Branny Boo!!

I can't believe my baby is 9 months old!!! He is the sweetest thing! All my babies have been sweet, happy babies...but there is just something about him. He is so content just to "BE". He acts like it is the best thing in the world just to be noticed. Here are some pictures from his six month shoot.

He is now crawling, babbling, shaking his head no-no, and pulling up. He also had surgery this month. He was a trooper to say the least!! :)

Sweet and Sassy

Sweet and Sass!!! That's what these two are made of! :)




I love this picture of Lorelei...it pretty much sums her up! She likes to have fun and is FULL of SASS!!! She's my very own Eloise...except, unfortunately, she does not get to live in the Plaza! ;)

What a sweetie pie. Drew is such a rule follower. He likes to know exactly what he's supposed to do, or how to play, or what is expected of him. This quality is going to make him a great man, just like his daddy. I'm glad Lorelei and Brannen have him as a big brother. I'm sure the two of them will stress him to the limit, but he'll be a great role model and advisary! :)

When Lilacs Bloom

When Lilacs Bloom

We're still here. 

Had visitors this month - an unexpected charming handful!

 I am so often easy to please - in the driver's seat. 

Safe Families for Children remind me of my need to trust and let go.

Let go, and let God. 

 That Asher: he's a handful of happiness. 

 Then there's happy, delicious, which Miss C baked, and we ate!

 He's been busy on Grandpa provided projects,

 and many many hours of spring soccer. 

 For someone's 12th birthday we had red-neck sushi.

It's a deep fried tempura battered pork roll with sweet sauce.

 He acquired his ham radio license!

 Yes, that cake was dry; it was.

Can't win em' all. 

The hat - it's a birthday must. 

She spent much of her spring building a Mars Axel. The Axel is the next generation rover to go to Mars. She also wrote a 7 page paper and did an amazing slide show presentation. So proud of her hard work.

It's May and a bit of warmth embraces us. The rains still fall, but the garden is tilled and ready to go. I will plunk plants in ground this weekend. She's intent on summer blooms.

We are working to finish school and STEM work strong and keep engaging with Safe Families. Don't know where my writing has gone, but searching for it this summer. 

Read a few books this winter. Ayn Rand Nation really got my attention. Here's a few more which spoke loud: Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Oceans, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms our Intuition, Leaders Eat Last, There is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know, The Wood for the Trees, and The Zookeeper's Wife. 

We also enjoyed these this winter:McFarland, USA, Hidden Figures, and The Queen of Katwe.

Break the Walls

The Wall

So what can I do? is a question artists often ask themselves related to the difficult social issues of our time. Especially with a seemingly intractable issue like the Israel-Palestine conflict, or more appropriately, the struggle of the Palestinian people for justice. Last night at the Lark Theatre Center in New York, the Break the Wall Theatre Project provided one valuable answer to that question. 

Inspired by the controversy around Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Jewish_Children), and Churchill’s making the play available for free for performance by anyone (you can read the whole text here:https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza), Ismail Khalidi and David Zellnik have conceived and produced their own project, Break the Wall.

Conceptually, BTW refers both to the wall of separation built by Israel but also the fourth wall between stage and audience. BTW  intends to break through these walls. 

It’s first stage, celebrated by the launch, invited a variety of playwrights to write short plays on the struggle. All the resulting plays will be made available in an online archive for any who would like to perform them. The goal is to gather 50 plays within a year.

The plays presented Monday night were illustrative of the values that drive the project. There were common threads that run through all the plays. Among these is  the importance of approaching the issue through interpersonal relationships. Each play  (with one exception, Yussef El Guindi’s the Monologuist), is essentially a painful conversation about the issue between people who care about each other. The plays suggest that it is in the intensity of these conversations, as opposed to dialectical debate, that some understanding might come. 

That of course, is another recurring theme. The ongoing struggle of Palestinians to even be heard, let alone understood, even by people who are emotionally involved with each other at one level or another flowed through the plays.

