The Vibrant Channeled Creator

SUNDAY, MARCH 12TH, 2023
 “The missionary zeal of the believer expresses itself as a creative search for new ways of proclaiming and witnessing, new ways of encountering the wounded humanity that Christ took on. In short, of new ways of serving the Gospel and serving humanity. Evangelization is a service. If a person says that he is an evangelizer, and does not have that attitude, that servant’s heart, and believes himself to be a master, he is not an evangelizer, no … he is wretched.”
Pope Francis

Keep on persevering with your health and fitness journey.

The tarot card of the day is the Seven of Wands.
The Seven of Wands is a card that represents a tremendous amount of effort getting put into something. It shows that you have been, or are ready to, commit to a goal to better yourself and that you have the perseverance and willpower to do so.

The Seven of Wands is here today because you may have recently thought about committing to a health and fitness plan. If not, it’s a sign that you may want to begin thinking about doing so. The Seven of Wands says that there’s no problem with bettering yourself. There is always room for improvement.
Why is it vital to keep your body in a healthy shape?
The Seven of Wands wants you to live your best life. It also wants you to push yourself towards improvement, even if it’s only one baby step at a time.
Keeping yourself healthy and taking care of your body is essential, as you only have one, says the Seven of Wands. Making healthy choices such as eating healthy and partaking in physical fitness is always necessary. The sooner you start, the sooner you reap the benefits of it.
The Seven of Wands also wants you to know that the benefits of health and fitness are long-term. As you age, keeping up with healthy habits and a regular fitness schedule can help prevent many problems in the future regarding your health.

Why is a fitness regimen important?
Fitness and adequate exercise are essential to living a healthy lifestyle. Besides eating a healthy diet and staying away from toxins, maintaining a solid fitness plan is important for keeping your body in the best shape possible.
The Seven of Wands wants you to make sure that you’re partaking in regular fitness activities regularly. This is because of all the benefits of doing so, both short-term and long-term.
The short term benefits of fitness:

• Within one hour after exercise, your blood sugar levels will be lowered.
• You will have much more energy throughout the day.
• You will be able to keep up your strength throughout the day.
• Your stress and anxiety levels will significantly be lower.
• It prevents you from experiencing fatigue.
• It will allow you to have a better sleep at night.

The long term benefits of fitness:

• You will be able to maintain a healthy weight.
• Reduces your risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
• Lowers your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
• It keeps your bones and muscles strong and prevents them from deteriorating.
• Improves your mental health and overall mood.
• May decrease the risk of developing certain types of cancer.
• Your chances of living longer will improve.
  How can you persevere on your health and fitness journey?
  The Seven of Wands knows that you have the strength and determination to persevere on your health and fitness journey. Here are some tips on how you can do it.

Take it one step at a time.
When trying to improve your health, it is best to begin with only one thing at a time.
For example, instead of completely changing your diet and cutting out all of the things you’re used to eating, cut out only one thing at a time. After your body adjusts to that one small change, begin to make another one.
It’s okay to start with baby steps.
It’s okay to start with just baby steps when you’re new to fitness and want to increase your physical activity. You don’t need to go out and run a marathon right off the bat.
It could be as simple as taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator or going for a brief 10-minute walk every day. You can increase it as your body adjust and build up to reaching your end health and fitness goal.

color pulls my favorites together

outlines the rows

horizontal and vertical

claws and toes

purrs, tail sleeping

dreams and knows

feline things

who is Queen

on international women’s day.

March 11, 2023

all rights

jp

at Fox Hollows where one can get free of the electronic screen and renew relationship of 25 years

Mothers. Mothering. Wow.

When I talked to my mother a few days ago, she was happy. At peace. Still.My activity was keeping tabs on her feeling state and being hyper-vigilant about intuiting what needed to be done so that she could be happy. And I could be safe.It never worked, of course, because it wasn’t up to me. I’m out of that job now and it feels like the door of the cage I didn’t realize I was in flew open. Oh, I think to myself, this is what it’s like to have a mother who is self-regulating. Who doesn’t depend on me for anything except to say “hi darling, how are you.” And as much as that freedom is startling after 71 years, what is equally as startling is her ability to drop who she was to be this new person she is. Which, I realize, means dropping any kind of resistance to her situation. “The food is awful,” she says. “But that’s fine. My table mate picks her nose and burps louder than a locomotive. Oh, and she picks her teeth at the table. But oh well.”I’ve been quoting Stephen Levine for years who said that “hell is wanting to be somewhere other than where you are.” Even when she was happily married, my mother wanted more. More money. A different house. More clothes. More vacations. More jewelry. More love. There was a hunger in her that nothing ever satisfied. Now I see that it was, in part, because she was always looking out there to fill something in here. But when she dropped the resistance and chose to have what she already had, the suffering disappeared. When I want to know what it looks like to stop saying “This isn’t it” and “No, I want something else,” I have my mother to remind me. Wow.I am amazed at both her happiness and the effect it has on me. I don’t ever remember when I was not her best friend, her confidante, her wise counsel. Well, maybe before I could talk but even then (I started talking before I was a year old) there was a felt sense of her loneliness and deep unhappiness and I took it upon myself to make her better. Some kids might have distracted themselves, gotten involved with other activities.

