Please listen to and share my music …. to basically everyone on the planet !
Category: Success
Words that rhyme with “pandemic”

An epic pandemic for too many days
Petty polemics that fill me with pain
Oppression, systemic, from greed and hate
Recession, an epidemic of bills to pay
Schools closed, academics are slipping away
Health and wealth gaps, endemic, in political power plays
Protests, alchemic, transforming our ways
We know, it’s epistemic, got to vote for change
A magical Norwegian Forest cat
Witness the epic antics of Emmy, the Norwegian Forest cat we adopted from the Humane Society. The song is an original and so is Emmy !
Critics and “crickets”

This post is an attempt to inform, inspire, and hopefully even save lives for National Bullying Prevention Month…. please feel free to share!
First, let’s talk about the critics….
Safe and Sound
When we think of the idea of “safety”, we often think of our physical safety. There are safety goggles, safety belts, workplace safety, and safety pins, which are designed to keep us protected from physical harm.
But there is also emotional safety, which relates to our health and wellness just as much as physical safety does.
According to clinical professor of psychiatry Dr. Dan Siegel, we all have a basic need to feel “safe, seen, soothed, and secure.” There are so many situations in relationships, at work, at school, and in the community where we may not feel a true sense of emotional or physical safety. If you live or work in an environment where you don’t feel safe, it can affect you emotionally, intellectually, physically, and even spiritually.
There are many ways, conscious or unconscious, that we try to protect ourselves from physical or psychological threats. Some ways we work to make ourselves feel safe, strong, and connected to others are healthy, such as eating nutritious food, being physically active, playing music, bonding with family and friends, “pet therapy”, prayer and service to others, and practicing mindfulness meditation and movement arts like dance, yoga, and Tai Chi. Some ways that we try to make ourselves feel safe are not as healthy, such as using behaviors or substances to provide a sense of comfort and protection in a stressful environment or situation. There are often natural, adaptive, protective, and even unconscious reasons for why we started to act, feel, and think in those less healthy ways. So, acceptance and compassion for ourselves and others as a “work in progress” is important, while also realizing that, with the right knowledge and support, we can feel safe to try making healthy changes. Advances in neuroscience, with research by Dr. Shauna Shapiro, Dr. Dan Siegel, Dr. Kristin Neff, Dr. Rick Hanson, and many others, show that you can actually change your brain function and structure for the better, just by how you think. These changes in your brain then improve how you think, feel, and act, at all levels, mind, body, and spirit. But you have to let go of shame and judgement as you do the work of transforming your life, focusing instead on positive attitudes of acceptance, hope, genuine love, kindness and compassion, in order to change your brain in a healthy way.
Everyone needs kindness and compassion when trying something new, when making difficult changes or decisions, and when dealing with loss, trauma, failure, and disappointment. With support from health and wellness professionals that address the mind, body, and spirit, you can begin to naturally let go of emotional and physical pain, continue to grow healthy and strong, and learn to feel truly safe.
Love
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
When we are trying to make sense of these times and to do and say whatever we can to make the world a better place to live, it can be challenging. I believe that love will always be more powerful than anything that is not love.
There are so many examples of how goodness, even in the smallest acts of kindness, can change hearts and transform lives when done with the faith, hope, and love of God.
Faith, as small as a mustard seed, can move mountains. You may be moving the mountain one stone at a time, but it can be done, with faith in a higher purpose and with others that have that calling.
Having just a glimmer of hope can make all the difference in emotional and physical healing. We are moved when we see even the smallest example of encouragement offered to someone who needs it. We need hope to believe in ourselves and others. Hope keeps us going when life is hard.
Our attempts at love, no matter how meager, become so much more powerful when we let God love through us. Like a single candle, love can light up the darkness. Like a small stone thrown in the lake, love can create so many waves. As with all the resources God gives us, God multiplies our love, no matter how limited it may seem, when we choose to love with grace and mercy, compassion and forgiveness.
When you think that your efforts, no matter how small, can’t make a positive difference, think of Margaret Mead’s quote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Here is a song I wrote called “Small Wonders” about how something small can make a big difference.
Music takes you places
A song that I wrote ended up as a line dance in Austria years later. That’s what you get with a Swiss publisher, two American songwriters, an Austrian band, and an Italian line dance teacher!
Asheville
Send My Mail to Nashville web series
The movie that I’m in, Send My Mail to Nashville, is going to be a web series on You Tube. Stacey K. Black directed and edited the documentary about songwriters in Nashville and will release the movie as a series with ten episodes next year.
The best is yet to come
Here’s a chart that I came up with recently, about expectations about a future event and then how rewarding the event actually ends up being. The chart shows the potential emotions a person can feel with the various levels of reward (on the vertical axis) and levels of expectation (on the horizontal axis). For example, if you have high expectations that a future event will be very rewarding to you and it’s not, you will be disappointed. It is possible that you will be less satisfied in that situation than with any other combination of reward level and expectation level.
Although I believe in having a positive outlook on the future overall, I also think that there needs to be a balance with how low or high our expectations are about any one future event. Thinking that the best is yet to come and having a sense of hope for the future in general is good. But expecting too much from any one experience can lead to disappointment. Like when you have heard great things about a new restaurant and your meal turns out to be just average, you are often more dissatisfied than if you had no, or low, expectations about the food.
So, maybe we need to try to find a balance between feeling good about life overall, but not having overly high expectations about a particular event, person, thing, or place.
Accepting – low expectation and low reward. If you keep your expectations low about a potential reward and do not receive it at all or do not receive it at the level that feels rewarding, you can feel a sense of acceptance.
Elated –low expectation and high reward. This usually will mean that you will be at a higher level of satisfaction than any other of the options. You will be more likely to be pleasantly surprised and feel more gratitude when you kept your expectations low or weren’t even anticipating a reward at all.
Satisfied – high expectation and high reward. If you have high expectations and receive a high reward, you may feel satisfied, but not at the “Elated” level.
Disappointed – high expectation and low reward. This will be the least satisfying situation and may even result in feelings of loss or failure because you fully expected the reward and did not receive it at all or did not receive it at the level you wanted.