Thirty Days hath September...

“Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November

All the rest have thirty-one……..”

A childhood rhyme for learning the days in the months of the year. Now, decades later, I still recite that phrase as I did tonight. It’s really a pretty little phrase with it’s old English ‘hath’; a word now obsolete, unless one wants to sound rather old fashioned, or unless one has difficulty remembering how many days are in March!

“I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, 

and I have not found any books so sensible since.”

~ G.K.Chesterton

Before the Green

Streets were dusty brown

Ice melted and gone

A breath of calm fell

for winter’s farewell

“Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life Each Day

“Things you want to get right before it’s too late”……..a line from the book Tuesday’s with Morrie by Mitch Albom. I was perusing this little book to jog my mind tonight. Settled into the quiet of the evening, I wondered what things I want to get right. Nothing that is long past, because, as we all know, the past can't be changed, but as my life as it is today can be. I have found myself wandering into the realm of distant future seeing a slow decline of health ~ mental and physical. When I notice these worrying signs, the air is my sounding board. Aloud I say: ‘Today is the day I am in, I am healthy today, I can maintain my health today, I have only today.’ So when I read that line ‘things you want to get right’ it is my thoughts, my self-talk that I need to get right. I don’t discount the slip and slide of life’s currents and my reaction to them, but moving in balance, I can enjoy my family and friends and my life each day.

“You live and then you die, I thought. It’s good to have some good times.”

~ Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure: 

A Bartender, A Monk and My Unlikely Path to Truth

Bridging with Storytelling

World Storytelling Day reminds us that storytelling is a human quality. Before the written word, stories were an important part of the human experience. With each turn of the historical wheel, stories of our past, stories from mythology, and children’s story could vanish if it weren’t for storytellers, and organizations like Storytelling Alberta. Tonight, I’ve listened to some of these stories as told to us from Ethiopia to Alberta to America through the bridge of present day Zoom technology. Wisdom, personal strength, forgiveness, humour and personal journeys were shared in the backdrop of personalities, cultures, beliefs and differences. It was an absolutely wonderful evening.                                                                    

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, 

we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”

~ Sue Monk Kidd, author

p.s. - the first Storyteller was my sister Betty!

Purple Day for Epilepsy Awareness ~ 2

Epilepsy ~ a chronic brain condition, not the purple bruise on a face, but a purple flower in bloom

taking life by the hand between seizures

unwelcome sounds 

~ rude or annoying, 

un-choreographed movements: 

  ~ convulsions that steal consciousness

    ~ momentary lapses that no one notices as odd

or behaviours that defy logic.

any or all and maybe more ~

when convulsions of any magnitude 

defy medication, surgery and care, 

the grip on living can become tenuous, 

 quality of life wilts

   sometimes lost ~

 lives given to others to manage

In the space between seizures

  Family participation is challenged and will adapt

    Education is challenged but goes on

      Employment is challenged but continues

        Community activity is challenged but develops

Health and happiness can be a daily challenge.

        

Epilepsy ~ a chronic brain condition

not the purple bruise on a face

but a purple flower in bloom.

“It appears to me to be no more divine nor more sacred than 

other diseases, but has a natural cause….like other affections.”

~  Hippocrates, 

On the Sacred Disease (written 2400 years ago)

Author’s note: 

Epilepsy is no longer considered a brain disease, but is a brain condition. There are multiple causes, including stroke, brain trauma, any neurological brain damage and one form termed Idiopathic, meaning no known cause. Presently treatments are wide ranging - many different medications used depending on the individual, brain surgery if it is deemed appropriate, life style changes: any or all of them.

Fly Away Words

I reached with my mind 

 to cup the words 

before they vanished 

but that was eight hours ago ~

after a Monday life at home,

morning thoughts had been 

  left to hang out alone, 

   swept under the rug, 

    drifted out an open door, 

     swirled down a drain, 

untethered words flying away

 until and when time to return.

“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”

~ Sigmund Freud

A Coffee Shop Read

between paragraphs and sentences, 

laughter and stories bounced and flew

~ I had come to a true story space.

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from 

cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”

~ Mia Couto, journalist and biologist