Marcia Epstein writes on Smiles/January 27th 2015 Tiny Resolution

Marcia Epstein/photo by TR

Today’s guest is long-time friend, social worker, radio host, poetry advocate, and mother of two sons, Marcia Epstein.  Marcia, her husband Kyle, and their rescue dog Beau live in an 1880’s Victorian home of many colors in the neighborhood between downtown Lawrence, Kansas and the campus of the University of Kansas.  I met her in the way back when, volunteering for a crisis hotline and domestic shelter where she later served many years as a beloved director, overseeing hassle-free and anonymous 24 hour mental health support.

just do it.

Marcia specializes in suicide prevention and suicide bereavement support.  After decades in the nonprofit sector, she now works for minimal profit in private practice, with several volunteer projects on the side.  She volunteers on the Training Team of the new Trans Lifeline, a national hotline.  She also hosts (for free!) a radio show called “Talk With ME” on www.LawrenceHits.com. Find out more about her work at http://marciaepstein.biz/

Thank you, Marcia, for your words, and your lifetime of love and service.  And these wonderful photos of love in the Kansas streets.  --jls

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 “Smile, breathe, and go slowly” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

This one really is a tiny resolution because it’s something you already know how to do.  Just one simple task: share some smiles every day.  You can do it!

good advice

Start your day by smiling at yourself in the mirror.  No judgment.  Just do it. “And if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer,” urges Canadian spoken word poet Shane Koyczan (from To This Day).

When you’re finally out and about, smile at a not-yet friend, someone you see on a sidewalk, in a hallway, in the grocery, on a sidewalk, in an elevator. You won’t know which of those people really needed that caring acknowledgement, but you will be making a big, positive, difference in at least one person’s day.  And that person may “pay it forward.”  Imagine the ripple effect!

As long as you’re out and about looking for people to share a smile with, pay attention to your surroundings and surely you will notice things that bring smiles to your face even if no one is around.

And of course, smile at the people you know!  Because as Maya Angelou said, “If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.” 

look at your beautiful self!

I will confess that this smiling thing comes easily to me.  One of the things I’m known for is my laugh, which is big and frequent.  I believe that if we don’t laugh, we will explode.  Which just wouldn’t be pretty.

I also believe in keepin’ it real.  So that also means acknowledging the whole range of emotions that we experience, including the painful ones.  Both 2013 and 2014 included some very traumatic experiences for me, so I’m not always laughing.  But I smile and laugh every day.  And encourage you to as well!  Happiness can only get in when we create an opening.

So… start with a smile!  And then another.  Thanks!      --- :) M.E.

Spoken word poem:

Joe Pound ~ The Art of Kindness

song:

Nat King Cole ~ Smile

Midwife and Pilgram Lisa Lehrer offers a Shiny Resolution: January 26, 2015

Lisa, welcoming a new soul

Lisa Lehrer can't walk many places in Corvallis without running into one of her clients.  A midwife for over 25 years, she's well past her thousandth delivery.  Originally from Minnesota, Lisa has made her home in the valley since adulthood, but she maintains a Midwestern blend of warmth and pragmatism that lets mamas and daddies relax and babies smile.  She's an intrepid, often solo world traveler: trekking in Nepal, biking in Amsterdam and this fall, walking a few hundred miles through Spain.  

Lisa's one of the most unpretentious women I've ever met; unless you know her well you'd never know about her amazing travels, how she can handle a skill saw and lay a stone walkway, and she can paint, draw, sew.  I'd find her completely intimidating except she's also my very dear friend, and a truly gentle soul.  

True to her reserved nature, it took some encouragement to get her to offer a guest piece.  I'm delighted she did.   --jls
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Lisa writes:   This is a SHINY resolution (as compared to a tiny one).

Radiance

I walked on the Camino de Santiago this past season and had an experience that keeps informing my movements, thoughts and actions.

the long road to the labyrinth

 It was on the last day of my walk that I came across a stone labyrinth on top of the world. I knew immediately that I would walk it. The sky had already brought me a multitude of gifts that morning. First, the golden light of sunrise as I was walking through a forest that was open in an inviting way. Then walking out where the expanse of rolling hills and small villages in the distance were breathtaking. I could feel my breath come into my body just taking it all in. 

