Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
You are currently browsing Colleen’s articles.
Tags: Quoting
After much consideration, I believe I have finally, at least for now (life is fluid, after all), come to the point where I understand my purpose, or at least part of it (I am open to more). It’s to be as kind and generous as possible, open heart, open mind, and to love everybody. EVERYBODY. The easy people and the difficult people. Do not confuse this loving with letting everybody treat me how they wish, however. I gave up my doormat status.
The actual shape this is taking? I am choosing to recognize the humanity in all of us, the utter miracle of our sometimes deeply flawed creations. We were born! We are alive and breathing thanks to a million operations occurring simultaneously in our bodies. Blood pumping, cells dividing, lungs breathing, neurons firing. What beauty!
It is my great ambition to not let politics or cruelty or whatever else might cast serious shade on another person hamper my enthusiasm for the fact that we are each of us wonders. I may not like you, but I T R U L Y love that the universe brought you here to teach me. Patience, gratitude, resilience, and maybe even resistance. A million thanks!
My visit to Portland. I never thought I would return – a twofold fear of the BIG one and the notion of visiting a city I would no longer know. A city that is no longer mine.
But I did it, without a moment’s hesitation. For Solveig, my daughter from another mother and her sweet kids. The family not born but built with infinite love.
And I kept crying. At the Eastern Oregon wrinkle of rivers, I cried. At Mount Hood towering beautifully over the forest, as it has for eons, beacon of the eastern skyline, I cried. Just about everywhere. Walking, eating, driving – snaking up and up the magical 20th-21st southeast to northeast ribbon, crawling past Alameda, Elliot Smith singing along. And me lamenting my latent appreciation. Better late than never.
Why the tears? Why so many? I never experienced such overwhelm when returning to Arvada, home of my youth. I realized that is precisely it. Portland is the birthplace of my adulthood, our FIRST house. Place where I learned to plant, to love plunging my hands in soil to witness the miracle of shoots turning to leaves, to plants, to boisterous blossoms. Even trees!
It is the place where my sense of self turned from liquid to solid, or at least the appearance of it, a slow moving slab of glittering glass.
Where I decided on friends, realizing I am worth kindness, not snark, open hands and hearts, worth goodness and the very best in people. Honesty and accountability. LOVE.
Where my politics and lofty dreams rooted, deep and sequoia strong. Be NICE. Don’t be a doormat. And as I wandered, I suppose my unconscious remembered before I did, saw the places where the first seeds were planted. Odd corners and unpaved roads of one great and glorious city.
And so the tears and sobs. Heaps and tons.
And hugs, conversation, blessed quiet, with the dearest people of my past and present, almost like I never left, but with it hanging in the air. The sweetest start of a soft storm, soaking me through, puddle jumping, LAUGHING, to myself and Portland, a city that remains very much mine.
Tags: Portland
We are all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
Charles Bukowski
Tags: Quoting
A dear friend lives here! We ate and talked and enjoyed Fifty Licks of ice cream. The time whooshed and the sky turned starry.
Luna graduated from preschool!
Aloha!
Lucky to have had these fine folks as my Portland neighbors. It was like I never left.
Zoran likes workbooks. His Mama does, too.
Super Girl Heart Warrior
picnic in a box
Much beloved Portland rain, tumbling down just for me. Or so I like to think.
Kill your television?
As I was short on time and long on activities, I didn’t make a visit to my favorite bridge in the world, so imagine my delight when the plane home gave me this view.
And then this one of THE old neighborhood! I walked and biked and drove every one of these streets in happiness and sheer joy, sometimes in tears, always in gratitude.
Can you see the plane shadow surrounded by a rainbow? It was much, much clearer when first I spied it but wasn’t quick enough to capture. But still, how cool?
Denver! Almost home…
