I once read an article with advice on how to relieve stress. The author suggested that everyone should carry an image of a happy place in his/her mind. Whenever life threatens to become overwhelming the person should mentally go there. I have used this little trick over and over again and I must say that it works very well. I have a number of happy places and not surprisingly most of them are in Rocky Mountain National Park. For whatever reason I prefer the mountains over all of the splendors of nature and over the years I have experienced remarkable inner peace and calm along the roads and trails of Colorado. Continue reading “The Happy Place”
As I prepare to do some traveling tomorrow I find myself being unfocused and filled with random thoughts. I suspect that I’m in checklist mode as I make certain that the the mail will stop, the bags are packed, and my plants are watered among a hundred other little details that have to be covered before we drive away. Going on a trip brings out my obsessive compulsive tendencies big time. 
I once drove through a neighborhood and spotted an obviously abandoned house whose walls were literally covered with a sprawling bougainvillea plant that had grown out of control. The blooms were a magnificent deep wine color and they were winding around the crumbling wooden structure in profusion. What should have been a dreary scene of a long neglected property was instead a glorious feast for the eyes. I’ve often thought about that lovely image and seen it as a kind of metaphor for life’s difficulties. It seems that the more stressed a bougainvillea vine becomes the more beautiful and hardy are its flowers. The bougainvillea is a determined survivor often flourishing in the harshest of environments.
I vividly recall spending a great deal of time in fourth grade learning how to duplicate the Zaner Bloser cursive alphabet that hung on neat green cards at the front of the classroom. The E’s and the Z’s were the hardest and unfortunately the S’s also gave me grief, a terrible irony since my first name begins with that letter. I aimed to please especially since my teacher insisted that we master the swirls and the curly Q’s of the letters until we might have been able to forge checks for the inventor of that handwriting style. All in all I got fairly good but never really managed to make a decent looking Z. Years later when I was confident enough to be boldly independent I began to write with my own take on the letters that gave me the most fits. The result was quite legible and I have often received compliments from people who marvel at how well I mastered the art of cursive. 
