Sunday, October 24, 2010

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them...

A lofty purpose?
A few days ago, one of our community members, Yosef, had a stroke. Yosef is not just an anonymous man who comes to services, does his thing and goes home. He is like an extra grandfather to my children, and is always kind and loving, dispensing hugs and lollipops every shabbat. 



We wish him a full return to health. Please meditate on him and send him healing - his name is Yosef ben Rachel.


When I told my daughters about what happened and that Yosef was in the hospital, Miriam burst into tears and sobbed in my arms for about twenty minutes. Then she, along with the others, set about making him get well cards, which we gave to his daughter-in-law on shabbat to pass along to him. 

But it didn't end there. All during the Torah reading and meditations, which lasted about two and a half hours, my 8-year old and my 6-year old sat in the lobby and scanned the Zohar to send Yosef healing energy. Later, Leah, the 6-year old, patiently explained to her little sister how to scan for healing. "You scan from right to left," she told Rebecca, "and you say 'Please, please, please, Man in the Sky, make him feel better!" (Okay, so I know we need to work on terminology, but still...)

I'm not telling you all this to pat myself on the back as a great parent. Through this terrible event, I got a view into my children's heads, and I was stunned by what I found. 

Most kids are self absorbed. The Zohar talks about how babies are born with their fists clenched tight, signifying their desire to receive for themselves alone. The growing up process is supposed to be us learning how to transform that into a desire to receive for the sake of sharing. As parents, we are constantly trying to instill good values in our children, and it may seem as if they just don't hear us. But they do. They hear everything you say (and a lot you don't say) and they store it away in their consciousness until they need it, and then they surprise you.

The other point I want to make is the amazing power in teaching kabbalah to children. You may think they are too young to grasp the metaphysics, and you are probably right. But there is a tremendous amount you can teach them, even at a very young age. If the spiritual seeds are planted and nurtured, they will grow, and these children will change the world. So, support programs like Success for Kids, which provides these invaluable lessons to kids from all walks of life, and all religious backgrounds. The world won't change until we change it.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Beeing Mindful: What We Can Learn From Bees


Bees are fascinating creatures. When we look at them, they seem at first blush very different from humans, but if you look at little closer, you will find that they have a lot to teach us.

  1. When you live in unity with a shared purpose, you can receive all that you need to live, plus more. – Honeybees each have their own individual roles in the hive, but they all work in unity for the good of the hive. Working together, with the queen producing the next generation and some bees gathering nectar, others building the hive and feeding the young, etc., the entire hive prospers and produces more than enough honey to feed the colony. Try to surround yourself with people who share your goals and have complementary skills, so that you can all work together. Ideally, your family and your work environment will function like a hive. If not, choose the role of queen bee and try to bring unity to the group.
  2. Choose a leader and follow him or her. – Honeybees have one queen, and that is the one they are loyal to. Whether you are talking about a spiritual leader or a spouse, pick one person that you are committed to and then stop looking for someone else who may be a little bit better.
  3. Nothing is impossible. – According to the laws of aerodynamics, the bees’ small wings cannot possibly support their relatively large bodies, so it should be impossible for them to fly. Yet they do it. Maybe because they don’t know the laws of aerodynamics, they don’t limit themselves (sort of like in the Roadrunner cartoons where he runs off the cliff and doesn’t fall until he looks down).
  4. Guard your entrances. – Bees produce a substance called propolis, that they spread at the entrance to their hives. The propolis seals the cracks in the hive and protects them from incursion from ants and viruses.  Similarly, we can make sure that our entrances, our eyes and ears, are protected from negativity. When people continually complain and find fault, when people speak badly of other people, we need to walk away or change the subject. We can also protect what we see by avoiding gratuitous violent or sexual images. And we can make an effort to surround ourselves with positive people with good values and avoid the other kind.
  5. Choose your battles. – When a honeybee stings a person or animal, it dies because its stinger is closely attached to the rest of its body and the back part of its body comes off with the stinger. This makes it extra important for the bee to decide very carefully when it is worth sacrificing its life. So the next time you get mad about something, think if it is worth your life to react, because little by little, anger can lead to heart attacks and other dangerous conditions, albeit at a much slower pace than for bees.
  6. Work hard. – We don’t say “busy as a bee” for nothing! Bees know the value of hard work, and they are willing to put the energy in to get their desired result.
  7. Share your knowledge. – Like bees, people are not meant to be solitary creatures. When a bee finds a good source of nectar or identifies a potential threat to the hive, it communicates to the other bees through scent or by doing an elaborate dance. We don’t have to dance, but we should tell people we care about if we see an opportunity or a threat that may impact them. 
  8. Immortality is possible. -  When archaeologists unearthed the ancient tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt, the found honey among the personal effects. Even after thousands of years, the honey was still good and perfectly edible! If we keep the right consciousness, we may be able to last as long and remain as sweet as that ancient honey. 


