A Work in Progress

The longer that I live the more I am sure of the fact that life is a work in progress. It is a never ending process so in keeping with that I would like to share with you the things that have helped me to find a focus in life that is workable. It is a bit altruistic but it makes life more interesting to keep on trying. This will grow each week. Please add yours if you wish.
Send them to me via e-mail for posting.

HAPPINESS

Oh, Happiness is two kinds of Ice Cream,
finding your skate key, doing the time.
And happiness is learning to whistle and
tying your shoe for the very first time-

Happiness is playing the drum in your
own school band, and Happiness is
walking hand in hand. And Happiness
is five different crayons knowing
the secret and climbing a tree---

Oh Happiness is finding a nickel, catching
a firefly and setting it free. And happiness
is being alone every now and then-
And Happiness is coming home again-

Happiness is singing together when day is through.
And Happiness is thoughts who sing with you.
And Happiness is morning and evening day time
And night time too-

For Happiness is anyone or anything at all that is
Loved by you----

OUR ANIMALS AND OUR PLANET

I thought long and hard about where to post this information and finally decided to post it under a Work in Progress as the most appropriate place on my Website.

Recently a man by the name of N. Glenn Perrett of Canada sent a request to me for some photographs and permission to put up his Website Logo on my links page. I told him after reading his site that I would love to list his site on mine.

I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful Website he and his wife have made. Their site has some really neat information about Oz but the thrust of the site is about animals and the planet we live on.

As most of you know if you have read my page called A Work in Progress, I am very concerned about our planet and the people who inhabit it. I have also felt the need to be very responsible for the animals in protecting them from harm and to afford them good care. My husband and I have a house full of animals that were abandoned and nearly dead when we found them. There are pictures of them to be seen on the second page of my Autobiography. They are well cared for, healthy, and thoroughly loved.

Glenn and Lynn have put together a wonderful site to help all of us to make this world a better place to live for all of its inhabitants. There are many articles with practical information about our animals and it is so well done that as much as I thought I knew about the subject I learned a great deal.

I also learned about the planet I live on and what we can do to be responsible for keeping it a place of beauty and a place that will sustain our world as long as we are willing to treat it with respect. So much damage has already been done that in some ways it is already in danger of disappearing and of course "us" along with it.

The part I liked the best is called, DO SOMETHING! If our planet lives or dies is really up to each and every one of us. Glenn and Lynn rightfully point this message out and give us places to look on our computers to help. We need to be proactive and do our part to preserve our home for ourselves and our progeny.

Please take a few minutes of your time and read this Website. Please don't come away from this site just agreeing with its message-Do something to help!

http://www.amorak.net

When Coping With Life:

"SURVIVAL MEANS BEING BORN OVER AND OVER"
---ERICA JONG---

"WHEN ANGRY, COUNT FOUR, WHEN VERY ANGRY, SWEAR"
---MARK TWAIN---

WE ALL HAVE GHOSTS DEEP WITHIN---AND NOT VERY MANY OF 'EM ARE "CASPER"
Credited to DEP as an original aphorism.

" TAIL LIGHTS ARE BRIGHTER THAN HEADLIGHTS"
Credited to DEP as an original aphorism.

"THE ART OF BEING WISE IS THE ART OF KNOWING WHAT TO OVER LOOK"
---WILLIAM JAMES---

Education:

We have more food than we can eat. We have more money per person than anywhere else in the world. With six percent of the population we hold eighty percent of the wealth. We have bigger homes, bigger schools, bigger television sets, bigger cars, bigger theaters, bigger schools. We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all----time to think and the habit of thought.

Norman Cousins
Human options
W.W. Norton Company
Copyright 1981

A CASUAL ATTITUDE toward human behavior is the surest sign of educational failure. It is also the beginning of the end of a free society . . .

Education is not just what takes place in a building marked "school." Education is the sum total of all the experiences and impressions to which a young and plastic mind is exposed. The parent who insists on sending his child to the finest schools, but who sees no problem in allowing that child to spend at least an equal amount of time looking at TV gangster serials, should not be surprised if the mind of his offspring gives back the meanness and the sordidness put into it.

Norman Cousins
Human options
W.W. Norton Company
Copyright 1981

THE AREA IN WHICH a poor education shows up first is in self-expression, oral or written. It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete. The business of assembling the right words, putting them down in proper sequence, enabling each one to pull its full weight in the conveyance of meaning---these are the essentials. A school is where these essentials would feel at home.

