From Marie-Jeanne's latest email....

All the resources you will ever want or need are at your fingertips. All you have to do is identify what you want to do with it, and then practice the feeling-place of what it will feel like when that happens. There is nothing you cannot be or do or have. You are blessed Beings; you have come forth into this physical environment to create. There is nothing holding you back, other than your own contradictory thought. And your emotion tells you you're doing that. Life is supposed to be fun—it is supposed to feel good! You are powerful Creators and right on schedule. Savor more; fix less. Laugh more; cry less. Anticipate positively more; anticipate negatively less. Nothing is more important than that you feel good. Just practice that and watch what happens.

I have to disagree with the part "nothing is more important than that you feel good." as I adhere to the believe that selflessness and serving others is supreme to ones own happiness. Yet I appreciate the viewpoint that we have come here to create, through our art, through our lives, and that we are "right on schedule." Good to hear. Also good to hear: savor more, fix less, laugh more, cry less, anticipate positively more, anticipate negatively less." Definitely something I need to hear right now. It speaks to my life.

Voyage

O Lord of the Oceans,
My little bark sails on restless sea,
Grant that Jesus may sit at the helm and steer me safely;
Suffer no adverse currents to divert my heavenward course;
Let not my faith be wrecked amid storms and shoals;
Bring me to harbour with flying pennants, hull unbreached, cargo unspoiled.
I ask great things,
expect great things,
shall receive great things.
I venture on thee wholly, fully,
my wind, sunshine, anchor, defence.
The voyage is long, the waves high, the storms pitiless,
but my helm is held steady,
thy Word secures safe passage;
thy grace wafts me onward,
my haven is guaranteed.
This day will bring me nearer home,
Grant me holy consistency in every transaction,
my peace flowing as a running tide,
my righteousness as every chasing wave.
Help me to live circumspectly,
with skill to convert every care into prayer,
Halo my path with gentleness and love,
smooth every asperity of temper;
let me not forget how easy it is to occassion grief;
may I strive to bind up every wound,
and pour oil on all troubled waters.
May the world this day be happier and better because I live.
Let my mast before me be the saviour's cross,
and every oncoming wave the fountain in his side.
Help me, protect me in the moving sea
until I reach the shore of unceasing praise.

from "The Valley of Vision" a collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions

Pablo Neruda

Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes

April 25th, 2008 Arbor Day

"Acts of creation are normally reserved for Gods and Poets.
To plant a pine, one need only a shovel."
Aldo Leopold

Prodigal Summer

"I don't really see you anywhere but in the woods," he said.
"Well, I guess it's been a while"
"Don't you miss it, any of it?"
"There's some people I'd love to spend the day with, sure, and some things."
"Like what?"
She thought about it--"I couldn't even say. Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask, but walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew existed-- that I might miss."

from "How to Read a North Carolina Beach", by Pilkey, Rice and Neal

What's up? Well, the number of buildings is increasing along our Norht Carolina shorelines because we are in teh middle of a giant rush to the sea. The scramble to the beach is fuelded by a society with a lot of money, a love for the sea and desire to live beside it, a greedy development industry, an irresponsible real estate industry, local governments anxious to create more tax revenue and employ more local citizens, and a contempt for the forces of nature.

From a short-term economic standpoint, owning a beachfront house makes sense. Individuals and companies own many such buildings for the sole purpose of making money--an old and respectable American tradition. In this sense, the North Carolina beachfront is a giant cash cow. no doubt about it, however, by ost other measures of societal and personal responsibility, owning a beachfront house is imprudent, if not irrational. Stan Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University, has suggested that owning beachfront property is akin to having a picnic on an interstate highway, and image meant to convey how irrational it is to put your property as well as yourself and others at risk.

- author Anne Lamott, in a recent interview.

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.

This could be the happiest day of my life...

I have discovered flying snakes.
Which bring me about as much joy as footage of swimming elephants.

http://homepage.mac.com/j.socha/video/mov_clips/863_cam_2.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwDAsJCB2Pg

a commentary on some north beach visitors

Edward Abbey

"The fat pink slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over-sized over-priced over-advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country: Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet-riddled petroglyphs, spray-painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled-up waterholes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles. Etc." (Postcards from Ed, pp. 66-67).

The Goodness of Snakes

So I am very excited about the classes I am teaching at the Center for Wildlife Education in Corolla, NC. One is on Nature Journals, allowing me to combine my love of nature with my love of art and writing. It is perfect. And the other I am starting is a course on Snakes. I love snakes. Very much. Perhaps I always was oriented towards them...or perhaps it was being raised by a father bringing home snakes that he found on the side of the road or in our yard, so that my sister and I could hold and keep them for a day or two. But the fear of our society towards snakes (especially women, which gets into a whole other topic I could go into even more) certainly is a typical case of fear resulting from a lack of knowledge and understanding. Humans fear what we are ignorant of. And so, in the same human pattern of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic prejudice, this particular species is seen as inherently bad and feared.

So I am researching for it, and looking up the benefit of snakes in their respective habitats. And I googled "the goodness of snakes"....and there was not one result. This is shocking! Nowhere, on any webpage, is there the phrase "the goodness of snakes." This is a very sad thing. I shall endeavor to change that! Along with people's mentalities towards them :)

How could anyone resist such an adorable little face?

Quote from Liberty Hyde Bailey

“Lessons for the Farm Home: ”
I would not limit the entrance of women into any courses of the College of Agriculture; on the contrary, I want all courses open to them freely and on equal terms with men.... Furthermore I do not conceive it to be essential that all teachers in home economics subjects be women; nor, on the other hand, do I think it is essential that all teachers in the other series of departments shall be men. The person who is best qualified to teach the subjects should be the one who teaches it...I hope for the time when there will be as many women in the College of Agriculture as there are men.