Category Archives: Spirituality

Posts related to spiritual topics, including the works of Seth, Abraham-Hicks, Elias, Kris, Ramtha, Bashar, Ernest Holmes, and others

Happy Holidays!

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Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays, Everyone! There are a lot of different celebrations this time of year, but they all share the same general ideas… so whether you prefer Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Solstice or something more personal (the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr is on a different, lunar calendar), we wanted to wish you a safe and happy Holiday Season and a New Year filled with as much love, joy, peace, adventure, contentment, prosperity and excitement as you can handle!

As a gift, we’d love to share this with you: TEDxSF – Louie Schwartzberg – Gratitude

Thanks so much for dropping by our little corner of the ‘net!

Hugs,
M&M

(P.S.  Thanks to John for the idea for the image at the top!)

Understanding Criticism

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Hi Folks:

This is going to be a very short (for me) post, and is really just a pointer to some excellent articles written by someone else.  Photographer Alain Briot recently wrote a series of three articles for the Luminous Landscape, and while they’re primarily written for the understanding of photographers, I think the points Alain makes have a broader reference to the criticisms we all deal with in our daily life.

You can find them here:

Understanding Criticism, Part 1: The Many Faces of Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 2: Responding to Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 3: A few words on perseverance

Okay, that’s it for now!

Hugs,
Mike.

(See, I told you it was going to be short… 😉 )

It’s Our Birthday!!

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Hi Folks:

Happy 2nd birthday to our blog!  Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the US, it seemed appropriate to offer some thanks here as well.  After all, we have a lot to be thankful for.  So, in no particular order:

We Give Thanks for You: While this little corner of the ‘net is our own window on the wider world, it wouldn’t mean much without you, our readers.  You’re really the reason we’re here!  Both of us are writers, but a writer without an audience speaks only to himself, or herself as the case may be.  According to Google Analytics, in the past 2 years we’ve had nearly 40,000 page views from over 15,000 different people.  That may be small by some standards, but we’re both amazed and delighted by your continued presence!

We Give Thanks for Family: Together we have the usual number of parents and an ever-increasing number of relations, from sisters and brothers to nieces, nephews and beyond.  We have two wonderful sons, and two wonderful nieces who are like daughters.  We also have two grandsons and one great-nephew who counts as a grandson too.  The little ones bring such joy to our lives!  There’s a saying that one can choose one’s friends but not one’s family; even if we could we’d stick with the ones we have!  Special thanks goes out to our son Nick, not only because starting this blog was his idea to begin with, but because he continues to do a lot of the ‘behind the scenes’ technical support for us.

We Give Thanks for ‘Family’:  Ever since the invention of Facebook, the words ‘Friend’ and ‘Like’ will never be the same again.  Nonetheless, our connection to others around the world through Twitter, Google+ and several forums has opened doors for us that would be possible in no other way.  Because of that we’ve made ‘friends’ with some remarkable people!  We give thanks for your presence in our lives!

We Give Thanks for Each Other: A few days ago we celebrated our 225th Monthaversary of the day we met.  Earlier this month we celebrated our 17th Anniversary of being a couple, and last month we celebrated our 9th Anniversary of being married.  In truth, we celebrate every day together.  We are both truly blessed to have each other, and we acknowledge it in every way we can.  In the movie ’50 First Dates’, Drew Barrymore plays a woman who is incapable of making new memories, and Adam Sandler plays a man who devotes himself to having her fall in love with him every day.  We treasure all of the memories we have, but it’s easy to say we fall in love with each other every day. 😀

And with that, we thank you for coming by; we’re serving (virtual) coffee and cake (two candles ¡¡ ) in the living room!!

Hugs,
M&M

More Little Wisdoms

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Hi Folks:

A few months back I wrote a post called ‘Little Wisdoms‘ because I often get these short insights – sometimes when I awake in the morning and sometimes during the day.  Most of them are pretty short and almost all of them get posted on Twitter, but I’ve started making a collection in a Word file as well.  I’ve accumulated another stack of them so I thought I’d share them here.

