If you give it power, it will survive

Symbols are huge in Spirituality, but this does not mean that they have to have all that power we give them!


I can never take away the pains of atrocities from the past. At the same time, to continue to allow events and things which are symbolic of a painful past gives those symbols we hold near and dear - and even not so near and dear - more power than they are due.

Yeesh...


I enjoy much an online life which allows me the ability to debate in a forum which is not so "in your face" as is the live version. This does not mean that there are not things that I post which do not upset people - that's kind of my lot in life...to make people think and to even, in some cases, see things from a different angle. Recently I have been debating with some of my Facebook friends about the power that we give to things. The 'thing' in question is the Confederate Flag and how even in this day and age there are people who still see it as a symbol of a past which is mired in pain. Though I get what my Facebook friends are so upset about (I do get it, ladies), what I do not understand is that, if we are such powerful people, then why are we so intent, too, on giving power to things, namely things that should have NO power whatsoever.

I know already that there will be people who will prefer to no longer be "friends" with me in that social network, and I understand that there may be people who are of my own ancestry who will find that what I have offered as my counter-argument in this debate over a past symbol of hatred and negative power who will be very upset with the idea that my thinking is that whenever we give power to something negative, we are robbing no one but our very selves.

It is like when we tell our kids that we want them to ignore the ugly things that other kids say to them. "They are just words, honey," is what we tell them, preferring that our own kids not give in to the idea that someone else is far more powerful than they are on their own. We want our children to know what it is like not to judge, not to do more than question, and not to start a fight over something as trivial as symbols and what they mean personally to each of us. We want for a better life and peace and prosperity in the Now, but we want to be able to hang on to a past mired in pain and the rubble and shards of our lives as they once were. We want the world and people and even our place in history to evolve but on our terms and at our pace. We want to not hurt from the past, and we want to heal things that we are not comfortable with, but we are not willing to see that there are some things that stay the same, but in general, everything evolves, including the way that people think.

Even positive can end up being negative


For generations in the USA there has been the prevalent thinking that owning more things than everyone else in our circles of communication makes us the most powerful, most important people in our world, and sometimes in theirs as well. There is truth to saying that we do not own our things and that in some cases, our things own us. They make us feel good about ourselves and give us a false sense of being. Our things make our egos feel like we are important, and the more our things cost us, whether monetarily or otherwise, the more importance they hold for us, therefore making our things seem way more important than they really are.
Even though we love our things, even as our things make us feel better to a certain and limited extent, our things can never really 'be there' for us, no matter how much we tell ourselves that they are as important as we make them out to be.

We get comfort from our things, but eventually the things that give us comfort end up no longer being sufficient . We end up experiencing an emptiness inside which prompts us to gather yet more things to compensate for the things that no longer do for us what once they did.

We feel a rush of positive emotions when we acquire something new, whether it is brand new or just new to us. We are gatherers of things, we human are, and it is in our survival mechanisms for us to collect things, because things make our lives better in some cases, and things make some of the things that we have to do during the day easier for us to accomplish. It is not that we are not supposed to like our stuff, but that we are not supposed to like our stuff to the point that our stuff runs our lives, not literally, but figuratively. There are those of us with whom we share the planet who feel like they are nothing without their things. Some folks like to parade their things in front of other people, showing off and behaving as though just because they have the means to acquire all their things they also have the same right to shove it in other peoples' faces. This is when our things which once were positive symbols for us become vehicles through which we find our power, but what we are not realizing is that this is not power, but is instead being owned.

When we let those things and abilities which are outside of ourselves be what speaks for us, be what is of utmost importance to us, be what becomes our ability to love and to be loved, this is when the positives that once were symbolized by all of our acquisitions turn into negatives. They become negatives because we give them the power that should be ours. We give power to things when instead we should be learning how to use the power that we have to help change the world around us for the better.

...but we can't do this unless we are in control of ourselves and of our things and not the other way around. Humans are funny. We want to be in control, but we allow things to be in control of us. That's worse than letting other people be in control of us, but that always follows the things being in control. Trust me - I know this. I used to be one of those people who allowed their things be what spoke for them, and that is very odd seeing as how I am pretty damned outspoken. I allowed my house, my cars and my bank account be the things that were more important to me than the intangibles in my life. These days my things are limited, which means that I have to do what I can so that not only other people know and see that people, not things, are more important to me. And frankly I like it this way. I like it that I have to make sure that I am at my best, even when I am at my worst, and I have to make sure that what I say is real and true to who I am.

It was not easy to learn to do this, but it was very well worth it. I can replace all my things, and I am intending them all everyday, but I cannot replace me or the people in my life. Priceless is the only word that comes to mind. We are priceless, worthy of all the things that we desire, but we are not so pathetic that we should allow our things to become more important than we are, ever, for we are more precious than all the diamonds that this finite world can offer us.

On the flip side of it all


We never realize that there is real power within us all, power to change the world around us. We do not know our selves until time and turmoil force us into choosing for ourselves what we never thought we would ever have to. None of us ever thinks that we will lose our jobs, our homes, our cars, our stuff, and it is not until we have had to make the choice between what we have and who we are that we finally know the sweetness that is life and all its wonder. We can never know the joy within if we are so busy having joyousness through our stuff. We cannot ever know the pleasure that is physical love, really and truly, unless we have experienced a void of those things. It is when we no longer have our things that we start wondering what it is that we are doing here, why it is that we work so hard at a job we hate for years and years, and please, don't get me started with the crap about "you have to have a lot of money to survive." No, you do not - you have to have a lot of money to have a lot of nice things, but in order to actually, physically survive, we need very little.

So long as we have the ability to look up into the sky and squint to see the bright sun, the birds in flight, and the clouds as they float on by, we have the ability to survive. When the day comes that we cannot plant, cannot harvest, cannot breathe, then and ONLY then are we not able to survive. We do not need a glut of things to live. We need Love to live, and we need to learn to be as blessed as we truly are. This is not to say that we do not deserve to have nice things, but rather, is to say that as much as we glorify our things, we, too, should be glorifying our ability to acquire those things, and if we can have those things through efforts we lovingly do instead of efforts done out of a sense that we were raised to accept our crappy jobs so that when we are finished doing unsatisfying work for a thankless stranger we can hopefully find time and space in our lives and in our boss' demands for work that we actually were placed in this life to perform.

It is not as hard as you think it is to detach ourselves


Detachment is not as harrowing as any of us is raised to think it is. There is no written law that states that that which we acquire we also must keep until we are old, crippled, forgetful of things and people, and peeing on ourselves. Things are temporary, no matter how old some things are. Things come and go, but Wisdom stays, and Wisdom is only acquired through loss, not through acquisition. The more that we have, the more that we have to account for, and that is where we get lost in the confusion that is what we think is love but isn't. It is not loving for us to be enslaved by our ego's need to have more and more. It is not loving for us to compare our things and our selves to those who do not have as much as we do, and it is not loving to be empowered by the finite.

Detaching ourselves from outcome, from assumption, from the stuff that we are lied to and told are more important than Love is not simple. What we have to do in order to detach is to stop believing what we have been told our whole lives is correct and right. While it is nice to have a lot of things, there is nothing quite like the knowledge that we have our things - NOT our things having us.

If you give power to anything, it will have power - YOUR power. Be careful with what it is that you hold near and dear, and be absolute in what you know is worth your time, your efforts, your attention and especially, your Love.

It is not until we have none of our things left that meant anything to us that we realize the importance held in knowing that it is not the thing which is important, but the effort and namely, the Love it took to have that thing in the first place, no matter what it is.

I LOVE YOU ALL !!
...Roxanne...

The Beginning of the End of Things

We are all anxious for an end to this seemingly perpetual turmoil


These last years, from the summertime of 2007 until right this very moment have been harrowing to say the very least. When thinking in terms of how much longer it is that we have to suffer through yet  more turmoil, the thought in our heads should not be about how much we want an end to things, but rather on what it is that we will do with all this newly acquired Wisdom.

Even as many of us are materially poorer, the fact of the matter is that on the upside, we are all Spiritually more abundant than many of us have been in the entirety of our lives.


I am willing to bet that you can think back a few years to the idea that what was going on at that time would go on forever and ever into the Universal eternal abyss. For me, I was in the middle of pretending to be good at having a whole lot of money, of living in what I now know was not that big of a deal of a big fat house, of pretending to wedge my Higher Self into a life and style that were chosen for me. I know now, even in all my utter material lacking, in all my "in limbo" and in everything and all that has happened to me, my family, my life, that I would not ever, not for any amount of money, not for any promise of best selling book author status, not for all the poi and lomi salmon in the world, change one part of any of it.

I am stronger now than I have ever been. I am wiser now, more patient, more easily and readily able to deal with things head-on instead of just letting them slide on by until time is running out and I am at a deficit for things that issues we experience need- time and thought, both of which, just three years ago, was in high demand and short supply in my life and perhaps in the lives of many, many others. What I needed, what we all needed and what so many of us have decided is an option instead of a requirement is not more money, not more stuff, but simply, a better understanding of our very selves. We can never know one another until we are willing to know our selves. How sad it is to know that we are among people who know much about the world we live in, but nothing of the one person they think they know but are clueless about - their own Selves.

What I mean by "the beginning of the end of things"


I mean that right now seems to just drag on by, which, normally, at least in my own world, means that things that I have been manifesting are about to begin to show signs that the Universe and God know that I am ready for the big changes ahead, that maybe I have been hasty in the idea that I deserve anything or do not deserve anything, and that surely, within weeks to come, there will be sureness and signs that the beginning of the end - the slow beginning of the end, that is - of all these tumultuous things that have happened are about to take a turn, not for better and not for worse, but all for the sake of and in the name of Universal balance.

In other words, that which was crappy and has stayed crappy is about to become not so crappy anymore. Things that broke our hearts and made us believe that who we are depends on what we have are not so weighty anymore and those things that we lost, for whatever reason and however we lost  them, do not matter anymore to those of us who have decided that now  is the time when we should be reflecting, not regretting, on those things that are no longer here. We should not be pining for what was, but rather, for what is. No matter how much we miss our things there is one thing that we have all gained in the losses, and that one thing is that not a whole lot of us have been able to see past what it is that we lost.

Many are choosing only to know our losses but are not willing to see what it is that we have gained through it all.

What have you gained?


Yup...what have you gained? What is it that you have learned through all the turmoil and what is it that you have come to find out is the truth about yourself and who it is that you really and truly are? Are you not every bit as strong as no one else and even your very self would believe you were and are? Are you not every bit as ethically inclined as you have always known you are? Do you, at this time in your life, finally Know Love, and Truth, and how just to simply Be in the Moment? Ask your Self these questions before you decide that life sucks for you and that things are just not going to change. Think about how much you have gone through and who you have become because of it all. I believe that you will find that you cannot even begin to imagine being who you were long before the turmoil became a normal part of your everyday life.

I can say for sure that even though I bitch a lot about what is going on, even as I know that things are never going to be as they were and that yes, very soon, I will be by myself, I would not, if given the opportunity, change one thing that has happened to me and for me these past few years. I would not be who I am right now if I did. I would not be this strong, this Wise, this smart, this person. I would not be able to wake up in the morning, hopeful for the things that are in manifest, and I would not even bother with the things that I love to do, which is to write and to dance. I would not be able to look myself in the eye if I knew that at any point at all throughout these last few years I wanted to give up and just let someone else do everything for me. I know that I needed to go through what I have been through in order to have what it was that I so wanted, which was simply just the ability to see everyone through the eyes of Love.

I would not change one thing - this is the person who I asked to be. I wanted to be more intuitive, and I wanted to know what it was like to have compassion which came from the very depths of my soul and I wanted to understand the hurts that others go through, all in the name of Love. I wanted to be able to have a certain level of Knowing, a certain degree of understanding what it was to be in the other guy's shoes, to walk the length of that infernal tunnel of pain at whose end the light seemed but like that of a pinhole. Without all these things that hurt us and made us crazy for as long as they have, not one of us would be able to know for sure that we have been made solid, not even like rocks but instead and rather, like diamonds which have been carved by the hands and the chisel of time and turmoil. Without all the crap in our lives, we would, ourselves, be the thing which we loathe - which is, by and large, crap !

You cannot expect everyone to change, just your self


I have this friend. I cannot say her name. She knows who she is. We were friends from the very first hello. Yes, I pissed her off one time, and it was not until a few exchanges later that we found out that we were meant to be pals, and to this day, a few years later, we are still thick as thieves, close like sisters who were born within the same star family even as we were not born of the same womb. We are different as day and night, but we are close as to friends can be. I have only a very few people in my life with whom I share this sort of closeness, and I am close with them because of the one thing that we have in similarity with each other.

We have all been through a whole lot of crap, and we are better and stronger for it now, when it matters. Another friend goes through crap with her "only wants her when she tells him she is leaving" scab of a husband, and there is the one friend who, just a few years ago, was stricken with illness so grave that the doctors were not sure that he would make it through, but he did, and he is stronger for it because of it. And by stronger I am not talking about being stronger physically only - I mean he is also stronger in the soul because of all the people who would NOT take him to the ER when he so badly needed to be taken there. There are more than just these three, and it is strange to me sometimes that I draw these people to me, but if you know me, then you know that for me strange IS normal. I draw people to me who can relate to turmoil and I draw people who have something other than a sad story to offer me and the rest of the Universe as a sample of who they are as people. I draw the truest of the true, because that is who I am, and dammit, it was not easy learning to be this person, but it was very, very worth it, every minute of it- tears, foul language and everything else that goes with having to grow.

We can no longer only be willing to see what we have lost. What is lost is in the past, and what is to be we can never know until then is now. All we have is this moment to be brilliant, to be who we are and to Love our Selves the best way we know how to, by being honest and patient and by learning to simply just Be in the Moment, in the Now, because the Now is all we really have anyway.

'Tis truly the beginning of the end of things we have come to know as 'normal.'


We all need to learn to get accustomed to the idea that life as we knew it a few years ago is over with. We no longer have a reason to pine for the things we had, only time to learn to let go of what is gone and can no longer serve us or the purpose we are here to serve. If you were ever wondering what it was that God was doing when God decided that it was time for you to lose your stuff, God was busy starting to teach you what it was that you needed and wanted and asked to know so that you would no longer be blind and wandering through the proverbial and perpetual wilderness called Life. It is now time to start really thinking about Who You Are and what it is that you are supposed to be doing in order to serve the rest of the population of Earth, one person at a time, one soul at a time.

When I say that it is the beginning of the end of things, I mean things that we have gotten used to being normal for us. If you have been waiting for change, well, my friends, it is upon us.

Change. It is that thing you asked for and cannot  handle dealing with. You wanted it. You are getting it.

So deal with it and smile as you deal - your end of things is about to begin !

I LOVE YOU ALL !!
...Roxanne...

Just be Who You Are and what you want will follow, duh!

There is nothing better in life than a person who knows who they are


If what you seek is a new start, there is no better place than within!

"Let me be myself..." (Three Doors Down , "Let me be myself")


When I was a  girl in high school, I recall fondly the weirdness of everything. The one thing that I do not remember, though, is ever NOT being myself. When we are kids we are very idealistic, and it is not hard for us to be our own truest selves. We want to be noticed, and we want people to love us as we are, and if they don't want to Love us as we are, then we do everything within our own power to be even more ourselves than we did prior to our finding out that not everyone on the planet digs us. And what a slap to the ego that is, right?

Right!

One day, in fact everyday, we grow out of that version of ourselves, and then...


Then life begins for us. In fact, life begins every single moment of every single day, for each and every one of us, without fail, and it happens this way because that is the way that Life works. We are not static. We evolve. Everything that we are and everything that we do is totally who we are, even if who we are not is nowhere near who we were even a year ago. We grow out of our little bodies as babies and become children, and then from children we become adolescents, and from there we turn into adults. Yet, even though our bodies evolve and change, and though Life evolves and changes, there are things which DO NOT change, and one of those things is that one thing that we do well enough to refer to ourselves as 'gifted' with.

"I am not good at anything!"


Yes you are. EVERYONE is good at something, and that one something is that one thing that we are supposed to be doing with our lives. Seriously. This is the truth. This is what I know to be true. If it were not, I would not care enough about it if I didn't at least feel a tiny twinge of guilt when I don't sit down and at least write one sentence, at least try to choreograph at least three counts of eight in a hula, whether it is in my head or actually my getting up from this keyboard and actually dancing the dance that my third eye saw me doing, and there is not a day which goes by that I do not try hard to do something creative.

I used to think that what I loved to do (write, dance, opine, orate in front of crowds...)and my way of doing it was not good enough, would never be good enough, and that no one would want to know about it all. Then one day I no longer cared about what other people thought - I was and am really good at what it is that I was sent to this life to do, and dammit, I don't care who doesn't like it!! 


No one was born with no special gift, not one of us. Whatever it is that comes to us effortlessly - THAT is the thing that we have been sent to do. I mean, yes, porn stars are good at what they do, and drug dealers what they do, and in a sick sort of way, and because the world and the cosmos needs balance, even as many of us do not think that either of those two things is any sort of great way to live, it is in existence because it needs to be, because there are people for whom these are the things that they are good at, and there is no one else who can say differently or who can take it away from them, no one. I mean, yes, these are very extreme examples, but none the less they are also things that a select group of people are meant to be here to do, whether we want it this way or not. And  it totally is because the universe requires and demands balance - Hollywood has its thespians, and well, the San Fernando Valley has its own, too.


