The Vibrant Channeled Creator

FRIDAY JUNE 16TH, 2023
“Perseverance is remaining in goodness. Let us ask ourselves: what is my perseverance like? Am I constant, or do I live faith, justice and charity according to the moment: I pray if I feel like it; I am fair, willing and helpful if it suits me; whereas if I am dissatisfied, if no one thanks me, do I stop? Do my prayer and service depend on circumstances or on a heart that is steadfast in the Lord? If we persevere — Jesus reminds us — we have nothing to fear, even in the sad and ugly events of life, even in the evil we see around us, because we remain grounded in the good”
Pope Francis

TUESDAY JUNE 13TH, 2023
“The Eucharist calls us to love God before everything & our brothers & sisters. This Bread is the Sacrament par excellence of love. Christ offers Himself and breaks Himself for us, & asks us to do likewise, so that our life might become bread that feeds our brothers and sisters.”
Pope Francis

the crown and thorns

the horizontal and vertical cross

the whip and the sword

the death and the life

the spirit and isolation

the sweat and the blood

the bread broken

self love and sister love

surrender and transformation

by JP

MONDAY JUNE 12TH, 2023
“This is the prayer that I suggest to you today. “Lord, that I might see and have compassion just like you see me and have compassion on me” — that we might have compassion on those whom we encounter along the way, above all on those who suffer and are in need, to draw near to them and do what we can do to give them a hand.”
Pope Francis

SUNDAY JUNE 11TH, 2023
“In the Eucharist, everyone can experience this loving and concrete attention of the Lord. Those who receive the Body and Blood of Christ with faith not only eat but are satisfied. To eat and to be satisfied: these are two basic necessities that are fulfilled in the Eucharist. Adoring the Body and Blood of Christ, let us ask him with our heart: “Lord, give me the daily bread to go forward, Lord, satisfy me with your presence!”
Pope Francis

Barack Obama

Barack Obama 6/11/23 Inc.This Morning

Advice for Success

“I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated at explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed,” he explained. “But what I’m always looking for is, no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.'”

Let me take care of that. In most instances, your customer, or investor, or boss doesn’t need or want to know why a problem is challenging or how it came about. What they do want to know is that the problem will be solved, and that they can rely on you to solve it. If you project that attitude that whatever it is, you can handle it–and then you do handle it–that will make you stand out, he said. “People will notice, ‘That’s somebody who can get something done,'” he said. 
Choose what you want to do, not what you want to be
Obama shared a second excellent piece of advice: “Worry more about what you want to do than what you want to be.” He often encounters people who want to be a member of Congress by the age of 30, or have made a certain amount of money by a certain age, he said. Those are certainly good goals. But while it’s great to focus on your desired end result, it’s also important to ask yourself if you’ll enjoy doing the work to get there. 

For example, an aspiring entrepreneur may dream of heading up a billion-dollar company someday, without thinking about the hours and years of working and scrambling it takes to start a company and build it to that level. When my book Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work came out, many people who had never written much of anything told me they wanted to write a book too. What they really meant was that they wanted to have a book with their name on it, do book signings, and other things that go with having a book come out. I’m not sure they would enjoy spending the hundreds of hours of sitting alone in a room researching and writing that it takes to create a book. They were focused on the results, not the process it took to get there. 
But, whether you start a business or write a book or do something else entirely, the process is how you’ll spend most of your time. So, Obama says, it’s best if it’s something that really appeals to you. “The people I find that are most successful are the people who say, ‘I’m really interested in computers and figuring this stuff out.’ And then they end up being a Bill Gates,” Obama said. Or, he said, they’re really interested in curing some disease. They may or may not win the Nobel Prize, but they love their careers because they were interested in the thing itself.
If you choose work that you find absorbing, “you’re going to get really good at it,” he said. “And whether you’re recognized or rewarded, or you get the positions that you want or not, the journey will have been a good one.”