Norman Cousins
Human options
W.W. Norton Company
Copyright 1981

Only the curious will learn and
Only the resolute overcome
the obstacles to learning.
The quest quotient has always excited
me more that the intelligence quotient.

Eugene S. Wilson
The Portable Life 101
Prelude Press
Copyright 1992

The scientific theory I like best
is that the rings of Saturn
are composed entirely
of lost airline luggage.

Mark Russell
The Portable Life 101
Prelude Press
Copyright 1992

We don't receive wisdom;
We must discover it for ourselves
After a journey
that no one can take for us
or can spare us.

Marcel Proust
The Portable Life 101
Prelude Press
Copyright 1992

What a wonderful day we've had. You have learned something, and I have learned something. Too bad we didn't learn it sooner. We could have gone to the movies instead.

Balki Bartokomous
Perfect Strangers

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
Henry Ward Beecher
1813-1887



Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats

Some days you're the dog, and
some days you're the hydrant!!!!!!!!

Anonymous

The following were provided by Chris Bergh, Loveland, CO

If you can neither accept it nor change it, try to laugh at it.
(author unknown)
..............................

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens: but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us." - Helen Keller
.................................
On Youth -

Youth is not entirely a time of life - it is a state of mind. it is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips, or supple knees. it is a temper of will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at stars - Oscar Wilde

The vast loneliness is awe inspiring - the earth from here is a vast ovation to the big vastness of space - Jim Lovell/Apollo 13 Astronaut

If our life lacks a certain magic it is because we choose to observe or acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force. - Antonin Artaud

We must first become human before seeking anything superior. - Rene Daumal

The truest profession of man is to find his way to himself. - Hermann Hesse

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In trying to live you see you have nothing.
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of your self.
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing.
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become.
In desiring to become, you begin to live. - Rene Daumal

It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. it is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch fro some perfected creation. - Olaf Stapeldon/Star Maker

The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. - Carl Jung

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in space to light their funeral pyre. The choice is ours. - Stanley Kubrick

Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. - Ian McHarg/Design With Nature

We are anthill men on an anthill world - Ray Bradbury

The tragedy and the magnificence of Homo Sapiens together rise from the same smokey truth that we alone among the animal species refuse to acknowledge natural law. Robert Ardrey/The Social Contract

The world looks as though it has been left in the custody of trolls. - Father Robert F. Capon

The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man passing. - Loudon Wainrght

Call up the vision gardens and order me a newer planet to live and work on. This old earth is too bilboed and shackled, too chained, too sacked and sandbagged, too beat, too narrow, too filthy, too vile and poisonous and to near death for me to live or dwell on. - Woody Guthrie 1947

Thank God, men cannot fly, and lay waste to the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau

The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacreous, it was opal. No. it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. it displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. - Olaf Stapeldon/Star Maker

Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our heads, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. - Lynn white Jr.

A Globial Village:


If Earth's population were shrunk into a village of just 100 people -- with all the human ratios existing in the world still remaining -- what would this tiny, diverse village look like? That's exactly what Phillip M. Harter, a medical doctor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, attempted to figure out. This is what he found.

57 would be Asian

21 would be European

14 would be from the Western Hemisphere

8 would be African

52 would be female

48 would be male

70 would be nonwhite

30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian

30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual

11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59 percent of the entire world's wealth, and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death

1 would be pregnant

1 would have a college education

1 would own a computer

Think of it this way. If you live in a good home, have plenty to eat and can read, you are a member of a very select group.

And if you have a good house, food, can read and have a computer, you are among the very elite.

Life doesn't seem as hard now.

The above was provided to me by Dawn Simpson.

Life is rich in its consequences. Consequences give reality to man's capacity to struggle between good and evil, nobility and venality, altruism and selfishness. We fashion our consequences as surely as we fashion our goods or our dwellings. Nothing we say, think, or do is without its consequences. Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without it effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt. Reality is consequences. At every stop in life we are coping with the consequences of ideas and action, most of them long since forgotten. These consequences or effects are the unseen factors in individual life and the affairs of man; they are the imponderables only in the sense that they are not directly identified. But they are no less vital than that which is explicit and accessible in human experience. In short, life is of consequence-literally so. Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.


Norman Cousins
Human options
W.W. Norton Company
Copyright 1981

HOMEPAGE