[Closed] How to Get through these times without going crazy

Thinking about these guys makes me fill up with  happiness. Is it worth planting butterfly bush as well?  Let me know if you like Flight Behavior.  

deetoo,

I resonate with your post and find myself posing similar questions. Thanks so much for the conversation. It was wonderful.

I know! Me too! If you are talking about butterfly bush as a perennial nectar plant, that would be great. Their host plant is milkweed only and there are several varieties. 

I will let you know what I think of the book.

Jeanne,

I was wrong. The generations coming north from Mexico live up to 6 weeks. The monarchs migrating south to Mexico in the late summer/fall live approximately 8 months. 

The monarchs that emerge in my garden in the fall are heavier, bigger and their bodies are furrier. The are built for the long journey to the mountains in Mexico. 

Imagine holding a butterfly..sometimes when I talk with them they turn their heads. When they take flight for the first time they look like toddlers. Some of them don’t catch on the first try and tumble to the ground. You pick them up and whisper to them..you aren’t a caterpillar, you have wings and you can fly. Once I walked over a mile with a butterfly perched on my index finger pointing south telling her, You can do this, but it’s October so you need to rev up your wings. She finally took flight. 

I’ve been identified by some as the lady who raises butterflies. The truth is the butterflies are raising me.

Ok..I’ll zip it now. Posting about this really lifted me. So grateful for this place.❤️

Oh don’t zip it, Stardancer.  Your posts have filled me with wonder. 

You've convinced this former city kid to plant a butterfly bush and some milkweed!  What an uplifting thought to hold as I retire for the night.  Thanks and blessings to all of you!  

Did anyone mention that the monarch is now endangered?  Everyone plant milkweed! https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23472939/monarch-butterflies-endangered-pesticides-climate-change/

I have been following this story for the last month or so. ?

The butterflies that migrate from Mexico in the Spring return to Texas to locate milkweed to lay their eggs. This will be the 1st generation. What will they find this year? 

All you need is one monarch butterfly to show up in your garden. They lay over 200 eggs. ? I will continue to focus on the transformational power of love. The journey isn’t easy. It may appear as if we are losing. Our hearts know..love wins! I’m going to return to that sacred place that you refer to in one of your posts, deetoo! Again and again, when discouragement begins to set in I will not return to the jar. I’m going to the sanctuary! Beauty, truth and wonder is the life Ive signed up for. That’s good news! 

https://www.courthousenews.com/texas-butterfly-sanctuary-loses-challenge-to-border-wall/

(Thank you, Jeanne... today felt more like a Full Moon day... sweet dreams)

I am in a work situation in which one of my coworkers-- her energy is just very labile and exhausting. I am an empath and she seems to persistently exist in a high level of anxiety but her messages are always counter and I often wonder if she is trying to punk me. There is a level of contrarian in her and she seems to enjoy the role of martyrdom and at any rate blows up multiple situations into a three ring circus. I cannot imagine how dense the energy field has to be around her husband. Anyhow, she stirs up a lot of controversy and I think she cries at work a few times a week-- probably from emotional exhaustion- the level of energy she spins on cannot be infinite in supply.

My other coworkers and I-- our strategy has been to not feed into the behavior. Just say okay and move on when she makes dramatic statements etc. My latest strategy has been to erect the big plastic bubble around me before walking in. I try to keep a very even, positive flow. My other strategy is to find something outside the room (such as procedures off site) to keep busy with aka avoidance. 

At this point, my hope is that she decides this is not challenging enough for her and she looks to seek out a position that provides greater and more frequent adrenaline rushes.

@rowsella

Sounds like your co-worker is mentally ill and suffering as a result. You are right to avoid reinforcing or engaging with the behaviors. Keep grounding yourself, nod, smile, and move on.

Re: monarchs, a friend of mine finds eggs and raises, then releases, the monarchs. She saves dozens if not more every summer. This summer, she went to her usual patch of milkweed, got a few leaves for the baby caterpillars to eat, and within hours, all the babies were convulsing, leaking a green fluid, and dying. The patch that had always been safe had been sprayed. It was devastating. We need more homes planting and cultivating milkweed so it can stay clean and sustaining for the caterpillars. And learning to raise them to their butterfly state is a wonderful act of hope.

@saibh

OMG how sad! I would love to grow milkweed in my yard. I am going to google to find out how.-- Okay, I ordered some seeds. I am also happy to report that this summer I planted a butterfly bush.

Just be sure to get the milkweed from the area you live in.   Many nurseries sell Tropical milkweed, which confuses the Monarchs- they will think they are already in Mexico, and will stop migrating.  There are like 250 varieties of milkweed, so there will probably be a lot of varieties that are ok for most areas.     Also, if you are getting plants instead of seeds, make sure they are raised organically, so the butterflies dont get poisoned.

And thanks for helping to save the Monarchs!

I've been planting milkweed for the last few years but hadn't realized it needs full sun.  This year, I planted it in two places, both full sun, and it grew and grew and now there are monarchs flying around my garden for the first time in 20 years.   Fun. Fun.  You can bring back a declining species. It's been done before.