SATURDAY JUNE 10TH, 2023
“God is Father and looks after you like a father. As the best of fathers, he does not look at the achievements you have not yet reached, but the fruits you can still bear. He does not keep track of your shortcomings but encourages your potential. He does not dwell on your past, but confidently bets on your future. This is because God is close to us. He is close with mercy and tenderness. In this way, God accompanies us: with closeness, mercy, and tenderness.”
Pope Francis

“I know that I have less to live than I have lived.
I feel like a child who was given a box of chocolates. He enjoys eating it, and when he sees that there is not much left, he starts to eat them with a special taste.
I have no time for endless lectures on public laws – nothing will change. And there is no desire to argue with fools who do not act according to their age. And there’s no time to battle the gray. I don’t attend meetings where egos are inflated and I can’t stand manipulators.
I am disturbed by envious people who try to vilify the most capable to grab their positions, talents and achievements.
I have too little time to discuss headlines – my soul is in a hurry.
Too few candies left in the box.
I’m interested in human people. People who laugh at their mistakes are those who are successful, who understand their calling and don’t hide from responsibility. Who defends human dignity and wants to be on the side of truth, justice, righteousness. This is what living is for.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of others. Who, through the blows of fate, was able to rise and maintain the softness of the soul.
Yes, I hustle, I hustle to live with the intensity that only maturity can give. I’ll eat all the candy I have left – they’ll taste better than the ones I already ate.
My goal is to reach the end in harmony with myself, my loved ones and my conscience.
I thought I had two lives, but it turned out to be only one, and it needs to be lived with dignity.”
Brilliant Anthony Hopkins
and free interpretation of Mario de Andrade’s poem

With age comes wisdom.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 7TH, 2023
“God loves us while we are sinners, not because we are good or able to give something back to him. God’s love is a love that is always in excess, it always goes beyond calculation, always disproportionate. And today he also asks us to live in this way, because only in this way will we truly bear witness to him.”
Pope Francis

TUESDAY JUNE 6TH, 2023
“Our God is communion of love: this is how Jesus revealed him to us. And do you know how we can remember this? With the simplest gesture, which we learnt as children: the sign of the cross. With the sign of the cross, we remind ourselves how much God loved us, to the point of giving his life for us; and we repeat to ourselves that his love envelops us completely.”
Pope Francis

Red Never Lasts
by Anya Krugovoy Silver
There’s no doubt it’s the most glamorous,

the one you reach for first—its luscious gloss.

Russian Roulette, First Dance, Apéritif, Cherry Pop.

For three days, your nails are a Ferris wheel,

a field of roses, a flashing neon Open sign.

Whatever you’re wearing feels like a tight dress

and your hair tousles like Marilyn’s on the beach.

But soon, after dish washing, typing, mopping,

the chips begin, first at the very tips and edges

where you hardly notice, then whole shards.

Eventually, the fuss is too much to maintain.

Time to settle in to the neutral tones.

Baby’s Breath, Curtain Call, Bone.

“Red Never Lasts” by Anya Krugovoy Silver from from nothing. © Louisiana State University Press, 2016.

Your relationship to food is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. No matter how sophisticated, wise, or enlightened you believe you are, how you eat tells all.
During this recorded workshop, you will begin to understand what prompts you to eat when you aren’t hungry and the steps to ending obsession (and the absolute freedom and joy of that).
You’ll learn the 3 Key Shifts that thousands of women have gone through to achieve their natural weight and make a lasting change in their relationship with food and their bodies.
Rather than getting rid of your conflicted relationship with food, you will become aware of what’s standing in your way:

