  Go figure.

Home improvement is no longer about decoration so much as it’s about making it an easier space to live in.  We’re adapting our habitat to suit the new us.

Even if you’re not a “hugger,” those of us at both extremes of the aging spectrum, grandparents and little kids are the best at giving hugs.  We know the value of a good hug. It’s helpful to hug.

History can be problematic.  Who of us hasn’t got history?  But remembering it is when it gets tricky.

Hysterectomy.  It’s okay, ovaries and uterus are just extra baggage and obsolete at this point, probably the feminine appendix of aging.  Why bother?

Instead of a brilliant but sneaky internet thief, a hacker seems to be one who has the persistent cough from heretofore unclaimed mystery allergies.  Or having been hacked, is the telltale sign of an aging Facebook user.

It has been noted that one’s hands and neck cannot lie as to your age.  Rings no longer fit over problematic knuckles and scarves become our friends. Do you remember the beautiful Doris Day singing, “Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera.?”

There are still hoops to jump through.  But now I realize it’s not my circus and I’m not your clown.

Hinky is when the whatsit goes wrong.  And you don’t get to your age without trying to right a whole bunch of wrongs which have gone way past hinky.

Habaneros and heartburn go hand-in-hand, but throw caution to the wind and spice up your life a bit.  After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger said in Kindergarten Cop, “it’s not a tumor.”

A hullabaloo isn’t so much a type of groovy dance move, as the dance we do when trying to talk sense to a customer service rep on the telephone.

Honey-trap?  I don’t think so.  I could probably get over the temptation of sweets if I could just have salt.  But no such luck.

Speaking of luck, some folks don’t believe in it, unless they’re Irish.  Every detective I’ve seen on television has said at one time or another,” I don’t believe in coincidence, “or happen-chance.  But, the first cousin of happen-chance is happenstance and that is my middle name: random occurrence.

I believe in random.  In fact, I’m a big fan of Matthew 5:45 – God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust, alike.  I also understand, I Peter 5:9 – Stand firm in your faith and the knowledge that your siblings throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering as you are.

Home is where the heart is as well as heaps of housekeeping.  Dirt happens, especially in the entry portals of aging amateur horticulturists, which most of us have become as we’ve aged.

Humility is easier when you no longer need to impress anybody.  And honesty is the best policy because when you’ve aged a bit, remembering a lie, like a spy, is too complicated.

Hash can be a ground up meal, a kind of psychedelic drug, the re-working of old or familiar material, a symbol on a keyboard which was substituted for the word “number” or even “pound;” but now facilitates the search for a topic of interest on the internet (as in hashtag #).

“Get your motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure, in whatever comes our way” (Born to Be Wild 1968 Steppenwolf). A highway can be called a motorway, byway, or freeway, but most of us call it a road and we all go down one, on our way….  And, we don’t go halfway down that road and turnaround; for us it’s all or nothing.  We’ve habituated to this path and we’re taking it to its limit (reference Eagles 1975 Don Henley/Glenn Lewis Frey/Randy Meisner).

Back in the day, “heavy” was a cool and groovy word for deep, now it just means overweight or a crap spot on the BMI index.

Hindsight is what we wished we had our whole lives while waiting for wisdom to kick in.

Headlights nowadays are lower on the chassis and shaped funny but we’ll get used to them.  It’s all a blur at night anyway, thanks to halogen.

“Happiness is morning and evening,” or so goes the Charlie Brown Happiness Is song.  So, whether you’re in the morning or the evening of aging, happiness can be your signature.

What with the State of the Union speech by our President rebutted by the progressive branch of the President’s own democrat party and Russia invading the sovereign state of Ukraine just because it wants its resources, and the U.S. importing oil from Russia with price’s skyrocketing when a couple of short years ago we were energy self-sufficient and exporting oil….  Oh my.  What is this state of affairs?

As a person who thinks dream interpretation is interesting, I can’t help to get a giggle out of the place my brain goes when analyzing our state of affairs.  Speaking of interpretation, that’s what our Supreme Court is tasked with doing to our Constitution – interpret it.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that the President addresses Congress periodically with the State of the Union.  After 1913, the speech became a platform for disseminating the presidential agenda.

The State of the Union speech does not necessarily reflect the state of affairs.  A state of affairs is “the way things are,” or “the facts of the matter.”  The State of the Union is as the President sees it, or more succinctly, his wish-list for Congress.

I remember acting alongside my friend, Steve, in a high school play called, State Fair.  The play was set clearly in “another time” in history.  It was 1946 in fact, at the Iowa State Fair.  The plot follows a heartland farm family to the State Fair, with the parent’s intent on winning some blue ribbons and the teenagers maneuvering the midway, focusing on coming of age.

