Quick, Hand Me a Bounty

I need a Bounty paper towel-the quicker picker-upper, you know, for the bigger messes.

I started out blogging here on WordPress.com well over a year ago. Then stopped, then started again, and with new enthusiasm, decided that having my blog at my own URL was the way to go. I have forgotten now why I decided that. As things turned out, I used this site for practice in learning to operate the program. Maybe I thought no one was reading it. Surprise! Now I am beginning to get trackback, I think it is called— I am still so new to this blogging world— and things are getting messy. A dear friend called to tell me yesterday that she had read that day’s post on The Gluten Free Mom  and found a quote from my Curtiss Ann Matlock site. Wonderful… but which site?

It is time to clean up my mess. From now on, this blog is officially moved to: http://www.curtissannmatlock.com/

Come on over y’all!

Not That Anybody Asked– ‘The Queen’

‘The Queen’ has been out since 2006 and received rave reviews and garnered an Oscar Award as best actress for Helen Mirren, but I just last night got around to seeing it. DH bought the DVD for me for Christmas, and we thoroughly enjoyed watching it on our big screen (to think I hated that enormous ugly gray box when we bought it.) It is a family movie, no sex and violence and rough language, imagine that.

Seeing movies far after their popular run is usual for me. I do not even pretend to keep up with the day, a trait that gave me instant empathy for Queen Elizabeth in the film, which is a biography of her, encapsulated in one incident in her life— the death of Princess Diana.

I’m not certain I would have watched the movie had I known that it was set around the death of Princess Diana. I pretty much had my fill of her when she and Prince Charles were an item, then divorced, and her death was plastered all over the news for months. (Perhaps the ravenous public interest in all things ‘Di’ was what the movie producers counted on.) I admit that Diana was a pretty and nice woman, but certainly she did no more than was required for any nice woman of her position. Pretty and nice women die every day in horrible car wrecks, and they do not even get a mention on the news. Frankly I just did not get all the uproar. Apparently neither did the queen.

The film is worth viewing for Helen Mirren’s masterful acting. Mirren herself disappears into her portrayal of Elizabeth. The story is tight, each scene necessary and compelling. The filming is beautiful, not only the scenes of the castles and gardens and rugged north landscape, but even those scenes in the Prime Minister’s offices and home. They are crisp and clear and portray the people and their times in contrast to those of the royal family. There are no good-guys or bad-guys in this film, except perhaps the media, which comes off looking pretty…well, like they really are. The movie is a portrayal of people, and as such always vastly interesting.

Let me add that I found a number of exchanges funny in the film, and I believe a number were meant to be funny, thankfully. I do hate unremitting drama. However, I admit that I possibly found some things funny because of not being British, and my general irreverent nature. And I kept wondering if all those people who stood outside the palace gates and wailed for Diana did not have jobs and families and lives to attend.

Not that anybody asked.

One Tiny Thought

Watch your thoughts; they become your words.

Watch your words; they become your actions.

Watch your actions; they become your habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Everything starts with a thought, and then comes a word.

Last night I had one of those quick little thought conversations that often goes unnoticed, but this time I noticed. This year we are moving to our dream home. Oh, gosh, I hope so. Dare to believe. Just say it. Oh, it’ll sound silly. So what?

So, I said to DH: “This year we are moving to our dream home.” He replied, “How do you know that?” And I said, “I just know.”

Of course the doubting thought is there, only to very quickly remind me: You do not know. You’ll feel foolish, if it doesn’t happen.

True enough, I do not know, but I have high hopes. The move to the house of my dreams is on The List, after all.

The thing about thoughts is that they are a choice. Many will present themselves, as they did in that quick, silent inner conversation. The choice is mine. The thoughts which I choose eventually become my life. It is up to me to choose those thoughts that serve me, that nurture and contribute to an abundant and healthy life. It is said that if a farmer is praying for rain, then he had better walk around with an umbrella. If I want something in my life, if I am praying for something, then I had better support that desire with thought and words.

