One-Liner Wednesday: We’ll Still Have Power

There’s a big hurricane heading my way. We will probably lose electricity. I know electricity is important and that there are people whose lives  depend it. I pray they will be safe. When we say, “we lost power,” or “they were without power,” what does that do to us mentally and emotionally? What if we said, we lost electricity?

Even if we lose electricity in the hurricane, we will have power.

We’ll have the power to pray, sing, and reminisce, the power to light a candle and tell stories or read a book. We’ll have the power to ask for help or help our neighbors. The power to clean up and, if we need to, rebuild.

Is it a coincidence that a major hurricane is coming on the same week home repairs have relocated us to the house my parents left me? My Wilmington house is 15 minutes from the ocean. My parents’ old house, an hour north, is about 30 minutes from the ocean.  I feel safer here where the windows are reinforced and the roof is metal. Thanks, Dad. Plus this house is mostly brick, a little higher off the ground, and the trees are further away from the house. Thanks, Dad. I do wish I had thought to hug my beloved sycamore before I left and told her to hold on tight. I’ll be sending her love.

If this house was on the beach, where evacuation is mandatory, I’d definitely head for the hills. But this far inland, evacuation is voluntary. We plan to stay here with our old dogs who are just getting settled at the new location. I’ll be a little worried about my Wilmington house, but I believe we’ll be safe here. Prayers are welcome and appreciated.

Doodle is getting ready for the hurricane. She has the power to sleep.

Thank you to all the animal shelters and foster homes doing extra duty. Never leave your animal friends home alone during a hurricane! And kudos to my friend Michael who drives buses for the city. He’s was called into work yesterday to drive people to Raleigh.

…

One-Liner Wednesday is brought to you by Linda Hill. For more one-liners, visit Linda at:

https://lindaghill.com/2018/09/12/one-liner-wednesday-too-much-computer/

Here are the rules which we don’t always follow:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.

3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.

4. Add our lovely badge to your post for extra exposure!

5. Have fun!

Keeping Power in Stormy Weather

Today is day three of hurricane season. Whether we get a big storm or not, remains to be seen. September and October are usually the busiest times for hurricanes. I still have the urge to buy candles because I don’t want to run out. Several? many? years ago, Hurricane Floyd, I think it was Floyd… Let me look it up. Okay, Floyd hit North Carolina on September 16, 1999.  Or maybe it was Bertha in 1996. But what I do remember is being without electricity for over a week and running out of candles. Of course it could have been worse. Some people die in hurricanes. So I’m thankful for my life and my trees holding on.

You might have noticed that I wrote above we were without electricity. That’s my thing, to use the word electricity instead of power, so as not to give electricity so much power. I’ve written blogs and poems about it. So far, my campaign to say, “We lost electricity,” instead of, “We lost power,” has not caught on. But there’s always hope! I did hear one news reporter use the word electricity instead of power. Just once. I bet the higher ups in the news rooms prefer the use of “power” because it’s more dramatic to lose power than electricity. “Without power” sounds pretty scary. Unless you go to a 12 step perspective of powerlessness, because a higher power can help us with the scary stuff.

I am powerless over whether other people say electricity or power, but I will continue to say and write ELECTRICITY when I’m talking about the lights going out in a storm.

Do I have enough candles? Probably. But I might buy more. I’m guessing I have about, oh I don’t know, 20 big candles around the house, plus another 20 tea lights. Plus a couple of flashlights. Not that I’m worried.

I used to like little hurricanes that would close offices and give me time off work with only minor, minor damage. But now that I’m working from home, let’s just have reasonable weather. If only…

Here’s my latest poster on electricity and power in case you want to join the movement:

Today’s Stream of Consciousness Prompt was, whether/weather, brought to us by Linda G. Hill at:

https://lindaghill.com/2017/06/02/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-317/

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!

We Still Have Power

 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

When we lose electricity,

we still have power.

When I saw this prompt, “power” from Erica at https://2020hines-sight.com/, I immediately thought of this song, and since it’s been in my head since then, I’m sharing it here. These guys have a good sound.

And then there’s this little girl with a lot of power:

Thanks to Dan Antion for standing in for Linda who hosts Just Jot it January at

https://lindaghill.com/2017/01/09/jusjojan-daily-prompt-jan-9th17

The rules for Just Jot It January are as follows:

1. It’s never too late to join in! Here, we run on the honour system; the “jot it” part of JusJoJan means that anything you jot down, anywhere (it doesn’t have to be a post, it can even be a grocery list) counts as a “Jot.” If it makes it to your blog that day, great! If it waits a week to get from a sticky note to your screen, no problem!

2. The prompts will be posted every day at 2am my time (GMT -5). You don’t have to follow the prompt word, but this will be where you leave your link for others to see. Make sure you link your post to the correct day’s prompt. There will be a post like this every day except Wednesday, when the prompt is simply my One-Liner Wednesday, and Saturday, when you’ll find the prompt on my usual Friday Reminder post for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS).

