Paradise

"If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it."

I can hear the skeptic voice in all of us rise up in response to this statement instantly, this paradise? Look at the poverty, look at the wars; how could anyone call this life of struggle and suffering heaven? Yet if I invite you to look at a freshly bloomed rose or the innocent smile of a child your heart would open to the beauty you see before you. Similarly if you recall a struggle from your past that you have surmounted and from which you have grown you can also see the beauty in that experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Behind us all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the pictures of memory.” 

Even in my darkest moments I have known that there is beauty and good and love to be found and if I can adopt the pace of nature as Emerson says; "her secret is patience," it will reveal itself in time. So take heart if you are in despair or off kilter today, all things come to pass and not to stay.

For the Glee version of the song "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTBG7FZvmc0&feature=related

Another Day in Paradise

As I lay my head on my pillow these nights I say to the universe, thanks for another day in paradise!

Is that because I live on a white sand island and eat my fill from the trees everyday, chatting with the other bare footed inhabitants as we loll in the sunshine? NO!!
I live in Los Angeles and though we have nice beaches here it is a far cry from anyone's vision of paradise! I drive on the freeways and I walk on the concrete, I wonder about the source of my next paycheck yet I eat well everyday. I am not without the normal concerns of a life.

But that's just it. The normal concerns of a life. My last statement of the day is inspired by a character in a fabulous novel I am currently reading. The character is a doctor in a Mission Hospital in Ethopia. He is father to twins who witness his nightly declaration, "Another day in Paradise!" It mystifies them as they see the poverty, the human struggle, the daily parade of needy patients in the hospital. They think their father a little crazy. It is not until their world is turned upside down because of a coup in Addis Ababa  in the 1960s, which leads to the arrest of the man they know as their father, that they finally realize the truth in his statement. A day when things are normal, when the people we love are safe and warm, when our world seems mundane yet all is well, that is another day in paradise. Not till its taken away do we fully appreciate the humdrum pace of a normal day.

So may I suggest to you that today you live in paradise. If you have family that loves you, if you have health enough to love them and to do the things that you need to do, if you have a warm dry place to lay your head tonight and a fridge with food enough to eat today, you live in paradise. If you are not being bombed, persecuted, threatened, then let me suggest that you live in paradise and that the humdrum day can be something for which to be grateful!

(The novel by the way is "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese)