Mission Statement

You know how mission statements can be boring, run too long, sound like they are God’s gift to the consumer, and promise to heal the ills of mankind? Sometimes when you look at a company and compare it to their mission statement you wonder if they live on the same planet.

I Googled, “#Mission statement” —you know the first place we go these days for information.  Google’s advice was, “Keep it short.”

Viola’ this popped into my head. “Live wild.”

That’s it. That’s short. That’s my mission statement.

Live Wild!

Perhaps a tag line could be: “Help people improve their lives.”

Yes, yes, I know, “Physician heal yourself.” I’m not a physician a psychiatrist or have any such illustrious job titles. Remember the old Bible story of the man on the road to Damascus and saw a fellow traveler lying wounded? The Good Samaritan stopped and poured oil on his wounds. The prevailing joke in college was, “Maybe the man didn’t want oil on his wounds.”

If you do, ask for it.

I’m asking this: If you would like to help with the direction of this blog, it would make me happy as our two pups running around the living room, circling the coffee table, over the couch, into the bedroom, over the bed…

Here are the questions:

1.                 Who are you? _______________________________________________

2.                 What are your hopes and dreams?______________________________

3.                 What is getting in the way of achieving those dreams?

                  __________________________________________________________

Copy, paste and send to my personal email jewellshappytrails@gmail.com

I won’t promise a perfect solution. I won’t always be upbeat because life isn’t that way all the time. I won’t try to be someone I’m not; even wild horses get pissed sometimes. (But that doesn’t remain a permanent condition.)

I’m staying with my title “Wishing on White Horses, www.wishingonwhitehorses.com as that is the title of this blog,  I’ve had it so long it is ingrained in my consciousness, it has a dot com, and I have some dear, wonderful, stupendous followers. Are you one?

How about a sign-up?

See, I’m learning to ask for what I want.

 How about you?

I can’t wait to see/read what is going to happen here. I’m jazzed.

Live wild,

 Joyce

P.S. If you want a personal answer to a question that’s been stuck in your craw, 

  Click here
livewildwithauntjo.blogspot.com

Now 15₵ (Price of living increase you know.)

The answer might be pertinent, or it might be “Go home and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”  It depends on my mood, my mental capacity, or whether or not Mercury is in retrograde.

Live long and prosper.

Faint Hearts Never Won Fair Ladies

The Vision

I wrote this blog, and then I chickened out and let it sit. Then I thought I would go ahead and publish it. No, don’t do it, Joyce, you’re sticking your neck out. It might get chopped off.

Maybe. Maybe not.

This how all this came about:

A couple of days ago as I wandered Barnes and Noble bookstore, I came upon Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 50th-anniversary book #Gift from the Sea. I have loved it for about that long, and there it is, still in the bookstore. It occurred to me that I, too, might have something to contribute to the world.

Many women related to Lindbergh when she recounted how fractured she felt caring for five children, and even though she had household help, she still managed the meals, drove the children to the orthodontist, to soccer practice, cared for her husband, called repair men when the refrigerator broke down, and in the midst of it all searched for grace.

We all related to her words when she penned: “The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”

We championed her cause when she wrote “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return.”

 The subjects of which she spoke have lived and touched the hearts of readers throughout all that time.

So why I am writing this?

I am using you as a sounding board. Forgive me—I could use the page alone, and not send this, but I trust that you are with me on this journey, as we were with Anne when she lived in a minimal house on the beach. It was a house where she let the wind blow through and brought in only what suited her—shells from the beach, shells she used as metaphors for her chapters.

Last night I listened to a webinar by Caz Makeover who is a travel writer (www.yTravel.com). Her topic was “How to Turn a Blog into a Business.” I have wished for that but felt it was not possible for me. My mindset was that making money from what I wanted to do was a pipe dream. Yes, I know, I have read, “Do what you love and money will follow.” Nice lure, I thought.

Then I realized I had “Stinkin thinkin.”

I tell other people they can do it and then I don’t believe it myself.

Why not me?!

If your intent is to serve, and mine is, if your intent is to make a difference, and mine is, then if you don’t make money doing it, your business is soon over—no service, no difference. Kaput.

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

I had been griping that it appears that people are often asking for money. I felt the pull, the desperation of others so that I couldn’t consider that maybe people wanted to give to me.

Open the pipeline so money flows to you, not out of you.

I don’t know how I am going to do it yet. I can offer my words on a blog, and that’s free, so I’m not sure where the money is, but I trust that I will find it.  I have the first step, The Vision.

To quote Jonathan Mead (Paid to Exist)

“As we grow up, we're taught to follow a template.

“Let's call it the "Freedom Template."

“We're sold this idea, this myth that if we just follow the template, someday we'll earn our freedom. Someday, we can finally be happy.

“…This "Freedom Template" is a big, fat, lie.

“But the problem is, maybe you don't know how to do it any other way.

Maybe you don't know that in order to opt out of the template, you must create your own path.

“That's pretty terrifying.”—

Keep checking in, and together we will see what happens next….

Next blog is the Mission statement.

Thank you for reading.

“Don't wish me happiness
I don't expect to be happy all the time...
It's gotten beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Super Heros

On June 30, 1908, at 7 a.m. a man was sitting on his porch when he was suddenly hurled from his chair and felt such heat that he thought his shirt was on fire.