3. As long as your blog is on WordPress, you’ll be able to link via pingback. To execute a pingback, just copy the URL from the daily prompt post, and paste it anywhere in your post. Check to make sure your link shows up where you want it to, and go back occasionally to see other bloggers’ entries – the more you visit others, the more they’ll visit you! If you’re participating from another blogging host, just drop a link into the comment section. Note: The newest pingbacks and comments will be at the top.

4. Tag your post JusJoJan and/or #JusJoJan.

5. Write anything! Any length will do! It can even be a photo or a drawing – you’re going to title it, right? There’s your jot!

6. The prompts are here both to remind you and to inspire you to write. However, you don’t have to use the prompt word of the day. You can link any kind of jot back here. Even your shopping list. Note: If it’s 18+ content, please say so in a comment with your link.

7. If you’d like to, use the JusJoJan badge (above) in your post so that others can find your post more easily.

8. Have fun!

If you’d like to look ahead to see the upcoming prompt words, click this link: https://lindaghill.com/2016/12/31/just-jot-it-january-2017-rules/ You can always write your post ahead of time and schedule it to come out on the appropriate day.

If We Lose Electricity…

If we lose electricity

in the storm,

We will still have power.

We have the power

To check on our neighbors,

To ask for help,

To move to higher ground.

The power to tell stories,

To laugh,

To sing lullabies.

The power to write a poem,

To mend what’s torn,

To read by candlelight.

The power to hope and pray,

To reminisce,

To hold hands in the dark.

The power to clear a path,

To rise from ash,

 and rebuild.

_____________________________

When we say we’ve lost power, it minimizes the power we still have. If we lose electricity, let’s say we lost electricity. We still have power, at least over our thoughts, words, and actions.

I send prayers for safety and comfort to all those in the path of the storm.

What I’m Learning about #BlackLivesMatter

It started on my way to the Potluck for Peace hosted by the local YWCA.

Just around the corner from my house, I passed by a black man in a red car who had been pulled over by a police officer and a deputy sheriff. The officers were approaching his car from behind. They appeared to be calm, and I didn’t see any guns. Part of me wanted to turn around and watch from a distance. But I kept going and said a prayer for the man in the car and for the officers. I asked God to keep them all safe.

What struck me in the few seconds as I drove by was the body language of the man sitting in the car. His hands were up on the ceiling, like he was pushing them up as high as he could within the confines of his car. It looked like he was smiling a wide and nervous smile, shaking his head from side to side, and saying something. I imagined that he could be saying: I’m not doing anything wrong. My hands are up, see? I’m not armed. I’m not resisting. God please let them know that.

I remembered the time I was pulled over by the police, many years ago, for going a little too fast. I remembered the sick feeling in my stomach of being in trouble. Then I thought about that feeling being magnified 1000 times. The thought made me shudder.

At the Potluck for Peace, about fifty of us shared a meal. We were a good mix of African American and Caucasian, with one Latina and several police officers.

Our speaker defined racism as prejudice + power.

We’ve all felt prejudice. When you add power, that’s when you get racism that can impede a person’s access to jobs, housing, safety, and justice.

We were invited to write feelings and thoughts about racism on giant sticky notes placed on the walls.

Then we were asked to discuss the notes nearest our table in small groups. My group focused on this one:

We talked about how fears and prejudices are passed on through generations, and how we need to start teaching children as early as possible to look beyond those fears and prejudices.

One black man shared about the internalized inferiority he felt as a child when he saw how sales people disregarded his mother in stores. As a child, he received the message that people like him and his family didn’t matter.

Black Lives Matter does not mean white lives don’t matter. All lives matter. But black lives have mattered less (sometimes far less) in our system for a long time.

Black lives matter because all lives matter.

We don’t have to pick a side. Black Lives Matter is part of the larger whole that all lives matter. Shouldn’t we give more caring attention to the parts of the whole that are being harmed more, including, not only black lives, but blue lives, and LGBT lives?  Which reminds me of this video of the BLM/police cookout:

https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/1111255742297882/?pnref=story

Lately, I’ve heard white people I respect referring to black and brown brothers and sisters. I’m relieved we are finally realizing that talking only in terms of black and white is polarizing.

What if we started to recognize all the colors in between black and white?

It makes me want to know what people want to be called: black, brown, black and brown, African American….  Maybe I’ll do an informal survey. Feel free to comment!

My friend’s grand daughter recently referred to another little girl as having peach colored skin. Maybe she has the right idea.

 

 

 

 

Power in the Darkness

So many possibilities for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness prompt: “light.”

I wrote about moonlight recently. Light can be symbolic for goodness. Light is good. But it doesn’t always have to come from electricity. And power is more than electricity. That’s been a topic of mine in the past, but with hurricane season here again, it bears repeating.

Why do people keep saying “power” when they mean electricity? Do we really want to give our dependence on electricity so much power?

When the lights go out due to a storm, we have lost electricity.

We still have power, even when we don’t have electricity.

I know electricity can be a life or death matter for some people, and I wish them their and their loved ones abundant power and life sustaining support if the electricity goes out.

But most of us can get by without electricity.

What did people do before electricity?

They sat around a fire and told stories.

They read by candle light.

They played guitars and drums and sang songs.

We still have the power to pray and laugh and sing and love one another.

