Well today was Halloween, and now it is almost 10pm and the hoopla is over. I dressed up as Dr. Seuss- Cat in the Hat and I dressed Apollo up as a super duper cute Pumpkin. He looked adorable! Last year because he was only one year old, I took him to the mall for Trick or Treating. Some people reading this might not know what I'm talking about, as this may only be a cold-city thing, but over the last 10 years or so, parents take their kids to shopping malls on Halloween and the kids get candy from all the different stores. This is awesome when the weather happens to be super shitty, as we can commonly get snow by Halloween (not in the last few years though, thankfully.) But even when there's no snow, it can still be pretty chilly by the end of October. Anyway, as the weather wasn't too bad today, I decided I would take the little Bugger on his first neighborhood round of Trick or Treating. So after dinner, my sister, Apollo and I joined some neighborhood friends for a little candy stroll (Kev had to stay home to hand out candy.). It started off fine, but as soon as we got to a house where the door was answered by a man dressed as Dracula, then that's when the tears started! Poor little guy! He kept saying he was scared and wanted someone to hold him. The tears would cease for a minute or two when he was getting candy put into his little bucket but then start up again as soon as he saw any skeleton decorations, or whatever. It was pretty cute, even though I felt sorry for him!
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| Apollo, my sister Marlena aka Minnie Mouse, and moi, The Cat in the Hat. |
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| Poor guy, all traumatized and tired. :) |
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Since about 2006-ish, I have been wearing my hair black with a blonde streak bleached in the front (kind of like a skunk). When I get sick of it, I sometimes add some blue or green or yellow or whatever color to it to change it up a bit. I can't seem to get rid of it for good though. Whenever I look at pictures of my hair just all black, somehow there's just something I don't like about it. Anyway, my sister is an ex-hairdresser, so she showed me years ago how to bleach my own hair so I would stop bugging her to do it. As I am not the most patient person in the world, nor the most exact, PLUS I am not a fan of getting my hair done, PLUS my hair does not bleach easily, then my blonde has been known to be a little brassy sometimes or you can see 'bands' of past bleachings, etc. I tend to hide it with my love of messy hairstyles. Anyway, another downfall to my homemade hairstyling, is that I have noticed a TON of breakage all along my forehead. I have lots of spiky little pieces that just stick up because the hair broke from being so bleached and damaged. Well, since I can't bring myself to get rid of the streak, but I definitely need a break from bleaching, I decided to go Turquoise for a while. and BAM! Can I tell you that I am completely in love with it now????? The color is so Peacocky-divine, and I think it actually looks really good with my skin tone. It also looks wicked with the black. I am really, really digging it.
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I have some really cute black rubber Wellies I bought a few years ago for really cheap. The fit nicely, look good with leggings even if its not raining, and are just plain awesome. I haven't been wearing them lately, because I noticed that I snagged the rubber on something and ripped a hole in the side. Totally sucks. At the craft store I found that you can buy Duck Tape in different colors and patterns not only in a roll, but a sheet of it as well! I decided to craft a patchwork heart for my Wellies out of it and Voila! Here's the result:
A little homemade-looking, but better than a rip if you ask me. At least this way, I can still wear them while doing yard work, or going to the grocery store.
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For those of you with children, and those of you have had it up to your ears with trying to find a decent way to deal with your kids' tantrums, meltdowns, and other misbehaviour, well let me share that I found an awesome book at the library for that! I always feel that I am either too lax or lose my cool too harshly when it comes to dealing with misbehaving. I don't want to be a complete rigid stickler, but at the same time I can not stand kids who don't listen to their parents, don't respect adults or rules, or are just plain shits, ya know? But at the same time, disciplining kids (especially young ones) is soooooooo tiring. Well the book is called |Ain't Misbehavin'" by Alyson Schafer. She is a Canadian psychotherapist and leading parenting expert. I definitely am going to buy this book because it's an awesome reference guide when you don't know what to do or how to handle a situation. I would say this book is good for anyone with toddler aged children to pre-teens.
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Now for those of you needing some inspiration in this end of Autumn-beginning of Winter time, let me share with you some of my favourite excerpts from the book "Eat, Pray, Love' by Elisabeth Gilbert.
Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union”. The task at hand in Yoga is to find union- between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors.
Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra- the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga-your disciplined practices of sacred union- to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh.
The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in-glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance. Buddhism calls it ignorance. Islam blames our misery on rebellion on God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self that is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, you poor wretch, and know it not.”
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy-men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral-they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance. “Our whole business therefore in this life”, wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore the health of the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly the same occurrence. Generally, their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light. The Japanese call this energy ki, the Chinese Buddhists call it chi, the Balinese call it taksu, the Christians call it The Holy Spirit, the Kalahari Bushmen call it n/um (their holy men describe it as a snakelike power that ascends the spine and blows a hole in the head through which the gods then enter.)
In Indian Yogic tradition, this divine secret is called kundalini shakti and is depicted as a snake who lies coiled at the base of the spine until it is released by a master’s touch or by a miracle, and which then ascends up through seven chakras, or wheels , and finally through the head, exploding into union with God.
The human body is made of a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.
And my absolute personal Favourite:
God dwells within you, as you.
Meaning, you are absolutely perfect as you are, with all your so-called flaws and all. God (or whatever you want to call him) made you as you are and his energy flows within you, so you don't have to worry about beating yourself up for saying the word 'Fuck" or not being a virgin, or not praying everyday, or not going to church or whatever. You are as he made you and you are perfectly the way he wanted you to be! So stop beating yourself up, and accept your perfection and LIVE HAPPY and FREE!!!
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And that concludes our Hippie portion of the blog.... I'm gonna go eat some Halloween candies now. Goodnight!
