The unique gift of Eat, Pray, Love

I have a mirror over top my sink in my kitchen. From time to time I will admittedly use it as a post-it reminder board. One that is a steady visitor has the saying: “Be Realistic ~ Plan for a Miracle”. The other one that has been with me also for a long time is: “Today is the Greatest Day of My Life”. I find the unique gift in both of these post-it note reminders (tattered curled edges and all from the sink's humidity) is they always make me smile. O.K. actually I have quite a few more, like: “There are Angels assigned to listen to every one of our prayers”.

Often I will add “floater” post-it notes: These post-its stay for a few days or weeks. These can be anything from pay a bill to a book. The post-it that has been there for at least a year or longer now is Eat, Pray, Love book to read: that is what the note says, and I have to say that in the end the book was given to me as a gift from a friend who had read it.

I originally heard of the book through an email from a friend who mentioned it when telling me what books she was reading. This has got to be well over a year ago if not more. I saved the thought onto a reminder, because I have such a high level of regard for Hilary Rosenfeld on a professional basis (my friend in the email) who is an East Coast Costume Designer. I thought if Hilary was reading that book then I was going to read it too.

Time passes…..

More time passes….


I am in the local book store last Christmas and they have an assortment of books and collectibles with the signage “The perfect Unique Gift” or something to that effect.
I scanned the table to see what books they were promoting and there low and behold was the book title that had been living on the post-it note mirror over my sink. I picked it up and was reading the front jacket when two extremely well dressed, well groomed young women late twenties most likely, dressed up like they were in their late thirties (they will regret that like the rest of us ) and they were gift shopping like me. One of the two savvy shoppers picked up the book I was holding and this was their discussion: “Giggling” “Oh, that book forget it, just another mid life crisis story of a disgruntled woman”.

I put the book casually down, and picked up “Life with Morley”. It seemed forever in my mind how I was going to walk away from the table; I felt that the book I was waiting to read in my mind without knowing anything in advance about it, was to be likened to something such as Deepak Chopra in nature with spiritual lessons like he so amazingly does, only with Food, Prayer and Love. I honestly was stunned to hear the book I was waiting to read was referred to as a midlife crisis mixed in with a self indulgent, self-discovery of self.

Time passes….

The book I put down is now on the big screen as a Feature Film. Just a few weeks ago I was talking with a girlfriend and told her the story of how I have missed reading this book and she gifted me the book as she has read it. I am always amazed to see the translation from book to film, so I picked the book up to read it and got to page 6, and burst out laughing.

You see on page 6 the Author says that she is thirty-six years old. I flashed back to the two young women, me now giggling that they thought mid life was 36 years old. Then I stopped giggling and thought maybe they were right? So, I googled mid life crisis and after reading two pages on Wikipedia about mid life crisis with everyone from Freud to Betty Crocker giving his or her hypothesis, typically the age for a mid life crisis is 47 years old.

Also, mid life crisis does not exist in Japan or India.

So, that is as far as I have gotten in the book. It seems to be a wonderful read and I thoroughly look forward to get back to it. I thought about those two young women and how grateful I was to be who I was and where I am on my life journey. The power of youth and beauty can be intoxicating but you have to wait for the real inner yearning of self-acceptance to settle in. No matter how hard you try to be forty when you are thirty, it is really the only thing that cannot be hacked like identity fraud. You can look and walk like a person who is self realized but only you know yourself when you are there.

This sums up where I am on my path presently,

I am beautiful, You are beautiful, We are all beautiful.


Have a beautiful day,


Photo: 'passage way' PKM


Joy,

Rena

www.talktotheturtle

Toltec wisdom and inspirational jewelry

I picked up a book I have had years now that is called The Four Agreements and re-read it. It got me thinking-mostly that you cannot be 40 when you are 30 years old. Let me explain myself further. I remember reading this book years ago, and I just could not for the life of me understand it. I mean I read it but it just did not sink in. When I picked up the book to read it this time, I read thru it quickly without stopping and understood every single nuance. I also had a "ah-ha" moment when I understood the value in inspirational jewelry in our day to day comings and goings.

Here is an excerpt from Don Miguel Ruiz book, The Four Agreements:

PRELUDE TO A NEW DREAM

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself.

In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, “This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; this is possible, that is impossible.”

One single agreement is not such a problem, but we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change even the smallest agreement?

If you can see it is our agreements that rule our lives, and if we don’t like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.

Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements.

You need a very strong will in order to adopt the Four Agreements but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing.

~The First Agreement~

~Be Impeccable with Your Word~


The first Agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call Heaven on Earth.

The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful. Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. The Gospel of John in the Bible, speaking of the creation of the universe, says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word is God.” Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.

The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. You can speak. What other animal on the planet can speak? The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human; it is the tool of magic.

Pretty lofty reading I will agree, but very thought provoking as to how you can have choices in your life. Well worth the read and $13 it costs for the book.

The Four Agreements : a practical guide to personal freedom /Miguel Ruiz
ISBN 1-878424-31-9


Have a beautiful day,


Photo: 'walk in the trees' PKM


Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle

Charm of The River Runs Through You

Finally some beautiful hot sunny days here in the great Northwest. Some days are sealed forever in my memory of a picture perfect day. The charm of this day revolves around a visit to a mountain fed river that at this time of year is at its deepest four feet. It winds its way thru farmland on the way to the Snoqualmie River which is a huge fat lumbering river waterway in the State of Washington.

Kids and Adults and dogs flock to this river all with the same thing in mind, and that is to cool off. How to do this is mixed. Some people-well actually entire families on their inner tubes-will float down the river and then hike back upstream to where they started.