So, in 1946 people had hopeful expectations for postwar, post Great Depression, “better days ahead.”  The microwave oven and the first car phones were invented.  Today, we’re supposedly in those better days, and it’s a rare home that is without a microwave oven and humans without mobile/cell phones is nearly unheard of.

It was the start of the baby boom and the first meetings were held of the General Assembly of the United Nations.  Donald Trump was born in 1946.

And here we are.  Today, the permanent members of the UN Security Council include China, Russian Federation, France, UK and the US.  What’s wrong with this picture in view of the state of affairs in the world?

Recently I wrote in my journal, “I need to get back to putting my effort into what’s presented to me each day and not try to control what’s next”.  Part of Jesus’ most famous sermon, Matthew 6:34 tells us just that.  “Don’t worry about tomorrow, each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Tomorrow may very well be a different day than I expect, from today’s perspective.  It usually is, in my experience.  But remembering this is not an easily acquired skill for some of us.

“…Each day has enough trouble of its own…” – Years ago I cringed a bit when I read this.  I mean, my faith wanted to banish the thought of trouble in the life of a believer or in a nation of believers.  That Jesus verily predicted trouble, even trouble every day, didn’t sync up with what I wanted to believe.

The title line from The Beatles song, “Get Back,” rang through my head.  “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.”  Without getting into a whole bunch of music history, suffice it to say, that for me, Get Back means to release my dreamy expectations for big things, and get back to my mundane but “happy place.”

Sometime, somehow, I fell into a pattern of striving, “kicking against the goads,” – an exercise in futile and pointless resistance that is both a hopeless and losing battle, in the short term.  The very connotation of anxiety is anticipating a threatening, difficult, or dangerous future, mostly the near future.

One of the most effective techniques to combat anxiety is to live or get back to living in the now; to pull yourself out of that foggy future into the clear and present moment.  In fact, I wonder if the happiest people are those who live moment by moment, those who get back to the present.

But then again, Vladimir Putin wants to “get back” in another sense.  He would like to emphasize another Beatles song, “Back in the U.S.S.R;” including the lyric “…the Ukraine girls really knock me out…”

In order to get out of this state of affairs, or the state of our union, do we really want to go back?  We’ve forgotten those past days of trouble and we’ll soon forget today’s.  How about we look forward to better days ahead?  Cheers to a peaceful state of affairs that we can all settle into.

 

 

How many times in your life have you been shot down?  Or, if you’re like me on some days, how many times a day have you been metaphorically beaten down?

Maybe your work just wasn’t up to par.  Or maybe you can’t hit par, the real par in your golf game.

Perhaps everything you tried, failed or was rejected.  Or try as hard as you can, you can’t make headway, or worse, fall back a peg.

We’ve all been knocked down and had to get back up again.  It’s about the proverbial get back atop the horse after you’ve been thrown to the ground.  Or who hasn’t fallen off of their bike, only to get back on the saddle again.

I grew up going to the roller-skating rink and in the process, we learned that you fall down periodically and you just get back up and do it all over again.  I think I benefited from that experience of falling down and getting back up.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from trauma.  Studies over the last fifty years show that the most significant factor in how resilient you are in the face of difficult situations is how loved you felt as a child.  That’s something to ponder.

I’ve known some people who’ve faced unimaginably difficult situations and bounced back seemingly quickly.  Then there are others who, after years, even decades, can’t seem to fully recover after a relatively minor psychological or physical boo-boo.

As an adult hiker, I’ve had my share of fall-downs.  As a middle-old adult I realize that falling down isn’t the end of the world.  It might hurt sometimes more than others, but eventually most of us recover, to do it all over again.  We don’t stay down.

How many rounds in terms of the fight, does a fighter get knocked down yet gets back up to fight some more?  Being knocked down seems to be on a continuum from the life knocked out of us or our family members or friends, literally, to getting the wind knocked out of you for a few seconds.

Some of us have been knocked out of a job that we dreamed of.  Or, we’ve been knocked out of a relationship that we thought was ours and it failed, died or was stolen.  We’ve had our health knocked out of us, to be cured or cared for so that we can recover our get-up-and-go.

I realize that the same circumstances that knock me out may not knock you down and vice versa.  The thing that we share, however, is that we both got back up, in our own way, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

I wonder if a sort of resilience is built into our humanity?  I’m guessing we all have the capacity to learn how to get back up and do it all again after being knocked down.  But some of us have and some of us haven’t developed the skill.

In 1314, Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland said to his troops shortly before walloping the English at Bannockburn, “If at first you don’t succeed try, try and try again.”  It’s best, we’re told, not to fear failure but rather fear not trying.

