•  Reading, EVERYTHING
• Valley Center
• Making ice cream from fresh cream separated the day the cow was milked
•  Learning to garden with Grama and later, Mom
• Living at Rancho Lilac
• Meeting Eleanor Roosevelt 

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Socrates was asked once why it was that Alcibiades, who was so brilliant, was so unhappy. 

Socrates replied, "Because wherever he goes, Alcibiades takes himself with him.”  This is still very profound for each of us today.  

Have you ever tried to move to a new place, to start over, only to find the same situations following you from place to place?  This certainly happened throughout my childhood, the issues of poverty following us from place to place as my mother lied to one landlord after another, changed jobs and clung to survival as tenaciously as is possible.  The deeper, and more personal issues followed me into my adulthood for resolution.  

I changed schools about 27 times, counting the schools at Hillcrest Receiving Home and the high school classes at San Diego County Juvenile Hall.  I counted that out about 25 years ago, now some of it is a blur of forgotten names and circling back to schools I had left already. 

I have been thinking of what I am grateful for. It is quite ordinary to be so loved and so appreciative. My gratitude extends to everything about my life these days and particularly to very ordinary things. I am grateful for the kindness, encouragement and intelligence of my husband with whom I live in a consistent state of Love. We live comfortably without any particular excess. I am grateful for the wisdom to live simply and to live trusting that our needs will be met.  With all the shortcomings my family may have had, I am grateful that I was raised to take good care of what I am given, preserving it and honoring the privilege of my abundance. For that I say "Yea and Amen!" to Grama Cavanagh with affection.

I know that outside the window where I sit there is a colorful garden that represents in microcosm the entire basis for my deep appreciation of nature and all its gifts to human life. I am grateful to those who have been so generous in my life and I am amazed as I discover the depths of that well of generosity out of which we take our gifts for one another. I believe that we live lives infinite in the means whereby our gifts are created and dispensed. We are avenues of Spirit's self-givingness and grow in that capacity as we open to the possibility of endless gifts.  We are meant to be generous and responsible for how we use the lives we are given. 

“Rancho Lilac was the site of the smallest post office in the United States. The post office, which still exists, was not much bigger than a phone booth. It functioned until about 1912. The property changed hands many times and eventually was purchased by Col. Irving Solomon in 1945, who raised Hereford cattle. Solomon was instrumental in the formation of the United Nations.” [1]

I played post office on the site of this tiny post office without knowing its history until recently.  I simply came upon it while playing in the yard in front of Col. Solomon's ranch house.  I didn’t know as a child that Col. Solomon had worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the formation of the UN.   I did know that his cattle were prize winners and that he was a really nice man.  I have no memories of his wife and family at all.  I am indebted to him for his kindness to me on that one day when he could have left Mrs. Roosevelt to enjoy a rest beside the pool, but instead asked her to greet me.

 "Sometimes the days they can be very busy, so I like to stop and think now and then.  I think of the reasons I have to be happy, and that makes me happy all over again."

 To read the first Installment, click on Knowing Myself-Post 1

Second installment click on Knowing Myself-Post 2