Growing Up Alone . . . And Life Goes On
19 May 2012 3 Comments
in Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Philosophy, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: Alone, Cynicism, Knee, Naitivity, Naive, San Francisco
San Francisco Nob Hill photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I think I was ten years old when I saw the movie King Kong on our old black and white television in Sacramento, California . . . a long, long, long time ago. It scared me silly.
Back then, I wasn’t able to distinguish between reality and fantasy, at least while watching television or a movie. Now, I have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy whenever I watch the evening news on television—which is why I’ve quit watching it.
In those days of yore, however, I was very, very, very naïve. Now, I’m just plain naïve.
In short, I believed everything anyone ever told me. I still tend to do that, at least until proven wrong—benefit of the doubt and all that. After all, I had (and have) no reason to question what was (and is) being told me. Unless the source is some faction of government.
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“Bad, Bad Winter”
13 May 2012 2 Comments
in Farm Life, Humor, Life, Lifestyle, Philosophy, Thoughts Tags: Hay, Indian Legend, Kansas, Legend, Putting up hay, Rural Legend
Putting up hay with Mormon hay stacker, Box Elder County, Utah, circa 1940. Photographed by Russell Lee, 1903-1986. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
“KANSAS LEGEND tells of a pioneer rancher who spent the summer making a huge stack of hay to feed his cows through the winter,” relates Field Editor Karen Ann Bland of Gove, Kansas. “When he thought he had enough, he sent his son to ask a wise old Indian chief what kind of winter to expect.
“The chief solemnly shook his head and said, ‘Bad!’
“Alarmed, the rancher made even more hay, then sent his son back for an updated forecast. ‘Very bad!’ the chief said.
“So the rancher desperately made still more hay, then sent his son back to the chief. ‘Bad, bad winter. Much cold. Deep snow for many moons,’ he warned ominously.
“Impressed and worried, the son finally asked, ‘Please tell me: How do you know this?’
“The chief pointed toward the family’s distant ranch and said, ‘Because white man make much hay.’ “
—Country magazine, October/November 2006.
This is only ONE reason I love Country magazine.
No, I don’t work for the magazine, but that would be an ideal job, if there is such a thing as an ideal job.
Perhaps one day I shall share some other reasons why I love Country magazine when I’m stuck for something to say. Well, I’m not really stuck for something to say. I just read this and had a good laugh and wanted to share it with you. It caught me so off guard, as I hope it did you.
Have a great day!
Peril Atop Mount Timpanogas: An Adventure to Last a Lifetime
11 Apr 2012 3 Comments
in Adventure, Hiking, Inspiration, Life, Personal, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: Hike, Hiking, Mount Timpanogas, Mountain, Peril
Mount Timpanogas viewed from the east. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (All my photos were destroyed by water)
Five o’clock came early on that fateful morning of November 22, 1976.
Misty puffs of air from my breath fogged everything around me as I peered through the small opening in my uncomfortable sleeping bag. Well, the bag wasn’t so much uncomfortable as the ground beneath it was.
You see, during the night, a herd of small, hard stones had conspired to gather together underneath me. You recall the story of the Princess and the Pea? Well, it was like that, only I didn’t have twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds under me, just twenty jagged-edged stones.
I was lying half-way up the 11,700-foot plus Mount Timpanogas, about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City, Utah, along with a group of young college students from my church. I was the oldest college student of the group, being past the normal college age.
The first half of the climb to the summit was accomplished via a curvy, paved road, which we traversed the night before. Now, we were ready to tackle to second half of the climb.
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Missing Time, Or Was It Brain Freeze?
09 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: Brain freeze, Missing time, Strange, Time
Collage created from public domain images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
As I was listening, I recalled a strange event that happened to me while I was waiting for a bus about 14 or 15 years ago in Murray, Utah, a city about six miles south of Salt Lake City.
I was waiting for my bus outside a large mall. As I was about 15 minutes early, I decided to go inside one of the department stores and check out the CD racks for a few minutes. I hadn’t been there long when a lady clerk came up to me and asked if she could help me find something.
I told her, no, thank you, I was fine. I then picked up a CD and started looking at it.
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Easter Bunny, Really???
08 Apr 2012 6 Comments
in Holidays, Inspiration, Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Philosophy, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: celebration, Easterr, holiday, pagan
Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
You know, I think most people out of habit say, “Happy Easter”, when it comes to “celebrating” Easter Sunday. I would modify that to say, “Have a reflective Easter.”
I’m probably an odd ball (okay, no probably about it), but I don’t think Easter is meant to be a happy holiday, at least not in the sense “Have a happy Holiday” is normally used.
Easter is a special holiday because of its Christian influence, except today it has become somewhat of a pagan holiday. I mean, we have dyed Easter eggs, the Easter bunny who somehow comes up with all these billions of multi-colored hard-boiled eggs every year, chocolate Easter bunnies, little foil-wrapped chocolate Easter eggs, little yellow spongy duckies, Easter baskets and so forth.
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I Can Forgive, But I Can’t Forget
22 Mar 2012 7 Comments
in Inspiration, Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Philosophy, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: Cris Coleman, Forget, Forgiveness
Angry Woman by Vera Kratochvil
Public domain image courtesy of www.publicdomainpictures.net
Have you ever heard someone say, “I can forgive, but I can’t forget”? Perhaps you’ve said it yourself.
