Every two years the World Harmony Run travels across the USA and all over the world in more than 100 countries. To view how this year’s event is unfolding in America, visit Live from the Road. Right now the Run is in Arizona and once it reaches the West Coast it will return back to the East Coast until it arrives in my home state of Rhode Island on August 15th.
Leave me a comment here if you would like to take part in the Run in Rhode Island. It’s on a Sunday so for many there is no conflict if you work the usual weekdays 9 to 5.
I ran with the World Harmony Run (then Peace Run) in its inaugural year 1987 in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. Those days remain some of my life’s absolute favorite memories.
I love this featured video with footage from all over the world: Check it out!
Later this year I turn the big five-o and I don’t mean the Hawaii kind. Because this year is also my half life anniversary of journeying on a spiritual path, I have started brainstorming ideas to mark the occasion with gusto, flair and gratitude. I have scribbled some ideas in a notebook but am only just starting to approach the concept. I don’t dare commit most of them to public scrutiny yet but they will probably somehow include the number 50 or the number 5. Feel free to add a comment if you found inspiration in commemorating your 50th birthday with some kind of achievement that was meaningful to you. Maybe I will add it to my list!
Because I knew I could use a few good laughs, I couldn’t resist starting my contemplation of the subject on the lighter side of my list of possibilities. This website has lots of links to funny jokes about turning 50. Dare I admit it has the word “senior” in the URL??? I imagined that it wouldn’t be one of the harder tasks to find cute humor about cresting the half century hill.
The cardiologist’s diet:
if it tastes good, spit it out.
- Paulina Borsook
At fifty you’ve accumulated the knowledge and wisdom of half a century. This would be a tremendous asset if only darned senility hadn’t wiped your memory bank.
I also need levity to counteract the next time I have a hot flash, can’t sleep or remember my name, age and serial number, at least I can laugh. So the quest for 50 hot flash jokes is near and dear to my heart. If you are born free or young enough to not get the joke that God made women over 50 unable to have kids because they wouldn’t be able to remember where they put them, then I hereby command you to move on to another blog post such as the beauty of daffodils.
If you are nodding your head in agreement and laughing out loud at the joke, then hold on to your hat while you read these stories from minniepauz.com. You might wake your neighbors you will laugh so hard. I especially liked the story about the woman who jumped inside the ice cream freezer at the supermarket since I have become a big friend of taking deep breaths with my head inside the freezer of my refrigerator when in the midst of my own personal contribution to global warming.
Luckily I also have the inspiration of Sri Chinmoy to get me through rough moments such as these.
I am mostly thrilled about turning 50 but to quote Sri Chinmoy once again, there are some new circumstances in my life that have me insistent that “Humour is My Only Saviour”.
Traditionally Mother’s Day is a time for family to share together and includes Mother’s Day greeting cards, flowers and gifts, and a meal at Mom’s favorite restaurant. This year Mother’s Day took on a slightly different hue because of a little “cookie love” I shared in 2 different Drop In and Decorate Cookie Donation events held in honor of Mother’s Day.
First I attended a Drop In and Decorate event in Rhode Island at the home of professional food writer and blogger Lydia Walshin, the founder of Drop In and Decorate. There I got to rub shoulders with some veterans in the craft of artistic and creative cookie decorating. In honor of mothers everywhere, we decorated 325 cookies for: SSTARbirth in Cranston, a shelter for chemically dependent, pregnant or postpartum women and their children; Abby’s House in Worcester, a multi-purpose resource center for homeless women; and Our Place in Cambridge, a day-care center for homeless children and their moms.
Cookies decorated at RI event
Lydia kindly sent me home from her 3rd annual event for Mother’s Day with leftover icing and some cookies so that I could use them at a Drop In and Decorate event I organized at the library where I work in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
On Tuesday May 4th, the library enjoyed its second Drop In and Decorate event, having previously done one in December 2009 to give cookies to the local Senior Center in town. This, our second ever event, saw us expanding our community connections with 250 cookies for the event baked and donated by the New Bedford Vocational Technical High School Culinary Arts Baking students.
The actual decorating event was shared by local Boy Scouts, TCAN/Key Club students from Dartmouth High School and various community members and library patrons.
The cookies decorated at the library were given to the Women’s Center of New Bedford and Fall River. 3 shelters run by them each received a tray of cookies along with a smaller tray for the hard-working staff as well. We hope the cookies are a nice Mother’s Day touch in their lives today.
Here is a video on YouTube which shares about the event:
I made another video on Youtube about the daffodil field in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Making a visit to its sea of yellow and white is now a tradition every Spring. This year’s pilgrimage came on my day off of work and found me driving all the way from Rhode Island to Dartmouth to hang out with the daffodils in Parsons Reserve. I enjoyed the solitude and beauty since I had the daffodil vista all to myself. They are stunning don’t you think?
p.s. for me this was self-transcendence because I used some editing techniques that were new to me such as cutaway…
Did you know that some tulip flowers are officially named after someone or something? Examples include presidents, royalty or famous people.
There are currently over 3,000 varieties of tulips and the Royal General Bulbgrowers Association in the Netherlands keeps careful track of all the new hybrids with the International Cultivar Register of Tulip Names.
Sometimes an unnamed tulip receives the name of a person, place or thing recognizable to many.
Some of these tulips with famous and recognizable names can be found in Keukenhof, an amazing huge garden located southwest of Amsterdam in Holland (or the Netherlands), the modern-day tulip capital of the world. If you love tulips, this is a must see place to go. It is the biggest bulb flower garden in the world with 4.5 million tulips.
Over 44 million people have visited it and it is the most photographed spot on the planet. New to Keukenhof in 2009 is the “Walk of Fame” which features tulips named after people and things. There you can find tulips named after the band Pink Floyd, the Disney character Donald Duck, the famous Indian actress Aishwarya Ray, 4-time Olympic medalist Inge de Bruin, Ferrari, Prince Willem-Alexander and more.
My meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy is one of these notable people with a tulip named after him. The tulip is is an orange/red colour with a yellow edge on the petals. It was cultivated by Jan Ligthart and was officially inaugurated as the Sri Chinmoy Tulip on April 30, 2005 in Keukenhof in conjunction with the World Harmony Run arriving in Holland. The tulip is “permanently listed in the International Cultivar Register of Tulip Names” according to the official certificate received during the tulip’s inauguration.
I was lucky enough to purchase some of these Sri Chinmoy Tulip bulbs in order to plant them in the yard of my home and I have flowers blooming right now this April.
It took two years for me to succeed (squirrels are a big problem in my yard) but it was worth the wait. In 2008, I planted my first Sri Chinmoy tulip bulbs brought all the way from Holland by some of Sri Chinmoy’s Dutch students. I tried my technique that worked like a charm in previous years where I waited to plant the bulbs in early December to thwart the squirrels from eating them. No charm this time – not a single tulip bloomed the following Spring.
So last Fall (2009) I switched it up and tried a different technique to protect the tulip bulbs from getting devoured by the squirrels. I put Shake Away granules to deter squirrels from coming around the area where they were planted. This time it worked! I have my first Sri Chinmoy Tulips blooming in my yard in Rhode Island. I would happily do a commercial for Shake Away, having used it to get rid of a mystery critter living under my shed and to get mice to move out of my house. But back to the tulip…
The tulip is quite stunning. I particularly like the way it looks like light is emanating from it when the sun hits it. For a tulip to look like it is giving off light is rather symbolic given that it is named after a spiritual teacher who dedicated more than 40 years of his life to helping seekers find divine light, truth and peace.
