Well_Being

Hi, it’s Marilyn Fuller again: health coach, nurse, nutritionist.

I talked to you last time about the Circle of Life: primary foods, secondary foods. Primary foods being Relationships, Regular Activity, Fulfilling Career and Economics, and Spiritual Practice. Once you are satisfied and balanced in those areas, you’ll be happier and more fulfilled. You’ll be satisfied with life!

Then you can go on to what you're putting in your mouth, which is secondary Foods.

You know who often teaches me
How to live life
Is my dog Missy
My shi tzu
I have to tell you
She really shows me how to embrace the day so often
When I get up no matter what time
What the weather is, whatever the conditions are
She just jumps up and is ready to the greet the day
She eyes me as I move around my home
She looks at what I do
And if she sees me put on my shoes and socks
Immediately she is ready to go
She has no clue where I am going
It could be somewhere not even fun that I am going

When I was a child, my father told me, I don’t know if it was in grade school, or high school, he said, “Son, never cheat. Again, you shouldn’t cheat in school. I know, I’ve seen people do it, and they do it in college.
But if you start cheating, later you could cheat on your wife, your family, your children, your friends, your boss, your coworkers, your customers, or business associates – where does it end?”

What’s that sound
The sound of my dog
Missy as she is howling and growling away
playing with her toy
Having such joy with this stuffed animal
Is the sound ferocious?
is the sound she is making an expressing
Delight
Frustration
fun
there are so many sounds we hear in life
And the meaning we put behind the sound
And the expression of the sound
I can tell she is having a lot of fun
Running around
Enjoying this toy of hers
Just having a really good time
Getting up in the day

I really enjoy looking at tree bark - the whorls and swirls of bark as it moves up the trunk of the tree. It overlaps like house shingles. And it eddies around limbs and around the stumps of fallen limbs. You see the tree holes, and the flow of the bark around them.

The patterns are mesmerizing, like watching water that is stopped.

It really seems like something is written on the tree, by the tree, over and over again.

And when a vine climbs the tree, it is even more beautiful, especially in the autumn when the vine turns red.

I love working with beets – whole, leafy, bushy beets.

Everything about them leaves this deep, ruby tint. As you rinse the giant green leaves, the red stalks look like rhubarb and tint the water red. As they drip on the steel sink, the droplets look luminescent over the cool, silver blue.

If you hold a leaf up to the light, so the sun shines thru, the leaf is a gorgeous, vibrant yellow green, contrasted with the crimson stem system running thru the leaf.

The leaves taste great raw.

Flip Flops

"Flip Flop I was taking a bath," I think that is the song.
Or is it "Splish splash I was taking a bath"?
I think this was the song.
Hi, it is summer and it is hot.
A lot of humidity in the day here today.
I went out there to do some yard clean up.
We had a really bad storm here in Newtown, CT.
It was actually a tornado a micro burst or macroburst or something like that.
There are branches down everywhere.

How long can you smile?

Can you consciously keep a smile for a day? for an hour? for 3 minutes?

I’ve tried this, and it does take effort.

Even consciously returning a gaze with a smile.

There are those rare people who always seem to have a smile – they actually always seem happy.

At the supermarket, anywhere where there are strangers, it is kind of fun and interesting to hunt for visually happy people.

Sometimes the earth seems more beautiful than ever, like when the sun lights up the fall leaves, from behind – the leaves literally glow.

The light is always changing, so that what five minutes ago was a dark, drab patch, is now sparkling with bright leaves that decide to shine.

When the light is just right, any scene becomes lit like a theater stage.

I just have to be still outside, and beauty comes to me – or perhaps I tune in. A squirrel comes by, or a chipmunk, or a hawk.

I love stained glass windows. The colors are so luminescent, especially deep blues with glints of deep red. The windows glow.

The fragments of glass set in lead, all fit together, like a poetic puzzle. All the glowing pieces are bordered in dull silvery lead, as if someone outlined everything in the picture.

They are huge and intricate, often mounted high up. Sometimes I go into a church just to be inspired by the stained glass windows, and smell the incense, and see the candles.