FIRDAY, MARCH 3RD, 2023
 “The words Jesus addresses to us in the Gospel are demanding, and seem paradoxical: he invites us to turn the other cheek and to love even our enemies (cf. Mt 5:38-48). It is normal for us to love those who love us, and to be friends of those who are friends to us; yet Jesus provokes us by saying: if you act in this way, “what more are you doing than others?” (v. 47). What more are you doing ? Here is the point to which I would like to draw your attention today, on this what more are you doing that is extraordinary.”

Pope Francis

THURSDAY, MARCH 2ND, 2023
 “We have been given forty days, a “favorable time” to remind ourselves that the world is bigger than our narrow personal needs, and to rediscover the joy, not of accumulating material goods, but of caring for those who are poor and afflicted. Let us set out, then, on the path of prayer and use these forty days to restore God’s primacy in our lives and to dialogue with him from the heart, and not only in spare moments. Let us set out on the path of fasting and use these forty days to take stock of ourselves, to free ourselves from the dictatorship of full schedules, crowded agendas and superficial needs, and choose the things that truly matter.
Brothers and sisters, let us not neglect the grace of this holy season, but fix our gaze on the cross and set out, responding generously to the powerful promptings of Lent. At the end of the journey, we will encounter with greater joy the Lord of life, we will meet him, who alone can raise us up from our ashes.”
Pope Francis

Turning
by Joseph Mills

My friend’s kid runs the sideline, gets a pass,

turns, and scores with a kick to the near post.

It’s how the play should go, but at this age

rarely does. My son sprints to him, arms up.

They high five and celebrate a moment,

then turn to jog back to their positions.

Last year, they would have hopped around madly,

twirled, fallen backwards, and rolled in the grass.

This season, they are serious. No more

skipping. No more acting sweetly goofy.

Now, they turn towards one another rather

than towards us. No more checking that we’ve seen.

But we have. We know the score, and what’s lost

as they try to turn themselves into men.

“Turning” by Joseph Mills from This Miraculous Turning. © Press, 53, 2014. Reprinted with permission

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1ST, 2023 “Jesus teaches us to repel the attacks of the devil who, as his name says, wants to sow division in us, between us and God, between us and others. How do we repel him? Not by negotiating with him, but by opposing him in faith with the divine word. (Mt 4:1-11). During Lent we are called to respond to God’s gift by accepting his word, which is “living and active” (Heb 4:12). Regular listening to the Word of God makes us open and docile to his working and bears fruit in our lives.”

