quail and families

Recently we found an abandoned quail nest in our backyard (probably our dog's fault). We retrieved these eggs and decided to attempt to hatch and raise them, as it was partly our fault that they were orphaned. For 3 weeks they needed to be kept warm, and to be turned a couple of times a day, to be sure that they would grow and develop normally, and to keep the embryo from sticking to the shell.

I can guarantee that the mother isn't sitting on the nest when she is incubating the eggs thinking to herself: "oh dear I better roll them to keep those embryos from sticking!" Instead, she does it simply because she knows and understands that rolling them and keeping them warm is all that she can do at that point to help them grow.

Likewise, when the quail hatch, the mother will be present but will not assist them in getting out of their shells. The chicks must do it themselves in order to gain the strength they need to survive.

Now I can't imagine that this is easy for any mother, quail or human. Rather, to me, it is a testament to the divine role that mothers have. Even with all of the resources that I had at my disposal, I struggled to do what the mother quail does by instinct, and better than I managed.

Indulge me now as I share another quail anecdote. Recently, my family also had a family of quail, with a bunch of newly hatched chicks, come running into our garage. With our presence there they were terrified and took up refuge under an engine that we had sitting on a pallet. I was curious about them so I went over to peek under at them. As I did so, the father flew out at me to distract me and try to get me to follow him, to draw me away from his family. What an act of bravery, love, and sacrifice, found in a bird.

It was then that I noticed that one of the chicks had gotten separated from the others and was alone outside. I went toward it to attempt to get it back with its family, but I only succeeded in scaring it into the bushes. I decided not to interfere and stood back to watch. The father had taken post on our roof where he was safe and could see. He called to his family and was quickly able to get them all back together and to a safe place, away from me.

He had left the little one alone and scared for a time, because he knew that it was safe. He waited until the danger had passed before bringing him back out into the open.

One final story. One of our eggs, when it was hatching spent eight hours working at it. Eventually I intervened, and discovered he had gimp feet. This didn't stop him though, and when another chick was hatching and had trouble, he pulled himself across the floor to help him, and took him under his wing, though he was not wholly well himself.

Families are incredible. They are the basic social unit found all over in nature and in our world. They are such a blessing and offer us the best opportunity to learn and to grow, whether they are by blood or by adoption.

missed

So last night I saw the most absolutely beautiful sunset, with someone I care a lot about. I didn't have my camera with me and so I wanted to run back and get it, so I could capture that image forever. But by the time we got back, the colors had already faded, the clouds had moved, and there wasn't hardly anything left, just dark sky.

Remember the tools for staying happy are only tools. And sometimes, it is the wrong tool for the job. Instead of trying to freeze that image forever, I should have stayed and made a memory I could cherish forever.

Don't lose sight of your priorities, and what is most important in your life. Journal it out, type it up, make a sticky note, whatever. But think about it. Relatively often. Whether that's once a week, once a fortnight, once a month, just do it. You may find yourself finding that some of those stressors just really don't matter. It makes it a whole lot easier to do what you need to do that way :)

delving into the unseen

It's been another couple of days since the last time I posted, but I'm determined to not have a huge gap again (especially a nine month one).

In these last two days though, I have had a bit of a....funny...experience. My Thursdays are absolutely packed with classes. I spend a full quarter of my day in just two of them! All in all I spend around nine or ten plus hours doing school stuff, not really including homework time. Well I spent a lot of Wednesday, especially Wednesday night stressing over how I was going to get everything done. Then I spent most of Thursday dreading whatever was coming next, even though I had done all of the preparation ahead of time, getting ready to complete my labs, studying for my quizzes, and doing my homework. By the time I got through it all though, I realized it really wasn't so bad, and was not quite sure what I had been stressing out over. I mean, sure I was tired, but I wasn't at wit's end. I guess that just goes to prove that old proverb,

If ye are prepared ye shall not fear.

Now I wasn't quite on par with that saying, as is apparent since I still was "afraid". But that's just because I was not quite wholly prepared; I left out one important step: trusting myself that I could accomplish what I prepared to do. If you haven't developed confidence in yourself, you haven't quite prepared.

