APRIL - 2010

SPRING

April – “The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” - Cummings

“…in the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” - Lord Alfred Tennyson

“In the springtime love is carried on the breeze. Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head.” - Emma Racine deFleur

“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks ‘GO’.” - Christopher Morley

April showers bring May flowers. - Proverb

Why are people so tired on April 1st? Because they just finished a 31-day March.

“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps harvest in the Autumn.” - B.C. Forbes

“April hath put the spirit of youth in everything.” - Shakespeare

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!” - Sitting Bull

HUMOR

How does a barber cut the moon’s hair? Eclipse it.

A man took a fancy to a church notorious for its exclusiveness. He told the minister that he wished to join. But the minister sought to evade the issue by suggesting that the man reflect more carefully on the matter and pray for guidance. So the following day the man told the minister: “I prayed, sir, and the Lord asked me what church I wanted to join. When I told Him it was yours, He laughed and said, ‘You can’t get in there. I’ve been trying to get in that church for 10 years myself, and even I can’t get in.’” [Hmm, imagine that – a Godless church.]

Some of my elderly aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poke me in the ribs and say, “You’re next.” But they stopped needling me after I did the same thing to them, at funerals.

A missionary heard about a native who had five wives. “You are violating a law of God,” he said, “so you must go and tell four of those women that they can no longer live here or consider you their husband.” The native thought for a few moments, then said, “Me wait here. You tell’em.”

The little daughter of a colonel living on an Army post was taken to church for the first time. The minister was one of the old-fashioned types who believed in illustrating his sermons with vigor. The little girl stared in awe at the old minister, enclosed in his little box pulpit, thumbing the Bible and waving his arms wildly. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, she whispered to her father in a frightened voice, “What will we do if he gets out?”

GRANDMOTHERS

“I grasped her hand like a common consoling friend and felt, immediately, the grim forbidding strength of her, undiminished all these years.” - Louise Erdrich

“I went to my grandson and held him. I looked into his piercing, blue eyes. He returned my look with total trust.” - Charlotte S. Goodhue

“Grandmothers don’t have to do anything except be there…. It is enough if they drive us to the market where the pretend horse is and [they] have lots of dimes ready. Or if they take us for walks, they slow down past things like pretty leaves or caterpillars. They should never [say] ‘Hurry up.’” - Patsy Gray (age 9)

“It’s so great to have a grandmother to grumble to.” - Anonymous child

WOMEN AUTHORS

“A woman’s life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience.” - Wallis Simpson (1896-1986)

“I don’t wait for moods. You cannot accomplish anything if you do that. Your mind must know that it has got to get down to earth.” Pearl Buck (1892-1973)

“Look twice before you leap.” - Charlotte Bronte ((1816-1855)

“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.” - Sofia Loren

“Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.” - A. Sullivan

“Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.” - Doris Lessing

“I’ll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say.” - Elizabeth C. Gaskell (1810-1865)

MARSHALL STEWART BALL

ALTOGEHTER LOVELY
God is good and merciful
because He is also bright and intelligent.
Seeing, feeling all that is true.
Clearly He feels and listens
to all our desires.
Clearly He has everybody’s
dreams in mind.
I see God altogether lovely.

Marshall wrote this poem in 1992 when he was six years old. He can neither speak nor walk and depends on others for physical help. He points to letters on his alphabet board to spell words which other people write for him. At age nine he was evaluated by the public school system as reading at the twelfth grade level of comprehension.

Once when his mother asked what he would like painted on a beam in the ceiling of his bedroom he wrote:
"Understanding takes a dear good listening thinker."

His grandma, in her eighties, painted it for him in 1994 while standing on a scaffold straddling Marshall’s bed.

IDEAS

Opportunity occasionally knocks but temptation seems to pound on the door daily.

Don’t put a question mark where God put a period.

You know that you are living in 2010 when:

“Happiness is contagious. Be a carrier!” - Robert Orben

“Joy is the feeling of grinning inside.” - Melba Colgrove

“When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hold on a moment longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Life is uncharted territory. It reveals itself one moment at a time.” - Leo F. Buscaglia

“Each day comes bearing its gifts. Untie the ribbons.” - Ann Schabacker

“The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively and says nothing.” - Henry S. Haskins

ILLNESS AND HEALING

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” - Helen Keller

“Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find goals and purpose in our lives that make even the situation worth living through.” - Viktor Frankl

“Learn to listen carefully. Healing wisdom knocks softly.” - Greg Anderson

“Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.” - H. Longfellow

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” - Benjamin Franklin

Nothing in excess. - Temple at Delphi

“It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.” - Epictetus

He who conceals his disease cannot expect to be cured. - Ethiopian idea

Leave tomorrow until tomorrow. - German Proverb

“When I go into the garden to spade and dig a bed, I feel such exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don’t lie down when you can sit. Don’t sit when you can stand. Don’t stand when you can move.” - Lawrence E. Morehouse

“To remain healthy, man must have some goal, some purpose in life that he can respect and be proud to work for.” - Hans Selye

PRAYER

From the cowardice that dare not face new truth, From the laziness that is contented with half truth, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord deliver me. - Kenyan Prayer

I come before thee as one of thy many children. See, I am small and weak; I need thy strength and wisdom. Grant me to walk in beauty and that my eyes may ever behold the crimson sunset. May my hands treat with respect the things which thou hast created, may my ears hear thy voice! Make me wise, that I may understand the things which thou hast taught my people, which thou hast hidden in every leaf and every rock. I long for strength, not in order that I may overreach my brothers but to fight my greatest enemy – myself. Make me ever ready to come to thee with pure hands and candid eyes, so that my spirit, when life disappears like the setting sun, may stand unashamed before thee. - Sioux Prayer

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when he is silent. - Jewish

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. - Attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr

THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Delay is preferable to error.”

“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”

“Do not bite the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.”

“Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities, the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind.”

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

“Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.”

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

“[It is] the people, to whom all authority belongs.”

“The freedom and happiness of man…[are] the sole objects of legitimate government.”

“In matters of style, swim with the current; In matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

HUMOR

I was extremely stressed and really needed a few days off from work. But I knew that the boss would not allow me to take leave. I thought that maybe if I acted crazy then he would tell me to take a few days off. So I cut a hole in the ceiling, wedged in my feet and hung upside down, making funny noises. My female co-worker asked me what I was doing. I told her that I was pretending to be a light bulb, so that the boss would think that I was crazy and tell me to take a few days off.

A few minutes later the boss came into the office and asked what I was doing. I told him that I was a light bulb. He said, “Clearly you are stressed out. Go home and recuperate for a few days.” I jumped down and walked out of the office. When my co-worker followed me, the boss asked her, “And just where do you think you are going?” She said, “I’m going home too, I can’t work in the dark.”

One rainy evening, my husband, John, and I emerged from a restaurant only to find that he had locked the keys in the car. He insisted that he could open the door with a wire coat hanger, so he went back into the restaurant to get one. But there were none to be found. Then John ran to a department store about a quarter-mile away and returned with a coat hanger. After a few attempts, he got the door open and we climbed in. As we sat there, soaked and cold, he stuck the hanger under his seat. With a grinning smile, he said, “Now if this ever happens again, I have one handy.”