Pope Francis

written by Garrison Keillor

Believe it or not, I used to be rather cool. This was before you were born, probably, but I have pictures. I was aloof and enigmatic, unsmiling, and I liked the monosyllabic. Someone said, “It’s a beautiful day today.” I said, “Right.” Flat tone. Irony. My dad was a friendly guy who always made small talk with clerks and waitresses (“So how’s it going then?”), which I found embarrassing and stood apart from him so people wouldn’t know we were related.That was long ago and a person learns by experience and now I’m so far from cool I wouldn’t know it if I saw it. I am an advocate of cheerfulness. I believe in good manners. I like making small talk, just as Dad did.Six a.m. at the MSP airport, a February morning, long lines of sleepy travelers snaking their way toward Security, and I approach the scanner and a TSA lady sees that I haven’t removed my shoes and says, “You’re not over 75, are you?” and I say, “Darling, you’ve made an old man very happy,” and she smiles and says, “My pleasure.” I go through the scanner and a TSA guy pats down my back and underarms and I say, “Are we having fun yet?” and he says, “It’s a laugh a minute.” Two simple exchanges, two moments of fellowship.I’m old enough to remember the pre-terrorist time when you walked uninterrupted to your gate, no questions asked, and now long lines of flyers laden with baggage listen to screeners barking orders and a TSA sniffer dog walks along the line, giving it a prison-camp feel, and this makes it all the more important to be cheerful and say, “Good morning” and “Thank you” to the agent who stops me to search my briefcase and find the little capsules of eyewash.A bleak hour but you say “Good morning” to the clerk at the coffee stand and the gate agent and it improves your own morning inch by inch. I say it to glum young men just like the man I once was and it confuses them.I happen to own a grim gravedigger’s face, the result of growing up with the Book of Revelation, and Jenny reminds me often: “Smile.” So I try.Standing in a long line at 6 a.m. in February is not a unique personal experience. I’ve read stories about Nazi death camps and inmates who did their best to encourage others and maintain their humanity in the face of evil, and when they lost this cheerful urge it meant that their spirit was extinguished and the end was near.I see a young woman head for the conveyor belt and her lurching gait shows some sort of brain injury but she is very focused on putting her stuff in the bins and cleaning out her pockets. She appears to be unaccompanied. She also seems quite proud to be on her own, as she strikes the correct pose in the scanner. The TSA woman pats down her hips and back. The girl follows directions. The TSA woman puts an arm around her and says something and the kid grins.It was a beautiful little scene of civility. If this young woman can make her way cheerfully in the world, then what right do I have to feel abused? None whatsoever. The young woman collecting her stuff at the end of the conveyor is dealing with life cheerfully and this strikes me as the height of heroism.So when I hear a woman behind me say, “This is the last time I fly early in the morning. This is just unbearable” (except she put another word ahead of “unbearable”), I turned and said, “Did you hear about the guy who was afraid of bears in the woods?” She shook her head. “His friend told him that if a bear chases you, just run fast, and if the bear gets close, just reach back and grab a handful and throw it at him. The guy says, ‘A handful of what?’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be there. It’ll be there.’”“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, and then she laughed. It was a real laugh, not just a polite one. She said, “I can’t believe that you told me that joke.” I said that I couldn’t believe it either. She said she was going to Milwaukee to see her brother and she intended to tell him that joke. So we got into a little conversation about Milwaukee. She said, “Have a nice day,” and I said, “I’m having it.”

I was swept away with the technology and high scale tools available in ASR. The team got back to me immediately. They viewed my website,

Thevibrantchanneledcreator.wordpress.com

and deemed my art worthy of their standards.

They will make a website that shows my work, and have me selling successfully with assistance when I need it. Below is a screen grab that I took of a zoom video with a lesson in the pyramid on the 3 things to do to get attention to sell.

Abraham Lincoln
He ended the speech with the words, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, was not present, but had read the speech beforehand; it was, he said, “constructed with a view to accuracy of statement, simplicity of language, and unity of thought. In some respects like a lawyer’s brief, it was logical, temperate in tone, powerful — irresistibly driving conviction home to men’s reasons and their souls.”

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27TH, 2023 “The Church is the community of men and women who believe and proclaim Jesus Christ, but moved by the Holy Spirit, not by their own reason. Yes, you use your reason, but the Spirit comes to enlighten and move it. The Spirit makes us go forth, propels us to proclaim the faith in order to confirm ourselves in the faith, pushes us to go on mission to rediscover who we are. That is why the Apostle Paul recommends: “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thess 5:19). Do not quench the Spirit. Let us pray to the Spirit often, let us invoke him, let us ask him every day to kindle his light in us. Let us do this before each encounter, to become apostles of Jesus with the people we find. Don’t quench the Spirit, either in the Christian communities or in each one of us.”

Frank Woolworth

Frank Woolworth never married. He wanted women to work with men at Woolworths. He wanted children to be able to afford the prizes of 5 and 10 cents. In my hometown of Woodhaven in Queens , NYC, Woolworth’s was my favorite store. A community store. Pharmacies were the same delightful community setting. Now we have the dollar store, merchandise for the poor, and their children.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23RD, 2023
 “The Spirit sheds light on the path of the Church. He is not only the light of hearts, He is the light that orients the Church: He brings clarity, helps to distinguish, to discern. This is why it is necessary to invoke Him often; let us also do so today, at the beginning of Lent.
May the Holy Spirit sustain us this Lent in our ascent with Jesus. May we experience His divine splendour and thus, confirmed in faith, persevere in our journey with Him, the glory of His people and light of the nations.”