Tag Archive | wisdom

Space

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“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. “ ~ Viktor E. Frankl

This is a quote I found in a book about addiction & mindfulness. But it’s a great concept that can apply to any situation. We have the power to choose how to respond to whatever provokes us. It may feel like we have no choice and no control over a situation but the reaction is always in our control even if we cannot yet choose our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In this space, we can refine our ability to proact,. This space is empowering and it’s true our response can either contribute to evolving or to destruction. The more we choose to respond with positivity, love, grace, gratitude, and optimism, the more we evolve. 

We are truly liberated when we learn to always or frequently respond in a productive or positive way to people and situations that potentially tempt us to lash out or respond negatively in some way. When we have or cultivate a pro-active attitude and strengthen/maintain it, no matter what happens, no one and nothing gets over on us. 

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This is me today at work.

I hope your day/night is going beautifully! I was at work all day trying to work on blog posts and things but had no Internet connection. It wasn’t a really busy day but busier than it has been. But when I was not tending to customers and doing work related things and bloggy things, I read books on my Kindle app. It was frustrating at some points because the wifi would come on and I would begin writing things then trying to send them and it would go off before going through and sometimes I would lose what I wrote.
So I decided to see what quotes I have saved in my phone and found this! Great quote for the situation! 😀

Much love, ❤

Xoxo Kim 

Just Beautiful

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(This is the old church in the process of being demolished. 😦 I wrote about it before. It reminds me of the mini creepy castle in the horror book I’m reading!)

“Once upon a time she had pretended that the castle had been built thousands upon thousands of years ago by men from Saturn. And well it could have been, so far as any local person knew. She had chosen Saturn because of its rings. She could place herself in imagination upon the planet and look up at the colorful rings encircling the planet and see the most beautiful of all sights. And on Saturn the trees were all colors, like flowers, like the rings, and beauty was everything, just for the purpose of being beautiful.” (pp. 39)

I’m reading a good mystery fiction book, published in 1981, called Hear the Children Cry .

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This excerpt is out of this book.

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I love it because not only is it beautiful, it’s also very wise. Not everything we do or have has to be practical/have a practical purpose. It reminds me that it’s ok to not always be productive, just to sit back and bask in the beauty.

http://oneword365.com/

Much, love, light, & beauty to you!
❤
xoxo Kim

Everything is beautiful <3

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“Everything is beautiful
In its own way
Like a starry summer night
Or a snow covered winter’s day
Everybody’s beautiful
In their own way
Under God’s heaven
The world’s gonna find a way”

I love the message of this song. I don’t believe in any gods but the message is beautiful! It’s true there’s beauty in everything & everyone; we just have to open our minds and see, feel. And it’s true, if we open our minds to see beauty in everyone and everything, the world will find a way. ❤

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“There is none so blind
Than is he who will not see
We must not close our minds
We must let our thoughts be free
For every hour that passes by
You know the world
Gets a little bit older
It’s time to realize
That beauty lies
In the eyes of the beholder”

“We shouldn’t care
About the length of his hair
Or the color of his skin
Don’t worry about
what shows from without
but the love that lives within
We’re gonna get it all together now
Everything gonna work out fine
Just take a little time
to look on the good side my friend
And straighten it out in your mind”

Get that mind focused on Metta.

https://inspirationalgem.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/on-empathy/

https://inspirationalgem.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/offering-the-victory-universal-love-3/

Late last night, we actually got Snow here in Philadelphia! But it only snowed for a few minutes, not enough to collect on the ground but enough to collect on the windchimes and things on the ground, trash can lids…

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My phone doesn’t often take good pictures in the dark. It was nearly 12:00AM and when I woke up in the morning, the sun was out and the snow was gone! It’s still freezing cold today though! And I’m seeing & feeling beauty everywhere!  

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Thank you for the sweet messages on some of my posts! I will respond soon! I was without wifi most of the day at work and just got home. I always appreciate comments/messages & likes & shares!!! ❤ It was so cold at work so I had hot cocoa & tea!! yummy! :-p 😀

❤

Everything is Beauty – Ray Stevens – mobile

Everything is Beautiful – desktop

Much love,

xoxo Kim

Spinning

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“We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.” ~Rumi

I love this quote. My mind conjures up images of something unstoppable. It’s a great reminder that we have the power within to do & be great things no matter what our circumstances are. We can come out of nothingness and unleash that greatness.

Love & light to you….

❤ ❤

xoxo Kim

Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

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“See the curtains hangin’ in the window, in the evenin’ on a Friday night.
A little light a-shinin’ through the window, lets me know everything is alright.
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”

Today is like bordering on Summer here in Philadelphia! And I love it! Often, I don’t even want to think of Summer in Winter! But today is a beautiful taste of the soothing Spring & Summer to come.