Perhaps most importantly, the plays demand that we give up a balanced view. That in a situation with such an overwhelming imbalance of power …military, economic and political….a balanced view is morally untenable. It is to the credit of these artists that this point is made through the art, not through didactic moralism. You understand by being drawn into the relationships. 

While all the plays are of comparable quality, I went because of a long relationship with playwright Stan Richardson (co-founder of the Representatives .. http://therepresentatives.org/). Several of Stan’s plays have been produced at West Park, including the recent Edinburgh Fringe festival bound production of Private Manning goes to Washington.) Stan’s contribution, the Montagues, uses his typical command of relational conversation and the connections and gaps between us ending in his two characters’ passionate plea for help. In other words, exactly where we are. And  he doesn’t tell us what help means. We’ve got to figure that out. 

(It was also good to see longtime West Park friend Lynne Marie Rosenberg in several plays. She was a key cast member of the Woodshed Collective’s ground breaking immersive production of the Tenant that helped reopen West Park. http://www.woodshedcollective.com/the-tenant/)

Thanks to BTW for this demonstration of what artists can do in the struggle for justice while staying true to their art. The plays are there to read…and perform…in the theatre, in homes, in church, in the street…

For information about Break the Wall...and scripts...go 

Cowardice and Apathy

The primary reason why Ireland is in such a deprived state today, apart from our forgetting of God, is that we have grown apathetic to the thoughts of our ancestors, and grown cowardly when faced with criticism.

The majority of Irishmen today, if someone were to insult their country, would far more likely to be in agreement with our enemies rather than speak of the virtues of our culture and civilisation. Whether they have grown cynical with regards to the reprobate and corrupt political class which seems to endlessly rule our nation without real fear that the political establishment would be overturned should they act poorly, the real mask and true curse of national democracy, or they have seen enough of the vices of their fellow Irishman that they would have no issue with calling down curses upon himself and his neighbour so long as the foreigner would approve.

Now, a certain amount of introspection and criticism of one's faults and that of one's nation is good and healthy, in fact it is one of the perennial virtues of the Irish people that we had this measure of humility as a people, and it is probably one of the factors that helped us keep our virtues and our identity throughout centuries of deprivation. But when one is faced with an enemy on the battlefield, or a stranger at the marketplace, does one denounce and deride his commander and brothers in arms in full view and hearing of the enemy? Does one tell the stranger that his wares are sub-par, that he is a cheat, that his brothers are a cheat and that the stranger should not buy from him or his ilk and think this manner of pitch is wise and humorous?

No sane man of any other nation would do so. Yet the Irishman does. Why?

In my last blogpost I made the case that to get to the Irishman, the world had to tug at his insecurities, and relentlessly hammer home on his faults and failings of the past, to ignore and damn the good virtues and deeds so that in the eyes of the Irishman, he sees that the world can only see his faults and failings, and in time, that is all the Irishman can see too. And so the Irish have become scrupulous to the point of not seeing the forest for the trees. Nationalism is derided, tradition is considered worthless, history is forgotten, and the only thing that the Irish care about is not even their own material wellbeing, but whether the state's material well being in the economy is good.

When a poor man suddenly wins the lottery, he has no idea how to live with that kind of money, and more often than not, finds himself back out onto the street before he knew it. That is the state Ireland is in today, the Celtic Tiger years was a faustian bargain that flooded a historically poor nation with easy, free money but now Irishmen live in debt and deprivation without even the comforts or cultural familiarity that their grandparents had in their day to ease their suffering. And we do not see our suffering is the result of our sins and so we cannot see the trap that we are in, only accept the suffering and think this is the way of things. Our Scrupulosity has been turned into self loathing and we have lost sight of God.

And so the ferocious enemy laughs as they wipe us from the field of battle and the Wiley stranger manipulates our self hatred and guilt into giving up our wares not only for free, but to the point where we owe the stranger interest for the privilege of having our treasures pilfered by him.