It started to rain on and off. Gradually, the wind picked up until it was blowing both my hair and poncho all over the place. As I was walking toward the next village the rain slowed down, the sun brought rich tones to the fields and I was astonished at the display of rainbows that kept unfolding. First one arced over the village, touching the earth on both ends. Then another overarching the first. All told, seven different rainbows were gifted to me as I continued to walk.

gifting skies

Singing my way out of the labyrinth I was struck with the thought that I had fulfilled a long standing dream. What a surprise that was. Now, I’m inspired to be open to new dreams and possibilities unknown. On New Year’s Day the word that came to me in yoga practice was Radiance. It reflects a way of being open and honest, engaging, curious and alive. 

shine on

Look for the sparkle, twinkle or warmth that is there. Feel it moving through and from you.   Be Radiant.
                                ---Lisa Lehrer

May the long time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide your way home

Author Julian Hoffman writes on Keeping a Keen Eye Open: January 21st Tiny Resolution

Julian Hoffman and Julia Henderson

Ed. note:  Today's guest is author, amateur naturalist and avid walker Julian Hoffman, author of the award winning book, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World.  Julian  and his wife Julia Henderson make their home beside the Prespa Lakes in Northern Greece, in a natural area of the Balkans sharing the borders of Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.  There they monitor vulnerable bird species being impacted by proposed wind farms.  Julia provided the photographs for Julian's beautiful piece about remembering to keep a keen eye open in our daily lives.

Julian's fiction and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals.  He is currently working on a collection of short stories, and a new non-fiction book about the human interplay and connections with wildlife and natural areas.

I'm very grateful for Julian's generosity in sharing his eye with us.  Read it slowly; it merits savoring.  You can find more of Julian's work at this link. --Jana

More than Meets the Eye

 “The least I can do is keep my eyes open. Attention is what I want to spend. I don’t ever want to feel inside me a whole storehouse of unused binoculars, magnifying glasses, telescopes.”

                     ~ Barbara Hurd, ‘Sea Stars’, Walking the Wrack Line                        

Julian perusing the wilds

Here in the mountains of northern Greece, we never know what kind of a winter we’ll have until it’s over. In some years deep snow mantles the valleys and slopes like a rippling white sheet has been thrown over the world, the temperatures steadily sinking until the smaller of the two nearby lakes is glazed with ice and our village water pipes freeze solid until spring. In other years, though, winter simply feels like a long extension of autumn, when lizards continue to scatter over the stony hillsides and butterflies drift through the pale and slanting light, worn to a faded memory of their earlier sheen, as if in deference to the supposed season.

 

Julian surveys the blanketed estate

This winter has been one of the hard ones so far; the kind of winter when wild snowstorms are followed by a piercingly cold brilliance – the night skies so deep and refulgent that the clarity of vaulted starlight is haunting. But these winters, however beautiful and stilling I find them myself, are tough on the wild species we share this valley with, and so just before Christmas I hung our bird feeders from the snow-sleeved apple trees in the garden and loaded them with seeds. It took a few days for any birds to find them, the feeders swaying like censers in the whistling mountain winds, but when they did, their calls went out across the valley, echo after echo until a carnival of winged creatures turned up one morning in the snow.

rosie chaffinch holding out against
all those great tits.  photo: julia henderson

The main beneficiary of the bird feeders is the great tit. A relative of the North American chickadee, the great tit is one of the commonest species that exists here, an everyday sight around the village in any season. It’s joined in these roving winter flocks by birds that are no less unusual to this valley - chaffinches and tree sparrows that love to feed on the spill of small seeds at the foot of the trees. We’re so used to these particular birds that it’s easy for them to go unremarked, to see them simply as part of the outdoor furniture. The usual suspects – that’s what my wife and I often call them when we ask one another if there’s anything on the feeders.

Last March I travelled down the west coast of the United States on a book tour. It was my first time in that particular part of the world and everything about the journey – the people, places, landscapes and wildlife – was new to me, brushed with a unique light, the unmistakeable signature of first experience. My days carried a corresponding intensity. One of my stops that month was in Corvallis, Oregon, where I stayed with my friends Charles and Kapa. Along with their generous hospitality, and our long conversations and shared laughter, something else of that stay stands out for me: my time spent watching their bird feeder.

left lower great tit, high right great tit. 
they're everywhere!  photo: Julia H.

Charles has a ground-floor study facing the garden and he’s hung a bird feeder just beyond the window. Leaving for work one morning, he kindly said I could use the space to get a close view of its visitors. I settled in that morning with a mug of coffee and a field guide, and within minutes that simple pane of glass that framed a feeder had become a window onto another world. Something small flew in and foraged seed from the ground. It was black-eyed and shy, keeping close to the edges, the same cryptic colour as falling dusk. Another bird arrived, sporting rich chestnut flanks and startling ruby eyes beaded black at their cores. I watched, mesmerised by the sheer beauty of these birds that were new to me. As I turned the pages of the field guide, trying to assign names to a cast of colours, shapes and sizes, a bright flash caught my eye. I looked up from the book to see a large bird of deepest azure peering in from the other side of the glass. It carried the wash of a glacial lake on its head, tail and wings, as if an emissary from the far north. It sprung from the feeder and oared away on its own river of blue, but those few seconds in its presence were magnetic. 

