Reflections 4/8/2020: I’ve always loved the opening scene in “The Sound of Music!” I am such a Maria when it comes to being inspired by nature and beauty! Gotta sing, gotta dance! Gotta respond to the call! 🎶 “The hills are alive with the sound of music!”🎵 So this picture is both ridiculously funny, and horribly disturbing to me! Maria getting dragged off to jail for just celebrating life! I have felt that way of late! Not just the isolating quarantine, but the restrictions cancer has slapped upon my unwitting body. Dragged kicking and flailing to jail! (As in nausea driving me to bed!) In the middle of my song no less! Had to cancel our much anticipated family rendezvous in Playa del Carmen, Mexico in May. Ratso! Sand, surf, sea breezes! How I love to do my Maria dance as I race the waves in and out from the shore! The locals think I’m nuts, but who cares when the music of the waves summons you! I’m sure ALL of us can relate to plans gone awry… so it’s not just Ed and my plans shuffled off to Buffalo.

(No offense Buffalo!) I did notice as I hiked up the trail behind our house, (landlocked, but inspiring in its own right), that I felt that same “joie de vivre” in a special way… and it dawned on me that I can create joy in ANY scenario! It is not limited to “changes in latitude,” but rather, “changes in attitude!” And that’s Your specialty Holy Spirit! Thankfulness! Hope! Delight! Eyes to see the beauty around me in ANY situation. Like Viktor Frankl trapped in a German concentration camp… discovering they could control his outward realities, but not his inward connection with You God! So, Maria it is, on the mountaintop, beaches or bedridden! Makes no difference when my inner world is humming in harmony with You!