Regardless of what anyone thinks, this is how it is and this is how it will stay...


...so please, don't take forever to pull your head out of your ass, and do that quickly, because there are things that you have to do that other people need you to do, because if you do not do them, someone, somewhere, is going to have to wait in order to get their own 'thing' on.

No matter what anyone thinks, and regardless of your current job, your mission in this life is to be good at the thing you were born to do, period, and no matter how many times you try to fit yourself into another way of being, another way to do anything, you ultimately will always be brought back to that one thing that you do better than most and in your own very special way. A lot of my friends are stuck in a place where they would rather not be, but they don't want to be stuck with the struggle of not having the life they have grown used to, and they have grown used to it because they think they do not have a choice.

I beg to differ, on bended knees even.... Life is all about having choices. To keep yourself in a situation where there is no choice and there is no choice because you chose it that way, well...it means that you either are learning something that you need to know and no matter how many times you bail from the situation, you will be put right back into the same situation, possibly with the same people, and you will stay there, having no choice about that much, until you have learned what you need to learn. (I know ALL about this one- I am living in the middle of such a situation right now!) Yet, even being in what might seem to be a very stuck situation does not mean that you are really stuck at all. It just means that you have not yet figured out that you are learning something, that you are going to stay stuck for a bit, but at the end of it all, you will be better, stronger, wiser, whatever....you just need to stay stuck for a minute.

Stuck is nothing more than a place for us to study


I am stuck, and I know that I am stuck, but I am stuck for a purpose, and that purpose is to guide another person back to their true self. I know this. I have known this. I do not like this. Yet it is what is mine, because part of Who I Am is an unconditionally loving and compassionate person. Yes, it sucks, but there are other things that suck way more than this does (ever run outta toilet paper mid-pee? Yeah- that sucks ASS!!! This is a different kind of suckiness that I am telling y'all about right not and not outta toilet paper suckiness). There are other more pressing things that really bite the big one. I mean, yes, my situation is not rosy at all, and at the end of this current lesson I will be less one member of a family unit that I had half the responsibility of building, but this does not mean that I have lost hope. In fact, it means that I have much more to be hopeful about, much more to deal with, yes, but  in the loss that I wait for I have also found peace.

Peace is hard to come by if you are unhappy with the thing that you do versus doing the thing that you know you are supposed to be doing. I know that my time in the middle of this messiness is coming to a close, and it is due more to the fact that I have chosen just to be Me, just to do what it is that I was sent here to do (communicate Love to the rest of the planet via speaking, writing and plain old gettin' out there and giving Love to everyone I see and meet up with...sounds harder than it is, really) and to learn what it is that I am to learn from everyone and anyone with whom I come in to contact. If you are feeling stuck by the thing that you call your job, this means that you need to balance that stuckness with something that you love to do.

I have this friend.


Normally I do not name names when I write. However, this time I will because it doesn't make sense to not give props where props are due.

My friend, Jimmy Ash, is the most bad ass guitarist who has not yet been mollified in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. This guy, my pal Jimmy, can play ANYTHING on his guitar. Jimmy has a day job, and Jimmy knows that he only is going to his job everyday because he has promised himself, has dedicated himself, has made it his mission in life to do the one thing that he knows he was meant to do for the rest of this life, and that one thing is shred! And who can blame him? Outside of working out and just basically being a good guy, his one Love is his guitar (that is, after his own higher Self...) and man, does this guy LOVE his guitar!

To hear him play is like watching my little sister, Napua, dance one of her own original Tahitian dance choreographies, is like reading something that my Auntie Dot wrote, is like hearing my friend and Poly-Brotha Jeff Tofilau beat the hell outta his drums, is like seeing my Auntie Kalei'iliahi's drawings and my friend Kim keep a room full of 1st graders captive with her silliness and her magnificent abilities for storytelling. My point is that these are all examples of people who do what they do in their everyday lives, and in their everyday lives they are satisfied with whatever it is that they get from it all, so long as the one thing that they do better than most is part of their everyday living. As long as what we enjoy is part of what we live and do each day, there should be less pining over what it is that we want, because in doing what we love to do and were meant to do we find a certain level of satisfaction that dwarfs the idea that in order to be happy, we have to be and do more than what the rest of the world is doing, and this is just not the truth.

We are all here for a specific purpose, and no matter what that purpose is, if we fight who we are, our reason for being never gets known by us - we continue to allow the hamsters which run in the wheel in our heads to do the thinking for us, and the way that the rodent thinks is like a damned rodent - always on the hunt for more, more, more, with no clue as to how to just chill and let you be yourself. This is the problem that we have been brainwashed into thinking. We are told from a very young age that it is better to make money than it is to be happy and to wait for the money while we are living out our life's purpose. We are told that the one who dies with the most is the winner and that if we die broke and without things we were never worth much at all. This is really very sad, and it is sad because there are a lot of quality people on the planet who have not more than what they need - a house, a bed, food, and a smile, and sometimes, maybe a dog...

We glorify people who have a lot of stuff, a lot of money, and we vilify those, make a mockery of those, call those who have what seems like nothing "bad," as if we know what is good for everyone. We don't know. We can't know - hell, most of the time we are not even sure about what is good for ourselves, let alone everyone else on the planet, or at the very little least, those with whom we share our lives with.

A life lived by the rules of others is merely an existence


When we go by what others deem as acceptable, and we are not comfortable with what we are doing after we have followed what someone else has told us is good and right, we are not living. We are only existing at that point and the best we can hope for at that point is to continue to smile that same phony smile and that same vacant far away look - that catatonic stare we wear all the time that gives away the condition of our soul. If we keep on doing what does not make us happy, and we choose to do what fills our pockets and not also our lives and more importantly, our hearts and souls, we are merely existing.

"...lately I'm so tired of waiting for you to tell me it's ok

Tell me, please, would you one time just let me be myself? " (Three Doors Down "Let me be myself")

Know now that there is no better way to be happy in this life than to simply follow your heart and listen to the pinings of your soul and just be You !!! I promise you that those things that you want, those things that you need, and most of all, that one thing that you do, will get you to where you need and want to be, even if that place is within instead of a prime piece of real estate somewhere that is beach adjacent. I know this because I lived it, and yes, money and lots of it is nice, and yes, it would be nice again. But I know, too, that I am on my way back to that, because I have chosen to refuse to live my life by the standards of what makes other people happy. I no longer care to live my life by the standards of other people, no, not even my ailing spouse, who, by the way, would LOVE if I took my talents to the corporate world.

However, I can't, because my life is led by Spirit, not by the sponsors who brought you Life as you know it and hate it to be!!



I LOVE YOU ALL!!!
...Roxanne...

Lessons from Crap Stew Central

We are all in this together 


Right now there is a collective thinking that we are in the middle of a pot of crap stew that we will never, ever get out of. If we chose instead to look at these losses as our opportunities for change, we then would also be able to deal with the idea that this time, we are the ones who have to fix this, and we have to do it NOW.

Things will not change unless we exact that change


We have all heard that in order to see change in the world, we must be the change we wish to see. I would like to add to that by saying that not only must we change the way that we do things in order to get to the changes we want to see, we have to believe in the changes that we make. We can talk all we want about change, but unless we do what we suggest  others to do, everything else that is not part of our personal world will not change. We have to want the changes to happen, enough so that we would be willing to be uncomfortable being placed, by our own hand, even, in a situation that is confusing and precarious, but is none the less very needed. Change is painful, because change means that we need to change our thinking and change our ways of being and most of all, we have to work at the changes that we want to see in the world.

When it comes to the things in life that we want, we are willing to go to the very end of the universe, so to speak, in order to have it. Yet, when it comes to seeing to it that our thoughts contribute to the betterment of the entire world as it is, we become lazy. We want someone else to get the ball rolling, that way we don't have to claim responsibility to it all when the first hitch in the plan happens. Change hurts, because it calls into action that part of our selves that make us want to change, and that part, the soul, overrides the ego's need to constantly steal from us our will to be who we really each are. If we could all just manage, for perhaps an hour a day, to think lovely thoughts of things that we want - I mean really want - and we all did this every single day, we would see the changes that we want. There are no two ways about it - we get what we think about and focus on the most.

Yes, if you think constantly about the turd soup that you are being fed daily, you will experience turd soup kind of days.


