Potential

There are dozens of these caterpillars in my back alley. I presume they have fallen or been blown out of the largish tree. We find them crawling around in the concrete road, with no food source within miles (for them, at least). We try to rescue as many as we can (which reminds me of the story about the baby turtles washed up on shore and one lone person is walking along the beach picking them up one at a time throwing them back into the sea. Someone says, "There's no way you can save all of them; why bother?" To which the rescuer replies, "It makes a difference to this one.")

We did some serious investigative research (Internet search engine) and think they're going to turn into a giant leopard moth. Which makes me laugh. For now they're all cute and fuzzy and I feel quite charitable trying to rescue as many as I can.

But come July I'll be beating them off me as I try to race them into the house.

Niceties

A friend of mine said something on Facebook a week or so ago that was delightfully profound. I commented and told her so, and she said I should be on Twitter. I had a chance to talk to her about it on Wednesday and she said again that I should get on Twitter because she loves my own profound one-liners. (Her words, not mine. I may think I'm profound but would never say so out loud. That would take all the humility out of it!)

She said that her own goal on Twitter was to just find one positive thing each day and tweet that. I thought that was a fantastic idea.

I started thinking about what I could tweet. I have a lot of thoughts in a day -- it was just a matter of weeding through them to choose the most worthy ones.

And I realized that not only do I not have a lot of thoughts I need to share with the interwebs, I really don't have a lot of positive thoughts. But I don't think anyone else does either. Or maybe that's just my Facebook friends. There are plenty of status updates, but not really a lot of positive things. Kind of like the evening news. I wonder if it's a societal thing to think that it doesn't matter or it's not news-worthy unless it's negative. Well, maybe not negative, but not positive.

That's what I've been thinking about this week. Every time something happened this week I'd think, "Oh, I'll tweet that!" (knowing full well that people don't really care about my every thought. Or maybe that's because I don't care about other peoples' every thoughts so I think the same thing applies in reverse). But when I held that thought up to the "keep it positive" criteria, I realized that very little that happened, or more specifically -- very little of the commentary that I thought about what happened was positive.

So that's my goal -- to be more positive. It's not easy, at least for me. And I don't really think of myself as a negative person. Realistic, yes. Cynical, no. Sarcastic, definitely. Room for improvement? Absolutely.

I believe that as continue to (internally, at least) narrate the events of my life and strive to become more positive in that commentary, it will influence the rest of my life as well.

Tranquility

This is a picture I took on the temple grounds yesterday. The title of this post can have multiple meanings.