So when the lights go out, we may have lost electricity, but we still have power!

I’ve got my candles ready!

 

 

If you’d like to jump into the refreshing Stream of Consciousness Saturday post, visit:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/09/04/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-515/

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!

Mind over Matter: Things I Didn’t Learn in College

My psychology degree taught me a little about the mind: cognitive psychology, the study of consciousness…. mostly, it taught me about the brain and behavior. I guess it gave me a introductory framework, but most of the valuable stuff I’ve learned seems to have come after college, once I got beyond the craziness of adolescence and became more curious about the mind. Not that I wasn’t curious before, but, well, you know. The brain/mind is not fully developed, research tells us, until somewhere around the age of 24. And they say it takes longer for the male brain to develop. That’s a whole other subject, I didn’t mean to go there. I really didn’t.

Where I meant to go was how fascinating the mind/body connection is. Oh, yeah, and that stuff I’ve learned since college: about meditation and thoughts. How positive thoughts can help us feel better physically and improve our health compared to negative thoughts. The mind is powerful. There’s the placebo effect, for example, that makes some people better just by believing they are taking medicine. Well, I did learn about that in college, but I’ve seen it more in action since then. Music is like medicine for me. Meditative music, like Taize, can be and healing.

For many years, I’ve worked in a  program that uses Methadone therapy to treat heroin and opiate addiction. Addiction to pain pills is a bigger problems than heroin these days. That’s another story. Controversial, I know. It’s helped a lot of people, Methadone, I mean, and some, not as much. Some people, not all, on Methadone tend to attribute aches and pains due to aging or illness to not having enough Methadone. Their minds are used to going down that road. They risk covering up other problems that need specific treatment. What I find fascinating are the occasional accounts of clients who were arrested and couldn’t get their Methadone when in jail and said it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as they thought it would be. (For most people sudden withdrawal is horrible.). A couple of times, I’ve been told by people that he or she didn’t have hardly any withdrawal in jail, even thought they expected it to be bad. Why is that? These are people we need to study. I must add that the people who are successful in recovery, regardless of the type of treatment, get that recovery is a lot of work. I wrote about that here.

Where am I going with this? Oh, yeah. The mind is powerful. It can make us feel miserable or it can make us feel strong.  If we know something is not available, whether it’s a drug, or ice cream, we can accept it and it’s not so bad as when the thing we want is close, but just out of reach.

Twenty-nine years ago, I was going to have my first baby without any medication at all. Ha! After the first shot of Stadol started wearing off, I was asking for another. They said it was too late; it was almost time to push. I sighed and accepted it. It was not available, so I didn’t ask again, didn’t even think about medication again. About thirty minutes later, I pushed my son out and immediately felt better and ready to take care of him, fight off tigers or whatever. A total change in consciousness.

Who’s really in charge? Sometimes my mind is all over the place and all the meditation techniques I know don’t help me sleep, usually because I’ve been up on the computer to late and I got my mind busy.  But thankfully, I am usually able to get enough sleep when I have the discipline to turn the computer off at a reasonable time. Discipline. That’s a mind thing. Mind over matter.

And yet, sometimes we need help. Addiction, whether it’s to heroin, or to the internet, (not that I’m saying I’m addicted to the internet, I’m not saying that at all….but it is the next wave of addiction for our culture, I believe….)  Addiction is often too much for one mind to handle alone. When the mind is overcome by a mental illness or an addiction, we need help. I know a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. When I ask that power (for me, God) to help me turn off the lights by midnight, and I allow that power to help me click on the x and turn out the lights, it works a lot better.

I didn’t learn that in college.

Today’s prompt for Saturday’s Stream of Consciousness Post was: “mind.”

If you’d like to join the fun of Saturday’s Stream of Consciousness visit:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/08/21/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2215/

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!

Stay connected to your Power Source!

It’s Possible to still have Power in a “power outage.”

“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

_____Alice Walker

      I’m betting most of us feel like we don’t have as much power as we want. But we always have power. We have the power to change our thoughts. There are all kinds of words in our heads making up our thoughts. We can change the thoughts by changing the words. The journey of changing an attitude, can begin with changing a single word. Like changing “I can’t” to “I’ll try.”
Now, some people (like my friend Yoda) don’t like the word try. But sometimes try can help move us from, I can’t  to  I can, or at least from,  I think I can  to  Maybe  I can…..  Let me just try this one little step and see what happens.
We have the power to smile or laugh or cry.  We have the power change our rate of breathing. Most of us can take a deep breath, but even if we can’t, because we might cough or something, we can take a slower, longer breath. It’s amazing with a few slow breaths can do.
We have the power to ask for what we want. We might not always get what we want, but we can ask. And of course, if we try, we usually find we get what we need. We have the power to accept what we cannot change, and we have the power to keep fighting the good fight. We can choose what to encourage, even with a smile or a nod. And we can decide how much attention to give to things we don’t like.
We have the power to love ourselves and others, even if we have to love some people from a distance, we can always pray for them and for ourselves.
Even when the electricity goes out, we still have power. We can light a candle. We can sing a song. We can tell a story. Let’s make it a good one.