Firing up the Canon

Here's the happy clan in the morning. All cozy, snuggled in, bark and whine free for just a couple hours :) LUKAS - PUKAS LEIA GODIVA - DIVA BAILEI

I have a repeating dream. The minute details are different each time, but the basic premise is the same. I’m always enrolled in college. Often I miss one or two classes entirely for a large portion of the semester. In most versions of the dream I walk onto campus and have no idea what my schedule is. Once I look at it I realize that we are halfway through the semester and I haven’t even showed up for one class. I look at syllabuses and see that I’ve missed tests and information. Sometimes I walk into the class for the first time on the day of a test. It's always a scramble, depressing and totally overwhelming. At some point every time I have this dream I realize I have to drop out and start over and that I wasted tons of money. Here's what I do know: with me, until I have resolution to my dreams they continue to play out over and over again.. I wonder what this one means. ------------------------------------------- A sidenote on dreams: Check out addressedtoanonymous.co...

You could define the way you feel about yourself by someone else's opinion of you - but why would you? When we feel personally attacked in life we have a tendency to forget about human tendencies. Often times people are reacting to us out of emotion that isn't fully attributed to us. Little pieces of bad days, past hurts, assumptions, and defenses work their way into every situation and are then projected onto current realities. Because of this we are often attributed qualities or failures that aren't really our own. If we change how we feel about ourselves based on every last person's momentary judgments, we are doing ourselves, our esteem, and our self identity a great injustice. Only you know who you are and what your intentions are. There are times that you do something forseeing one outcome and getting a completely different one. Other times we completely overlook at potential negative side effect. That is the course of life. Things don't always go as expected...

I need inspired change. It’s getting to that point in the winter where I want to crawl out of the dark and cozy hole that I’ve dug myself into, but my body hasn’t fully adopted the potential change. I have good intention and desire to open the world back up to myself, I just haven’t figured out how to emerge – at least not in a healthy way. I’ve figured out how to go out to eat…but unfortunately that is just making the needed change a bit more difficult as I feel like I’m packing on the pounds and making any fitness and financial goals even bigger challenges. So I’ve decided I need to just make a first step - any first step. Maybe it’s going to the gym tonight. Maybe it’s enrolling for a class. I keep talking about things I want to explore and do and not doing them…and that is making for long periods of time with no change. I’m giving myself till five p.m. to figure out where I want to start. Where I’m going to take my first step. One thing I do know – it will not be into a res...

I want to scoop up cups of sunshine and pour them over my skin, splash them across my cheeks. I want to drink down the yellow and the orange - feel it swell in my joints, course my veins, strengthen my lungs. I want to blink away the bright of the day and sleep the slumber of summer, sticky with sweat and deep muscular exhaustion.

When I was younger I used Lent to make sacrifices of a personal nature, but ones that didn’t really have any true affect on me. I’d give up pop or make a promise not to gripe about something, but to be honest I never really felt a connection to my sacrifice. Last year I modified my thinking during lent and tried to incorporate elements into my 40 days that would not only benefit me, but others as well. Example. I gave up online shopping with one exception. If I found something I just “HAD” to purchase I promised myself that I’d give 5 items to goodwill. At the end of the Lent season I was really doing an exact tally, but I do know that six boxes of my things got delivered to the goodwill store near my house and I felt good about what the 40 days had added up to. This year I’m going to continue to collect things around my home to give to goodwill, but I’m putting a slightly different spin on Lent for myself. I’m going to dedicate the next 40 days to clearing out space in my life in ...

I’m up at all hours thinking. Contemplating life. Finding it takes me an extra 15 minutes to fall back to sleep once I’m awake, because some things are left unsettled in my mind. During these hours I find myself circling around the concept of perception and attitude. I’m realizing that we have the ability to paint our individual realities however it is we wish to see them. We can feel in control, victimized, opportunistic, burned, fortunate or deflated – and I believe that the perspective we have is an absolute choice. Things happen to all of us. Situations unfold and we react. Some things are solidly sad and unfortunate, but some of us choose to do positive and motivating things with them – and some of us choose the play the role of the affected. We have the absolute ability render ourselves powerless over what has “happened to us”. We can, if we want, forget to take responsibility for the role we play in our outcomes. I’ve been playing both sides of this coin in some regards, but I ...