The Skunks in our Lives

Crazy story: I was up at 5 am (not the craziest part) and noticed that the front porch light was on. Piper had heard Lucky (my parent's cat) meowing outside our windows. I took Lucky back over to my parent's house and walked around the back of the house to take him and his sister, Miracle, to where the food was. Guess who I saw? 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/SSrvoBtdeEURErYc8

The cats wisely backed away and I tried to figure out how to scare away the happily feasting intruder while avoiding smelling "wonderful" for days. I decided to go into the house and try and scare it away safely from the other side of the glass patio doors, which worked.

I let the cats into the porch, closed it off and left them food and water. 

As I drove away, I thought about how sometimes the people around us (or we ourselves) are like skunks--with natural built-in responses that are less than desirable, probably developed in combination of childhood/teen environments and natural man weaknesses. Sometimes we need to consider how we handle them this way: recognizing that yes, we can trigger the proverbial "odor," but no, it's not necessarily because we are doing anything wrong. But we can take preventative measures and we can be respectful and creative in maneuvering solutions around it. But the skunk is still just a cute little animal trying to survive and protect itself. No reason to feel any animosity toward it...just wariness . A little healthy wariness/awareness can go a long way to develop a viable relationship with the cute little skunks in our lives .

Mood swings and glimpses of the divine :)

Last October when we moved here, I remember riding a high of...something.  Everything was great!  Give me an obstacle!  Life is wonderful!

Then I hit grumpy time...and struggled through the muddle.

Discouraged, I thought, "Have I lost faith?  Am I doing something wrong?"  And then my dear friend Karen wrote something about how there is a time right after following a prompting where we ride on a spiritual high, and then there is a time of challenge...or something (I can't find it, but it was awesome!).  Anyway,  I feel this way so often after bearing my testimony about a principle:  it seems that by opening up my mouth about something, then I get a time to be tested to see how much I really believe that principle :).

Yesterday was one of those grumpy times.  I turned to Quinn and exclaimed, "I feel like I must be bi-polar sometimes!  Happy and euphoric one moment, then gloomy and grumpy the next!"  Fortunately, the sunny days outshine the gloomy ones.

I wonder if I went back through my journal and blog posts if I could detect one of those infamous cycles in my mood swings.  I just feel rotten when I feel gloriously sunshiney in the morning about everything and everyone and then turn into Mr. Hyde at night :S...

Nothing like reality to remind us how mortal and imperfect we are :). I guess it is nice that we can catch glimpses of the divine in the midst of mortality, right?  Maybe it is all in how we look at things: is our life full of darkness with occasional bursts of light, or are our lives light with occasional moments of darkness?

I think I'll shoot for the latter, since I heard somewhere that there is power in positive thinking :)...oh yeah!  It was in that book my grandma had on the back of her toilet in her bathroom for years!  Thanks, Norman Vincent Peale. (Maybe that is the best way to get your kids to read something...leave it in the bathroom for years, with nothing else to read during those "quiet moments," and they might "find time" to at least look at it a little :)!)

Created a new label for this blog post: "grumpies."  Maybe I should go back and add this label where appropriate? :)