Personal Story

She stared at me with her oh so serious and piercing eyes, chin resting on her hand, and said in a most sincere voice: “I love talking to old people.”

There she was, one of a gaggle of elementary school girls at the first meeting of our new workshop, and these were the first words I heard out of her mouth.

Well, I responded, "I love talking to young people, so we’re going to have a great time together – sharing and learning from each other."

I’d like to talk about my faith today. I give full credit to my mother for my faith.

My mother was a divorced Catholic who remarried. Who could no longer receive the sacraments in the Catholic church, but she made sure that we were brought up Catholic. Every week we went to religious education. And every Sunday, she took us to Mass.

And if my older brother, who had been out having a good time, came in late and knocked the phone off of the wall, we went to 7 o’clock Mass, otherwise it was usually 10 o’clock Mass.

This story I would like to tell is about friends of mine. Friends of my husband’s and mine, who recently got refugee visa’s from the Ukraine, and are now living in Oakville, CT.

Twenty something years ago, my husband is working in the shop, and the woman who was the engineer, she was crying. He said, “What is wrong Galina?” She said that my friend Irina in the Ukraine, she lost her husband at 28 years old of diabetes, because if the was money, there was no medicine, and if there was medicine, there was no money.

I will touch briefly on the birth of stars.

Our Miracle Universe, absolute darkness. Not a hint of light. No stars anywhere. No sounds of any kind. Nothing of any kind. Nothing at all.

Then suddenly a huge explosion like the universe has never known before, and probably will never know again.

In a matter of seconds, the universe was engulfed in a huge cloud of hydrogen gas.

The Big Bang had just occurred. From a tiny point called a singularity in the universe, the universe as we have come to know was born.

Good morning. This is April 12, 2023. Montgomery Frazier, The Image Guru.

And today I just want to talk about, in an aging population, we have to be our own health advocates for ourselves and for the people we love.

Did you ever go outside and feel that all the birds were singing?

Every single one. So many different songs. That there was a kind of happiness in the air. An exuberance at this moment. As if anything was possible.

Strange, isn’t it - the thought “As if anything was possible?” Most of us rarely think of this.

Suppose, just for a moment that it really is true – that it can be true - that anything is possible right now, just because I tune into and play with “anything is possible.”

What would you do? Really, what would you do?

The sound, the sound
Of the babbling brook
Of a damn of water
Thank you water for flowing
For your beauty
For nurturing my body
For being quenching
On a hot day
For being able to cleanse myself
Showering, bathing
May I never take you for granted
For doing the dishes
Yeah may I not take for granted for doing the dishes
Water you such a needed thing to have
And often I don’t know how much you get appreciated
Everybody needs to be appreciated
Ever thing should be appreciated

It seemed like it would be our ordinary 30 minute walk around our neighborhood, the same route, like every other day – but far from it this day.

First, as we approached a corner, we suddenly noticed a huge turkey vulture sitting on top of a telephone pole with its back away from us.

It was completely unfazed as we stood there for a few minutes admiring this unusual, beautiful sight.

But nothing prepared us for what we were about to come upon in the next few minutes.

I like to doodle. With an extra fine black pen on a piece of ordinary white paper.

The black ink is so stark, yet so controlled, so elegant because the line is so finely precise.

Doodling is one of earliest ways I remember to cope with frustration, with worry, with stress. It relaxes me.

There’s something about setting pen to paper that feels like raw creativity, pure play – no agenda – no picture in mind – just giving myself over to the moment.