Words are so powerful.
Last night I found this note from one of my participants. It warmed my heart and reminded of how fortunate we are to be able to lift up ourselves, and each other, using 26 little marks!

As I consider the power of words, I'm reminded of one of my favorite insights on resources - a quote taken from an advertisement  to promote local libraries.  

​Roger von Oech, author of A Kick in the Seat of the Pants and A Whack on the Side of the Head, shared his perspective from an advertisement for a library

“At your local library they have these arranged in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand.

It’s astonishing to see what these twenty-six little marks can do. In Shakespeare’s hands they becameHamlet. Mark Twain wound them into Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce twisted them into Ulysses. Gibbon pounded them into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. John Milton shaped them into Paradise Lost.”

What can you do with these 26 letters to honor yourself? I challenge you to arrange them in a way that will inspire and delight!! Make a gratitude list, write a thank you note to yourself, capture your treasured memories in a journal, write a poem or a song! Be kind with your self talk! Use affirmations. 

If we use our words to inspire and nurture ourselves in the same way we use them to honor others, our entire perspective about who we are and what we can accomplish will change. We will step into a whole new world of miraculous possibilities!
​

When people are born they are gentle and soft.
At death they are hard and stiff.
When plants are alive they are soft and delicate.
When they die, they wither and dry up.
Therefore the hard and stiff are followers of death.
The gentle and soft are the followers of life.

Thus, if you are aggressive and stiff, you can't win.
When a tree is hard enough, it is cut. Therefore
The hard and big are lesser,
The gentle and soft are greater.

     - Yi-Ping Ong, from the introduction, Tao Te Ching

"if you have faith, even if it's only as tiny as a mustard seed,  you can move a mountain." Our Bible school teacher passed around a necklace with a mustard seek embedded in plastic, while she explained the power of faith. Or tried. We didn't challenge her. Those weren't the days when a child would yell out "Are you crazy. You mean you think you can just sit there and believe and the whole mountain will move?" 

We lived in a town surrounded by mountains and I had never heard anyone express concern about their placement. The story made an impression, but it didn't make a lot of sense from my eight year old perspective. 

I was still thinking about it when I got home and did what I always did when something didn't make sense. I asked my father. He was brilliant. He taught calculus at an engineering school, read Chaucer and Shakespeare for personal enjoyment,  and did crossword puzzles in ink. He started college at 15, had 3 majors and 2 minors, and completed one of his master's degrees in French. He was one of the few adults who never talked down to me because I was a child. He made me feel he respected my opinion as much as one of his student's or  another adult's.

He had an extensive vocabulary yet communicated clearly. He wasn't interested in impressing others. He was interested in learning and education.. "if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it."  

My father could have been very judgmental about education and degrees, but he was concerned with learning for the joy of it. He literally lit up when given the opportunity to help others,process information. He had been a Methodist Sunday school teacher for nearly two decades, so he was well prepared for this conversation.

He explained that the mustard seed represented a spiritual point of view and the mountain represented a problem or challenge. "The mustard seed story illustrates if we have faith, we can solve our problems. It is also about taking the responsibility to believe in ourselves enough to confront our concerns."

"But," he continued, "we don't necessarily have to solve a problem. Sometimes we can move a mountain by changing our perspective. If we have faith, and stop reacting and trying to fix things, we might find that what we perceived as a mountain is a blessing in disguise. We often make things harder than they have to be by trying to control everything."

My dad used an example that made the lesson clear. I had recently been concerned that a friend was mad at me because she had been avoiding me for a couple of days. She had been planning a surprise party for me. I had been angry and hurt and began avoiding her. Later, I felt terrible. 

Faith comes from inside .We don't need to prove to anyone we have it if we do. It extends beyond the faith we have in ourselves. It is about giving others, and life's circumstances,, the benefit of the doubt, and not making judgements or assumptions. 

​I wrote this years ago, when my brother and I joined the Pine Street Presbyterian church in Harrisburg, PA.  Recently, there are events causing me to question our county's direction. Revisiting this helped shift my perspective and give me peace of mind. I hope it will do the same for you. 

When I find myself becoming defensive about a 'weed', and if you've followed my blog, you know I do from time to time, it occurs to me that it's probably time to seek help! Hahahaha! This time the plant I'm defending is poke. My friend Carrie has no empathy for the stand I'm taking because it's taking over her garden and yard, but as always, she's patient with my idiosyncrasies. 

My expectation certainly isn't that people nurture and cultivate it. Actually, the plant has done well on its own for centuries without any coddling from gardeners. It's just that anytime the wrath directed at a plant eliminates the appreciation for its benefits - and it does have benefits - my first instinct is to guide them to look from another perspective. 
​

Polk Salad Annie
Tony Joe White
If some of ya'll never been down south too much
I'm gonna tell you a little bit about this 
So that you'll understand what I'm talkin' about
Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods
And in the fields looks somethin' like a turnip green
And everybody calls it polk salad, polk salad
Used to know a girl lived down there 
And she'd go out in the evenings and pick her a mess of it
Carry it home and cook it for supper
'Cause thats about all they had to eat, but they did all right
Down in Louisiana, where the alligators grow so mean
There lived a girl, that I swear to the world
Made the alligators look tame
Polk salad Annie, polk salad Annie
Everybody said it was a shame
Cause her momma was a workin' on the chain gang
(A mean vicious woman)
Everyday ?for supper time, she'd go down by the truck patch
And pick her a mess of polk salad, and carry it home in a tow sack
Polk salad Annie, the gators got your granny
Everybody says it was a shame
Cause her momma was a workin' on the chain gang
(A wretched, spiteful, straight-razor totin' woman
Lord have Mercy, pick a mess of it)
​

The berries above are colored with poke ink - beautiful variations from pinks to purples. 

It's unsettling that there are such contrasting perceptions about Baltimore, a city I've grown to love. Yesterday I read a disturbing article detailing the police corruption through the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF). The article ended by saying "Baltimore can't run a school, a  police department or even a zoo". 

Admittedly, there is truth in that statement, and yet it disturbs me to see only one side of multifaceted city, so rich with warm and wonderful people, history, inventions, gardens and parks music and the arts . . . . It reminds me of a fable I read years ago. 
​

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all six of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant, 
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
God bless me, but the Elephant
Is very like a wall.

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho! What have we here?
​