When i first got milkweed,  5 or 6 years ago, the Monarchs showed up before i could finish unloading the plants from the car.  They were on it as soon as i set them down on the curb!      It took a couple of years, but now the milkweed has naturalized the only sunny spots left in the yard  (i have a jungle of a yard in the inner city)        I was thinking that, next time the house needs painting, i could do it the colors of Monarchs.    Nobody else is doing that combination on my street.

A "friend "of mine posted this on Social Media. I don't usually respond to controversial posts but...I needed to reply to this one.  For my sake.  Here is her meme and then my response.  

"Want to stop drunk drivers for killing sober drivers?

 Ban sober driver from driving.  That's how gun control works."

My reply:

" Really?  Hmm... I think it works more like  taking the keys away from someone who is drunk so they can't drive their car. Or making bartenders legally responsible if they serve someone too many drinks and then let that someone drive drunk . Or requiring repeat drunk driver offenders to loose their license or use a a car breathalyzer to prevent them from driving their vehicle drunk. You can't buy a drink unless you are 21 years of age. You need to pass a safety test in order to have a license to drive a car. You are also required to buy insurance for your vehicle. One must often have a background check in order to have a commercial drivers license.

That is how gun control should work.  

Currently it is easier for an 18 year who is a drug addict to buy a gun than for someone to drive a truck for Walmart.  Heck, it is even easier for for me to buy a gun than for me to drive an Uber or drive for Dominos.  It is more difficult for me to get a food handlers card so I can work at Mc Donalds than buy a gun in Arizona."

Sometimes you need a good laugh to get through these times without going crazy.  This struck my funny bone!  Ha Ha Ha!

It really happened.  

From BBC News:  

A heated debate about market stalls was disrupted by a foul smell and furious finger-pointing at a Kenyan regional assembly on Wednesday, local reports say.

"Honourable Speaker, one of us has polluted the air and I know who it is," Julius Gaya reportedly told Homa Bay county assembly.

But the member he accused of farting is said to have replied:

"I am not the one. I cannot do such a thing in front of my colleagues."

Hoping to clear the air, the assembly's Speaker Edwin Kakach then instructed members to step outside and take a break from the chamber.

Reports also say he asked officials to bring in air fresheners "to make it pleasant. Get whatever flavour you will find in any office, whether it's vanilla or strawberry.

"We cannot continue sitting in an environment that smells bad."

Yet the smell is said to have subsided before any such sprays were found, allowing the debate to continue.

This apparently is the NEW, new normal.

My daughter is a first year elementary music teacher at a title 1 school.

They have just completed  2 weeks of school . During that time, the school ran  1  announced fire drill , 1 announced locked-down drill as well as 1 surprise fire drill and 1 surprise lock-down. drill.

 4 drills during the first 2 weeks of school.  

Yeah.

During the surprise lock-down drill today, her 6th grade students  (37 in the class, yep 37) were rather "freaked out" unlike the 5th graders who knew it was a drill the week before and were quiet and calm.   They are supposed to be silent and gather in the back corner of the classroom.  She "swept" in a pre- K  student and aide from outside her room ( as they are supposed to do during a lock-down) , locked the door and tried to keep the kids silent and calm as she noted who was missing from her class and who she had that was extra from the pre-k class so she could notify the office via computer.  Standard procedure. 

The students  kept asking if it was a drill, which she could not confirm since it was a surprise  for the teachers too, though the teachers had been warned to expect many unannounced drills.    Thinking it might be  a real event, the students kept asking if she had  locked the door., over and over.    7 students hid in the storage closet on their own accord.  They were very fearful.  

She needed to have a decompression talk with the kids after the drill and remind them about needing to be silent and  following  directions.  I am not sure how she addressed the closet.  ( They needed to follow directions but it would be the safest place to be during a real emergency.) She thinks perhaps the previous music teacher might have had them do that in the past, though it is not procedure.  

As I mentioned, this is a title 1 school and there are definitely children who have undocumented parents which likely added another layer of fear for these kids.  

With everything that has happened in our nation over the past 2 1/2  weeks...

4 drills in the first 2 weeks of school.  Can you imagine?

She said it was a long drill. 

When she was in high school and in college, she was well aware of drills.  There was a bomb threat on her college campus and a real evacuation when something went wrong in a chem class in high school.  There have been all of the real shootings that happened while she was growing up that her generation has had to deal with  and watch on Live TV. She was in Kindergarten when 911 happened.  She vividly remembers that day, at age 5.  She had  H.S.  band camp the same week a neighboring H. S. band at their own band camp where an armed man came on to that band's  field with a gun pointing at the kids demanding they stop playing because it was "too loud".  We (the band parents and band director) had to come up with a contingency plan "just in case "  because he was still on the loose during our camp.  