I can't stand a person who will see only the high clouds hanging onto nothing in the wide blue sky. A pessimist is a person whose life depends on making sure that they do not slip up and they do this by being very (ahem) "cautious"...about every thing...to the point where it is maddening and eventually begins to wear away at the very foundation, not only of their own soul, but that of those who are nearest to them. These are people who talk about and wait for a 'rainy day' to happen, because this makes them right, perceivably, that  is. These are people who like the phrase "I don't want to rain on your parade, but..." and "Good job, but..." and for them there  is no 'but' big enough that they will have nothing to say about. These are people who seem to feed, not only on their own egotistical right-ness, but also on the idea that  they know that there will be many people affected by their lack of a positive outlook.

Being negative about everything is way easier than trying to find the light in the darkness, but the light is there - it is always there, and the light can never be drowned by the darkness- it just won't happen. The light will always be light, no matter who says or assumes what they will. There are no two negatives that can or ever will make a positive, because life is not algebra- and that is a good thing because there are a lot of us who cannot 'do' algebra.

We will all continue to have days that will challenge our patience, will test our integrity and will make us question our character and if whether or not our character is worth holding up as much as we should (It is, I promise you). Yet, there is a certain feeling, a feeling that, just like we all are collectively feeling like we are sitting in the same pot of shit soup and wading around in it like dirty little pigs, so, too, is the feeling that we are at the climactic part of the story, the part where the plot is not so thick that it makes us question if whether or not who we are versus who we think we are is somehow a contest which neither of the two of our selves will win. There are two sides to everything - light and dark. The dark wants to keep things dark, but the light won't have it that way - it CAN'T have it that way.

Let's think about this in terms of darkness versus light


Say, for a moment, that you are standing in a pitch dark room. Inside your pocket you have one match and one candle, and a flashlight with batteries that have a questionable amount of life left in them. Regardless of how dark it is in that room, and no matter if the light from the flashlight is dim it is still light, and even dim light will permeate a hole in the thick black darkness. Once the batteries have been exhausted, you get your one match and your one candle and you light the wick and unlike the flashlight, this light is brighter, and even as the source of the light is primal, is dangerous, it still changes the dark into something a little more tolerable.

The darkness of the soul can be permeated, all it takes is the tiniest amount of light to make this true. We all have had our share of days that suck ass royally, and it has come time that we all started realizing that since it is that we collectively brought ourselves to this point in time, collectively, too, it will be up to us all to bring us all back to a place where we are all happy and living in the light of the Spirit.


We chose this, and it doesn't matter who disagrees, because there is a majority out there reading this who know that this is a correct statement. It is far more than an economic problem, way more than housing and the stock market and the price of a barrel of oil. It is way more than the idea that illegal immigration brought us to where we are, and it is downright foolish to think that the same things that got us into this mess are the same actions that we have to take in order to get us out of it. We can never fix anything by making the same mistakes over and over again, ever. This time around it would be nice to challenge us all to give our souls the chance to stretch a little more, to reach a little farther and to seek that which it so desires, even if it means that we have to learn a little bit more.

We cannot continue like this forever


We cannot bear to keep this madness up. The very idea that somehow suffering is better is preposterous and really smacks of religious rules that make no sense in this day and age. Yes, it is wonderful to be  of good moral character, and of course, it is great to have a strong sense of integrity. However, there comes a time when the idea of doing things for others begins to rob ourselves of the essence that we are. It is one thing to be of service to the rest of the world, where your talents and gifts from God are utilized to make life nicer for everyone as a whole. It is quite another thing when service becomes servitude.

I had to learn a hard lesson about the teachings brought to me throughout my life about other peoples' ideals about religious belief and even Christ Himself, about the place a woman holds in the life of the man she has married, about the idea that what other people demand is not the same thing that each person is going to agree to doing. I had to learn to be strong so that I can deal well with what has become of my life (widowhood will be another lesson that I have to learn from) and what will become of my life. I learned what has been given to me as my life at this point in time is a gift and not an impediment.

We cannot live this way forever. God will not allow it. What God will allow, though, is just enough rope for us to hang ourselves with.

Coincidentally, the rope we are given to hang ourselves with is usually and also the rope that we are given to climb out of the pit we have found ourselves in.

I LOVE YOU ALL !!

...Roxanne...

You are amazing, just the way you are

It is not hard to be amazing

Often times in life we want for someone -anyone - to tell us that we are completely, totally amazing. The problem with this is that when we are needful of someone else's compliment, we do not realize that we are already amazing just as we are.

We are all part of God

Yeah, I know, not everyone believes that God is real, but God IS real, and I can prove it. When you are finished reading this, go outside and look at the tree that is nearest to you. Look up at its branches, and even if there are no leaves, think about the fact that in a few weeks there will be leaves, lots of them, and birds who will call that tree and those branches and those leaves home, even though only temporarily.

Then, take a walk through your neighborhood, or your local grocery store, the mall- anywhere where there is human life, and there before you will be evidence of a loving, giving and caring Creator. The gender of said Creator does not matter. What matters is that you and I and every single person on this planet knows or at least should know that we are all a piece of God, all of us. (Yes, even Charlie Sheen.) 

Being part of God means that we are perfect as we are, even with our imperfections

I have had the same problem with people my whole life. Folks like me well enough, but they want me to change. They want me to not be outrageous, not be mouthy all the time, not get angry (and I am GOOD at getting angry, lemme tell you what!), not be  my truest and highest self, but in their discomfort with my ways, they have not bothered even to think that maybe  the reason that they see the perceived faults in me, they are also recognizing my faults because they, too, have the same damned faults. 

That sucks ass. It sucks because we never bother to see the thing that we are, even though we see the thing that we are in others. Go Figure!

It took me a long time - a VERY long time - to learn NOT to judge people, but to, instead, become a quiet and reverent observer. It is better to observe, because observation makes us aware of the things that we both are and are not. I am not stupid, neither do I lack common sense, and no way do I cheat. I  will not lie to you and tell you that I have always told my old man how much money I have spent or that I spent any at all. What I will say is that even though I may have done some pretty crappy things in my life, the fact remains still that I am who I am, like it or not, love me, hate me, ignore me - it doesn't matter. It took me just as long to accept me for who I am, never minding that there are people on the planet who will not ever accept me fully as I am, as it did for me to learn not to judge others.

It is a feat that is not for the faint of heart, and yes, though you will become stronger spiritually, you will also go through all those emotions and all those feelings and everything that you are trying to avoid just so that you will  not have to suffer the slings and the arrows of pointing out in others what does not sit right with us. We LOVE to point out other peoples' "wrongs," and we do it because we feel lousy about who we are, what we are doing and who we are becoming. One more thing that we never cop to is the fact that everything we are, that we have, that we do, all of it is a direct result of our own thoughts and our own actions, meaning that very truly, we become what we think  about.

So, what are YOU thinking about?

Your pink hair, your pointed and spiked boots don't make you who you are


Who you are is a uniquely special Creation. You have purpose in this life, even though you might think otherwise. You have a mission to fulfill here on this earth and in this lifetime, and no matter who tells you what they think of your manner of dress, the way that you think, or the name by which you address the Almighty, none of it matters because God has a plan for you, for your life and dammit you should be thrilled to pieces about it.

You know what you are good at, and believe me, baby, when I tell you that that one thing that you do remarkably well is the one thing that you were meant to be here to do, because that one thing is the thing that you love, and our job here is to impart Love onto the world.

Love begins with each of us.

It a simple concept - love others as you would want to be loved, and folks, we are doing a miserable job at it. It is our mission here on planet Earth to be healers, and we are brought here to this life to love one another so that we may heal and be healed. It sounds so simple because it is simple. It is not hard to love. It is harder on us physically to be angry, to carry hatred, to long for what we had and for what used to be. I know this. I live with someone who longs for the days of the private golf course, of 5 cars from which to choose to drive on any given day of the week, but mostly, for the power that  this person had with a very limited amount of people.It is easy to be a big fish in a small pond if you are the one who is the biggest fish. Yet, when it comes time for us to be  released back into the wild, we find that we are not the biggest fish anymore and that which was once comfortably small and compartmentalized has suddenly, and much to our own chagrin, the deepest, darkest, coldest part of the ocean.

This is the point at which we find out what we are really made of. It is the part where we know, for sure, if we have been living honestly with who we really are or if we are pining for who we thought we were in another time of our lives. It is also at this point that we start to see who we are, and for the most part, we do not like our selves, and that is really very sad.

There was a time in my life, and it seems like it was yesterday - but  only  because the pain is still very much there, very real and hurts a lot - when I was all about what I had, how much money was in my pocket, and who my friends were. When we lost our golf course home, I was a mixed bag of emotions- rage and shame and guilt, but I was not less hope, not less Love, not less the idea that I am me, even without all those great things. I learned over time that the house is just a building, that the cars would have broken down eventually, and that life on the golf course was great, but it was not forever. We want the fun to last forever and ever, and we set ourselves up for a great fall if we choose to believe that we get to keep what it is that we want to keep. The Universe knows when it is that we have become so full of ourselves that we are forced into balance.