Now wait a second, am I saying that you have to be confident to be confident? Why does that make any sense? How do I ever start to develop that confidence in the first place? That's a good question. Now hopefully this is a good enough answer to match. More than confidence, it's a matter of trust, and not making things out to be worse than they are. There really are some situations that we honestly would not be able to overcome. However, I'm going to promise you right now, whatever it is that you are facing, isn't one of them. Now everyone is different so not being a psychologist who has spent an hour or two picking your brain I can't even begin to tell you how to trust yourself. But maybe by now you have come to trust me a little bit. And then it is my hope that you'll trust me when I say that you are a fantastic individual, and that you can do it, whatever it is.

What would life be without dreams? And if dreams weren't aren't achievable, we would still be in the Stone Age! Welcome to the realm of humanity, where we make impossibilities possible.

And you know what? If you relax into the flow of it all, you may find that you enjoy yourself. For example, I had a total blast taking pictures of everything I was looking at under the microscope:


The previously unseen is there just waiting to be discovered, just like your dreams.

self discovery

It is super late so I will try to limit my long winded-ness and make this short. Today was quite an adventure. I tend to be going and going all the time, staying super busy (hence my super late night). But a really good friend of mine keeps checking up on me and making sure that I take time to myself to do something that I love. She loves to ask and make sure I'm taking my "me-time". There really is great wisdom in that. Even doing things you love with other people just can't quite compare to the amount of unwinding that happens by yourself, sometimes in a secret place, when you get the chance. For me I like to go into a room by myself and play the piano, or go down by the river (where the poem's pictures are from) and play my guitar or just think. But those are just the things I do. There are innumerable others to choose from, each individual to each and every person.



And like I promised, I started carrying my camera around with me today (though I've decided I really need to find a better way to carry it around). At one point today, I was just taking pictures, and playing with the settings a little bit. I discovered something that I have always sort of known, but never really noticed or thought about before. You know that I absolutely love learning. I talk about it in pretty much every post. And going to school and learning is such an awesome experience (as in awe expiring like being in the presence of a super powerful being {or someone you greatly admire} that you can just feel, as opposed to 'cool') and I don't want to discount it, even remotely! But discovering new knowledge, for yourself, is so much more satisfying. For the sake of learning all there is to learn in the time that we have to learn it, school is extremely efficient and very very valuable. But take the chance sometimes to discover something for yourself. You'll likely remember it far better too. And it doesn't have to be something extreme or different. It can just be as simple as learning some of the material for a class, but going on an adventure of discovery to find it and really understand it, supplementing the textbook information with confirming research that really delves you deep within the subject matter, rather than just taking your teacher at their word and copying their lame notes.

Here's a quick story about me that kind of demonstrates the potential for doing this. As a kid, whenever I would have a fact based question, my parents would go tell me to look it up. I think they were quoting some movie or something, but they stuck by it. Well I would go to our great (and now old) enc-yclopedia set and look up whatever it was. If there was something within that article that caught my eye or that I wondered what was, I would go look that up too, to better understand what I was reading (which I was obviously interested in since I asked about it to begin with). One thing always led to another, and sometimes I couldn't even remember what I had started with, because I had spent so much time following such a long chain of queries and articles. But it wasn't ever boring like doing research for a poster in elementary school was. It was some of the most exciting reading I ever did as a child!

the silver lining in your shoes

Well, now we will see how my fantastic college experience lends itself to the blog-o-sphere, as we see whether or not I am too consistently brain dead after class to think of anything to write. You would think that I would be so mentally stimulated that I would be brimming with knowledge and ideas. For that I would probably have to sleep more. But let us wait and see what flows out anyway.

So a thing that I have been really big on is taking time to stop and try to see the beauty in things, to be grateful for what we have all around us. One thing I got to help me with this is a relatively nice camera. I have had a blast using it, and even got to try my hand at some more serious photography endeavors. One example was taking some of my sisters engagement pictures, like this one:

Aren't they so cute?

Since coming to school though, and being so caught up in the midst of things, I haven't had nearly as much opportunity to take my camera out and use it. Another problem is that I almost never leave my school's campus. I eat here, I sleep here, I go to school here, and I study here. Talk about short sighted! I guess it happens to the best of us though! I have been missing all sorts of opportunities right here in the world around me. My camera might become one of my constant companions from now on, as a trick to encourage me to look for those lovely little mysteries all around us.

