GGS

On the 10th Day of Christmas, My True Love gave to Me:

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Quiet.

Peace.

A little time.

I missed the eighth day of Christmas yesterday, and I apologize. I try to keep a series on track as best as I can. I’ve been ill since New Year’s, and then yesterday when I was feeling slightly better, my daughter passed out at school. No worries. It was a combination of not enough sleep, no breakfast, and overheating during gym class. She’s fine and she’s back at it. In fact, after a lie-down with me yesterday, she was already back at it. Her birthday is tomorrow, and she has plans. There is nothing that will get in this little girl’s way.

So today, I’m in recovery mode. List mode. Balance the checkbook.

Stay quiet.

Stay peaceful.

Take a little time.

There are only a few more days left in my Advent/Christmas reflection book and today I’m going to meditate on their suggestion of how I discerned my vocation and my call to follow Christ, and which people mediated that call.

Possibly to be continued with a reflection.

🙂

On the 8th Day of Christmas, my True Love gave to Me:

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…a new year’s cold.

Why do they call it a cold when it gives you a fever?

Bones mini-marathon.

I love having enough writing and reading experience that I can come in in the middle of a story arc, and pick it up as if I’ve been watching it from the beginning.

It makes sick days very convenient. LOL.

Be Resolute

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My New Year’s Resolution is to be Resolute.

I’m tired of every year having the same resolution; the same goals – lose weight, walk more, be kinder, yell less, pray more, write more. Every year, I do all these things, but then I falter. Something comes up. I fall back into old habits – like drinking soda before 10am.

This year has been a year and a half, and it’s finally over. I’ve talked about the deaths, and the bad, but it wasn’t all bad. Remembering the good is just as important, if not more important.

Perspective.

My charge to myself to be Resolute is in part political, part activism, part kindness, and part mercy, and through all of that, there is my faith and my writing that I want in the forefront of who I am.

Standing up and speaking out.

I don’t know if I’ll be more political, but I don’t see how I can’t be with what’s coming in the next twenty days, but I will let it go in honor of celebrating this first day of a new year; the first page of a new book, yet to be written.

I will be writing a lot about the first amendment and the press because I think those are the two things that will be most in jeopardy in the nest year.

My recommendation is to follow journalists, and if you read opinion pieces or opinion pundits, know that is what and who they are. Be informed.

Dan Rather

Ezra Klein

Vox.com

The Washington Post

Connie Schultz

Planned Parenthood- they are very active politically on many women’s issues
ACLU,

and Random Acts for good measure because we will need more kindness and random acts than ever before.

The Good…

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I think we’ve coverd the bad, and the ugly for this year.

After this post, I’ll have two more – one from my sister on the celebrities who’ve died this year, and one from Vox on the political stories and the end of year summaries. There will possibly be one last post right on the cusp of 2017 or very close to it, and then…it’s a new year! A happy one to all of you. Be creative. Be kind. Be you.
Here are some of the good that happened for me and my family in 2016: Continue reading

Those We Lost

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I was going to write a post about how much of my childhood I lost this past year. It seemed that every other day a new name was being memorialized on my television, on my Facebook, on my heart.

Our family lost my mother-in-law and a close family friend. My friend lost her father. Another friend lost his grandmother.

We will always continue to find inspiration somewhere, but that doesn’t make any of these losses, family or celebrity, any easier.

Death is a part of life, and with the turning of the calendar page, 2016 passes away, and 2017 is born.

We Lost a lot of Progressive Artists

Generation X Lost too many Touchstones

We Lost Carrie Fisher and so Many OthersRemembering Those We’ve Lost

Timeline of Celebrity Deaths – 2016

Memorial Video

My mother-in-law. (c)2016

Grandma with her grandkids (my kids) after the third one was born. (c)2006-2016

On the 6th Day of Christmas, My True Love gave to Me:

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…more snow, a Walking Dead marathon on AMC, and a New Year to be better in.

Tonight we’ll look back and collect our thoughts, gather our prayers, and look forward. 2017 is less than fourteen hours away, and the work’s not done. 2016 was extraordinarily difficult for several of us, and 2017 won’t miraculously be easier, but it will be, and so we need to be open to it.

Are you open to it?

On the 5th Day of Christmas, My True Love gave to Me:

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​…gumption.

This is disguised as a book rec. Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers by Nick Offerman. It is funny, historical and biographical, autobiographical, serious and not, and there is quite a bit of language, both of the English and the salty variety.

Comedian and all around great guy, Nick Offerman profiles many gentlemen and gentle-ladies who have that one thing that lets them hit their goals and more importantly to keep getting back up when the lemonade stand knocks them down. Making lemonade is fine, but adding a shot of whiskey is better. I think Mr. Offerman would agree with me.

Oxford Dictionaries defines gumption as:

shrewd or spirited initiative and resourcefulness

A few synonyms are: ingenuity, imagination, acumen, practicality, spirit, pluck, courage, moxie, spunk, and my favorite: wherewithal.

In total, in addition to an epilogue and a bonus chapter, there are twenty-one profiles, some you’d expect: Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Benjamin Franklin as well as founding father, George Washington, and some you might not expect: Conan O’Brien, Carol Burnett, and Willie Nelson.

Those last three speak directly to my prejudices. Despite loving many celebrities, finding inspiration in them, and respecting them, I am still under the impression that they and celebrities of all types are expected to be more because they do more. Or rather, they do more publicly, and often hide their hardships, not always because of shame, but because of being so far ih the past as to not talk about anymore. They appear to just do it, which I suppose defines those with gumption better than the Oxford Dictionary.

Just get it done.

When you’re a kid that phrase usually means clean your room, finish the dishes, put away the groceries, but responsibilities foster more responsibility.

Some shrug off the fall; others cry, but they all get up and make a new plan.

That, my friends, is gumption.

Read the book, learn something new, meet someone new in its pages, and find out where your gumption is and how to find it; to reach it.