Poems

I've embarked on several "30 day challenges" that are ideas for bumping up quality of life.  I love poetry but rarely read it because it seems to me that reading poetry should be reserved for times when I've finished all the important stuff.  I was taught this way of doing things (do the drudgery first and then the fun), and I've been working at escaping from it ever since.  So I've started reading at least one poem a day starting with Emily Dickinson.  She wasn't the most positive, inspiring writer of all time but I still love her.  This poem perfectly describes how I felt during the most painful periods of my life:

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

I think it always seems as if pain has no beginning and no ending.  Another reason to stick close to spiritual advisors who will remind you that it will end - and more quickly if you don't try to avoid it.

Pix:

Farmer's market - very hot so not very many people.

A friend invited me to a Rotary Club fundraiser at the Outback.  Good lunch, good company.  I learned that the fundraiser was for school supplies for kids in two Tulsa schools.  Rotary also funds an international initiative to eradicate polio as well as an international initiative to train people in their mid-careers on conflict resolution.  I think they have schools in about 10 countries.

This picture is in my office as well as on the walls of a lot of AA clubhouses.  This one is in the little room where a group of us do a book study.  It says, "Should I forget the misery and the pain of where I've been, Remind me, God so I might not return there again."  Good prayer.

Here are some of the love gifts I found at Tuesday morning.  I love butterfly gifts for Heart to Heart.  They symbolize transformation (from a caterpillar to a butterfly) that takes place on that weekend.

Both of the counselors I've seen in the past six years have had beautiful spaces to sit and talk.