It really is hard to look on the bright side of things all the time. The trick is, to have a trick! For me it is my camera. Now you might not have a camera or any inclination to take pictures, but you can always pick your own little trick. It might just be to whistle a jolly little tune as you go walking down the street, or to play a little game all of the time, like being careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk, or to always step on the crunchy leaves outside. Maybe you just like to wear mismatched socks, I've heard that makes your day better! You should do an experiment with that and let me know!

Here is another experiment to try, that will help make your day go better no matter what: as you go walking anywhere other people are too, try to make eye contact with and smile at as many people as you can. You will get a lot of smiles back, and you just can't help from feeling good! Sometimes I ended up laughing outright, for absolutely no real reason other than life is just a swell thing to be living. I wouldn't want to be living anything else for sure!

rebirth

Sooooo...... it has been a while since I posted. A long while. Too long in fact. But I'm going to go ahead and start again. I don't really have anything profound to say at the moment, so instead, I'm just going to give a bit of an update on what is going on right now.

I have now graduated high school, and I worked over the summer with three jobs. I was teaching piano lessons, I worked at a day care, and I was one of those people who goes around hanging those flyers on your doors. While all of this was going on I got to pack up my entire room and prepare to leave for college, and I helped get ready for my sister's wedding, and went and married her off. Congratulations sister! I love you!

Now I'm no longer working, but I am attending college, and keeping very busy. I joined the marching band here, and learned to march the glorious tuba. Marching band is over now so I am cruising along, taking 20 credits, and singing in the Vocal Jazz Ensemble, and singing with a church choir.

Now that doesn't sound like too much to have going on, but is has been kind of an incredible experience so far. I never did so well at high school. I didn't like to do my homework, and my favorite pastime was to sleep in class. Now I really regret that, and wish I had gotten my butt in gear just a little bit more. Then my GPA would have been that little sliver higher to have gotten me scholarships, so I wouldn't have to be worried about money. It's a little harder to focus on some things when you are worried about money all the time. You don't really realize that until you are paying a lot out of pocket. Thank your parents now for everything they do/did for you at home! You'll miss it, I promise!

That's a little beside the point though...what I was getting at, is that even though I just did not enjoy the whole high school process too much, I am now thinking that maybe I just want to be a professional student! I've always known I loved learning, and the freedom knowledge brings, but I never quite experienced it quite like this before. Being at college has opened all sorts of doors for me, in that regard. I could do this forever, and very well may!

Speaking of which, maybe I do have a special little something to share. Here is a little poem that I wrote last semester following one of the moments when I had stopped to enjoy the little beauties of the world. I had gone down to the little river right next to campus, and spent an hour or two, just sitting under the trees, watching the water flow past, thinking about the way time, and life flows on just like the river; noticing how the little water molecules have a general goal they are 'swimming' to (downstream) but they don't go straight there. They pause in the little eddies, they swirl up and down, back and forth, in a little dance, all together, so vastly complex and beautiful. I watched the light playing off of the water, and the reflections there.

This is what I came up with.
It's called

"Can You Hear It?"

there is Music in the world all around us
be still
listen
it's there

it's in the ripple of the water
the babbling of the brook
the waving of the grass
the words in a book
the twinkling of the stars
in clarity of thought

it's united, it's one

it's Life.

Now I am definitely no poet, but I've come to discover that so many things that we think of as art, are simply different facets of the same thing, a higher understanding: a form of enlightenment, if you will. One that is often overlooked, however, or thought of as separate, is that of thought and understanding. But no, I believe it is one and the same.

The pictures in the video are mine, that I took specifically with/for this poem. Enjoy :)

Remember to stop and smell the flowers.
It's the little simple things we skip over that can be the most important if we pause to notice them

momma's boy

Have you ever gone over to a friend's house, or were just watching people out on the street, and wondered what things would have been like if you had had their parents? For me it is kind of perplexing sometimes. I'm not sure I could handle even living in some of those houses. Other times I sit there and wonder how I would be different if I was raised there in that family instead of in my own.

I must say though, that any way that I look at it, it makes me so much more grateful for my family! Sure we have our moments of friction, and my little brothers can get on my nerves... but really, they are perfect for me. They are just the people I need around me, to associate with, love, grow with, and learn from. I'm where I am for a reason, and I'm happy with that.

Sometimes the reason is to do something, to help others grow. Sometimes it is to get help. But wherever you are, be happy with it. Try to make it better. Encompass all the scenarios and you'll never miss out:

Always be searching to serve, but looking to learn.