I was forced in to balance, and though it has been a hard time for me, it was, every bit of it, worth it all. The tears, the arguing, the sickness that he will not recover from - every single piece of it was worth it because without those losses I would not have gained something that I needed that is integral to who I have become.

Truly Me.

Trust that God has a purpose for you, a plan, and that no matter what your goals are, without Love, everything is for nothing, and you will continue to seek things outside of your self when in fact it is your very self that you should be not only seeking, but also, Loving. We are here to Love others, to heal the earth and to be of good service to our earthly family, all of it.

Go thee out into the wilderness and heal the sickness of souls...we need you, and we are waiting.

I LOVE YOU ALL!!

...Roxanne...

On the Brink

We are on the brink of something really cool


Take a look around you, guys...something is most definitely going on in the cosmos, and we are lucky enough to be here to bear witness to it all

All those tears, all that cursing, all that crap you just went through was for a reason


Following my Facebook one would be able to know that these last two weeks have been a BITCH! From marital strain to financial strain to simply just feeling like I wanted to cry (and did, a lot, thank you very much), these last couple of days have just royally sucked. When you are in the middle of something that sucks, it seems like everything else sucks, too, and when it seems that everything sucks, well, everything, essentially, sucks.

Too, when it seems that there is no way out, that is when we cry out immediately, begging for mercy from the God that I grew up with, the One Who punished more than Loved and the One Who seemed to want to destroy everything in its wake. Yet, when the turmoil began to subside, and things began to mellow a bit, there was clarity that was crisp and pure, like freshly washed sheets hung outdoors to dry in the hot, bright summertime sun. It all became crystal clear to me at that moment of clarity that my life was beginning to evolve. All those tears I cried, and everytime I bit my tongue and gritted my teeth came rushing to me like an August wind in the Mojave Desert - change is upon me, upon you, upon us all, and whether we believe it or not, all those things we have been intending are about to come into our lives,beginning now.

Everything that you have prayed for, wished for, intended, desired - they are all beginning to show signs of popping up in our lives.

Yay us !

Still, there are going to be things that will get in the way 


The things that will get in the way are the things that we still need to work on within ourselves. If it is that we seek and pine for Love, then we will be given the thing that makes us miss that Love and it will go on until we finally figure out that we are our own greatest and first true Love. If we want peace, we will be given more turmoil. If we want freedom, we will be placed into those situations which will take up our time, our brainspace, our freedom to do what we want, but only for a little while longer. And I say only for a little while longer because, dammit- this has gone on too long already. I mean, come on...the economy...housing...job market...all these things that break our hearts everyday are the very things which we all want so badly. We want the economy to be strong, so we are given a situation collectively where we have to pull it back together and make it strong again. We want decent housing, so we are placed in situations which give us reason to desire someplace better suited to our tribe. We want jobs, and we are given the opportunity to do what it is that we were placed into this life to do. When it is that we want, we desire, we pine for something, we are given the thing that we do NOT want, so that we can recognize what it is that we want when it comes into our lives, and when it does, we are surprised at the idea of the ease of our attaining it.

It is not that it will or ever was going to be easy, but rather that the things that we have to go through to get to where we want to be suck so badly that in comparison, when we finally get what we want, we are ever more grateful for it .

And yes, it sucks, too, that it is like this. It sucks so badly but hey - you know what they say...anything worth having is worth fighting for, even if who we have to fight with is our very self!

Stand and cheer for the Warrior within


It is time to congratulate ourselves. Collectively we have been through so much crap that it seems hardly believable that those things we want are almost to us. Yet, they are. The Love, the peace, the things and ways of being that we have all pined for are on the brink of happening to and for us in the here and the Now. There is no better place than the Now, anyway, and it is because Now precedes Then, and Then is where we all want to be. Now sucks okole. Now hurts and Now is the thing that we no longer want to be privy to. But it is all we have, the Now. We do not have yesterday (and really, who wants yesterday anyway, right?), and we do not have tomorrow (because tomorrow is yet to be and no one really knows what is going to happen precisely, right?). We only have this moment to be grateful for the hard times, as the hard times have taught us many needed lessons. We only have right now to be thankful for the experiences which brought us to this very sacred moment in time, this time where we are so excited for the future because the past is so full of heartache and turmoil that to look back at it would be like a dog returning to its own vomit.

But be grateful for all those terrible things that happened, all those words that hurt and all those tears that fell. Looking back at the reasons it all happened one can clearly see that it is but like a dream now, barely recognizable as anything more than what it was at the time - a pain in the ass- and what  it is right now - a hard lesson learned.

Stand steady, guys, and keep your eyes open and your hearts full of gratefulness, forgiveness and unconditional Love. The flip side of all the BS we have all been through is about to happen for us.

The Piper is about to be paid....

I LOVE YOU ALL!!
...Roxanne...

STRONG

It is never until we are called to battle that we realize the value of being the quiet Warrior


Sometimes, life just makes no sense whatsoever, and when it is that we find ourselves in the middle of a hot steaming pot of crap soup - THAT is when we finally realize what it means to have strength and to be Strong.

Strong is not something you are born as


We cannot fathom the depth of our own strength, our own integrity, our inner Selves, unless we have to go through stuff. It is not a secret that there are a LOT of us who have been and who are still going through stuff. I am going through stuff right now, more stuff than I care to. There are a lot of well-meaning people who email me and call me, call me to tell me things that I should do, that I can do, about things that I have tried which have failed. This is not a time in my life where my pride can be in the way, not a time when I can just choose to not do what I have to do - this is not a choosing that I 'chose', so to speak, but is a time that I was, instead, chosen for.

There is no one better in the world to endure what it is that is in front of me than me. There is no one in this world whose lesson is encased in this bullshit called 'my life at present time' who is better suited to fight the good fight, battling the quiet fight all while ensuring that my head is no where near shoved up my ass. There is, essentially, no one on the planet who can deal well with the task at hand (and it IS a task...I promise) than me.
Yes, while we choose who it is we will spend our lives and our families with, we are not the ones who choose to have to learn certain life lessons.

Right now, I am sure of it, the lesson that I am learning is that I am Strong. The reason that I am sure of it is is because I have not yet given up. I may have given up screaming and yelling, throwing things other than a 41 year old tantrum, but I have not yet given up the fight. I have not given up the fight, and I know already that this is only a mild taste of what is to come. Of course, what  is to come will not only be imposed upon me, upon you, upon us all, by one person, not by any means at all. What is to come are the little irritating things that set us off, but these little irritating things that are to come will come to us all in clusters, in the form of losses, of marital and familial discord, of things that none of us will be able to comprehend, maybe not the reason, but for sure, for the fight of it all.

And through it all, I am, you are, we all are, to be Strong like we have never been before. Yes, it is already and will continue to be that tough, and yes, totally worth it when all is said and done.

The message is...


The message is simple - right now we are all at the end of a cycle of our lives. For many of us, this means the end of a relationship or at least the end of the way that a particular relationship has been. This current time is all about the evolution of our very selves, and it is about time, because we have all been stuck in the same pattern, have become way to comfy with the idea that the mediocrity that we thought was our best is still our best, and that anything more than what it was is just too much. Some of us are breaking away from our old selves, while others of us do not even realize that this is what is going on, preferring instead to think of it all as being only one long string of really bad days.

WAKE UP !!

If you do not see already the patterns of evolution as they have happened, open your damned eyes and start seeing things for what they really and truly are - changing. Humans for as long as time has been recorded have hated change. We resist change because we fear the unknown, but if we do not like what IS known, wouldn't it make sense that perhaps the unknown might not be that bad? Yes, things that we fear take a little time for us  to face and to heal from, and if the thing that has been haunting you has not gone away, it is because you are not done with the lesson that you are learning from it.

Walk on, with your head held high, even though your soul feels battered and bruised...


The Soul is an amazing thing. It is resilient like a 5 year old and sturdy like thirty year old Tupperware. The soul is the barometer by which the seasons of change are kept track of. The soul knows what it can handle and rarely will it bother to take on more than it can handle.

We are to walk on, walk tall and proud, showing off our bruised selves as though what we have gone through is something that we should be proud of, and we should be. It is not until we are met with certain adversity that we ever know what we are made of.

Yes, this time in our lives sucks okole. We are all in the middle of a storm that is not relenting, and it is not relenting because we still have so much to learn. Walk on and keep walking, because you will never know what the hell you can deal with if you do not. This is not a fight that the Ego can fight, and it is because the Ego is the reason that the Soul has to fight - the ego gets us into trouble all the time, and like clockwork it is always the soul which comes to the rescue.