Tuesday, August 3, 2010

They Keep Going and Going and Going...

Remember when you were a kid and you couldn't wait until summer vacation? School was out and we went to camp. Well, my parents had one child, and I have five. Paying for camp for five kids is a bit out of my budget at the moment, so they are attending Camp Dublino.

The best part of Camp Dublino (for them) is that they get to sleep in. It's good for me, too, since I work from home and it gives me some quiet time in the morning to work uninterrupted. But there's a dark side - when it comes time to go to bed, they are not tired, not even one little bit. I have had to go in there yelling at midnight, one AM, and even later on occasion, because they are giggling and running around. And let's just say that when I am tired and can't go to sleep because of screaming girls, I tend to get a bit cranky. I will tell you that I am proud of myself for refraining from cursing at the little darlings (at least, so far).

These are the times when you wish they marketed a tranquilizer dart gun for children. You would just aim, fire and off to dreamland. If any of you is an inventor type, the idea is free, and I'll be your first customer.

My new strategy is forced labor. That is, if they can't go to sleep, at least they should be doing something useful with all that energy, so I make them clean their rooms. One of my spiritual teachers and fellow mother of five, Sarah Hardoon, gave me another strategy. She said when her kids wouldn't go to sleep, she made them stand in a particular place and told them they couldn't go to sleep. Eventually, the bed started to look really good and when they were exhausted, she eventually let them go to sleep.

What has your experience with getting kids (not babies) to sleep? Please share by commenting below!

Monday, July 26, 2010

My Other Life

My loyal readers may know (and hopefully love) me as a mom of 5, but I have another life - my work life. I am fortunate enough to do something I love to do: marketing. I have had my own marketing company, Pro Creative Marketing Group, for 13 years, and before that, I had another marketing company, Exe.com, which was responsible for selling, installing and teaching the teachers in the country's 3rd largest school district all about this really cool new thing called the Internet. (Yes, I know I'm dating myself here).

Pro Creative specializes in helping small and micro businesses stand out in the market, develop new sales channels and execute uniquely effective marketing programs. We write blogs for them, pursue relationships with their prospects through social media platforms, create new corporate identities, and advise them on product design and packaging.

If you have a small business and are looking for ways to differentiate yourself from your competition and find and connect to prospective customers, check out my business blog, The Pro Creative Buzz, or go to the main website, http://www.procreative.com.

Hope to see you reading and commenting here and also on the business blog!

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Mind Yr Manners, Plz!

I know I am dating myself, but when I was a kid, we had an avocado green push button phone with a really long curly cord. You could go all the way from the kitchen to the dining room with it. When we left the house, we were unreachable unless we made a call from the phone at the place we were or used a pay phone.

Now, everyone, kids included, is tethered to their mobile phone. In one way, it gives us tremendous freedom, powerful computing abilities and multiple ways to stay in touch. On the other hand, we are now expected to be accessible to everyone, all the time.

This technology has also brought with it challenges in etiquette. Children, in particular, do not seem to know where to draw the line between staying connected to their friends and participating in real life with flesh and blood people in the same room.

Just today, my husband called our son Danny in to hang out with us for a few minutes before he went to his friend's house for a sleepover. The entire time, he sat on the couch texting. When I mentioned that he had to take the garbage out, he uncharacteristically jumped up to do it right away. Why? So when he was outside, he could continue his texting conversation without parental interference.

I found the same type of phenomenon when we went over to Tarpon Springs near Tampa to visit my brother- and sister-in-law and their children. The two teens were constantly looking down at their phones during almost all of our family dinner.

