photo credit capturedbythe light

Now that my new website design is complete, I can say that one of the new features I’m happiest about is my ability to put up a new inspirational quote whenever I feel like it.

I first started to keep a Quote Book in 1971. That volume is an unlined journal with a canvas-cloth cover and has held up remarkably well. My first quote:     “What is friendship? One soul in two bodies.”  — Aristotle. Most of the quotes relate to my interests and issues in the 1970′s – friendship, relationships, sex, meaning of life, identity. It’s been interesting to see how my focus has widened and yet kept true to certain themes.

Quote from there that still captures me today: “Man grows according to his interpretation of his self.” — Victor Frankl

Continue to check out my home page for a changing panorama of inspirational quotes through the decades.

photo credit Cindy Andrie

Most people, if and when they think about leaving a legacy, think in terms of bequeathing money or valuables. But there’s something else you can leave behind that will benefit your children and their children and the generations to come.

And that’s your Story. Oh, how I wish I knew the stories behind the faces that stare up at me from the old photos I’ve inherited. I wish I knew what their childhoods were like, what they valued and who they looked up to. I know the few tales that were passed along by my parents but those are mostly facts about what happened to whom and when. I want to know how those people felt.

I’m reading a wonderful book that I hope will help me give my own future family something more to go on. It’s called The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories and Meaning of Your Life. The authors say, “It’s your experience, the details of your journey, that’s your real legacy…Let the children of your children know you as a person, so they can know themselves. Let them learn from your experience. Let them benefit from what you’ve worked so hard to understand. And, not least, give yourself the satisfaction of seeing your life whole.”

What I like best about the book is that it divides one’s life into stages, so no matter where you are in the process, you can distill the facts and memories that will allow you to derive meaning. The authors ask the questions and you can answer those that seem pertinent. Put together, you eventually have a notebook or a scrapbook or a memoir to hand down. 

This seems to be an original and innovative approach and I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who is working their way through The Legacy Guide.

photo credit cdedbdme

Roy was reading a new book by Greg Braden, Fractal Time, and shared this with me. I love it: “As we sifted through the boxes and bags that held the accumulated history of our entire family, we found ourselves engrossed in the memories and the meaning that the contents brought to mind. Every few minutes I would hear Mom’s excited voice coming from somewhere behind a stack of boxes taller than she was, asking me to look at the treasures she had rediscovered. “Oh look at this,” she would say, holding up something that my brother or I had made for her more than 30 years before. Like the Valentine’s Day card that still had two Tootsie Roll chocolates (now nearly fossilized) taped inside. My brother had made the card and given it to her when he was in the second grade…”

This is from a book about nature’s patterns (mostly scientific) but points to the cycle of human life and the pleasure that is there for the taking. Enjoy those moments when they come around.