She is part of a generation that scans exits in movie theaters and notes where the safest locations are in public buildings.  Our place of worship has been repeatedly threatened by a schizophrenic young man who will  disrupte service  claiming he can only find his "peace" inside as he rants and raves during service.    Yes, we have a restraining order.  The police have recently said we need to have concrete barriers in place on the side of the building , to deter anyone from causing domestic terrorism.  Our place of worship is located on a small one lane residential neighborhood, not a large urban street.  We have developed an emergency plan which continues to evolve.  I am sure she will be scanning the building for exits and her own contingency plans, should the need arise. The fact that this is considered "normal "frustrates her to no end.  

This is the world she lives in.  One we all to some extent live in. 

She is  quite aware of the fact that things have now switched.  She is now the first line of defense for HER  students  when only a little over a month ago  she was still the  student finishing her master's degree.

 It isn't easy trying to teach 37  6th graders  trumpet after a surprise lock-down drill.

I don't care for this "new" new normal.  

My daughter  is a fantastic music teacher and a shining light.  She is an empath too.  She loves teaching and her students already love her!  She is a strong leader, always has been.  So many people from her generation are  beautiful soles who are givers and love all people and nature in our world.  I have hope that they will be leading everyone  to a different and more peaceful, kind and loving new normal.   We need them.

@lovedures

These stories resonate in my heart--past, present, and future. But oh, how I grieve for the loss of so many children's childhoods!

And yes, most of us grew up with fire drills, and those if us living through the multiple decades of the "cold war" with the "bomb drills" from our national fear of Russia and communism by our practiced hiding under our desks as often as once a week. I can't say that I ever once understood it or was afraid, however.

But times were different then  (as we all so often say) the "Russians" of my childhood were almost cartoon like figures of Khrushchev banging his shoe on a desk, the pointy hat spies of "Mad Magazine," the silly later on Woody Allen movies like the "Pink Panther" or tv series like "Get Smart". 

Growing up on an island in Alaska, we'd only just gotten our first TV back in my earliest (black and white tv childhood) and only had one channel (reels shipped up from "the States") and even with our next color tv, nothing was real except my own rather isolated, living in a fantasy world of my own childhood dreaming.

My only true fears were at night. The boogie man came out big time to my hyper intuituve self one that literally smelled death and evil vapors back then after death or when the dark was after my light so to speak and  to subtly connect to another big  discussion on the forum and perhaps some of you, as well. Ha! 

I ignored all of the "grown up" stuff, it was far easier then. Now, we are all bombarded, saturated, and let's be honest here, almost living with moments of occasional paranoia even when centered and aware if focusing on balance.

We have many, many lovely and gifted members here who come and ago as terrors for their or their family's lives affect them and they rush back here after many, many months of absence seeking reassurance and prayers,  as well as recognition of their own innate powers and light so they can return to the chaos of living in this point in time.

Others who pop in to see if anyone they "know" is still here or where everyone is at, stuck at, or moving along to in a multitude of all of our understandings.

We are all (all of us alive today) part of one big purpose driven tribe. We may or may not recognize that "purpose" or "pull" as we all live in various mythological constructs of a greater almost magnetic attraction to stay our course.

And that "course" is a huge pull that we are quite possibly not even aware of as it goes by many names and paths and created mythologies or if you have read any Carolyn Myss, sacred archetypal contracts on smaller perhaps, scales.

So, here in this place, we find our own sub-tribes if you will, we bond or connect, we learn and we grow and bit by bit we have all transformed, raised our own light,  been truly "seen" at higher vibrations by others-- and that alone is the single biggest gift of this site.

But the question is...how do we help this generations children with all that we have created and now they have to deal with?

I had an awareness of that old children's  growth chart with the rhyme of children learning from how they are raised and taught...if they live in fear, they learn fear-- that kind of thing. The same is still true. So how do we take away the fear, our fear, the worlds fear? Think about it. Mediatate on it. Write about it here. But most of every day, in every way at least try to practice it. 

Help me think of ways that that Lovendure's daughter and all of our children and all anyone we love and every single person we meet can be uplifted by the simple shining of our light around and from us can affect and raise the vibratiobs of others.

I know in my heart, in my mind's eye, and by her mother's words that this daughter innately knows how and was a shining example of her "new normal best" under the new bizarre normal duress of an exceptionally challenging first day, first week, first experience for many-- day of school.

She was a light and I'm certain it eased fear at some level for each of them at their level, to know that she was in control (at her level, place, situation) and taking care of them, while still reaching out and gathering in the little orphaned others. Wow. She did really, really well. She is a light and with the added vibrational tones of music is a lovely, lovely one at that.

And that alone is how we become the change we want to see. How we teach, how we inspire, how we share, and how we get through really challenging times.

More examples, experiences, thoughts?

Besides the obvious -- that I lack @coyote 's self restraint at digression. Hahaha! 

PS The full moon meditation on the 15th was,  and is a wonderful example of all of everything. ?

Its manifestation was immediately and noticeably visible in mind, body, and spirit for those who needed and received our shared connection of higher levels of light.

Blessings and gratitudes  to all.

???