Dear God, today I choose to speak positive words of those things I want to be. I leave the outcome in your hands. Thank You! Amen.

New Year Dream List

   My friend e-mailed me: “Did you make your list? You know– your list of desires for the coming year? Five things. Now don’t forget!”

From across the miles I could see my friend’s stern expression urging me. She punctuated her message with testimony of dreams having come true and with the quote:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. – Henry David Thoreau.

Five things? Oh, honey, I want it All!

Now, to be clear, this is a list of wishes and wants, dreams and desires. This is not a resolutions list. Resolutions are things one thinks one should accomplish or be, and these without fail originate somewhere outside of us from others and society in general. There are no shoulds on the list of dreams and desires. This list is from the deep small voice within and is our very own.

I generally make my List of Desires and then tuck it away so thoroughly as to not remember what I did with it. I never even remember what I wrote, or even quite if I wrote, so how can I see if any of The List came true?

This morning, however, I had the good fortune to find my list from last year. I happened to think to look in a small journal I keep beside my meditation chair. Guess what? This journal turns out to be a depository of lists of dreams and desires and prayers from the past couple of years.

As I perused my listings, I could see that quite a number of dreams and desires had or were actually coming true. I had gotten my bedroom closet cleaned and organized, and a wounded relationship with one person had been healed far beyond my dreams, and certainly I had grown and progressed in the areas of faith and strength of spirit and purpose. I had not gotten the new living room rug I desired, but I no longer cared, and my interest in learning calligraphy had waned, so those were desires had been answered.

Then there were the things that had not come about and which I still desire: my craft room has not been cleaned, nor has my office. Far more important, a major desire that has not come about is a new home near my son and grandson, the home of my dreams.

Some things take time. Some things, in order to be all that we desire, must come in the right time. I think of the writer Marjorie Holmes. Years ago her book, Two For Gallilee, waited around for ten years and the manuscript served as booster seat for her youngest, before it was accepted by a publisher and wound up on the New York Times bestseller list. Had it been published when she so desired, would that have happened?

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Making The List of our dreams is the beginning. It is the first step daring to advance in the direction we want to go. Making The List is the way we break through the fears and the shoulds and the unworthiness. Making The List is daring to see ourselves honestly and to believe and actively trust that we are lead on a good and right path for us. It is faith in action. It is to listen and cooperate with the still small voice of God, who is always whispering, “Grow, I love you.”

Dear God, today I will open my heart and mind to the dreams You have implanted. Let them be. Amen.

The Dog Can’t Kill It

I have a rosebush that my grandmother started from a twig she plucked from a bush at her mother’s home some sixty years ago.  When we sold my grandmother’s home, I dug up that very same bush and hauled it eighteen hundred miles to plant at my home, where it has flourished. I keep starting new bushes from it, and last spring I took one of those little beginners a thousand miles to plant at my son’s new home. The small thing instantly began growing with pretty shoots and verdent green leaves, which son’s dog promptly chomped off. Eventually the dog ate the entire bush– yes, thorns and all–right down to the ground! Now the dog is gone (She tended to want to chew on neighbors and delivery people, too, so a new home with a fence had to be found.) and, if you look closely at where the bush is planted, you can see the promise of green life stirring yet again.

 That’s me and this blogging site. Each time I put forth a new piece of writing here, along comes life and chomps me right off.  Such is the way with any good endeavor, anything that is creative in nature. Resistance, Steven Pressfield names it in his book, The War of Art, saying that the more important the action is to our particular soul’s growth, the more Resistance we will encounter while we pursue it. He capitalizes Resistance, giving it personification.

There is always another chance…This thing called failure is not the falling down but staying down.   — Mary Pickford

The thing is to keep getting up and trying again. You will get somewhere, and very often it is far further and in a direction more grand than you ever imagined. My efforts at this blog have led me to decide to install a blog at my own url. Easy everyone said. Ha! But, oh, what an adventure! And often I think of that little rosebush, and smile.