It is fine to feel like a child lost in the grocery store, screaming in panic because we do not realize that our mother is just hunched down looking at the items on the bottom shelf. Mom would never leave us alone, so consider your soul the mom within you. The Soul takes care of us, makes sure that we only have just enough rope with which to hang ourselves with and is hoping that we decide to think of stringing the rope through the belt loop in our jeans and not slip it around our neck and decide to jump off the footstool we seem to think is what separates us from sure death and the floor which can sustain us, because like Mom would not, the soul would not allow us so short a rope that we could actually hurt ourselves.

STRONG


Strong. It is something that not a lot of people can claim as being. Strong people go through things without thinking that it is going to be a problem to have to go through things. We simply just go through them because it is what we must do. We know that there is a certain end to the turmoil, so with a heart as big as the sky and courage which could dwarf the Grand Canyon, we dive right into the fracas, hoping not that we are making the right choice, but that we make it through it all wiser than we were when we started out.

Strong is something that you must earn being, because Strong is something that is not for everyone. Not everyone is willing to have a broken heart, over and over again, and not everyone can deal with being let down, with being disappointed, with having to deal with the shame and the pain that are both part of strengthening of the soul

So go ahead- cry, curse the God to Whom you kneel, and know that you earned the right to do those things, because they are things that are set aside only for those who know what it is to have to cry, to have to try, to have to be in pain, all and only so that you can, I can, we can all be the thing that no one is ever born as being.


I LOVE YOU ALL!!!

...Roxanne...

You cannot save everyone

...so you might as well start with yourself, first


My sun is in Pisces, and because of this I am super-sensitive, super-compassionate, and unfortunately, super-convinced that I and my bleeding heart can save the world. The problem isn't that any one of us feels this way, but that we are convinced that we can actually do it! There are people within each of our inner circles who we think we can save, and God help us we try hard to help them. Yet, there is a time when our helping them will become more a nuisance than much else.

Again, we cannot save everyone


Now, this is not me saying that we cannot try to help everyone who comes our way who needs the help. Quite the contrary, in fact. We should be offering our assistance, as that is one of our greatest achievements in life - to be of good service to others. There is nothing wrong with wanting to help, nothing wrong with feeling badly that you can't when you find that you can't, and good gravy there is nothing wrong with offering assistance, but there is a line which gets crossed, a fine line, and once it is that you have crossed that line you have gone from being an altruistic friend to being a pushy pain in the ass.

Yes, it sucks that we want to help everyone but totally cannot, and this is not just important, but also an important lesson for us all. If you feel like you are trying too hard to help another person and that other person is not responding the way that you had hoped they would, it is at that point, when all possibilities within your zone of comfort have been exhausted, you need to stop. If you do not, you end up hurting only you...and the person who you were trying to help?

Well, in some cases, they no longer want us around, for any reason, not because we were trying to help, but because they really think they can handle things on their own. Sometimes, they really don't want to be helped anyway, which leaves us feeling like we are just spinning our wheels but nothing else. It is not that they don't want any help because they cannot benefit from it, but mostly, it is because they do not want to be helped! 

Don't get all butt hurt - it really is NOT you!


Half the problem that all of us has is that we have guilt if we cannot help someone else. We are raised to be a pushy pain in the ass, but we are not taught how to not be a pushy pain in the ass. We are taught that God smiles on us when we help others, but no one tells us that those we are trying to help have the option and the choice and most of all the right to decline any assistance from anyone at all. Then, when we see the inevitable happen, we become more weepy and feel more guilty, and dammit - that is not your burden to carry because you offered and they declined.

Did it ever occur to any one of us that this is the part that the other person hoped for? Yes, I said hoped for, and yes, there are people who hope that things go wrong, or at least not the way they really wanted it to, because then the person who 'lost' whatever it was that they wanted or wanted to happen now really has a reason to whine, to pitch a bitch, to recite, over and over, the thing that did not happen to them or for them. Now they get to have all that "poor me" stuff that egomaniacs LOVE. It is the attention that they are craving, really, and how better to get attention than to have a failure in an area that meant a lot to them? NOW- this is not to say that there are not people who do not ask for help because they are overly egotistical - some folks want to do things on their own, and when what  they wanted does not happen, they try and try again until every possible thing to try has been exhausted. Normally, it is this person who eventually accepts help when offered.

The other person, the one who over and over again declines help, who keeps talking about the 'monumental failure' they experienced, who keeps playing the let's-feel-sorry-for-(insert name here) game will continue to have to 'fail', again and again, because they have not come to terms with the idea that their biggest failure is NOT that they did not succeed with the thing they (ahem) "tried" to accomplish but that they do not try again for the reason, and they will never admit it, that they love the attention that their imminent failure brings them. It is easier for anyone to do what they always have because it is 'normal' to them and they know the pain of not trying and can deal with  that pain far better than they can with the possible failure of trying something new.

The squeaky wheels do not always get the grease...


We humans like to bitch, a lot, and because we like to bitch, a lot, we will sooner seek that which will make us bitch than that which will make us cry out with joy. That has GOT to be the SICKEST thing that anyone of us has ever done - prefer to bitch about something instead of actually doing something that makes our hearts sing with pure joy.

I am not saying that we will be a shining success- come on! Everything takes time and practice. What I am saying is that we can only deal with the pain of watching someone fail over and over again long enough to where we start being the way that they are. And who really wants yet one more sorry asshole around, right?
Just because someone complains constantly it does not mean that they will get the solution to their issue- it only guarantees them that someone WILL feel sorry for them, WILL pat them on the back and WILL be there to listen to them whine about something that is completely fixable. Yet even the ease of solving an issue is not enough in some cases to make these people pause to think that maybe their game is a bit old and that there is a good reason why their friends are conveniently and suddenly busy all the time.

No matter what you have been told, even as it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, no one likes to hear the noise.

You needn't feel guilty


If you are feeling guilty over you not being able to help someone, stop it, now. This is what they want - they want you to feel guilty, want you to feel badly because they do, and it is easier to have company when that company feels like they at least are entitled to you feeling lousy. Of course, most of the time no one plans to make anyone feel lousy, but at the same time, it should not suck to want to help a person. Yet, what does suck is the idea that these same people, underneath it all, do not care one little bit that they have made you hurt, that they have made you feel badly because you cannot help them. They are not even available emotionally to deal with it, so instead of healing, they much prefer to hurt. Hurting is the devil they know, the devil they can deal with because they have dealt with it over and over again. They become addicted to their pain because they also are addicted to the attention that their pain and their telling the world of that pain gets for them.

Yes, this is the truth, and this is the thing that you have suspected all along, and this is the reason that you might feel like crap when you are around certain people. Your Soul knows that these people are up to no good, even if they do not realize it. It is not hard to become an energy parasite, and it is easier to become affected by it even when you have nothing to do with what they are putting themselves through. It is not your fault that you have offered real help, and not your fault that you are having to deal with your loved one going through what they are.

But...


What IS your fault is that you have not yet learned to determine where the fine line gets drawn, when you will decide that enough is enough - and you don't have to be mean or anything like that, you just have to be careful to not be open to the vibrations they are emitting and more, that you are not open to their attacks on your Soul.

We can all do each other a great big favor if we can just see through the hurt to the problem. Just like a scrape on the knee that hurts so badly for the first few minutes after the fall, so, too does the emotional hurts we have which were not ours but that of someone else's. We cannot fathom to know that our loved ones are hurting, just like we cannot fathom that perhaps the reason they are being such a pain in the ass is not because of anything more than that they are coming to suck the life out of you, but that it won't  be the way that you want said life sucked out of you !!

I LOVE YOU ALL!!


...Roxanne...

It's about acceptance

Losses are meant to teach us lessons in acceptance


Apparently the keyword of the day today is 'acceptance,' and with good reason. Many of us cannot figure out what the hell we did to lose what we have, but the thing is that we are not thinking about what it is that we have lost in terms of it being a lesson for us.

Our human minds cannot comprehend certain things


When we are in the middle of a misunderstanding, or maybe we have suffered losses that we cannot fathom a reason for the losses, that is called a lesson in progress. There is an old saying that "when the student is ready, the teacher appears," yet, no one tells us, too, that when the lesson is over, the teacher goes back to his or her life.

I spoke with more than only one person today, and of the majority of them all, the one thing that stood out the very most to me was that these are people who are hurting, who have no idea what it is that they said or did, and that they know that somewhere along the lines, they lost out on things and on relationships that were more important to them than even they realized they were. The funny thing about relationships, no matter what kind they are, is that relationships all require a lot more than many of us are willing to put into it, and when we want to put more into it than is needed, that is when we need to question our own selves because it is at that time when we should be able to see and to know what it is that we are all about. And there is even a problem with that line of thinking, and it is because we may think we know what we are all about, but in truth we do not.