Charles asked me how I’d got on when he returned from work that afternoon. My excitement and delight must have been noticeable as I rattled on about the birds that had graced my day, their names alone a litany of mystery to me: dark-eyed junco, rufous-sided towhee, scrub jay. It turns out – and I should have known, given that it was a garden feeder - that these birds are some of the commonest around, the everyday Oregon equivalents of our great tits, chaffinches and tree sparrows. But that morning, staring through a pane of glass at a suite of elegant and astonishing creatures that were completely new to me, they were anything but ordinary. We tend to honour the first of things in our perceptual experience, elevating newness over repetition, rarity over regularity. It’s the novelty of the encounter that often sharpens its impression for us. Of course no matter how frequently we see a particular bird, becoming so used to its presence that we can sometimes turn indifferent to it in the process, the bird itself never alters at all.

Julia surrounds the usual suspect

Whenever I look out the window in the direction of the apple trees I try to keep that bird feeder in Oregon in mind, as if it were my first time in this snow-filled valley instead of being midway through my fifteenth winter here. I watch the great tits with the same keenness of eye that saw juncos, towhees and scrub jays blaze into my world as if forged new from a fire, resolving to be attentive not only to the things that are unexpected, but to those that are ever-present as well. The great tits are a blur of steely-blue wings against the snow, jackhammering sunflower seeds against the limbs of the tree. They send the bird feeders spinning like merry-go-rounds when they land on them at speed, twirling together until they finally slow, their feathers the colour of lemon peel and coal. I’ll see these birds throughout the year, long after I’ve cleaned the feeders and hung them from a beam in the shed, wondering what kind of winter will grace us next time around; creatures so commonplace that they’ll put in daily appearances as I sow and weed the garden and then harvest its fruits, but no less wondrous for their familiar and predictable presence.

                                                                                         --Julian Hoffman, January, 2015   

Tiny Resolutions Jan. 19th: DARE, by guest writer Nuray Önoğlu (Izmir, Turkey)

Nuray with one of her fan clubs

Ed. note:  Martin Luther King Jr said, "Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase".  Today's guest is a Turkish photographer, translator and retired palentologist living in Izmir who lives that faith. This brief bio fails to convey the force of spirit that is Nuray Önoğlu , a smiling bundle of positivity, courage and creative talent who also cooks, translates poetry, connects deeply and inspires me regularly.  She has an amazing story, only a portion of which is written here.  Thank you, sister. --jls 

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Nuray.  in the first picture she is
 exited but unsure.   Her father has
 given into her request to go to 
secondary school, and this is her
 official school badge ID photo.
  She worries:  What if he changes
 his mind, as he did with her
 older sister? #2, today.

Today's resolution:  DARE  

I am not going to give all the credit of what has happened on daring, but I am pretty sure that my life would be very different without daring a little.

I was born in a small village in eastern Anatolia where daughters were not appreciated much, though  my parents were slightly different.  They couldn’t expect me to learn even to read and write, let alone to get proper education. Most girls weren't allowed to continue schooling after elementary level.   Still, I have a degree in geology, a PhD in paleontology, worked as an academic, as a geologist, retired and now am translating books from English into Turkish.   I dared to ask to continue my schooling as a child; as an adult I dared to keep going.

I am a person who lives a life that is positively beyond my wildest expectations. Chance, coincidences, serendipity all have their fair shares in it, but also many things happened because I dared.

insect photos by Nuray

Examples are numerous; I will tell a few.  When I was told by colleagues that I needed a special number of publication in specific journals to be able to apply for the micropaleontology course organized by late Prof. Dr. Lukas Hottinger in Basel University, I dared to write to him, explain what I did and asked if I could participate and on what conditions. (Jana, this looks like asking a little isn’t it? But at the time I didn’t feel like just asking, I needed courage to do it).  He was one of the nicest people I have ever met, greeted me warmly and also opened other doors for me.

When I had to accept retirement at a relatively young age, I knew I needed to find a new vocation. I have always been a keen reader and some of the translation I read really sucked. I used to think to myself that I could do a better job.  Perhaps I could translate books? But I had no proper English education, having learnt it in courses and improved it mainly by reading, and who was going to give job to a retired paleontologist as a translator? Would I, if I were them? Probably not. Then a friend made me aware of a job advert of a publishing company. I applied. And to my surprise they wanted to give me a chance.  Currently I am working on my 24^th translation, 22 of them published.

Nuray, center front, with ii artists

When a friend told me about i am we interactive image , the global net-art project by Wolf Nkole Helzle, I joined the group.  I was just curious. Then I started to keep my photodiary in the platform.  After participating in the first exhibition of the group with two photographs, I dared to ask if we could have the second usermeeting/exhibition in Izmir, Turkey and ended up organizing the whole event. It was such an enriching, beautiful experience despite all the hard work I had to do.

"Eat on the grass
Hurry up
Sooner or later
The grass will eat on you"

Dare to ask, dare to try, dare to stretch your comfort zone.  Maybe not every day, but every now and then.  Life is full of surprises and some need us to have some courage, to come true.

And most importantly, do not afraid of appearing ridiculous every now and then. To be ridiculous is dare to be fully human.  

                                               -----Nuray, Izmir, January 2015