Jars of Happiness

 

These are my jars of happiness and want/need (prayers). There are some celebrities that have talked about doing this as a new years resolution but I have decided to do it because it offers a unique experience at the beginning of each year. I took these jars out this morning, and even though I was not very consistent with them last year, they contained little things I had forgotten about over time. Not only did the gratitude jar show all the little things that I was grateful for, the prayer jar showed how much my husband and I had accomplished through the year as well (with God’s help of course).

This year I replaced the gratitude jar with this bigger jar and I will fill it with one event that made me happy each day in an attempt to refocus my mind on happy things. It could be as simple as a feeling of contentment when seeing the sunrise or as big as going on vacation, it does not matter what it is only that it makes me happy. I do not like new years resolutions since many people do not keep up with it long, if you choose to try this, do it as a remembrance each day of the joy that surrounds us all.

My first happy event was playing pool yesterday with my family. We had a lot of fun and even though it did not last that long, I enjoyed every minute of it.

A New Year

Even though the calendar says it’s a new year I find that today feels no different than last week, or even 3 months ago. The only problem I will face with the change of the new year is writing the one and the six on my checks.

Even though today does not feel any different than 3 months ago, I know life, and myself have changed a lot during this time. What I considered important 3 months ago is not necessarily what I consider important now. What I see about life now is a lot different than what I could see 3 months ago.

As much as I enjoy writing about how to plant according to the pattern set by nature, I am beginning to see a new problem many people face and would like to focus on that as well. A close family member was recently diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, when I sit and think about how I would feel if I was in this position, I begin to realize that I do not enjoy life the way I should. Life is dark and unknown, it holds anger, hostility, and confusion instead of hope, love, and happiness.

With that being said, I am going to focus not only on planting gardens in a more natural way, but learning to enjoy life no matter what happens. There is so much beauty in this world that many miss because their focus is on situations they perceive as bad.

With this new year let’s remember the beauty of life and all it has to offer.

Adventure Is Out There

reach for the stars

Is life really an adventure? Can we overcome the day-to-day monotonous routine and find adventure that satisfies our inner being? Can people find peace and harmony in a world that seems to be so screwed up?

I say yes to all of these questions. Finding your place in life is not easy and it’s not about filling some preconceived idea of who you are, you must really dig deep to discover what you enjoy and how you want to contribute to life. Once you find this then you can start taking the steps needed to make it a reality.

I’ve known for a while now that I want to help people but I never knew how I wanted to do this. One day I was searching the web and I found a college test site that was studying how well people learn online and one of the courses I could take was psychology. After a few days of doing this I realized that I had found my path, I wanted to pursue a career in psychology.

I am the type of person that is shy and reserved most of the time but there are moments where I jump head-first into something and this was one of them. I asked my husband what he thought about me going to college, he always wants to make me happy so he said supported me in any decision I made about it. I immediately started searching out potential colleges that have the flexibility of online degrees. I applied for information from 4 colleges and ended up taking the next step in 2 of them.

Not going to school in over 20 years made me nervous about being accepted into any college, it’s been a long time since I have been in that type of environment. As it turns out both colleges accepted me, so then I had to make a choice of where I wanted to go, in the end I picked Regent University.

I wanted to post this blog because then any reader will be informed of what I am doing and why I may not post as much, I have to wait and see how blogging fits into my school, life, and work schedule first.

Also I wanted people to know it is never too late to follow your dreams. I refuse to focus too much of my attention on money and how we are going to pay for all this schooling, if this is where God wants me to be then it will work out no matter what. Reach for the starts, make plans and reach your goals. Only when we do our best in all areas will we feel satisfied and happy with our lives.

Us And Faith

photo from Pixabay

Last weekend I was reading a book called “The Miracle of Mind Power” by Dan Custer, and in his book he made the statement that humans are born with faith, and lots of it. We have faith that a chair will hold us, or an apple seed will produce an apple, or that our gardens will do well, but when it comes to a Higher Power we tend to redirect this faith somewhere else, so when people say we don’t have faith that’s not exactly true.

For a long time I had total faith in things not working out, I lived with fear, anxiety, and worry, I had so much faith in it that it continued to manifest in my life year after year. Believing what I was taught as a child I thought I didn’t have any faith, but in reality I had a lot of faith, faith in what I didn’t want in my life.

Society teaches us to fear and worry about everything going on, the news tells story after story of hate, anger, and violence. Watching these types of things can redirect our faith to hate, anger, and violence, and when our faith is in these things we will begin to see it more and more wherever we go.