How lovely!

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I have this song on my mind today! I love the images it inspires in my head.

Summer Breeze – Seals & Crofts – mobile

Summer Breeze – desktop

I see visions of green and floral beauty and sunny skies and fragrant air upon my skin! ❤ ❤

As I mentioned, my word for the one word challenge is Beauty. So today I made it a point to focus even more on the beauty of this lovely imitation of a sweet Summer day and take note of it by writing in my one word journal and writing about it here.

I’m also celebrating at work with a sweet iced coffee!

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Tomorrow, I hear it’s going back to below freezing! So I’ll be sure to soak up every bit of the warmth I can today!

All last night & into the early morning (for a couple nights now), the next door neighbors were blasting music so loudly I heard and felt it vibrating through the walls as I was in bed reading then drifting off to sleep. I did not mind. I like hearing people awake in the night while I lay in my dark room in bed. I like hearing them talking, laughing, playing, music…

Some people think it’s a lot of nerve blasting music at that hour. And well I guess it is. But I was pleased to hear it as I was falling asleep. It’s not the kind of music I would ever listen to intentionally but that’s ok.

“See the paper layin’ in the sidewalk, a little music from the house next door.
So I walked on up to the doorstep, through the screen and across the floor.
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”

These lyrics remind me of it. Lol

Here are five beautiful things I encountered today.

1.) a light, misty rain

2.) this shopping bag mixed in with all the bags we use for work. “Thank you” when said or felt genuinely, are very powerful words. What a great reminder to give thanks.

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3.) a sweet girl and her husband who came to my workplace for ice cream today. They were both so friendly and happy together. What a pleasant encounter! And to top it off, she was wearing lovely stiletto boots!

4.) my phone is so full of photos, e-mails, and everything else. It’s in desperate need of a cleanse but I want to save a lot of photos before I delete them so I send them to my photobucket account first. One did not go through and a red circle showed up in my e-mail box next to the e-mail that did not go through. I can’t stand when that happens. It pisses me off. My e-mail box has thousands upon thousands of e-mails, mostly junk. But I like getting so many because there’s also inspiring messages and stuff that come through. But it can be hard to find certain e-mails I’m looking for in the midst of all that. I sent one of my pictures to photobucket then deleted it out of my phone then later decided I wanted the picture back on my phone to share here. Using my phone, it’s hard sometimes to save my pictures off of photobucket after I put them on. So I decided to look back through my sent e-mails to find the photo in my inbox when I sent it but since there’s hundreds and the e-mails aren’t named, it would be hard to find. But the ugly red circle indicating that my e-mail did not go through, helped me more quickly find the other e-mail I was searching for since I know it was close to that one in my inbox. So I just scanned my inbox quickly til I saw the ugly red circle then knew the e-mail I wanted was close. Turns out the ugly red circle isn’t so ugly after all! Lol I don’t know if any of this seems to make sense but basically something I was pissed at turned out to work in my favor! Yay!! When something that seems unpleasant doesn’t naturally work out in our favor, we can get creative and look for ways to use it to our advantage!


5.) for some reason this light rainy, warm day triggered pleasant memories of college. I was severely depressed back then, somewhat often but along with my very painful memories I also have beautiful, very pleasant memories of those days. There were so many happy days as well. This day inspires a very pleasant memory of another rainy day in my first year of college. But that other day, it wasn’t Winter, it was early Fall, I think, or the end of Summer. And it wasn’t a light rain, it was a heavy thunderstorm and very dark. There is nothing significant about this day back in college. It wasn’t a holiday or anything out of the ordinary. It was my first semester ever in college. I remember I was sad and missing high school and all the people I knew in my old school but still happy to be in college and definitely happy about my experiences there. I had a Criminal Justice paper that had to be turned in that day and I waited til the last minute then my printer wouldn’t work! So I decided to go to campus hours early to work on it before class that day. I had to write it all over to print out. My dad drove me to campus that early morning while it was still dark out before going to his work. I loved the dark and rain and going to campus early. There were very few people there that early and while I sometimes felt lonely back then being physically alone, that morning, I loved my own company. I loved the feeling of novelty. I was full of hope and curiosity about college even with my sadness and longing for high school. I loved my classes already. I was so young, only eighteen years old! Every rainy day now doesn’t inspire me to recall that day in college, most do not. But for some reason today inspired that pleasant memory. I’m so thankful! Savoring our memories and truly feeling them can inspire in us whatever emotion we felt back then. If you tap into your memory of your wedding day or the day you gave birth or your first day of college or moving into a new house, whatever pleasant experience you recall….really tune in, you can feel those same emotions ripple through you even if you haven’t felt them in so long. That’s a great technique for practicing gratitude, recalling old occasions we felt gratitude and truly allowing them to surface and flow through us. It can also bring a pang of sadness, longing, nostalgia of course but that’s ok! That’s beautiful too.