Others will just float in the water without inner tubes. The shoreline is dotted with people just sitting on their beach chairs right in the water. The rocks on this river are all about a perfect median size of an ostrich egg. These rocks are smooth to the touch, and slippery to the foot in the water.

One of my favorite things to do is to put on my water shoes, and wade out into the swift water and plunk down with a rock in each hand to weight myself down. I find two rocks to brace my feet against and then I sort of float while going nowhere and this feeling of the river energy running through my body is the only way I can best describe it. It feels like the ocean except it is one continuous body current of water that is quite a wonderful experience.

It is on my top ten list of happy experiences in my lifetime. We bring along a cooler with some sandwiches and iced tea and build a pool of rocks to keep the tea cool on the river's edge.

The water at first touch feels quite cold, as it is the season's end of the run off of the Cascade Mountains snow melt. After the first dunking in however, it becomes this dreamy experience of baking on the hot stones by the river's edge and then cooling off in the water where you can see the occasional little fishy cruising by.

The group next to us had a golden retriever to which the family would throw rocks, and Penny the dog would chase out into the water and actually dunk her head down into the water to retrieve the rock.

The water is glistening, and the trees are gently rustling, and I wait all year long for this day of my river healing, as I refer to it. The window is actually a couple of months long but usually with work and my life schedule I get a narrow two-week period and it is usually in August.

Its effect (of sitting in a mountain river) is dreamy and extremely purifying. For days afterward the lasting feeling of actually having all that water moving through you, releases what feels like ions of stuff that I hold onto, is gently moved along, and I let go of it with the grace of this kind mountain river. I am smiling and giggling like a child (along with everybody else) and it is not something I set out to do; the only participation on my part is to enjoy the day, the sun and the water.

To add to this day there was a reported meteor shower at night, and I was really excited because the sky had been so clear that I was looking forward to seeing the awe of the evening heavenly stars. However, I was so happy wasted tired from the day I could barely stay awake till dark. I did though, and went outside onto the deck with my pj's , my hooded robe and my ugg boots to ward off any mosquitoes nipping at my ankles.

I lay down and gazed up at the sky.

There were so many stars out I couldn’t even find the Big Dipper. It was like some sort of rock concert of the heavens and all the stars came out to shine in their glory. I lay there thinking that here I am, human being spirit Rena looking out to a galaxy of stars from my beautiful home planet Earth.

Earlier in the day we were discussing the meteor shower, and I mentioned that shooting stars and meteor showers are one and the same are they not? My reasoning for this is I have always wished on a shooting star? So, I figured if there was going to be a shower of stars I should be able to make a wish on every one I see. Kind of the lotto of star wishing, so to speak.

I thought about this a lot during my time in the river and I thought I would start off with something big like “World Peace” and then with every star work kind of backwards, like a good trending stockmarket, and then throw in a wish for a new car for grins. Why not, I mean there was to be a shower of stars?

So, I am lying there gazing at the heavens and stars and "whoosh” a shooting star happens. It always takes my breath away to see a shooting star and I don’t know why but it has never lost its ability to do that to me. I immediately said, “I wish for World Peace”. I closed my eyes and lay back waiting for the rest of the amazing meteor show to continue.

The next thing I remember is BB touching my arm saying “twinkletoes you have been asleep out here for awhile now, best to come inside to bed”.

I fell asleep, can you believe it? I just couldn’t even keep my eyes open or the energy to stay outside anymore. I got up and went inside.

Over breakfast in the morning, we were talking about the Meteor Shower and BB asked me if I saw any meteors, and I said well yes I did and I only got out my wish for a World of Peace and didn’t get any farther down the wish list. No new car, just World Peace. Then I fell asleep.

This day I have had the honor to experience and write about is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Ann Scott. Mother to Sandie, Jimmy and Johnny, who are my cousins. Their Grandmother was my Grandmothers sister. Barbara was seventy four years young, and was an ordained Minister and I send a prayer of love to the heavens.

My Dad phoned me last week and told me that Barbara had passed away after a lengthy illness. "You know your Mother and Barbara are already off and away on the path to shopping. Those two had a passion for beautiful things, and so no doubt your Mom Elsie was there to greet her".

Have a beautiful day,

Photo: "room with a view" PKM

Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle

Fun sayings, positive affirmations and powerful quotes:

The dream was always running ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
-Anais Nin
American/French writer


. . .The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
-Martha Washington (1731-1802)
American First Lady


Life never becomes a habit to me. It’s always a marvel.
-Katharine Mansfield (1888-1923)
New Zealand writer

This is one of my favorite positive affirmations statements:

When you ask for happiness and a beautiful life, ask not just for you, but for everyone. When you ask for something better, ask not just for you, but for everyone. By all means ask for abundance and health for you, but also ask for it to be given to everyone.

Can you imagine what would happen if over six billion people asked for these things for you?

-Rhonda Byrne
Creator of “The Secret”



Here is an excerpt of Dr. Joseph Murphy,
from his book: “Mental Poisons and Their Antidotes”

Meditate and pray upon positive and spiritual values. Claim your ideal, solution, health, or peace of mind upon the basis that the Spirit within you is supreme and omnipotent, and by thinking of your solution or ideal with confidence and faith you are conditioning your mind to the answer. Your mind is full of confidence or fear according to what you put into it. Claim God and His Love go before you.


Have a beautiful day,

Photo: "mountain space" PKM

Joy,


Rena

www.talktotheturtle.com