Life's Loving Memories

  DREAM TEAM "It is what it is, it is what you make it."   --James Durbin In my first eight years of teaching high school, I was blessed with so many wonderful students. I had come to a school whose drama program was just starting again after a lull of about five years.   I began a drama program and speech team from scratch. Perhaps it was because I was in my thirties, perhaps it was the students I had, or because of the desire we all had to build something new. We built the flats needed for scenery, collected a wardrobe of costumes, and the students took their acting seriously.   In speech it took a few years to build the team; but having students who memorized lines for a two-hour play, made it easy for them to memorize ten-minute speeches. The faith was there, and it fed the desire. And just think, all of this happened before I discovered my New Thought philosophy. Actually, I think the seed had been planted early on in life and finding the Religious Science T...

  CAR CONSCIOUSNESS "Your good is not postponed or delayed. Your mind senses the spiritual activities within it within it and cooperates fully. You watch new ideas happen in your mind and new events take place in your experience."      Ernest Holmes, The Power is within You Growing up, my brother and my dad always worked on the car when it had its little breakdowns.   It might take a day or two to fix, but more than likely it lasted a week or more. From that early experience came a fear of what would happen next as far as breakdowns were concerned. I worried about my tires going flat and life listened to me, I had more than my fair share of leaky tires.   New thought teaches us that what you think about comes about, and my worry about what would go wrong next, lead to a myriad of repair bills. Then I met my second husband, Gary.   He always believed his cars would last, even after the speed-o-meter turned over one hundred thousand miles. He believed...

  DISCOVERING THE SCIENCE OF MIND "Truth is unchangeable. This is self-evident since there is nothing for the Truth to change," Ernest Holmes Shortly before my divorce in 1997, I discovered the Science of Mind.  I was looking for something that matched my spiritual beliefs, and I found it in the same building that my Toastmasters group had been meeting it for three years. One Saturday morning I picked up the flyer that had been in the room since I first started attending.  I vowed that I would attend the next Sunday. The Saturday before the meeting, I found a book by Louise Hay, The Power is Within You, at Costco.  I read the book at loved it. The next day I went to the Bonita Center for Joyful Living.  I discovered that it was just what Louise had spoken about in her book.   I learned that Spirit's power was within me, and that I was walking a new path. I decided to look at the divorce as my discovery of a new teaching. All of my decisions in life have...

  MISS RUSSELL’S CLASS “Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.” Richard Bach --Jonathan Livingston Seagull My all-time favorite teacher was Miss Russell.   I was in her honors English class my freshman year, and she was the toughest teacher I ever had. I worked very hard to receive an A from her. We participated in a book club where we mailed away each month to order books. I got to oversee filling the order form out, so I was able to choose one extra free book along with my own order. During the year we all entered a student writing competition where we had to write a paragraph about something.   All of us in the class wrote our paragraphs, mine was on watching television, and we mailed them away to “Young American writes”. Mine was the only one in the class that got chosen to be published.   At the end of the semester, Miss Russell again gave me a “B”.   I summone...

  LATCH-KEY KID "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us." Ralph waldo Emerson When our family moved to California, my mother went back to work again. That meant that after I came home from school, I had the house to myself for about four hours.   I was a latch-key kid before the terminology started being used for it. My homework was the first thing I would do, then I would play in the front yard for an hour or so, and finally get dinner started. Home, by myself was at first a scary thing, but it became habit fairly quickly. From 10 years old until I graduated from high school, I became my own playmate in the house.  Buttons and marbles became families that I made up stories for.  Still, I wish I my parents had been home a little more. I imagine latch key kids are in the majority in this day and age. Are your kids latch-key kids? "No more words. Hear only the voice within."  Rumi What was your life like when you we...