I know I’ve heard people say that and it makes me wonder: What’s forgiveness all about if it’s not about forgetting?
We’ve all had people do or say things to us that got our hackles up. It may have even made us angry and resentful, perhaps even hateful and vengeful.
The problem with this is that it has a deleterious effect on our bodies and our psyches. The longer we hang onto these feelings, the more of a negative effect they have on us.
If we say we forgive a person or persons for whatever they did or said, but we don’t forget, then we are only fooling ourselves. Our minds may say we indeed forgive, but our bodies, which hold onto the old negative feelings, continue to remember. And that’s not good.
Here’s the thing: In continuing to remember, those negative feelings continue to affect our bodies and our psyches.
On the other hand, the forgiven but unforgotten goes on his or her way completely unaffected by whatever we are experiencing. They’ve probably even forgotten whatever it was he or she said or did that affected us in a negative way. Thus, the only person who is likely hurt by our forgiving but not forgetting attitude is us.
Here’s what dictionary.com says about the verb forgive:
- to grant pardon for or remission of (an offense, debt, etc.); absolve.
- to give up all claim on account of; remit (a debt, obligation, etc.).
- to grant pardon to (a person).
- to cease to feel resentment against: to forgive one’s enemies (emphasis mine).
- to cancel an indebtedness or liability of: to forgive the interest owed on a loan.
Without getting religious, I wish to quote one scripture that illustrates what I’m talking about.
“And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34.)
While we say we forgive but can’t forget, our subconscious behavior will betray us every time. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, but sometime in the future, all will come out. It may come out in a sudden burst of temper or outrage against the person we had supposedly forgiven or a snub or whatever. We may not even know what caused our sudden behavior. But our bodies know.
What it all boils down to is this: Where there is no forgetting, there is no forgiveness. We can lie to ourselves to comfort our ego, but we can’t lie to our bodies. They remember everything.
If we say we forgive, then we need to forget, as though the thing never happened. There is no other way.
St. Patrick’s Day Green
16 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Inspiration, Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Philosophy, Reflections, Thoughts Tags: Green, St. Patrick's Day, St. Patty's Day, writer wednesday
©2012 Cris Coleman
Green Pond by Cris Coleman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Here’s my entry for St. Patrick’s Day.
Surely there’s something magical about a green pond.
Surely there’s got to be Leprechauns somewhere around there to keep it so nice and green.
That being said, I’ve never understood what all the hoopla is about when it comes to St. Patrick’s Day. It seems everyone goes nuts — parades, green beer, green eggs, green puke from too much green beer, and so forth.
When I was a wee lad in elementary school, if you didn’t wear green, you got pinched. What was that all about? You didn’t even have to be Irish to get pinched. Of course, my mom never bought me anything green. You can guess what happened.
In a r-e-a-l-l-y small town in Iowa, one of the things they do on an annual basis on St. Patrick’s Day is turn the river that flows by their town green. I mean, come on…
I can hear all the Irish men and women out there (or maybe those who just like to drink green beer) shouting at me, “YOU’D UNDERSTAND IF YOU WERE IRISH!” Well, maybe, maybe not.
I may have a wee bit of Irish blood in me. I’ve got a two-thirds chance that one of my great, great grandfathers may have been Irish. From what I’ve been able to tell, about two-thirds of all the Hines in Kentucky during that period of time came from Ireland.
On the other hand, it might be that I just came from a family that didn’t get excited about anything. Or it could be that I’m just an old curmudgeon after all.
Still, I wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
Whatever that means. 
“The Johnstown calamity”
11 Mar 2012 2 Comments
in Life, Personal, Reflections, Thoughts, Uncategorized Tags: 1889, Calamity, Disaster, Flood, Johnstown, New York Times, Pennsylvania
"The Johnstown calamity. A slightly damaged house." Photo by George Barker, 1889. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
I ran across this photograph from the Library of Congress newsletter and thought I’d share it with you. I’ve seen plenty of devastation photographs, but this one is unique. I’ve never seen anything like it.
When I looked up the tragedy on the Internet, I was surprised to learn that the Johnstown, Pennsylvania calamity was caused by a flood, rather than from a tornado, as I had previously thought.
A dam holding back an eight by three mile wide mountain lake broke and almost completely wiped out a city of 25,000 residents. For a summary and a New York Times account of the disaster, go to an account of the Johnstown calamity.
If you look closely, that looks to be a Pennsylvania Rail Road car underneath the house. You’ll note the initials “P.R.R.”. Apparently, Johnstown was an important hub for the railway, according to the article, “How Johnstown Made Its Living, Part 2″.
The town did rebuild, by the way, and celebrated the calamity’s 100th anniversary in 1989, according to the “calamity” article.
A note regarding the photograph: The original was very dull and without much contrast, so I lightened it up some and added some contrast to make it more appealing, at least as appealing as a disaster photograph can be.
Updated Out of Comfort Zone tab
06 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Inspiration, Life, Lifestyle, Personal, Philosophy, Reflections, Thoughts
This posting is a little late for my February 24, 2012 “adventure”, but here it is for those interested in getting out of one’s comfort zone and doing something out of the ordinary rut of life.
I encourage all to take the challenge and click on the No Comfort Zone patch on the right-hand column and take the plunge. Do something different.