In fact, we know so little about a lot of things that when it comes time for us to realize what has happened, we are perplexed at the truth that has become our own.

It's all about the acceptance


I bitch a lot, pretend not to be afraid of the inevitable nature of the things that are contained within my near future, but I am afraid.

I am afraid that one day I am going wake up and realize that there are a whole lot of things that I have purposely left unsaid to my husband that needed to be said that I was too scared to say so as to save him from having to deal with something that I have said. I am afraid that one day, after I have opened my eyes to see that daylight is upon me and that once again it is time to take the kids to school, I am going to look over at him and find him not breathing and cold. I am afraid that after all these years, and even after all the shit the man has put me through, my life will, in that one moment, change irreversibly. I say a lot about his impending passing, and though in a collective and round about way, I am not afraid of the things that most women faced with such an immediate future, are.

I am not afraid to be alone, and I am not afraid to raise my kids by myself. I am not afraid to be misunderstood, or anything else that wives in my position should be or are, but I am scared of so many other things, things that make no sense, not even to me.

Yet, the one thing that I know that makes this fear more prominent for me is that no matter how I perceive this to be, the one thing that makes the very least sense to me is that for the first time in my life I am not able to fully understand, and more, fully accept that these are my circumstances, and truly, to a certain extent, there is nothing that I can do about it. I must accept that this is what has become of my life to this point. I must accept that I have talked myself into the idea that one day soon, I am going to be (gulp) widowed, and I must accept that though I, for a little while, lived the "American Dream," with the house, the cars, the fancy neighbors who actually loved me and still do. I lived the life that most wives only dream about, are wistful about, pine for and talk mad shit about women who are fortunate to at least one time in their lives be able to look out a window that she calls 'hers'.

I should have known better to get attached to that life, because we all know that the life of those who live in Spirit is never easy, even though it is also never boring. I should have known that like all else, that situation was going to be temporary, and I look back at it now and see that it was never the building, the vehicles, the unity I felt with those people and that neighborhood, but that I got there but did so not alone.

For better, for worse, we - he and I- got there together, and again, this is yet one more road that we will travel together, even though when it is time to again walk the Path again, after all is said and done with, alone again I will travel. And yes, that scares the hell out of me. For twenty years I have had the mixed blessing of having someone - even as unenlightened as he has  been, can be, is - no matter what, I have had that benefit of knowing that he was there, even if only physically.

And this is where the acceptance comes into play, at that point where, once again, he is right. There really is nothing that I can do to remedy what others have said, done, will do, and that the only person whose ideals and inspirations matter at this point are mine. This is not a selfish statement, and neither is it meant to illicit any sort of emotional response out of anyone that mirrors anger or rage. This is simply the truth that belongs to me at this present moment. The only time that I venture into that area where rage rules is when I am accused of being somehow heartless because I refuse to show emotion regarding my circumstances. I cannot be made to feel like I should not about it all, because when it comes right down to it, it all depends on  me, the idea that I have to accept this as my own truth, my own fate, my own, period.

And yes, the sooner that I can go within my own self and begin the healing process - make  no mistake...this shit hurts - I can begin to take the time to accept what it is that apparently I was cut out to deal with.

"No matter what, you are going to be just fine, I promise..."


Ahhhh...spoken like someone who really does not understand what it is like to be the one walking in this particular pair of Steve Madden's.

This is the part of acceptance that no one really understands, the part which tells someone like me that no matter how I feel about a certain situation, this is all mine, and the more people tell me - one person in particular- that I am going to be 'just fine,' the more I begin to understand that even though I might not like it, they are right - I am going to be just fine. The world is going to continue to turn on its axis, people are still going to be here on the planet, and I am going to be just fine. In large part I know that this is the truth, but there is that little tiny piece of me that is freaking out, that is not happy with what she knows will be the outcome of this all, and most of all, is not buying into the idea that people have about me that says that I am the strongest woman alive. I may very well be, but that remains to be seen.

No one can predict how anything will turn out, and at the same time and in the same light, no one can also put their own selves into another's shoes enough to be completely empathic about anything. I can tell my friend who recently moved into her parents' house that I get how she feels, but only part of me does. How she accepts her circumstances will be and likely is different than how I have done with mine. We can never put ourselves into the shoes of another person. That is asking way too much from them, from ourselves, and we torture ourselves all the time trying hard to understand completely, and it is for nothing more than the sake of the ego trying hard to be the savior. I know better than this, to try to save everyone, but I do it anyway. I lend myself to them because like they are only starting this part of their lives, I am in the home stretch. To that end I have accepted everything happening to me and in my life right now, and I can whine and pine all I care to, but that won't change anything.

The only thing that changes my circumstances is my acceptance of them, period.

We know who we are not by what we have done, but how we feel about what we have done


Acceptance is like integrity - you are not born with the ability to accept - we are here to learn to do that through the things that break our hearts the most. In my case there is a lot more to this all than only the 'happily every after' that is going egregiously wrong. It is also that throughout my life, your life, our lives, we have been told that 'this is the way that it happens,' and then it doesn't happen the way that we are told, and we end up feeling like we'd been lied to. I know that this is the way that it happened for me. My whole childhood is ripe with memories that tell me childhood is wonderful, marriage is meant to be until one of you dies, and you are not supposed to die until well after at least one person is calling you "grandma." No matter how I think of it, though, this view of it is not a lie, at least not for someone else, but for me, it does not even come close to the truth.

My marriage has been rife with pain and loss and heartache, even as my memories of the last twenty years are also pregnant with joy and happiness and quiet revelation. We all accept the happy part, but there are those among us who still cannot accept the parts where feelings were hurt because someone said something hurtful, where lives have been changed because someone made a decision that was not intended to benefit anyone but their own selves. This is not only true in marriage, but in life itself. Marriage is just the best example of being able to learn and to deal with and accept the circumstances we share with another person, for better or worse.

Unless and until we can accept that we are who we are, can accept that there are things within the confines of each of our lives that we alone are to learn from and to accept, things do not change. When it is that we can accept the truths that have become our own, whether it is through decisions made by us or not, that is when we will see the tide of emotion no longer as the tsunami that it never was.

It's all about accepting what it is that has become ours, no matter what. Right now, the only thing that I can accept is that I hurt, badly, and that I did not realize just how much strength it will take to say goodbye when the time comes. I will rise from this particular pile of ashes fine save for the memories which precede the hurt which I have not yet been able to grasp, even as it is my very own. I spin my wheels everyday, trying hard to make some sense of all this loss, and the only thing that comes to mind is that this is all a big lesson that apparently God knew and knows I am capable of learning from and accepting.

I just wish I knew when I will be done with this particular lesson...

I LOVE YOU ALL
...Roxanne...

Jealousy - the Anti-Love

We do not become anyone's property, and no one becomes ours, either


We have all been guilty of it, some of us more than others and more of us more often than a LOT of people. Jealousy has no place in Love, in relationships, and there is nothing else that will kill a relationship faster than jealousy, than possessiveness, than trying hard to make the other person or people believe that they are nothing more than possessions to be kept away from the rest of the world.

Here's a story for ya


I have to admit to it - that for a lot of years...more than 20, that is...I have been the object...OBJECT of one man's desires, and as great as that may seem to a lot of women in their younger-than-41 years, this is what Love is. Love, to a lot of women half my age...and hell, to a lot of men half my age...a lot of people my age, sadly. Love to anyone who has not yet really thought about the way that they expect to be Loved is an emotion which causes us each to lose our friggin' minds, makes us crazy with lust, and makes us think that we have to put all of our eggs in to one basket, proverbially. If I knew what I know now, way back then, I would not be sitting here trying to get at least one person in their twenties to read and take to heart this one message, and that message is that Love is NOT an emotion that will make any one of us crazy with anger or rage, and worse, with feelings that we are somehow Loving another person the wrong way.

God bless him, no matter how insane I have always thought he is


I must come to the table with this much right now - I have always loved my old man, always. He fathered my kids, took care of me for a lot of years, and in that time I had the unique 'opportunity' to teach him that being a man's wife does not equate to also being that one man's property. It took him a long time to realize that when I left the house to go to see my friends, to visit my family, to do anything that was not within ear shot or sight of him, I was NOT out messing around on him. I make light of that quote made famous by that cartoon vixen, Jessica Rabbit, when she said in the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" that "I am not bad, I'm just drawn that way," because it basically sums up the thing that I have had to deal with for a very long time.

I am not bad, not trampy, not a skank, not a slut...I just have a tendency to be built very much like the highest paid porn stars in all of the San Fernando Valley. I am not someone who has ever been able to act the way that I look, ever. Come on!! I was raised 'in the church,' had the hell scared into me by my mother, God's secretary - of COURSE I am NOT going to strip naked every chance I get - no way !! Yet, this is not something that anyone who came from a home where the mom DID cheat on the dad, and the dad DID cheat on the mom, and eventually that 'union' came to an end, all over the possessive nature of one or both of the  married individuals, will think about or even consider. All they know is that their parents did it, and as much as it hurt them, this is normal. Sorry, but that ain't normal, even though it may be normally the everyday behavior in a lot of households.