This is not the end, the enemy will not rest until St. Patrick is dishonoured and every snake he banished from this fair Emerald at the End of the World comes to rest and strangle us and our cribs lie desolate and fallow. There is one thing our politicians have proven themselves weak towards in their cowardice and apathy, and that is shame. If you want to change in the Republic without overthrowing the democracy and without violence, you must shame them, shame them worse then any criticism of the foreigner, shame them worse than their own cold hearts could bear. Break them with your words so that if nothing else, they will show themselves for the snakes they really are. Or else they will repent, and change their ways.

Stop worrying about the economy, it is never going to be what it once was, we may be prosperous in the future, but it will not come about the same way as the false prosperity that ruined us, and it won't be coming any time soon. Many things need to be changed in Ireland before a man can open up a store and not worry about having to close it in three months time because he cannot pay his rates and his customer's wages do not give them the money to spare in order to give him the means to do so. Not a single iota of this will change the more we worry about the 'high' economy of stocks that only benefits bankers and large corporations but not men. When we change the focus and let the large trees unfit to stand on their own strength fall, the sooner new trees can grow to replace them in the forest.

Do not worry about our debt, we have as of now, already paid the full sum and again of what we owed in 2008 when the world stopped turning. They have not let us off the leash of the Troika and they never will. In fact of all the PIGS nations, Ireland has been the most industrious in trying to pay off its debt, if honouring our debts mattered a damn to them, we'd already be free. Sooner or later we will have to either leave the Union or default on our odious debt, or both. This is inevitable, we will have to suffer the consequences.

Do not worry about the migrant invasion in Europe, for all its horrors, our duty is to look after our own shores and borders. We must have our own house in order before we can begin worrying about the neighbour's house, we're no good to them if we become as flooded as they are.

Do not worry about wars or rumours of wars in the near east or elsewhere, worry instead about the silent war waged upon the entire Irish nation from the shadows of the airwaves and the radio, upon your ancestors, yourselves and your children. You will not raise men fit enough to be soldiers if you do not take care to protect your children from poison meant to weaken them.

Do not worry abut the Pope, pray for him, always, and pray especially for the bishops, cardinals and priests, but a certain degree of detachment from Church affairs is necessary in order to ease your anxiety and help you see clearly what you can actually do. Subsidiarity has always applied in the Church since ancient times, work on your parish level and do what you can do, leave the rest to God.

And above all do not despair. Despair is why we are where we are right now, and despair is what will keep us in chains. You have the blood of kings in your veins and the hearts of warriors in your breasts and, God willing, the souls of Saints. You are descended from the stuff of legends and you are destined to become the songs of heroes.

Act like it. The rest will take care of itself.

Face The Music

Dear lovely people,

Salmonella was downcast when we met that afternoon, her physique bore all imprints of a soul that had been psychologically stressed almost beyond limits. We had just been served two glasses of carrot juices, and I asked her what the problem was. I wanted to know why she looked like somebody who had been through a round rubbing tournament with all the devils in hell.

Unexpectedly, she burst out into tears, bawling terribly and almost going into fits. I sat there as if cast out of cement and struggled to give her a napkin at the same time, wondering why such a beauty would break into tears when I thought life was treating her well.

She told me, she’s read almost all of my articles, she’s attended my motivational speaking events and was trying her possible best to implement what she had learned but paradoxically, she’s been through all the troubles one can imagine. Her businesses are crumbling every day, her workers are disappointing her one after the other, her family is on her throat with all versions of disputes and worst still, she’s been through some relationships that were fashioned to ruin her than uplift her.

It all sounded like I was bracing up for motivational championship. I began with a question that brought the tears streaming down her cheeks to a complete stop. “What kind of life have you been leading?” she looked at me, deemed her eyes and ask the obvious “Do you mean living or leading?” and my response was instantaneous “both are correct”.

