A Nantucket Valentine!
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the beautifully calm, sunny, frigid island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this Valentine’s Day morning –Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!–the 14th day of February, 2015, a gorgeous one out on the Hyannis/Hyannis Port Waterfront(s), most definitely that ‘calm before the storm’, as the region braces for the winter hurricane to come…
If you have any last minute thoughts about ‘giving’ a Valentine’s Day care package to someone, even a friend, consider this little “Kickstarter” project. This artist, someone near and dear to me, has put together a series of children’s books on Maine Coon kittens raised here on little old Cape Cod, Yarmouth to be specific. The kindness and love that went into making these educational books designed for ‘children of all ages’ , is remarkable when one gets the side story about the author(s) and what they personally have gone through, which is self evident when one picks said books up, for the photography alone is worth the price of admission. To donate to this worthy cause, please log on to
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/15405938/kitten-tales
kitten-tales and those artists will thank you, as well as the children that will receive some needed LOVE.
Speaking of Love, a prominent New York Times reporter, another ‘reporter’s reporter’, collapsed yesterday at said ‘Times’, with many today remembering him and what he stood for. Here was a man who came full circle in this short life we all lucky enough to live (they say at the end it’s a blink of an eye), for early in his life he was seemingly caught forever in the web of addiction, but along the way, something profound happened to Mr. David Carr and he became the great reporter and human being that he will be remembered for. Remembered not so much for the actual ‘job’ (that he never considered as such), but for the life he led. Opting for kindness and grace, generosity and gratitude. For we all could use a little of that ‘gift of desperation’ from ‘time to time’, something this reporter knows all too well. Like David, I almost lost ‘myself’ in the depths of hell only created by choices “I” had made, thus the “blame” was squarely on my shoulders. Without that grace of desperation, or the memory therein, one tends to forget just how precious and lucky life really IS. To just be alive and not be homeless, freezing outside on Main Street hoping to ‘just get through another day’, like so many of our fellow man does, day in and day out, I am forever grateful and will be for the rest of ‘my’ life…
For this reporter, religion is for people who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for people who have already been there.
Making it all that much more important that I remember that feeling of desperate times; transcending “it” into bliss and LOVE when presented with GOOD times. Love is the answer and that LOVE is not ‘out there’ for one to attain or conquer, no sir! Love, they say, comes from within. And from that eternal well spring of love, joy and peace, one is privileged to GIVE it away freely, for that is it’s purpose and nothing more. It is LOVE, not money, that makes this little blue rock called EARTH go round and perhaps, someday, in the not too distant future, more than not will come to know and love that FACT.
Have a great day and don’t forget to tune into NBC on Sunday 8 p.m. sharp (eastern), for the “Saturday Night Live” (40th Anniversary Special); a three hour LIVE prime time spectacular airing for all of our loving pleasure, with many a cast and crew from the days of ‘yore showing up for all the laughs and, I assume, some of the tears… The Ghost of John Belushi will be in attendance as well, commenting once again on his “recent” win at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada, stating, and I quote, “…I logged a lot of miles to win the decathlon, and I ate a lot of donuts (large tray stacked high with ‘Little Debbie’ chocolate donuts sitting in front of John at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette), little chocolate donuts. These little chocolate donuts have been on my training table ever since I was a little kid.”
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
