Posts by Pat:
Luggage or Baggage?
It’s vacation time! Are you carrying luggage or your baggage with you? (And in case you’re wondering, I don’t mean the physical stuff!)
Though near-perfect synonyms of each other, baggage has several additional meanings which luggage doesn’t share.
We don’t know for sure whether the “bag” of baggage is the same as the English and French borrowed word for “sack to carry things in.” We do know that the “lug” of luggage is the word we still use to mean “to carry laboriously.”
The major difference between baggage and luggage isn’t in the concrete meaning but in the figurative meaning: we say “emotional baggage,” “political baggage,” and “personal baggage” to refer to intangible things that get in the way-but luggage is never used in this way.
You can’t possibly embrace that new relationship, new career, new friendship, new life while still holding on to the baggage of the last one.
Your ability to let go of your baggage can be enhanced by the reminders found in “The Knots Prayer” that follows, whether you believe that God is just another name for Universe or Love or Allah or…
Please untie the knots that are in my mind, my heart, my life. Remove the have nots, the can nots and the do nots that I have in my mind. Erase all the will nots, might nots that may find a home in my heart. Release me from the could nots, would nots that obstruct my life. And most of all, dear God: I ask that you remove from my mind, my heart and my life all the ‘am nots’ that I have allowed to hold me back, especially the thought that I am not good enough. –author unknown
Here comes the sun!
Summer has finally arrived, even when the weather doesn’t seem to agree! And June to me is a month of celebrating Life! The recent graduates are beginning their new lives; we celebrate the masculine influences in our lives with Father’s Day; and the summer solstice brings the longest day of sunlight. I recently saw an […]
A reminder from a dad…
One day little Jim was taking a walk with his father in the rugged roads of the mountain near their house. Suddenly, he slipped and hurt himself and screamed “AAAhhhh!” He immediately heard a voice from the mountains saying “AAAhhhh!” Jim forgot his hurt and shouted “Who are you?” and again heard that voice saying […]
Train your elephant!
In those days when an elephant would walk through a town with its keeper, the elephant’s trunk was a curious part of the equation. It had a natural tendency to explore whatever it wanted, disrupting fruit carts and kiosks as it made its way down the street. It had no qualms about helping itself to […]
The Clothesline Paradox
If you take down your clothesline and buy an electric clothes dryer, the electric consumption of the nation rises slightly. If you go in the other direction and remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline, the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is little credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs […]
The waves of life…
Life is always coming at us. There’s always something more on our to-do list. There’s always some unexpected event that comes crashing into our lives. There’s always something not going according to plan. There’s always something more on the calendar. We can certainly choose to feel overwhelmed by those things. We can hide under the […]
Speaking of angels…
Just for fun, see what these youngsters have said! “When an angel gets mad, he takes a deep breath and counts to ten. And when he lets out his breath, somewhere there’s a tornado.” Dan, 7 “It’s not easy to become an angel! First, you die. Then you go to heaven, and then there’s still […]
The Crystal Cup
A Zen master was given a beautifully crafted crystal cup. It was a gift from a former student. He was very grateful. Every day, he enjoyed drinking out of his glass. He would show it to visitors and tell them about the kindness of his student. But every morning, he held the cup in his […]
A Curious Boy
In 1925, one year before he entered school, Isaac Asimov taught himself to read. His father, uneducated and thus unable to support his son, gave him a library card. Without any direction, the curious boy read everything. “All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was […]
So what’s in a color?
And here’s why: Green is a combination of the colors yellow and blue, each of which brings its own unique energy to the overall feeling of the color green. Blue exudes calm and peace. Yellow radiates liveliness and high levels of energy. As a marriage between these two very different colors, green is a unifier […]