•  Understand Why the Shape of Your Body Obeys the Shape of Your Beliefs: We starve and stuff, we binge and diet. Not just with food, but with our very life force. But a belief is just a thought you’ve thunk thousands of time; it is not necessarily true. Learn to identify these limiting beliefs and explore what is true now.
• Learn the “If Love Could Speak” Guidelines: Not a diet, not a set of rules, these Guidelines help you to listen to your body, treat it with loving kindness, and feed it what it truly wants. The Eating Guidelines are a proven, direct way to lose weight.
• Disengage from the Voice that You Believe Tells the Truth: If beating yourself up with the inner critic in your head led to change, you’d already be perfect. Learn how to separate from that Voice and treat yourself with love and kindness.
• Work Through Life’s Challenges: No feeling or situation is unworkable. Not heartbreak, not grief, not sadness, not loneliness, not anger. Anything can be felt, sensed, worked through. By inquiring into feelings and beliefs, you can look into and see what is really beneath those compulsions. One taste of this direct knowing and nothing can ever be the same.
  Let this be the moment you make the SHIFT with food … and so much more. (written by Geneen Roth)

“In God we trust” is on currency, prayers are said at official events, we’re a Judeo-Christian culture and it’s woven into the fabric of things. Public schools can’t teach American history cleansed of Christian references. I think posting the T.C. on classroom walls is a piece of political silliness but if they do it, well, it makes for interesting reading — “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is not a bad idea: a purely materialistic view of reality does not come down in favor of honesty, only of self-preservation. I’m in favor of doing what needs to be done to keep assault weapons out of the hands of wackos who go into schools and shoot little kids. Thou shalt not kill. Do that and I don’t care what you write on the wall so long as you don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

Garrison Keillor

6/5/23

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.
Some libs wanted the White House to be renamed the Big House but I was not one of them. I simply feel that the nation should make good on its debts and if the Repubs want to tinker with American culture, good luck. It’s like trying to replace Tina Turner with Ted Turner: it ain’t gonna work, buddy. Making war against the culture is punching the air. We are a curious, lively, rambunctious people. Freedom has a big effect on people and it’s hard to squelch it, you pound on the bubbles and they pop up elsewhere.

I am not putting down the Repubs; some of my best friends, etc. I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of reason, certainly not an octagon or Oregon. Utter stupidity has been a recurrent fact in my life and now and then I find myself reviewing the Five Dumbest Things I’ve Done, which is brutal punishment but it does highlight the Five Luckiest, which take me into the realm of gratitude.
I was married twice before to women who were near total strangers, back when I imagined romance to be a mystery, the more mysterious the better, and in 1987 I did the No. 1 Dumbest when I gave up a radio show I dearly loved in order to make a woman happy — a woman who had married me imagining it would make her happy and it didn’t, of course, and I knew it was a mistake the night I announced my departure on the radio, and I sat in the kitchen with a friend and he said, “I think you should change your mind. You’d make a lot of people happy.” I didn’t do it. That was No. 2.
I’ve lost money on every real estate transaction I’ve done: if I told you the whole story you’d introduce legislation to put me under guardianship. I’ve thrown fistfuls of money into the wind but you can hire smart people to keep you away from the cliff. I am illiterate about the Christian faith that I subscribe to but I feel that God forgives this. Any third grader knows more about the natural world than I do and yet some very smart people are somewhat fond of me.
No, I’m referring to Dumbness in its pure form, when you walk with complete confidence into a brick wall and you don’t learn from this that bricks are solid, solider than flesh.
But stupidity has given me sympathy for other knuckleheads and also admiration for the beautiful competence of American medicine, which has extended my life dramatically, making it possible for me to beat myself up for my mistakes and not just take up space in a cemetery. And eventually it leads to this beautiful revelation: I will never be so dumb again. I’m too old and I adore the woman I married who is also my best-informed critic. This is an outcome devoutly to be wished for.
In the extra time that medical ingenuity has granted me, I intend to walk carefully, mind my manners, do my work, embrace friendship, sleep with my beloved critic, and put aside enmity and grudges and biases. Eighty is too old to be angry. Even seventy is.
Garrison Keillor 5/31/23