The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

A PIECE OF AMERICANA PIE

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I love pie, especially pecan, but I’m a sucker for a good piece of AMERICANA PIE no matter whenever or however it’s served up.  Nobody serves us a better slice than the late, great Paul Harvey.  Here.  Enjoy a slab of AMERICANA PIE:

PAUL HARVEY’S LETTER TO HIS GRANDCHILDREN:

We tried so hard to make things better for our kids that we made them worse. For my grandchildren, I’d like better.

I’d really like for them to know about hand me down clothes and homemade ice cream and leftover meat loaf sandwiches.. I really would.

I hope you learn humility by being humiliated, and that you learn honesty by being cheated.

I hope you learn to make your own bed and mow the lawn and wash the car.

And I really hope nobody gives you a brand new car when you are sixteen.

It will be good if at least one time you can see puppies born and your old dog put to sleep.

I hope you get a black eye fighting for something you believe in.

I hope you have to share a bedroom with your younger brother/sister. And it’s all right if you have to draw a line down the middle of the room, but when he wants to crawl under the covers with you because he’s scared, I hope you let him.

When you want to see a movie and your little brother/sister wants to tag along, I hope you’ll let him/her.

I hope you have to walk uphill to school with your friends and that you live in a town where you can do it safely.

On rainy days when you have to catch a ride, I hope you don’t ask your driver to drop you two blocks away so you won’t be seen riding with someone as uncool as your Mom.

If you want a slingshot, I hope your Dad teaches you how to make one instead of buying one.

I hope you learn to dig in the dirt and read books.

When you learn to use computers, I hope you also learn to add and subtract in your head.

I hope you get teased by your friends when you have your first crush on a boy / girl, and when you talk back to your mother that you learn what ivory soap tastes like.

May you skin your knee climbing a mountain, burn your hand on a stove and stick your tongue on a frozen flagpole.

I don’t care if you try a beer once, but I hope you don’t like it… And if a friend offers you dope or a joint, I hope you realize he/she is not your friend.

I sure hope you make time to sit on a porch with your Grandma/Grandpa and go fishing with your Uncle.

May you feel sorrow at a funeral and joy during the holidays.

I hope your mother punishes you when you throw a baseball through your neighbor’s window and that she hugs you and kisses you at Christmas time when you give her a plaster mold of your hand.

These things I wish for you – tough times and disappointment, hard work and happiness. To me, it’s the only way to appreciate life.

IT IS ALL GOOD
ALL OF IT
Hint: THAT’S THE SECRET INGREDIENT IN A SLICE OF AMERICANA PIE
(the Good and the Bad and everything in between)

Enjoy every crumb and don’t be afraid to ask for seconds; there’s always plenty for all.           .             .

Y                    U                    M                    M                    Y

JUST A MOMENT: UNLEARNING TO LEARN

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What are some of the lessons that you learned, were taught, or even punished for not learning fast enough when you were a kid?

Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson to learn it in a new way that would benefit your life?

It’s not that we were taught things to harm us. We were always taught lessons to protect us from the world and yes, sometimes from ourselves.

Come on we, don’t wait for the rain so that we could go outside and play or barbecue or lay out.  We don’t dance in mud puddles in our bare feet or worse, our brand new shoes. We know better because we were taught better and maybe, maybe we need to know a little bit more.  Go ahead, take a walk in the rain, stomp in a mud puddle, even with people watching.  Who knows, who knows, the exhilaration that kids have could just be what’s worth feeling for us, too.
S      P      L      A      S      H 
O  N

FROM THE SOUL TO THE THROAT TO THE PAGE

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Photo by Hannah Wright on Unsplash

My emptiness
has a fullness
that is hard to carry
It’s a thick sludge in my veins
that refuses to pump
through my soul’s heart
while it oxygenates the darkest
parts of me I wish dead

Consider these words from Richard Rohr, excerpted from his meditation on “The Sacred in the Concrete”:

Robert Frost said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness.”¹ If a poem doesn’t give us a lump in the throat, is it really great poetry? My final theological conclusion is that there’s only one world and that it’s all sacred. However, we have to be prepared to know what we’re saying when we say that. If we say too glibly that the trees are sacred, along with our dog, a friend, and the roses, then we don’t really believe it. We first need to experience “a lump in the throat” to have encountered the sacred. The sacred is something that inspires awe and wonder, something that makes us cry, something that gives us the lump in the throat. We must first encounter the sacred in the concrete and kneel before it there, because we can’t start with the universal.

