Don't Worry - Be Happy This New Year!

.   "Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing."    Thank you for your wise words, Mother Theresa.

This year is starting off with an air of impending doom on so many fronts, with the heaviest clouds darkening  the environment and world peace.   Some Happy New Year- right?  It is a difficult task lifting those heavy blankets and checking on the beauty that is still there, huddling underneath.  But it is there in so many forms.   Every day we are given the opportunity to contribute more beauty, more positives, more smiles to life's balance sheet.   Let us light up the darkness with a barrage of  kind acts, big and small - I know that so many of you already are.  I do not pretend to understand all of the complicated causes of depression; what I do know personally is that each time I decide to make a plan to help another, to turn my focus on another,  my happiness ratchets up many notches.  Therefore, my New Year's resolution will be to increase my awareness of others' needs, and to step out of my self-absorption more often.  I will invest in moments of prayerful silence and step often  into my "Happy Place" to restore my spirit and my kindness quotient;

My Happy Place - A Meditation

There is great peace in solitude,  

While walking in a peaceful wood,

But walking through a stressful day,

With problems blocking every way,

I need to find a happy place,

A memory room,  a welcome space,

A glistening, calming ocean shore,

An oasis deep within my core.

Breathing deeply, in I walk,

Letting go of time and talk;

At times it's hard to struggle through,

When answers are obscured from view;

Yet, in that silence, I'm aware

That someone's always waiting there,

A grandma's hug,

 A friendly tug

From one who says, with humble grace,

"Welcome to

Your happy place."

Happy New Year!

For myself, this year is starting off like every other 'New Year' - I am filled with longing for the world to somehow cast off its destructive attitudes and give us all the gift of hope;  for world leaders to  look to the welfare of its neediest citizens.   As I listen to news reports, that doesn't seem very likely;  Big media tends to focus most of its energy in highlighting all of the worst that mankind is capable of.   Small town media, on the other hand, brings us that hope in the form of uplifting stories that it prints of caring people who make a positive difference,  and of events that lift us all as individuals and members of a community.   Let's all aspire to love and to hope:

The Loom

The peddlers of woe

Are bending their bows,

Filling their quivers with fears;

The weavers of doom

Are  warping their looms

With  the delicate threads of our tears;

They add warp and weft

With fingers so deft,

Creating their coats of despair,

While we shiver and wait

In our uncertain state

For a glimmer of hope to appear.

Those peddlers know well

That fear and woe sells,

Though it takes a sad toll on the soul;

What a price we all pay

When  greed leads the way,

But there could be an alternate goal;

Let us pick up our shields

Where they lie in the fields

Of our dreams and our hopes for tomorrow,

And fend off the foe,

Tell those merchants of woe

That we don't want their weapons of sorrow.

What a beautiful garment

We all could create,

One incredibly vast in its scope;

Strong and divine,

To enfold all mankind,

On a loom strung with love, filled with hope.

   Love is our shield

And hope is our loom