| November 13, 2007 20:47 - Music, Time & Space
Depending on how much time you've spent exploring my site, you may or may not know that I'm a musician.
Today, I was thinking about how important music is to our lives.
Music can uplift us during times of stress, depression, etc.
I find that for some reason I haven't been listening to much music lately. I don't know why. I just haven't taken the time to pull out some of my favorite music and to put it on the CD player and listen to it.
Today, I became inspired to look through some of my old albums and put them on.
Isn't it amazing how we can listen to music from our formative years and, suddenly, there we are back in high school in our minds? ;-)
I've also been reading about how our sense of time as human beings is all wrong.
We think in terms of linear time. However, the spiritual sages have continually tried to tell us about how time isn't linear. When we achieve higher spiritual states, time and space change drastically.
Past and future don't exist. All that happens, exists in the same place and time.
When you listen to music and feel as though you're 15 again, is it really a memory or are you truly 15 and your "current" age all at the same time?
In the time you "remember" as 15, were you also every other age you will be or were in this thing we call "human" existence?
Maybe music somehow helps us tap into the area of our mind where time and space become one?
Hmmm....
November 26, 2007 22:53 - Family Quotes
"We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break."
-Marquise de Sévigné
"Families are like fudge - mostly sweet with a few nuts."
-Unknown
"Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted."
-Paul Pearshall
"Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back."
-Mignon McLaughlin, "The Neurotic's Notebook", 1960
"The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together."
-Erma Bombeck
"Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."
-Jane Howard
"The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born."
-Pearl S. Buck
"What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories."
-George Eliot
November 27, 2007 22:04 - Reaching Out to Troubled Youth
I saw the movie Fighting the Odds: The Marilyn Gambrell Story recently and it really started me thinking about how each one of us has the ability to make a tremendous difference in the lives of others.
If you haven't seen the movie, it's about a woman who begins a new class at Smiley High in Houston, TX for children who have parents in prison.
Many of these students had been beaten or raped, some by their very own parents.
Through her class, Gambrell makes a breakthrough with these children and helps turn around their lives in a positive way.
It's really a touching story and you can find out more here.
The main thing is that there are children right in your town who need help.
Someone to listen to them. Someone to let them know that even if their experience so far has been a lot of pain that some people really do care.
Throughout the movie, you could see how much children in these situations learn to put up a front. They're defensive and "tough".
But underneath all that, they're still innocent children trying to understand the crazy world they've been thrown into.
They want to make something of their lives. They just need a chance to break free of the hell they're living so they can concentrate on pursuing whatever dreams they may have.
When those of us who are more fortunate take the time to reach out, we can make the world a better place.
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