That sucks, doesn't it? It sucks to think that there is an entire population of people on the planet  who live this hell everyday. There are also a lot of people - namely women people - who go to great lengths to vilify this treatment, and to them I say that unless and until you have been squarely in the middle of being the object of another's possessive desires...well, just shut up, ok?You can't relate, and you never will, and God help you if you should decide to say something stupid like "I would NEVER be in THAT situation," because that will cause you to be in that situation, whether you want to believe that or not. It is not something that anyone just falls into - it takes time and a LOT of being manipulated, to the point, even, of being fearful, and if you have never seen me afraid, then you cannot possibly know that I do not 'do' fear very well at all. I won't sit here and tell you either that there have not been times when I have not been jealous, but at the times that I was it was over a misunderstanding, and of course, I was very young.

Does this make it ok? No, it doesn't. Does it make it a human response? Oh, why hell yes it does!!

We belong only to ourselves and God


The thing that was drilled into my head when I was growing up was that I belonged to God, that God has me and always will. What also was drilled into my head was the fact that biblically, women were expected to just take their place next to the man they married and just deal with it. Imagine the confusion I felt when I was taught that as well as being my own person. The mess was huge, because I did not realize then what I know now - that everything demands balance, and when there is none, balance just tends to let itself in and teach us what we were supposed to already know.

Love is kind, not jealous


Love is something that we know from the very beginning of our lives, and unless the woman who birthed you was a crackhead, there is no reason that any one of us should feel like we are not worthy of being loved just as we are. NEVER let anyone try to change you. I was a very young bride, having no idea what the hell I  was getting myself in to, and ever since then I have lived with the idea that this life - the one with the jealous and possessive husband - is not the one that I was meant for. I am not the cheating sort. I tend to like being a role model (yes, foul mouth and penchant for doing shots of Vodka and all) to my daughter, to my sons, my sister and my friends' kids, and when they find out that this is how I lived for this long, they look at me cross-eyed when I have the balls to tell them that they do not have to live this way, that the clergy who married me, because he was my father's associate pastor, felt he knew us both well enough to NOT counsel us, and when I marry people to each other, I am very concrete on the idea that there are things that we need to get out into the open between the marrying pair, things that have to be said so that more clarity can be had about what happens after I sign that license they so eagerly hand to me.

New couples are flying high on the idea that very soon they are going to be joined at the last name and the jointly filed taxes, that 'his' is going to be 'hers' and 'hers' will be 'his', and that everything is going to be 'theirs,' but they are rarely prepared for the realities that come with being married. They do not realize that this is the person with whom they will be sleeping every night, the person who, if something awful happens, they will be expected to make serious and life altering decisions for. No newly to be wed couple thinks about the things that hurt, that will hurt, that will be, in a lot of cases, the thing that can and sometimes does tear couples apart.

Never does jealousy make for a happy union. I won't lie to you all and tell you that my whole marriage has been completely wonderful or completely awful. I will  tell you, though, that it has its ups and downs, that you will be faced with things that you never thought you would be, and yes, sometimes, you will cry because this person to whom you are glued at the last name to has hurt you with his or her words. This is what being married is all about and it is NOT about the dress, the ceremony, where the nuptials will take place. That stuff is all irrelevant in the grander scheme of things and when you get to that 20 year mark, it is like a distant memory, almost like a movie trailer - gone, not forgotten, but seemingly not as big as deal as we made it to be.

Jealousy is the Anti-Love


We gals (and even a few guys) plan our whole lives for this one event- our wedding day- and when it comes down to it, we never fully can grasp that the day we marry is NOT the thing that will make or break us in the way of being married will. Marriage changes people in ways that cannot be described here because every single union is different. This writing is not about marriage, but rather, relationships and how it is that being jealous is not a good thing. It brings about severe misunderstanding, makes one partner feel as though they are not good enough, even as the other partner makes it seem that way. It is perplexing, someone else's level of low self esteem, and it erodes the person who is the object and the target of that jealousy in so many ways that if I have to sit here and tell you about it, I might as well just write another blog entry.

I call it the Anti-Love because there is no way that feeling awful about one's self over the way that another person seems to think they own us can be Love, no way. Again, some folks are flattered by the unending jealousy of their betrothed, but the greater majority of us don't deal with it very well. I didn't. I still don't, and  yes, he still is, and I guess that at least now, in this part of the game, he is willing to admit to it, because for years his jealousy was my fault. It is confounding to think that someone thinks so little of his or herself that they have this weird need to make someone else know what it feels like to have that massive lump formed in the middle of your chest, waiting there to become tears of misunderstanding.

Being the target of someone else's jealousy makes a person feel like they are stranded in the middle of the ocean, waiting for someone to rescue them, waiting for the person who is jealous to come along and say that their jealousy is not our problem, and it never happens. Many a spouse have been beaten over something that never happened, something that the jealous partner only assumes happened, still happens, will happen, and it is never a good day in the house of the jealous partner, because they are always suspicious of you. Even in his infirmity, he is still jealous.

However, I am no longer the cowering wife, no longer the one willing to be the target of his jealous and ranting foolishness. I simply let him be, and when he is done with his man sized tantrum, and after I have told him that I am better than a lot of spouses would be, he sees the ridiculous nature of the way that he thinks, namely about me. And always, I have to remind him that I am really not bad, but very simply just drawn that way.

It takes a lot 


The one thing that I ask couples who are marrying after being married already is the reason they are getting married and of course, are each of the intended spouses jealous of the other. Yes, it is invasive, but as clergy it is my duty to NOT marry people to each other who are only going to hurt each other. Now, I realize that their lives together after I have met them at the altar is none of my business, but it is also not my business to make sure that there is yet one more unenlightened couple whose life together is going to be rife with tears, with anger, with resentment and with pining for better days and in some cases, a different spouse. That is where I never want it to go, where I never want to see anyone end up, because that is not the reason that any of us gets married.

It takes a lot of swallowing of the pride, a lot of taming of the ego to be able to deal with another person's jealous nature. It takes patience, and it takes understanding. All of these things are what make for a coupling that is better off than one that includes blame, includes one spouse not stroking the other's ego, includes the things that have nothing to do with being together, for better or for worse. The end of Love is not the end of a marriage but rather is the end of the trust that people who Love one another should always have. Too often we see that there are people who come from bad situations who are ready to Love again, but there is that little piece of themselves that they just cannot grow out of. It is almost like watching newly paroled prison inmates being released into normal society after having been locked up for so long and they have forgotten about what it is like 'on the outside.' Like a former inmate, jealous partners apply the method of living they once employed to the way that they approach a new relationship. They seem always on the edge of panic, as if the one person they have learned to Love is going to do them wrong or something, and never do they realize that even as they 'Love' another, they have forgotten the one person who they need to learn to Love the most.

It is not as easy as you think, but it is worth it 


I write much about the concept of Loving the Self within. It is imperative in the lives of those who we Love that we know how to Love our Selves as we are. We want our other half to Love us implicitly, with abandon, with affection and with everything in us, and normally we do. The problem is that this is not the same that we receive. We receive contempt and our efforts at trying to help them gain understanding are thwarted by a past love, by someone who is no longer there, by a memory, and we suffer needlessly. Again...pre-marital counseling with your clergy is of utmost importance.

Learn to Love your Self first, guys. It is not an easy thing to do. We have to wade through the muck that was placed there by well-meaning parents, sometimes parents with no regard for the idea that we are different people, by friends who judge us from the time that we are little tiny kids, from the first crush we had that crushed us. We have to deal with the things that we told ourselves, the lies that we believed, and we have to deal with our crap AND someone else's, too, and that is a crapload of crap to deal with.

Love your Self first, and everything else is easy.

In the end, it really doesn't even matter


In the end, when the flowers have been given away, when the limousines have gone back to their respective lots, when the bride's maids have taken off their shoes and hopped into some trouble with the groom's men, none of the pomp and circumstance of the day matters. The only thing that does matter is that there are two people who loved each other enough to want to spend the rest of their days and nights together, enough so that they would make it legal and would declare their Love for one another in front of x-amount of their closest friends and the relatives who are there in support of this newly minted married couple. Jealousy does not only abound in marriage or Love relationships. It also is there in friendships and there in the workplace, is there in the classroom, and there, sadly, in the congregation.

There is no need to be jealous. Just  be yourself, no matter what. After that, everything else is easy...sorta...

I LOVE YOU ALL !!!
...Roxanne...