Category Inspirational
FMM 11 25 16 Trailblazers!
“Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.”~Gail Sheehy. In 2006, on a trip to the beautiful YS Falls in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, I was invited to take a chance, to take a leap of faith, to branch out. Zip-lining. I was tempted but. Perhaps it was too much money (a friend offered to […]
FMM 11 18 16 Chant a Psalm
“Just living is not enough…one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”~Hans Christian Andersen. My father was chaplain and teacher of Bible Knowledge at a high school in the heart of Jamaica. Since the school was founded under the ‘auspices’ of a Christian School, the subject was not Religious Knowledge. There was no […]
FMM 11 11 16 Remembrance
“In the end we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a card game we used to play when I was young; it was a simple game of pairing cards. But the deck was spread out (face down) on a table, and […]
FMM 11 4 16 Evoking our Better Angels
“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”~Mikhail Gorbachev. One of the problems with growing up as a preacher’s child (parson pickney, in Jamaican terms) is the unrealistic expectation that somehow you will behave better than the average child. My mother discovered that I had ‘unfriended’ […]
FMM 10 14 16 Awesome Wonder
“He who can no longer pause to stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”~Albert Einstein. I remember very clearly being taken by my father to see an amazing sight. It was one of the nights on board the SS Ascania, the ship that took us to Jamaica in 1963. […]
FMM 9 9 16 Walk a Mile
“This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.”~ Alice Walker. At the age of 8 or 9, I attended a country school in the heart of Jamaica. I was the only white girl in the school, which meant I was […]
FMM 8 26 16 Road Trip, Baby!
“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike”~Maya Angelou. Before my family moved to Jamaica, our annual vacations began with a road trip. My parents would pack up whatever old jalopy we owned (one was the ‘orange monster’!) with camping gear, supplies for a month, and five kids. The journey was made slightly […]
FMM 8 19 16 Leading with the Heart
“One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.”~Knute Rockne I was not an athlete growing up. I longed to be an athlete. My father had won awards for his athletic prowess, following his brothers in all manner of sporting events. But I had team spirit. I cheered my team along. I […]
FMM 8 5 16 Fingerprints and Footprints
“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers”~Khalil Gibran. The older we get, the harder it is to be fed a line. We have grown from being idealists to being cynics. When someone pays us a compliment we may […]