Poets . . . make the connection between the concrete and the universal. When we make that connection, there’s suddenly a great leap of meaning, an understanding that it’s one world. The very word “metaphor,” which comes from two Greek words, means to “carry across.” A good metaphor carries us across, and we don’t even know how it’s occurred.

. . . If we’re reading a poem too quickly, between two urgent meetings or other hurried spaces, we probably won’t get it, because we don’t have time to release ourselves. We need quiet, solitude, and open space to read poetry at greater depth. Then and only then do poems work their magic.

(My thanks to Fr. Richard Rohr, via the Center for Action and Contemplation 

Robert Frost, “Some Definitions,” in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 701.

It’s not that the Sun doesn’t gloriously melt through the clouds so much as we just don’t take time to NOTICE; which kind of means that the worst poem of all isn’t the one not yet written, just the one not recognized or read.         .           .p o n d e r e d

JUST A MOMENT: BEING IN PLACE

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It’s one of the universal first lessons we’ve ever learned, and we learned it at a small age: IF YOU USE IT, PUT IT BACK!  We all know there were consequences for not putting things back where we found them; maybe the lesson is there for us to learn again, especially when we feel like we literally have lost our place, where there’s no one that can find us, or maybe we’re hiding in such a spot where we don’t want to be found?

And then there’s the new mandate today of STAY IN YOUR LANE, which is a nice way to say, KNOW YOUR PLACE!  But it’s true, if we just stayed in our places 100% of the time and we’re good little soldiers,  new worlds as well as new adventures would never be had because sometimes the greatest thing we can ever do is being in the wrong place at the right time for somebody else.

Hey, JUST A MOMENT–notice where you’re at, where you want to be and who you’re there for in the place that you are right now. And when you’re not being utilized,  put yourself safely away so that you could be available for the very next time!
FIND YOUR WAY TO BE WHERE YOU’RE NEEDED
WHEN YOU’RE NEEDED.       .       .
(even when it feels  OUT  OF  PLACE)

THE VILLAGE

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This video guts me. It filets me in a way that makes me more aware of what I should be aware of and maybe what I shouldn’t be aware of as much.

Most of the time when I stand up for the LGBTQ Community in any of its forms, I’m often asked, “Is there somebody in your family that’s like that?”  The generalize thought is that would be a reason why I should stand up for somebody that’s different than me, somebody who’s life and lifestyle I will never be able to understand or on my best day, comprehend.  Somehow the thought is, “Well, I could maybe understand if someone close to you lives this kind of lifestyle or why they chose it and you’re showing support”  Uh, NO, NO, when you interacted with those who live such lives and the people who love and support them suffer, you’d know it’s anything but a choosing anyone would purposely put themselves through and yet, STILL, THE ASKINGS.          .          .
I am also asked what’s your most difficult kind of funeral to conduct and my knee-jerk reaction often is a baby, especially one that may be premature; but in my heart of hearts, I think again the one the ones that get me the most are not suicides but suicide because somebody is different sexually, and a family member or members or society can’t accept that and they find no other way to cope, but to die, to commit suicide.
So yes, there’s somebody in my family that’s different,  just like there’s somebody in your family that’s different, just like everybody in the world is different and so now I have to choose, will I be different too and maybe more importantly will I treat people differently because of my differences?
QUESTIONS, CLASS?
Uhhhhh.    .   .if it takes a Village
.        .       .maybe it really takes a
BETTER ONE!

What say YOU?

EVERYDAYNESSES

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“A flat tire. An extra fee tacked on to a hotel bill. A cracked screen on your phone. A bike stolen from your garage. A large charge that they won’t refund. A deal blown up by a missed email.

Nobody likes these things. But does anyone think that a life without them is possible?

No, of course not. We understand that sometimes you get ripped off. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes stuff falls apart on the one-yard line.

Ok, then why are you so upset? You know it’s a statistical certainty, a basic fact of life. Yet here you are, cursing it as if it’s unfair. As if you’ve been singled out. Instead of just accepting it, instead of just saying to yourself as Marcus Aurelius tried to say of shameless people (who he also believed were a statistical inevitability), ok this is one of those people. Don’t ask for the impossible, he said, don’t get upset that someone who was bound to exist, exists or that something that was bound to happen, has happened.