Hugs,
Mike.

Continue Reading →

Hello in There

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Hi Folks:

Last Friday Marcia and I were at the Cornerstone Café for their ‘Open Stage’ night, and it was wonderful to see this continuing parade of people get up in front of the microphone – this person singing and picking a guitar, this person doing some very loving slam poetry, the next person reading what they’ve written, and so on.  And sitting there in the audience, it occurred to me that if you saw these people on the street or in the elevator you’d never know that she loves opera or that he’s working on a novel or… Continue Reading →

International Free Hugs Day!

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Hi Folks:

It’s not (yet!) commonly known, but the first Saturday in July every year has been designated ‘International Free Hugs Day‘; that meant it fell on July 2 this year.  Not that we ever need an excuse to hug people, but in order to celebrate we took our ‘Free Hugs’ posters down from the shelf and headed downtown.  We also brought along a stack of ‘Hug Certificates‘, of course!

For our last ‘Free Hug’ session we were down on the walkway of the inner harbour, but we chose a different location this time: In order to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Canadian Navy last year, a bronze sculpture called ‘The Homecoming‘ was erected at Ship’s Point.  The sculpture shows a young girl running into the waiting arms of her father, returned from sea.  It was a perfect location for us!

We held our signs aloft and waited, but not for long.  Very soon we had a reasonably steady stream of people coming by to hug, be hugged and, in some cases, to have their pictures taken.  Several people asked why we were doing this, and we simply told them that it was International Free Hugs Day!!  A couple of people wondered if it was a tourism promotion put on by the city;  that may be a good idea (‘Hug Me, I’m from Victoria‘ T-shirts?  Hmmm…) but no, it’s just something we enjoy doing.  We hugged young people and old people and everyone in between.  We hugged both locals and visitors to our city, all with gay abandon.  We were instructed on how to say ‘a hug’ in Portugese (um abraca, I think), and basically we had a wonderful time!  Hugging is good for you (and the person who’s hugging you), doesn’t take a lot of time, is non-fattening, doesn’t cause cavities and contributes to world peace!! Continue Reading →

Looking for Butterflies

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Hi Folks:

Yesterday marked the 16th anniversary of the day my sister Liz passed away. The details of that are irrelevant for the moment but her soft, gentle nature always put me in mind of butterflies, and tiger swallowtails were a favourite of both of us. You can read more about that here. It was interesting because before Liz passed away I had only seen a few tiger swallowtails in my life, but when we flew out for her last days and for the services after, we saw tiger swallowtails everywhere. Marcia and I would go for a walk and one would follow us down the street. We’d get in the car and drive somewhere and one would be there wherever we stopped. If we were sitting in the backyard a couple of swallowtails would come cavorting by. When we flew back to Ontario I saw three swallowtails in the first 48 hours, and I’ve seen several every year since. Continue Reading →

A Year in the Life … revealed …

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Hello Dear Ones!

Two years ago today, on the Sunday of Canada’s Victoria Day long weekend of 2009, I stepped onto the retreat grounds of Queenswood and an incredible journey began … leading me to write my first book:

A Year in the Life of a Bus-Traveling Poet

It has been – and is still – a magical journey, one in which you, Dear Reader, took an active role … as one of my dearest inspirations! That’s why I thought to stop by today to share this exciting news with you … my book has been published and is now available for sale!  You can check it out here: http://bit.ly/buspoet (paperback) or here: http://amzn.to/buspoet-k (Kindle version)

And, as a tantalizing little bonus for you, a glimpse of one of my very favourite sections: Continue Reading →

Serious Play

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Hi Folks:

I put this post in the ‘Spirituality’ section of our blog for two reasons: first because I think play is a wonderful spiritual exercise, and second because it gave me the opportunity to include a couple of great quotes on the subject. The first is from Seth:

“I communicate with your dimension, for example, not by willing myself to your level of reality, but by imagining myself there. All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.” ~ Seth Speaks, session 518.

Continue Reading →