Andra Day sings in her amazingly uplifting song, Rise Up, “You’re broken down and tired of living life on a merry go round…. And you can’t find the fighter, but I see it in you…. All we need is hope, and for that we have each other….  And we will rise up, rise like the day, rise up, rise unafraid…. We’ll take the world to its feet and move mountains…. We’ll rise up, high like the waves, rise up, in spite of the ache….” 

As with each day the sun rises anew, we’re endued with the hope that we too can rise up to face another day.  You never know what this day will bring, let’s rise up and check it out.

 

From the moment we’re conceived, growth and development never cease.  We’ve come to expect that the transitions from infant to toddler, tween to adolescent, and so on, throughout the growth cycle, will present certain stereotypical challenges and behavioral changes.  But we assume that the psycho-social growth of older folks stops with their physical growth.  Au contraire, mon ami.

Lest you think your particular age-stage is more difficult than your neighbor who’s in a younger or older stage, every life-stage has its growing pains.  Even a “good” transition to something new, different, or changed can be stressful. Sudden wealth syndrome – “what a shame,” we might think.  Adapting to success, what?

Older people continue to grow and develop as well as their younger counterparts.  The literature on psycho-social changes in older adulthood is fraught with a number of telling descriptive alliterations which include: adapt, adjust, accommodate, and attitude.

I believe it’s an old military slogan to “adapt and overcome.”  So, maybe it’s truly a battle to grow older.

“Youngsters” in their twenties and thirties have joked for years about “adulting” being a strange new world that they’re not all that elated about entering.  Was it Pat Benatar who sang, “love is a battlefield?”  Well so is developmental change.

By the time we reach middle-old at around sixty-five, we’ve become more resistant to change than ever before.  Thus, the stereotypical phrase, “stuck in our ways.”

The tasks set before us from middle-old to old-old, directly challenge our uncompromising existence.  It’s not unheard of for someone in their “terrible-eighty-twos” to stomp their feet and exclaim, “I’ve always done it this way, and I’m not about to change now.”  Or, when told that we have to accept assistance, we might be heard to resist with, “I’ll figure it out myself.”

Sometimes I think I’m growing more complex over time and with effort.  Other times I just think I’m growing like a weed.  Weeds aren’t much liked by most people.  In fact, the modifier, noxious – often accompanies any mention of weeds.

I’ve grown quite fond of many weeds.  Dandelions are beautiful if you look closely at their blooms, with an open mind.  Their greens are bitter but edible if prepared artfully by trendy culinary newbies or their country cousins who’ve been eating them with bacon dressing, forever.

Thistle blooms are untouchably delightful to behold.  Bamboo is a wonder, and the speed to which it towers and spreads mimics its grass cousins.  Its uses are manifold, but like Purple Loose strife, bamboo is considered by plant experts to be a noxious or nuisance weed.

I think the most prevalent explanation for human hatred of weeds is our perfectionistic, obsessive, or controlling need to dominate, subdue, civilize, or wipe them out.  Few of us can co-exist with weeds and just appreciate them, and those who do are frequently, if not openly, ridiculed for being lazy, untidy, or slovenly about their landscape.

Weeds grow rampantly.  The whole weed-thing, as a metaphor, fits many of us in the middle-old stage of growth.  Some of our thoughts are contrary – just like weeds, to the acceptable fundamentalist rural culture that many of us live in.

Fundamentalism would have us believe that personal growth means you’ve grown higher, better and above other folks.  A more gracious perspective of growth is that it is circular rather than vertical or hierarchical.

It’s likely that a fully-grown adult will be a person of a certain age, with perhaps a relatively vast base of lived-experience. From this point of view, a “grown-up” has developed in terms of depth rather than stature.

Because I’ve grown up or might even be considered mature, doesn’t mean I’m better than you if you haven’t grown so much.  In fact, it’s possible that my growth means I’ve experienced a much larger share of adversity, and opposition than you have and been humbled into an unassuming, content, weed-patch.

Then again, some of us grew through adversity into loud, obnoxious victims of circumstance.  Maybe it’s time to judiciously pull some weeds?

Oh, my goodness, have you observed many grown-up politicians in America lately?  Apropos for these times in politics is the prophetic Scripture, Isaiah 3:4 which says in various translations: “I will make youths to be their leaders, and babes shall govern them.” 

I wonder if their power cancels their growth, as we’ve ended up with metaphorical babies leading us.   It seems that many of those baby-rulers haven’t grown nor stretched when they encountered opposition, challenge, resistance or trouble, but morphed into victims.

The developmental fight of the mature among us, is in the seeking not the finding. Growth achieved through inner wanderings is manifest in a personal style of open-ended seeking to “be all you can be,” another classic military slogan.

Discovery is fuel for the journey, not the final destination.  This makes my spirit leap within me like that of a fully-grown adult soldier, flowering like a weed.