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Thank you to every single person who reads, likes, “likes,” follows, shares…my content!! I deeply appreciate it always!! ❤ 😀

I hope you are having a beautiful day/night wherever you are and basking in all the beauty around & within whatever the weather is like. We can always bring our own sunshine & rain. ❤

Much love,

Xoxo Kim

Beautiful

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“I know who I am. I am not perfect. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world. But I’m one of them.” ~ Mary J. Blige

As I mentioned in my last post, my word for this year’s one word challenge is Beauty.

http://oneword365.com/

I believe it’s good to celebrate our own beauty as well as each other’s and the beauty of life in general.

I wrote a long post on the one word challenge and lost much of the post now have to rewrite it! That sucks! oh, well. I hope I remember it all. But like I shared here before, when I lose stuff I write, I try to make it even better. Remember to save your work every couple of seconds. It’s worth it!

This is a picture of me in Summer 2015 at Wildwood, NJ. I chose this to share because I love my geuine smile and did not know my dad was taking the picture. I was so happy about getting into the eight feet water to go swimming! 😀 ❤

I love this quote. It's a great attitude to have. If we believe we are one of the most beautiful then we are! Confidence is sexy.

I love when I see a woman I think is prettier than me. I'm blessed to be able to see and receive her beauty.

Instead of feeling low that someone has something more or better, we can just be happy for those people instead and bask in the beauty of those people. Let’s be inspired by their beauty and accomplishments.

I hope you are having a beautiful day or night! 😀

Much love, ❤

xoxo Kim

Loving those who are still sleeping

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“Once you awaken you will have no interest in judging those who sleep.” 

Yes! Sometimes it may be tempting to speak of love and compassion then negatively judge those who do not act as lovingly as we ourselves do or think we do. We may learn something new, become financially better off, obtain an advanced school degree, become enlightened in some way, get an amazing job promotion, lose weight, live a healthier lifestyle….then come back to judge those who are still less educated, less well off, less wise in certain ways. 

But I believe true wisdom is letting others be. Let them be how they are, embrace them in the state they are currently in while wishing the best for them. We do not have to be arrogant or condescending in our ways. It’s great when we accomplish something amazing and deepen our wisdom and compassion but it doesn’t mean we have to become smug about it. Even if we try to help them wake up, we can do this in non condescending ways remembering that we were not always so wise or educated and that there will always be those more wise, educated, skilled, or intelligent than we are. 

The longer I live, the more I realize the importance and deep wisdom of humility. 

This is a lovely quote that sums it up so perfectly. 

Much love & light to you!

❤ 😀

Xoxo Kim 

The Life Before Her Eyes

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“As much as we can be overwhelmed by the world, we can also draw hope from it, from beauty, from promise, from the simple fact that we have the talent to imagine our future selves from all the possible lives that pass before our eyes. We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience.”

Some years ago, I watched a movie called “The Life Before Her Eyes” over & over. I love movies that have to do with friendship. This movie is a very sad movie but very good. It’s about two high school girls who are best friends, one is a “good girl” and the other is a “bad girl” but they are the best of friends. Their friendship is so tender and loving and warm and even after they get into an argument. The girls do a great job playing the part. A true friendship like this one is a great blessing! I think platonic friendship is one of the greatest gifts in life.

A kid comes to school one day with a gun and kills a lot of people, including one of the girls. The other girl develops severe post traumatic stress and struggles with her loss, guilt, and anxiety and caring for her family after she grows up with a family of her own years later. She can’t let go of the past and overcome it and move forward. I wouldn’t expect someone to completely forget that her best friend was murdered and all those other people and wouldn’t expect her grief to go away but it’s possible to heal to a certain point. She has a lot of difficulty. I recently watched the movie again. 

This line above is out of one of the scenes. Isn’t it inspiring? So full of hope & beauty.

I love how many scenes in this movie can be analyzed and interpreted, like they have underlying meanings.

It’s a great movie but I would never recommend it to someone who has ever been involved in a school (or any) massacre, especially one involving gun violence. It may be a serious trigger.

I hope you are having a beautiful day/night!

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Much love & light, ❤

Xoxo Kim