“Be as you wish to seem.”
Socrates
Coleus plant from the Manhattan Beach Mall.
There comes a time in life, when you walk away from all the drama and the people who create it
Surround yourself with people who make you laugh, forget the bad, and focus on the good.
Love the people who treat you right.
Pray for the ones who don’t.
Life is too short to be anything but happy.
Falling down is part of life, getting back up, that’s living.
Shine On
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
Charlie Chaplin
A sincere compliment can really boost ones morale. I’m not one who demands constant attention or praise. But, it sure is nice to hear, “good job” once in a while. I always have showered my son and husband with compliments. Whenever I accomplish a major hurdle, my son is always the first to give me a compliment.
After 20+ years living together, I’ve come to realize it’s just not my husbands style to give out compliments easily. I guess my husband’s style is more akin to Don Rickles than Johnny Carson.
A few years back I suggested my husband “get in touch with his feminine side”. So one day he said something that was showing his feelings. When he realized this, he stopped and pointed out to me that, “he was getting in contact with his feminine side”.
He may not dish out kudos or compliments easily, but he makes me laugh. To me, that’s more important than any compliment he could ever give me. When I’m feeling low, I can always count on him to make me laugh.
Fishing for compliments has never been something I’ve ever had to do. And I’m not planning on starting this late in life. Besides, I’d much rather be with someone who makes me laugh, because as the old proverb says, “laughter is the best medicine”.
Shine On
“It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants
are good for our psychological development.
If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down.
Torture victims begin to recover when they
spend time outside in a garden with flowers.
So we need them, in some deep psychological sense,
which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.”
Jane Goodall
Shine On
“What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history
is a constant domination by bacteria.”
Stephen Jay Gould
It’s a small dangerous world we live in. A world where all around us are tiny living organisms. No fellow followers, I’m not talking about The Donald. I’m talking about organisms, or microorganisms as they are commonly referred, so small that hundreds of thousands of bacteria could fit onto a pinhead.
Most microorganisms are beneficial but some are also dangerous. For example, there are microorganisms in our large intestine that synthesize vitamins and allow them to be absorbed into the bloodstream. However, a tiny minority are pathogens (disease-causing agents). These pathogens, often called germs or bugs, are a threat to all life forms.
Even those of us who pride ourselves with extraordinary hygiene cannot hide from the one trillion number of bacteria on our bodies. That is just the amount on our bodies, with another trillion or so within our organs. The thought of this makes me squeamish. Yes, our body is the ultimate food court for these microorganisms.
Bacteria has got along fine for billions of years without us. We on the other hand, couldn’t survive a day without some of them. They purify our water and keep our soils productive. Bacteria process vitamins in our gut and convert the food we eat into useful sugars and polysaccharides all along going to war on alien microbes that slip down our throat. Sounds like something from a science fiction novel, but that is how we have survived for centuries.
Microorganisms have been around since this planet began. They will live and thrive on anything you spill, dribble, or shake loose. All they need is a little moisture – just run a damp cloth over a counter – and poof, just like magic, they will bloom as if created from nothing. They also will feed on anything they can find, even such caustic substances as plutonium and waste from nuclear reactors.
The most extraordinary survival in history was when a sealed camera lens that sat on the Moon for two years was recovered and scientist found Streptococcus bacterium on the lens. It just shows us that there are few environments in which bacteria cannot live.
Scientist now know that there are even strains of bacteria living deep within the Earth. This bacteria they found eat what is in rocks such as iron, sulfur, and even manganese. Some scientist believe that their tireless nibblings within the center of the Earth could have created the Earth’s crust.
What’s amazing to me is all this research and findings about microorganisms didn’t appear in school textbooks until the 1960s. Prior to that, the world divided the living into two categories, either plant or animal. But thanks to a German naturalist, Ernst Haeckel in the late nineteenth century we now place microorganisms into their own separate kingdom.
It’s only natural for us humans to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements. A never-ending advancement toward mankind. But, we flatter ourselves because most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. The large things are just a stroke of luck. It’s the little things that belong to the world. A world that has been around for a very long time. But, a world as we all are coming to realize, is a small world after all.
Shine On
