Thank You

To you who told me to just 'paint it out, what ever it is'

To you who gave me courage

To you who reminded me that missing someone or somewhere doesn't have to kill you

To you who came to me even though we were not supposed to meet

To you who did not care

To you who did not know

To you who talked with me about life

To you who screamed with me

To you who took my mind away to something else

To you who called and asked me to join for a cup of coffee

To you who gave me days off work

To you who laughed out loud 

To you who wasn't afraid to be silent

 To you i never met before

To you who came to me for help

To all you fifteen people listed above and many more, thank you for being there. Even without realizing the influence you had.

: Owl / 2012:

Chief Seattle, 1800's

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? 

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family. 

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother. 

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. 

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. 

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival. 

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left? 

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. 

All or Nothing

First I thought all or nothing is a bad thing and life sould not be a battle like that. But it is... It is all or nothing.. There is no half-way freedom - you're either a prisoner or a free man. Either you eat or you starve to death. Either you love or you don't. You're life is about you, what makes you happy, you follow that path. No one ever goes to a place where they know they can't be happy or where they get hurt, you avoid it. When you do what you want and what you love, you do it with all or nothing mindset. You make it happen, you dedicate yourself to that, you don't just let it go, you want to fight for it. To me, All or nothing is not using the ESC-button when it doesn't work, it's the opposite. It's putting yourself on the line, jumping off the edge, taking the leap. You have so little time here so why hold back and play it safe. "I want to, but.." well, then no you don't. If you want to, if you love, you make it happen. There are no "but´s" in doing, doubting isn't part of wanting to make it happen and dedicating yourself to your life. 

Live your life with everything you have. Take the leap. Go and say you love someone if you do, quit your job and travel if you want to, move out of that place where you're not happy with yourself, say yes or no - lose the i don't knows and maybes when it's about 'do you want to', there will always be a way to make it happen, open your eyes and see it. And yes, you're going to make mistakes but you are going to do those anyways, playing it safe doesn't take them away. Remember that you are the one who loses the game if you don't truly play it. Play your game, live your life. Don't fall in to the pit of misery, unhappiness and decisions made for you. You make yourself happy, no one else can do that for you. You can be happy with someone but the ultimate happiness is you in you.  

Tuesdays with Morrie part 2. Culture & Dying

We put our values in the wrong things. It’s all part of the same problem. And it leads to very disillusioned lives. We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on. They repeat something over and over again. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it – and have it repeated to us – over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have. There’s a big confusion over what we want versus what we need. You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don’t need the new sports car, you don’t need the biggest house. The truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?  

Offering others what you have to give. I mean your time. your concern. Your storytelling.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they are chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to certain something that gives you purpose and meaning.

 People are only mean when they are threatened and that’s what our culture does. This is what our economy does. Even people who have jobs are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It’s all part of this culture. I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. The little things I can obey. But the thing is – how we think, what we value – those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone – or any society – determine those for you. The way to do it isn’t running away, every society has it’s own problems. No matter where you live the biggest defect we have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say I want mine now, you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. 

We all have the same beginning and the same end. How different can we be? In the beginning of life, we need others to survive, right? And in the end of life, you need others to survive, right? In between we need others as well. 

The culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks – we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing? You need someone to probe you in that direction. It won’t just happen automatically. We all need teachers in our lives.

Everyone knows they’re going to die but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently. To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living. Have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, is today the day? am I ready? am I doing all I need to do? am I being the person I want to be? Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. Why is it so hard to think about dying? Because most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently, you strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

 

Dying is only one thing to be sad over, living unhappily is something else. So many people are unhappy. Why? Well for one thing the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it.

It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature. We’re not. Everything that gets born, dies. As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without rally going away. All the love you created is still here. All the memories are still here. You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here. 

Death ends a life, not a relationship.