“Suddenly in the north sky… the sky was split in two,’ he recounted, “and high above the forest, the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire… At that moment, there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled.”

All this was caused by a “#dirty ice ball” known as a comet. This occurred in a desolate area of #Turguska Siberia Russia. No causalities (of people) were reported, but it decimated over 770 acres, killed Reindeer, and sent a shock to Japan 5.0 on the rector scale.

In 2009, a comet, (The Westly Impact), hit Jupiter leaving a “spot,” the size of our Pacific Ocean.

Fifteen years earlier for the first time, humans saw the impact of two solar bodies. This was the Shoemaker Levi 9 comet plowing into Jupiter.    

          

I had been trying to turn my husband into a Superhero by finding comets before they find us.  He has a long history of detecting things, and I thought comets would be a worthwhile cause. Of course, then we need to engage earth’s brilliant minds on how to get rid of them—drive them away, shoot them down, whatever it takes.

And then I find a superhero in the form of a little lady named Carolyn Shoemaker.

In 1913, she and David Levi had discovered a comet orbiting Jupiter. The following year the comet broke into a “string of pearls” and by gravitational pull was sucked into that humongous red planet named Jupiter. This impact was equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT and was named after its finders Carolyn Shoemaker, and then an amateur astronomer, David Levi , thus the name, The Shoemaker Levi 9.

Jupiter, “The shining father,” is a giant protective magnet, a sentinel for the earth. For the Romans’ he was “King of the Gods,” and they replaced the name of the Greek god Zeus with the name Jupiter. Maybe they knew something it has taken us years to learn.

Jupiter is protecting us.

Thank you, Jupiter!

Jupiter because of its immense size draws flying objects into its mass, thus sweeping up debris that could seriously damage us.

Mrs. Shoemaker says that as a young girl she had little interest in science.  Yet she has discovered more comets than any other living soul. To date 32 comets, and  800 asteroids.

She said she at first considered Astronomy a field "relegated to only old men in white beards, smoking pipes, and staring at the sky." In the 1960s, there was still a "prevailing attitude in astronomy that women were used as computers for their attention to fine detail, not for theory."

Mr. Shoemaker was a cheerleader of other people's interests. In 1960, he encouraged his wife to fly and become a pilot because he knew she wanted to, as he could not due to health problems. In the late 1960s, at the age of 51, after years as homemaker and mother to their three children, Carolyn was faced with the empty-nest syndrome and wanted to do something fulfilling. She asked her husband for advice. He thought she might be good in astrological research.

In Australia, in 1997, the Shoemakers were involved in a car crash. Gene Shoemaker was instantly killed while Carolyn sustained severe injuries. She eventually recovered and continued her observation work becoming known as “The Comet Lady.”

Her awards have been:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal
Rittenhouse Medal (1988)
Scientist of the Year Award (1995)

More If’s And’s and no Buts.

Isaac Asimov said, “If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood, I’d type faster.”

More If’s to think about:

If the crowd likes sweets, does that mean we ought to sweeten most every food? And instead of sprinkling a few grains of pure cane sugar from Hawaii, grown in the sun, (didn’t we do that when we were kids with little repercussions), we hire scientists to create chemicals that trick our brains into thinking we are tasting sweet, all the while those substances called "diet," are doing the opposite.

If the crowd likes big booms, explosions, and war games, does that mean we ought to up the ante in movies, books, and video games to see who can provide the biggest boom, fire, or car crash?

If children like solving puzzles and playing games via the internet, does that mean that the only way we can provide tension and conflict, it to kill something?

If the crowd likes to be chased does that mean we ought to provide a chase scene in every action movie?

If the crowd likes digests over books, then should we offer more U-tube videos, sound bites, and quick reads?

If the crowd will stand in line for a popular attraction, and by-pass the meatier dramas, documentaries, or movies of substance, then do we need to sell the sizzle and not the steak?

If the crowd likes simple, cheap, fast and fun, then, in order to sell, do we need to enter those concepts into most all advertising?

It the crowd doesn’t like to read, does that mean we stop printing books?

Do  you think when Michelangelo was carving David he was concerned about whether the populace would like it?

Do you think when Andy Warhol painted soup cans he thought that people loved Campbell’s Soup so much they would want a painting of that product on their walls?

Do you think when Orville and Wilbur Wright climbed into their bicycle made flyable with wings they thought they were going to get rich building airplanes?

No, these people were experimenting. They were expressing their creativity; they did what they wanted to do and in the doing of it, advanced their craft, and thus civilization.

There is an aspect of the crowd that creative people sometimes forget—that is that chase scenes wear out, that hype gets old, and that the new, the fun, the creative, gets their juices flowing.

Do the work that matters to you.

You’re the one to make a brighter day.

If

“If you can start the day without caffeine,

“If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,

“If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,

“If you can eat whatever food is put on your plate and be grateful for it,

“If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,

“If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,

“If you can watch friends go away on exotic vacations when you have to stay at home, without even a twinge of jealousy.

“If you can face the world without lies and deceit,

“If you can relax without beer, wine, or liquor,

“And if you can sleep without the aid of drugs,

“Then you are probably a dog.”

--Jack Kornfield