It turns out that Salmonella is one of those who think that when your income base starts increasing, it means you should forget some principles you had set for yourself when you were still struggling. She no longer did her check and balances, she would give-in to the least pressure and though every issues could be settled with banknotes. Her businesses no longer had the same attention she gave it in the past, was no longer that critical, matter-of-fact person she used to be. The outcome was that she allowed seemingly little things to build up overtime to become major barricades to the extent she could no longer manage them.

The fact is that we all want success in life but most people often forget that success is not necessarily measured in terms of the banknotes we have stored away in bank accounts. When the success you seek comes, you don’t have to forget about that once focused and in-control-person that you had always been. You just have to maintain your operations under control least they start working to your own disfavor. If you marry your quest for success with blind-rocking and docility, you will at one moment face the music you have intoned.

Your climb up the mountain of success and personal achievement can be tough and bone wrecking but once up there, you must keep it at the center of your mind that your fall down even beyond the bottom can be so quick and lethal that you will left with no nerve to bounce back. Maintaining yourself at the summit then becomes a full-time job.

When All Hope Seems Lost

Dear lovely people,

When David’s bus left Douala that morning, it was clear in his mind that it was over with Dorothy. He relaxed in the comfort of a 72 seater bus and allowed his mind to wonder back to some of the difficult moments he had been through with Dorothy. He remembered clearly that a lot had happened between them added to the distance and that all his efforts to save the relationship was futile.

David, knew he was part of the problem. He had never found a way to forgive Dorothy since the day he met her embracing another man at the entrance of a hotel in Douala. To him that was the foundation of their chain of difficulties. He was still pensive when a waiter shook him to remind him that they arrived the bus stop in Yaounde, it was amazing to realize he had been buried in thoughts throughout the four-hour journey.

Boarding a taxi, he decided to go straight home, take a bath before going to his automobile spare parts shop. On the way, his phone rang and when he answered the call, he felt like jumping through the window of the taxi to end it all. His brother was at the other end of the line, telling him that his shop was subject of an ongoing conflagration. By the time he got to the scene, everything he had so worked for was reduced to ashes.

From all counts, this was another tough blow on David in one day, his emotional and professional worlds were crashing in on him at the same time. I am not sure what is up with you now but does David’s story sound familiar? You might have gone through such, going through such or know somebody who has gone through or is going through such evidently horrible trials.

Whatever the situation you might find yourself in, let me talk to you about three things essential in bouncing back after a major setback as the one David found himself in after all, bouncing back is what makes the difference between losers and winners.

Firstly, you should let yourself fully feel the emotions. Faced with a major failure in your life, you may be overcome with disappointment, and despair. Holding in your painful feelings can have negative effects on your health, your relationships, and your future success. Rather take time off to notice each emotion as it comes to you. Take time to name the emotion, be it anger, sadness, fear, or shame. This will enable you to work through it without blaming it on yourself or others. It’s equally important that you take time to process your feelings. If you try to fix or move past your disappointment before knowing how you feel; you may act rashly.

Secondly, work to address the cause of the failure. What went wrong and how did it go wrong? Could it have been prevented? Think about possible solutions you could have put into action, and what their consequences would have been. Were your initial expectations unrealistic? For example if you were disappointed in love as was the case with David, ask yourself if you were putting unusual pressure or expectations on your romantic partner. Did you understand how they were feeling throughout the relationship? Did you support their projects and friendships?

Thirdly, change your approach and try again. Brainstorm ideas and select the one that seems durable. Ask yourself if you have the resources to put your new plan into place. What new problems are likely to come up? How will you solve them? What needs to be in place before you begin? This is the time when you must avoid repeating the same mistakes. Your new approach should not include any of the strategies that may have caused your last approach to fail.

It is equally important that you create a plan B. Even well-executed approaches can fail due to unforeseen complications. With your new goal set, and your new plan solidified, set out to achieve your goal. Take the time to reflect on your progress as your steps take effect. Feel free to change your approach. You are learning as you go, and a natural part of this process is to adjust and tweak your approach.