Bistro Fada

Office Mural
Keller, TX

Woke up this morning with several musical themes in mind. The dominant one was Stephane Wrembel's work, Bistro Fada. For those of you who have not heard his work please click on the link. His fingers lead you through a magical tour of late night cafes in Paris. The experience is quite magnificent.

For over a decade, my wife and I, have archived our experiences within the walls of a place we call home. We want our friends to feel our warmth and our joy. It's truly our way of taking you with us and bringing you back safely. There's so much to share.

There has not been a day that I've not enjoyed my office and the mural that watches over me as I work. Angels and Demons freely interact in a Mexican heaven and exist independently as a part of life. At times, when I lapse into forgetfulness of how good my life is; I choose to look up at the mural and experience specific moments of my travels once again.

During the past several years, there have been instances when I felt that the best moments were behind me. Now I recognize that the best moments are the ones that I enjoy today and that remain ahead of me. I choose to make each day count and to fill them with meaning. Life, my life, is both for me to enjoy and mine to share.

Lone Gull

Lone Gull on Journey

This has been a difficult year for my family filled with emotional and financial disappointments; the stuff that would make most lose hope and buckle under its stress. There is no perfect time to both lose a job and a parent. There is no magic that can assuage the agony of grief and the mental torment of job loss. The solitude this brings is hard to bear. The silence spoken by what use to be friends leaves one baffled.

Thanks to a very supportive wife, a few close but geographically distant friends from destinations as far as  Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Oregon, Tennessee, Massachusetts,  and all places Texas, I was able to weather the most troubling part of the storm.

Frequently, on this blog, I've mentioned that we are preordained to create; that it's in our nature to create and that we should not allow ourselves to become alienated from our own creativity. There's something else that I've also discovered. We are also predisposed/programmed to survive. The stress we feel is our call to action. It's our very basic instinct to survive and make something happen. We do not need a large corporation to dictate or remind us. Corporations need us to survive it's not the other way around

Today, please remind yourself of these facts: 1) we were born to create;  2) we were born with the innate ability to survive, and 3) we were born to work together to facilitate our own and the well being of others.

The lone gull depicted by my photo above is on a journey. The inscription which I wrote in Spanish means "not alone but rather together." We are are not alone and we can achieve more by supporting each other. Pick up your cell phone today text, email, or call someone you know. Let them know you are there for them. Tell them about how you survived and how they can make it too. Better yet lend a hand if they need it.

A friend of mine took a sabbatical from his lucrative music/entertainment career in his mid fifties. He told me that he took a low paying job and baked brownies for a year. He took time to paint and create. Later on, he picked up his career where he had left off and became even more successful.  I am simply baking brownies. You might want to do the same.