I don’t want to live this way, I want to redirect my faith back to love, happiness, and hope. Yes, violence and hate will continue to be seen on TV and be read in the newspapers, but my personal world will be full of love and happiness.

Are We Willing To Do The Work Needed To Make The World Better?

Photo from pixabay

I have to get something off of my chest this morning, you could call this a rant but I would say it’s righteous anger, if there is such a thing.

I read a post yesterday that was bashing Natalie Portman for her opinion that one act of genocide is no more important than another. Not only were these people who were commenting on the article calling her bad names and telling her to shut up, they were acting as if her opinion didn’t matter when it does. Even I could see that Natalie was expressing her opinion that all lives are equally important.

As I read this post a fire was beginning to build within me, I couldn’t believe that people could be so uncaring of other people who have died. When people act like this it creates a victim mentality and starts a long line of “mine is worse than yours” ideas which feed division and separation between nationalities, sexes, and classes. None of this promotes a loving and unifying atmosphere that encourages love, compassion, and kindness, and yet we sit and wonder why the world is going down the toilet. We as humans will continue down the war-torn road we have always been on because we fail to see the value in all people, and we fail to change the things that perpetuate war and genocide.

What bothered me the most was their lack of compassion for anyone but their own “kind” of people, as if everyone else who died doesn’t matter. What happened to love? What happened to compassion? I wanted to share my thoughts so I commented on how sad I thought their logic was, how sad it was that they didn’t care about anyone but themselves and their own people. I wanted to add a few more choice words like arrogant and prideful but I refrained from doing that out of respect for their opinions, unlike them, I know every person and their perspective matter. We all go through hardships and many let those hardships define them and make them who they are, so in the end they become bitter and spill this negative energy on everyone who comes in contact with their words.

What has this taught me? That I don’t like it when people act as if other people don’t matter, as if their life was only created to be thrown away like a piece of trash, or that their life was only created to be a slave to someone else. Defining another persons life as beneath your own is above ANY humans pay-grade, only one Being gets to define each life and it will judge, not by human standards, but appropriately and fairly.

 

Tackeling The Overpopulation Myth

Are there too many people?

I shared an article on my Facebook page the other day about overpopulation.

I don’t want to use any statistics for this research, I read a statistic the other day that said 42.6% of statistics are made up on  the spot and who needs them anyway, most statistics are not done in your area and won’t reflect what you see going on in life. We can all figure out our own statistics, all you have to do is observe what is going on around you.

I notice 2 major problem when observing my area,

1. Abandoned buildings.
2. Large fields that grow corn, soybeans, and wheat.

I know many may think #2 is food that is grown for all those people who are taking over the planet, but I don’t see them as food. My biggest problem with them is with 3 little letters, G-M-O, plus I don’t feel comfortable eating something that people are tampering with.

So when I look around me, I don’t see an overpopulation problem, I see a waste and greed problem.

Here’s Hitler’s thoughts on overpopulation and what his plan was to fix it.

The Nazis supported territorial expansionism to gain Lebensraum (ideology proposing German expansion) as being a law of nature for all healthy and vigorous people of superior races to displace people of inferior races; especially if the people of a superior race were facing overpopulation in their given territories. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic people. ~Wikipedia

Do we live in America, the home of the free, or do we live in Nazi Germany where people deemed inferior were killed or deported for their land?

The Happy Things In Life

Art Piece #1

I want to share one of the things that make my life happier. I purchased this plant a few years ago, I know you can’t see it that well but the plant is now chest high.

My husband and I decided to put it in the bathroom since it’s warmer and more humid, especially in the winter months. At first I was a little embarrassed that I found myself sitting and talking to the plant, I also found that this plant is special, it is a time machine in disguise. When I sit and rub one of the leaves I get transported back to when I was a kid running through the fields or playing outside.

Art Piece #2

I loved it so much I bought a second plant just like it and put it in the living room. I always wanted my home to be full of artwork that was big and beautiful and that expressed who I am and now I have it.

Ever Wondered What Social Permaculture Is About?

Helping nature AND people

I wrote a previous post about social permaculture and what it’s definition is according to someone else. Lately I have been thinking about love, work, helping others, and living a happy life, and when you get down to the basic foundation, these are what social permaculture is all about.

