It’s Our Birthday!

Botanical Beach

Botanical Beach (image by Marcia)

Hi Folks:

Well, it’s now been 10 (yes, ten!) years since our blog took its first breath, and we currently have 602 blog posts and 146 pages on our site. The posts cover poetry, photography, our hugging adventures (88 countries and counting!) and various other musings; our pages include some of our stories and free Adventures of Rainbow Mouse colouring pages to download and enjoy. We’ve shared some wonderful adventures with you through these and are looking forward to sharing more in the future! This blog is our gift to you, our readers, and we very much appreciate having you here with us.

Remember to hug someone you love today. Or a stranger. Or, preferably, both! 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♂️

M&M

P.S. The image above is a composite made from a sequence of 23 images Marcia made with her cell phone. Look for an upcoming blog post on image stacking in the (hopefully not too distant) future!

It’s Our Birthday!!

Hi Folks:

M&M’s Musings is nine years old today!! It’s been quite a year for us – more stories, more photographs, more travels, more sharing of free hugs (82 countries and counting!) and much of that has been shared here with you, our readers. Our blog currently has 573 blog posts and 147 pages, including stories, colouring pages and more! In the past year we’ve made Marcia’s books available for sale through our website and in local stores, and we have (to the best of our knowledge) complied with the EU GDPR.

We have many more stories, photographs and free hugs to come in the next year, so thank you for continuing to be here with us! This site is our gift to you, after all.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. We didn’t actually buy our blog a birthday cake, but Marcia’s birthday is also soon, so maybe she’ll share some of hers… 🙂

It’s Our Birthday!!

Hi Folks:

We are 8 years old today! Wow… Whodathunkit? Well, we did, one day and one post at a time. So far we’ve posted 549 blog posts (including this one) and 138 pages on a variety of subjects, and we’re just getting warmed up! Those 138 pages include 50 of our short stories (and how many have you read? 🙂 ) We’re certainly not alone in our celebrations, either. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first printed 152 years ago, this month!

Follow the White Rabbit

How far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go?

In a world that often seems polarized, today we want to celebrate two words that are most often misunderstood: respect and competition.

We use respect as a stick, and wield it over others. Respect your elders, respect your boss, show some respect for ___

Respect isn’t external, it’s internal. Re-spect: literally to look twice. To live with awareness of your ideas and your choices not because someone else told you that it was necessary but because, after giving it careful thought it makes sense to you. It’s about action, not re-action. Respect is the essence of life, to be true to one’s self.

Competition has an equally bad and equally undeserved reputation. We think of competition as some twisted version of Darwin’s theory – survival of the fittest (Darwin never actually said that by the way, but that’s another story).

We start instead with the Latin word competere: to strive together. One does not compete against anyone. To compete with someone is to seek the best in yourself AND to encourage the best in those around you.

FEAR can seem a powerful voice, but fear is just an acronym:

False
Expectations
Actualizing
Reality
(author unknown, but appreciated)

So, in closing out today’s post we want you to join us in celebrating kindness. Here are a few places to get you started:

Remember to hug someone you love today. Or a stranger. Or, preferably, both!!

Hugs,
M&M

Victorious Voices, 2017!

Victorious Voices 2017

Hi Folks:

Last week marked the 8th annual Victorious Voices Festival here in Victoria! We missed the first two years, but we’ve been stalwart supporters of the event ever since. If you want to read our previous posts on this amazing creative blending of people and talents, you can find them here. Back in 2013 Mike wrote his first (and so far, only) slam poetry piece in honour of the courage of the many young people who perform during this event. If you’re interested, you can find that here. Continue Reading →

Victorious Voices 2016

Victorious Voices

Hi Folks:

April 13-15 marked the seventh year for Victorious Voices, and our fifth year of being able to attend! A part of Raising Voices, hosted by the Victoria Poetry Project, Victorious Voices is a spoken word poetry competition for high school students in the greater Victoria area. It’s a way of giving students a voice and showing them how to use it, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s about writing, creativity, cooperation, teamwork, literature, presence and so much more, and Victorious Voices is a competition in the original sense – from the Greek competere: “to strive together”. Whether performing individually or in teams, the poets are encouraged to bring forth the best in themselves and each other. Continue Reading →

Victorious Voices 2015

Hi Folks: This is the third of three posts on recent cultural events we attended here in Victoria… last (for now) but definitely not least! As we’ve written before, the range of activities available here continually amazes us. Last Saturday for example one could choose from:

  • Creatively United for the Planet Festival
  • Taking Poetry to the Streets Walk
  • Seed Exchange at the Central Library
  • Swan Lake/ Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary Annual Native Plant Sale
  • Astronomy Day at the Royal BC Museum
  • Weekend Market at Bastion Square and the Saturday Market at the Hudson Building

and those are only a few examples.

So, in that spirit… Continue Reading →

Victorious Voices Returns!!

Hi Folks:

One of the ‘challenges’ of living in Victoria is that it’s such a culturally rich, diverse place to be that there are times we want to befriend Hermione Grainger.  We’re sure she’s a lovely young woman, but our ulterior motive would be to see if we could borrow her Time Turner.  We’d even invite her along; she could just slip the chain over all three of our heads…  One case in point is that this past week marked the 4th Annual Victorious Voices High School Slam Championships.  Mike was able to be there last year, but Marcia wasn’t: an event we wrote about here.  Monday night was the Semi-Finals, with eight teams from five schools, plus a ‘wild card’ team made of students from other schools.  Monday night was also the monthly Pen in Hand Poetry and Prose Readings at Serious Coffee in Cook St. Village.  Tuesday night was the Youth Slam at Solstice Café, but there was also a talk at the Royal BC Museum (with Sierra Club BC) on the ecology and preservation of the Flathead River ecosystem in southeastern BC.  However, nothing was going to keep us from attending the Victoria Event Centre on Wednesday night to attend the Victorious Voices Finals.

Continue Reading →