We can’t escape it. We can only accept it…and be grateful that it’s rarer than it could be.”
When I read this in a random DAILY STOIC post I started wondering why I don’t like it when bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason or any catchy rhyming, especially to this trying-so-hard-to-be-a-better-person striving to do good for good.         .           .
B  U  T .      .     .the sacred isn’t always what you think it is or where you think you can find it.     .      .Embrace your EVERYDAYNESSESS
Now about that flat tire, well right after the leaky pipe but before the locked keys in the car or the lost credit card that I swear I put in my secret SECRET place and my pen, my Montblanc Pen.        .        .

Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst: 
BRING YOUR EVERYDAYNESSES
TO YOUR
EVERYTHINGNESSESS
ENCHANTMENT ABOUNDS
(and be the Caring Catalyst you are but rarely recognize)

JUST A MOMENT: FINDING THE SACRED

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Maybe the question isn’t so much where do you find the sacred, the holy as much as where does it find you? Just where is the isn’t the sacred, or at least, what you call it?  Whatever you find holy, wherever you find sacred, whatever feeds your soul and gives meaning to you, don’t let any label like the sacred or the holy or the religious or the spiritual or the essence or the energy take you away from it.         .           .
WHEN YOU FIND THE SACRED
you feel Peace
WHEN THE SACRED FINDS YOU
you become Peace

THE THING ABOUT KINDNESS

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Simple Acts of Kindness can change the people we become. When we take the time to support other’s needs, we create habits of change and here’s the real clincher,
WE BECOME BETTER

Here’s a thing about kindness: It’s only a word!  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really nice word but words don’t do much these days and they don’t get us too far down the road; they kind of leave us in an alleyway, don’t they? Dark.  Dingy.  Not always a comforting place to be at midnight with a few streetlights missing.

I mean come on, they’re just words, but when a word like KINDNESS becomes a verb that’s right, verb is just a word too. But when our KINDNESS puts on tennis shoes and workout clothes it all of the sudden becomes kindness is an action. though, When KINDNESS becomes something we do, it really defines who we are.  And then PRESTO:  We just don’t become different but everyone who’s shore our ripple hits and crashes down upon becomes different and a little bit better, too.

IF they become more than just words.          .          .

A GIFT OF TITANIC PROPORTIONS

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When the Titanic sank, it carried millionaire John Jacob Astor IV. The money in his bank account was enough to build 30 Titanics. However, faced with mortal danger, he chose what he deemed morally right and gave up his spot in a lifeboat to save two frightened children.

Millionaire Isidor Straus, co-owner of the largest American chain of department stores, “Macy’s,” who was also on the Titanic, said:

“I will never enter a lifeboat before other men.”

His wife, Ida Straus, also refused to board the lifeboat, giving her spot to her newly appointed maid, Ellen Bird. She decided to spend her last moments of life with her husband.

These wealthy individuals preferred to part with their wealth, and even their lives, rather than compromise their moral principles. Their choice in favor of moral values highlighted the brilliance of human civilization and human nature.


Just when I think I’ve
G        I        V        E        N
a five dollar bill to someone standing on a corner with an unreadable sign
a paid for Starbucks order to the car behind me
a meal for an elderly couple who held hands during their dinner
a well-intentioned compliment
I don’t think I know the real definition.            .            . YOU?

Maybe when you put a
D          O          L          L          A          R
amount of what you
G            I            V            E
you haven’t shared much at all.     .     .      ?

WAIT A MOMENT: LIFE AS A VENDING MACHINE

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Life is a lot like a vending machine
It’s really simple
You put your money in
For exchange of what you want
Simple
Easy
Until it’s not
Sometimes no matter what buttons you push, you don’t get what you expect
Or worst yet
You get nothing at all
No matter how much you pound
No matter how much you shake
No matter what kind of prayer you pray that you won’t pray on Sunday
You don’t get
What you paid for?
What you deserved?
What you expected
What you are owed
Sometimes life is exactly like a vending machine
And you get exactly what you paid for
And maybe
Maybe somebody else paid for
And they didn’t get
But you did
For the money
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
The next time
L  I  F  E
feels like a Vending Machine
make sure you press the
Right Buttons
to get exactly what you Select
because you just can’t get
ONE THING
when you choose something
completely
D I F F E R E N T
(then again, maybe that’s what makes LIFE advertously tasty?)
Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man