Tiptoe through the tulips with me.....

I just returned from a wonderful trip home to spend time with the kids and get a dose of Green. The weather showed off with temps in the mid 80's and Seattle did it's best to make me long to be back where my heart belongs. It was an eventful weekend with the opening of the tulip feastival in Mt. Vernon and the Green Fest in Seattle. I was in heaven.

We hit Greenlake park on the way from the airport to the house and EQ showed me how much she can do now. I was terrified as she climbed the steps of the slide and came down like a big girl. She showed me how to dig in the sand and loved having her legs buried. We both had such a good time. She was so happy to see me and remembered I was one of the good guys.

On Saturday we wanted to head North for shopping and tulips.We started with the outlet mall in Tulalip which turned out to be shopping vervana. I have never seen an outlet with so much~ We all shopped to exhaustion. Then we headed further North to the tulip fields where all we could see was yellow from daffodiles everywhere. It was a sea of yellow. The weather had been too cold for the tulips, which decided to stay closed until this week. I love daffodiles though and enjoyed seeing all the fields at the base of mountains. The sights are unbelievable. We took EQ there last year when she was only 6 months old, and this year she was walking and running! Her mother decked her out in an adorable Laura Ashley dress and we were ready for the pictures to start. EQ wasn't having it. The fields, unfortunately for her, are made of dirt, and she and dirt aren't friends. She was quite unhappy having to stand and look sweet when all around her were strangers and dirt. It was a riot. Then AR of course had to sleep through the whole event.

The next day we went to the Green Festival in Seattle. It was terrific and we learned and saw so much! I try to do as much as possible to leave a small carbon footprint, but living in the SW it's hard to know if I'm on the right track. Sundance and their green programing leaves me feeling like such a failure sometimes, so seeing I was doing a pretty good job made me so proud. I have changed all my lightbulbs, inside and out to low energy, I have a front loading washer and hang my clothes out to dry, and use as little water as possible in my garden. If it would ever rain I could cut back even further on the watering. My next house will be 90-95% green inside and out. We discovered several great green clothingdesigners,(www.textureclothing.com and www.smallaxeclothing.com) from the NW, and a new social website dedicated to green folks called Greeniacs and there was vegan food and great music. EQ took advantage of the music and danced and flirted with the bass player. (Who flirted back ). We had a great time and learned a lot.

It was nice to be with family and play with kids again. When I'm here in the SW I work too much and laugh too little. Being around the little ones and my kids makes for a lot of laughter, love and snuggles.

In an effort to give back and open my horizons I have become a volunteer Wise Elder with the Elder Wisdom group and have offered advice to several people. I've lived a pretty colorful life and love sharing what I've learned with younger peeople. I certainly don't feel elderly, but have learned a few things along the road to where I am now and people seem to appreciate what I have to say. I also got my first 'bulk' order on Etsy for my Obama shirts. Yippee. I love him. I want his vision for the United States to come to fruition. We need a major change and for me he answers all my hopes and dreams for what we can be as a nation.

Well, that's it for now. As always....

Dreaming in Colors

Hannah

Dancing shoes

When a little girl gets her first pair of light up shoes and a pink tu-tu, life is just about a good as it can get. The absolute thrill expressed is contagious to everyone around her and they too are filled with this joy they can't explain. She puts on the tutu and is transported into a beautiful fairy, dancing in pink with a crown and twinkle slippers.

I know that feeling is better than anything I can accomplish with yoga or exercise or living right... Pure joy. The best feeling and one we search for whenever we're awake. We really need to go back to the magic of childhood. Imagination is replaced with dreams of sleep instead of seeing magic when we're awake. We get transported into whatever we're reading, at times, but spend too much time watching TV where there is no room for imagination. Quiet encourages imagination and I find I'm spending more and more time in silent surroundings and my creative imagination has the opportunity to flourish. Even if I'm dead tired from a day at the office, the stillness makes me relax and my mind has the freedom to excerise itself. What a revelation.