How do you live a life of social permaculture? You can do anything you feel is beneficial to those around you.  You could,

1. Be respectful to all people. I see respect as treating others the way you would want to be treated, so treating others in a kind and loving way will help them feel like someone cares. In most cases, the simplest things you can do, will mean the most.
2. Make eye contact and say hi. Another simple thing you can do that makes people feel like they matter.
3. Do the best you can at everything you do. Most of the things you do are not really for yourself but are for others. When I do laundry I don’t do if for myself even though I do wash my own clothes, I do laundry for my family and when I do it to the best of my ability it shows my family that I care a lot about them.

I could continue but I think you get my point, treating nature in a way that is more natural and benefits yourself and other animals is really important, but so is how we treat other human beings. It’s disturbing to see how compassionate people are towards animals and how judgmental they are towards other human beings, people matter just as much as nature. If we only focus on nature we miss a huge part of the puzzle and when you are missing pieces, the puzzle will not form a beautiful picture.

I know its challenging but if we incorporated social permaculture values along with doing permaculture techniques, we would really have a movement of epic proportions.

Today I am going to do my housework the best I can without complaining, I am going to take my husband out for lunch since he has been working so hard lately (along with thanking him for his hard work), and I will challenge myself to say hi to as many people as I can.

My Self-Discipline Challenge

Yesterday I decided to start a 30 day blogging challenge. I love to blog and share with others but some days I lack the initiative to write because of various reasons. When you get right down to it, I have plenty of time during the day I just don’t manage my time as well as I should, so for 30 days I am going to try to manage my time better and get done what I need to get done.

Today’s blog I decided to get back to my happiness journal. Happiness is an important part of anything in life, especially the more challenging areas that tax our moods and emotions. Here are some of the reasons I fail to see beauty in my life,

1. Work. Some days my job can suck the happiness out of me. I work 1st shift so that first 8 hours can set the tone for the rest of the day.
2. Fear. This should be first on my list because it messes with my happiness more than anything else. Fear can be broken down into a lot of subcategories but the biggest ones in my life are anxiety, worry, depression, and anger.
3. School. I do home school my kids, and even though I use an online school that has the curriculum and everything already there for me, I still have to help my 2nd grade son a lot since he is having trouble reading.
4. Feelings. This one may sound weird but you’ll understand when I’m done why I added this and what I mean. There are days where I get the feeling that I am doing everything myself and no one is helping me. Are these feelings true? 99 percent of the time these feelings of doing everything myself are not true. I also get the feeling that I don’t have time for this or that because I have too much to do. Is this true? If I am totally honest with myself, I know I fail to manage my time efficiently and end up wasting it doing things that I didn’t need to do while failing to do the things I should.

The first step to finding happiness is to observe what is blocking it in the first place. Once you begin to notice the little things that block your happiness, you can start working on a plan change it. The biggest change I had to make, and am still making, is my perspective about what I am doing. I need to focus on the blessings each of them contain rather than focusing on the negative.

When you are too focused on the grey cloud, you fail to see the silver lining.

Once you observe what is blocking your happiness and you begin to set a plan in motion to change these blockages, you must find the self-discipline to continue.

If you truly desire happiness then you will find the things in life that feed your happiness.

I Care

I care

Sometimes the most inspiration you receive comes from areas you wouldn’t expect it to, so I was surprised when I received some inspiration from a book I had to read for work.

In a nutshell the book is about mutual respect in the workplace, and how having respect for yourself and for others will not only make work more bearable but will increase productivity and satisfaction from patients and customers.

I would also like to define respect as I see it, I don’t see respect as admiration for something someone else accomplishes, I see respect as treating others the way you would want to be treated. If you don’t like people looking down on you don’t look down on others.

As I was reading this book I began to realize how something as small as doing your job to the best of your ability shows how much you care. If you came to my shop and I did everything I could to help you or get you what you wanted you would know that I care about you.

Whatever you do, do it enthusiastically

I began to understand that helping others feel better is as simple as doing the best you can in whatever you are doing. When I do the best I can at laundry, or cooking, or cleaning, my family will know that I care about their well-being. This extends to every area of your life, your family, you job, and to your gardens.

I am not perfect at this and I need a lot of work myself, but if we really understood the meaning behind do your best then maybe we would take it more seriously and stop this trend of uncaring, unloving attitudes.

“An ecology of feeling leads us to a new ecological ethics that declares we should conserve nature not only because it is useful or because its complexity has an intrinsic value. We should protect other beings because we love them. We love them because we are a part of them, and even more, because they are part of us.” ~Spiritual Ecology