Here are my rules for phone manners, which I find myself needing to reinforce more often as my son gets older:
1. People physically present with you, even in the car, trump anyone on a phone or text.
2. Always try to engage the real people you're with in conversation. If they are otherwise occupied, it is OK to use the phone.
3. If I call or text you, respond first to me, and secondarily to any friends.
4. I don't mind some common abbreviations, but try not to sound like a total illiterate, even while texting.

This last one really irks me, because as a writer and editor, it bugs me when one of my children uses poor grammar or spelling. Last year, I read all of Jane Austen's novels. One of the things that really struck me was how beautifully the educated class wrote their letters. Back then, letters were the only way to communicate other than face to face, so how a person expressed herself in words was critical to how the world saw her. Now, I'm afraid that we have not only lost the art of lovely prose, but are in danger of losing even the fundamentals of spelling, grammar and sentence structure.

Let's try to preserve some semblance of civilization in our kids or at least common courtesy. I'll try if you will, and I think we'll all be better off for it.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Life on the Road

Last night, we arrived home after a 2-day, seemingly endless road trip from the mountains of North Carolina to South Florida. In the car were 5 kids, a dog, an intermittently cranky husband and yours truly, and behind us, we were towing a U-Haul trailer filled with furniture and whatnot.

It was a good thing we had the trailer, because I don't know how we could have fit all of our stuff in the car otherwise. On the way up, we had one less kid, since my son had gone a week early with his grandparents as a way of giving us extra room and reducing friction between him and his four sisters. Now we had him, plus all of his stuff.

We have an Expedition, so there are two back seats, and we were constantly doing a shell game, trying to rearrange the children to avoid fighting and minimize car sickness, as much as possible. On several occasions, the iPhone was our savior. When the little one was in tears because someone was mean to her, she stopped crying once she was offered the phone to play with. Other arguing was avoided by keeping the kids busy playing games or listening to music on the phone (a headphone splitter also came in handy). Of course, then we had fighting about who's turn it was to have the phone, but what can you do? Overall, it was a win.

Some of the car sickness complaints were successfully dealt with by putting a couple of drops of peppermint essential oil on a napkin and giving it to the girls to smell. I've found that having some key essential oils is a big help on a trip (and at home). Lavender helps minor cuts and scrapes heal quicker and relaxes the kids for bedtime. Tea tree, eucalyptus and lemon essential oils fight viruses and infections. It worked to help get rid of a nasty flu-like virus I had and that my daughter Mia was just starting to feel the effects of too. If you use essential oils, make sure you dilute them in another oil like almond or jojoba; otherwise, they can burn the skin.

Anyway, the good news is that we made it home safely. We will be returning the trailer tomorrow, which will be fantastic because I can't use my truck with that thing on the back since I don't know how to back up with it. When we got home, our pool was a swamp-like green color, but it is getting better since we added a bunch of shock. All in all, we're settling back in to normal life, with the exception of five kids rattling around with nothing much to do for the rest of the summer.

Anyone want to rent a kid or two?

Sunday, July 4, 2010

A Slice of Americana

Every year, my kids look forward to the 4th of July parade in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and this year was no exception. The town held the parade a day early, and as I was listening to the live bands in the park and looking at all of the happy families dressed in red, white and blue picnicking on the lawn, I thought that this is a bit of Americana that few people get to experience in the 21st century. It is like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.

The parade features floats from local businesses, politicians and groups, dancing groups clogging their way down Main Street, fire trucks, tricked out equestrians, and a Shriner's band playing Souza tunes. There are clowns, old cars from the 1940's and '50's, dogs dressed up in patriotic ribbons, and a stiltwalker. This year, two of my daughters, Miriam and Leah, were also in the parade, tossing candy to the children along the street.

Blowing Rock is a small town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, populated by earnest, polite and hardworking mountain people. In many ways, it is a throwback to simpler times, when people would greet you in the street even if they didn't know you. Older kids can wander through the park, to the ice cream store and on to the public pool without supervision or fear. Children address adults as "sir" or "ma'am".

I sort of grew up with Blowing Rock, having visited it just about every year since I was around 8 or 9 years old. My parents have owned a home here for 30 years. When I was a kid, it was even more quaint and less commercial, with a real 1950's style soda shop named Storie's. But the main parts have remained the same, and I am grateful that my children get to experience it.