By watching EQ doing her pretend play I realize the TV is off and the noises of life within the house don't infringe on her creating a world of real friends and sharing tea. We look in from the outside and see nothing but cups in a circle, but she is in full conversation with her guests and enjoying a tea party with all of her special people. The conversation is lively and sincere. Her baby brother is a real live baby but serves as a new doll for her. Whatever she sees him as, is what he is. He looked particularly fetching in the stickers she placed all over his head, face and clothes. She was quite amused.

I am thankful she is getting the opportunity to entertain herself with imagination. It isn't encouraged enough in children today and those of us of a certain age, remember all the pretend we did as kids - cowboys, bank robbers, cops, teachers, doctors and nurses. I remember being convinced that I was an auburn mare trotting all over my pasture when I played recess with my grade school friends. I was so envious of the palomino. She really thought she was something. The trees in the yard were houses and forts and the tricycle made a great truck, car or horse depending on where I was at the time.

We didn't have a television set until I was in junior high so books, the radio, playing outside with the neighbor kids and my imagination kept me busy from breakfast to bedtime. I remember being so busy all day that it was hard to stop long enough to eat lunch. When the weather was warm enough it was always a picnic in the backyard and the milk in a metal cup was colder and tasted so good. During summer, I spent time every day in the garden with grandma. The rest of the year I helped wash clothes, learned to iron (hankies and dish towels) and learned how to cook being with her. She tried to teach me to sew but I'm still getting the hang of that now. We didn't miss TV - we had ourselves for entertainment and it was wonderful.

My life is so much happier now that I have turned off the TV at night and head out to the garden instead, while it's still light out. At dusk I move in to my craft room and sew or scrapbook until late in the evening. If there is something important coming on TV that night - I record it and watch it when there is nothing else to do. Not watching the news three times a day has made an immense difference too. My dreams are better and I rarely have nightmares. I'm not afraid to leave my house and the world isn't a big bad place anymore. I read good news and scan the Seattle Times when I eat lunch but that's about all the news I need.

Get outside and get your vitamin D and smell the fresh air - Enjoy your life!!

Thanks for checking in.
Hannah
Always - Dreaming in Colors

Goodbye - dear friend

It’s been an odd week. Sunday brought the news that a man I have admired for over 30 years had finally found peace and passed over after suffering from pancreatic cancer. Dith Pran. He had a website that made it possible to communicate directly with him and I felt honored to be included in his final months.

I first discovered him back in the 1970’s when he worked with Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times who was a correspondent in Cambodia during the Viet Nam war. When he and Sydney first started working together they witnessed the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia. Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets and I kept this quote: "If you didn't think about the danger, it looked like a performance," he said. "It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don't get killed. But because you know it's going to kill, it's no longer beautiful."

Schanberg moved to Phnom Penh because he recognized that what was happening there was an unfolding catastrophe. He hired Pran full time, and together they covered the deterioration of Lon Nol’s corrupt government and the gathering power of the Khmer Rouge, culminating in 1975 in the communist victory, and the mayhem that followed. After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Pran’s choice to stay in Phnom Penh and at Syndey’s side when the Khmer Rouge took over is now a piece of history. (The film The Killing Fields) Schanberg was soon expelled and Pran was sent to labor camps where he somehow endured the tortures that took the lives of as many as two million Cambodians, including many in his family. Dith escaped from the camps,dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Thailand. From the Thai camp he sent a message to Sydney, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier. "I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran," Schanberg said. "I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life." On their last meeting on Saturday just before Pran died he told Syndey “I promise to send you my dreams” as assurance they will continue to be together. They both acknowledged they were more than brothers.

Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime. When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide. "The Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot," he said. He founded ‘The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project’ (http://www.dithpran.org/) to educate “American students about the Cambodian genocide which occurred from April 17th, 1975 to January 7th, 1979.”

A man who could survive the horror and come through it with the outlook that Pran did, had a profound effect on me. He has always been a source of strength, and when things get overwhelming, I remind myself that people like Pran overcame things far worse than anything I will ever experience. He found beauty and joy and built a valued life! It really doesn’t matter what we own or the superficial things we sometimes make too important. It’s the contribution we make to the people in our lives, and the earth that is truly our legacy. I can only hope to do a small percentage of what Pran accomplished to feel like my life too, was a success.

Peace

Hannah