Blowing Rock is a welcome respite from the unrestrained materialism prevalent in Boca Raton. Our annual summer trip serves as a reinforcement of the values we try to instill at home: kindness, hard work, respect, sharing and good manners. Just because we live in modern times doesn't mean that we have to give up on those positive values that helped form this country. Perhaps if we all tried to tap into that old time Americana, we could pull ourselves out of our overconsumption of media and connect with each other in more meaningful ways.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

A Poem for My Husband

This Thursday is my husband's and my 15th wedding anniversary. Many years ago before we were even married, I had a journal that I used to write in all the time. It was part diary, and had a lot of poems in it too. Occasionally, I would read the poems out loud to my husband (then boyfriend). So, he figured that because I shared some of the content in my journal, that he was free to peruse the rest of it. Not only did he read the private parts of my journal without permission, but then he got mad about some of the things I had written in it about relationships I'd had before I even met him. So, as a result of that huge fight, I stopped writing poetry.

Now, 15+ years later, I decided start writing poetry again. This poem, to my husband, is about how love changes over time.

When we first met
I dove into you
Head over heels
Shocked and delighted
Immersed in your eyes

That was long ago

I tasted a bite of madness
So madly in love was I
With your smile and the richness
Of your laugh

Many years ago

Now the madness has receded and
Sanity has returned
I no longer vainly try to quiet butterflies
At the thought of seeing you

Now I go deeper

Every part of me resonates with your soul’s music
Our love has left the sunny meadows and hills
It’s battled dark things
And glimpsed the Light

Words fall defeated when confronted with
Describing the fruits that have budded and ripened in our orchard
Each one more wondrous than a magical journey
Half remembered from a dream

And there’s more and more of you to know
Because love is ever expansive
Limitless
It’s about Now swaddled in Forever

And I still lose myself in the curve of your face

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

It Makes Me Sick

At the end of the year, we lost our health insurance coverage as my husband transitioned from a traditional job with an employer-paid health plan to being a consultant. The company was slow to send us our COBRA paperwork so we could have uninterrupted coverage and my daughter Miriam came down with a fever that lasted several days.

Normally, I wouldn’t have taken her to the doctor because it always seems to be the same diagnosis, a virus that you just need to wait out. But this time, she had already missed three days of school and she told me that she had a very sore throat and a stomachache, which I know can be symptoms of strep throat, so I made the appointment.

I had some doubts about whether we were still covered because the company had deducted money from my husband’s last paycheck for our portion of the health insurance premium, and I wasn’t sure if that was for the following month or the one that had just passed, and I thought I’d just have to take my chances and pay if necessary.

When I got to the pediatrician’s office, the first thing they did was check the insurance and got some nebulous status like “inactive,” rather than something definite like “cancelled.” I told the office staff the situation and they said they would try to contact the insurance company and get a clear answer as to whether we were covered or not.

They made me wait with my 8-year old sick daughter and 4-year old in the waiting room for over an hour. Finally, they called me up and asked me to sign a promise to pay, something they could have asked for when the issue first became apparent. Instead, they made us sit there, while we watched every other person go in to be called before us.

I signed the promise to pay. Then, because I knew that sometimes doctors will lower their prices to those who have no insurance, I asked if that was an option. No, I was told. Either they put in for the insurance or they reduce the cost for “self-pay” patients, but if the insurance company rejects the claim, then the patient must pay full cost, even though in effect, we would then become self-pay patients.

My daughters were getting antsy, to say the least, and Miriam in particular wanted to leave. She looked like she was feeling better, and in truth, she probably should have gone to school, but she’d milked it for all it was worth and got another day off.

I looked her in the eyes and asked her, “Do you really feel that you are sick and need to see the doctor or do you just want to go home, because it may end up costing me $100 or more.” I paused, and added, “If you are sick, we’ll stay.” As I’d expected, she elected to leave.

I’m not in the medical field, and I know that they have their own hassles to deal with, like collecting from insurance companies, processing mounds of paperwork, and, well, dealing with sick people. But I would imagine that when each of the doctors in that pediatric practice decided to pursue medicine as a career, and to specialize in pediatrics, if you would have asked them why they’d made that decision, they would have answered something along the lines of “to help people,” or “to help sick kids” and not “to make money helping sick kids whose families have health insurance.”

As I left the “Sick” section of the pediatric office that day with my two daughters, sick is just how I felt.