On Generosity and Friendship

Every gift, every frienship goes both ways. Without that duality they are not what they seem.

Each of only so much time to share. When I'm not sleeping I can give my time to my work which feeds my family, to family and friends which feeds my soul, or to others which feeds the community and makes new relationships, new family and friends.

I love doing all three. Each is a choice. Each when I choose is an act of generosity.

When people hear I like to help others, sometimes they come to me to ask for help. Often they understand that when I give my time to their cause or endeavor, I am using time I might be spending on my work or with my friends and family. That's lovely, that's a gift to me. It allows me to be generous. Everyone likes to be generous. Generosity is a wonderful feeling.

Now and then others come who ask but don't realize. They expect my help. They overlook that I am giving by choice. That takes away my generous feeling -- it becomes a one-way exchange.

Every gift, every friendship goes both ways. It seems strange that because I am generous, people who don't know me expect generosity from me. It happens so often.

Generosity is a gift that disappears the second it is no longer seen.

--me strauss Letting me be

Thinking

They say that the difference is that we know how to think, but I've met so many folks who just don't. They don't want to. They don't like it. They've forgotten how or been taught that it's dangerous.

Oh man, just to think, just to dream, just to watch the clouds and imagine what could be.

Sometimes I think about things that happened once.

Once I painted my face with my mom's lipstick to put on a show. I didn't know she'd be mad.

That makes me think that I figured out by the age of eight that whenever I expected my mom to be mad she never was. It was when I never expected that it happened.

Now I'm thinking about that . . . thinking is like taking a trip with no map.

--me strauss Letting me be

A Different Life

Imagine a different life.

A different reality is happening. People in a place far from this are seeing magnificence. They don't cars or concrete. They don't know air conditioning. They don't know clocks or commuter trains. They don't know you or me.

What they know is wide, wild space, and broad, beautiful skies. What they know is the music of the breeze and the language of the grass and leaves. They can hear still water move. They can hear the sun shine with the gold and yellow of unimaginable light, bright in the dark of the oncoming evening. Color and life is more than 3-dimensional there, and feelings don't tear at the mind and heart. They live in the whole body.

A different reality is happening.

Imagine a different life.

One that was meant to be.

--me strauss Letting me be

Red Tulip on the Table

It was there on the narrow table, under the window. A perfect red tulip placed by an unknown hand, for an unknown reason.

It was a gift. it was a puzzle, but for only a second, because it was hard to care about how it got there. The juxtaposition, the color, the light all worked in a way to say that was the only place this red tulip should be.

I wanted to stand and stare until my legs couldn't hold me. I wanted to perfectly mirror the red, yellow and green of the tulip in the colors that I wore that day. I wanted to imagine the story of the hand that had placed it there. I wanted to believe that it been left by an angel for me.

Tulips work hard to become flowers. They pass through freezing temperatures to find their way to Spring. The hard the winter is what provides the environment to feed the flower.

I wanted to believe the tulip was reminder about life that came when I needed it.

And so I did.

A red tulip perfectly set on a table wasn't a flower. It was a symbol of the hope, a gift perfectly chosen that arrived perfectly on time.

--me strauss Letting me be

Camp Tuck-Me_in

When we were small, it was a boy's scout camp with the coolest Indian name. Kee-sha-wa. I used to love to say it. The boys stayed in tents for the weeks that they spent there. They sleeping bags on the ground. My big brothers went there. They brought home arrowheads and things they had carved with knives. The boys swam in the Illinois River.

The boys' camp sounded so much more exotic than the camp I went to for a week, Tuc-a-batch-ee, which to me said Camp Tuck-Me-In -- where the girls go to learn how to throw like a girl. The camp itself reinforced my concept -- we slept in cabins and swam in a pool. I always wondered what it would be like to stay at the boys' camp. After all, I read The Hardy Boys, not Nancy Drew.

Finally I got my chance, they turned the camp into a bed and breakfast. Wouldn't you know? My friend and I got a nice cabin-like room over the old "pool house," to the pool the boys never used. At least, I got to sit out on the deck under the stars and imagine sleeping there as a kid. It was closer to Camp-Tuck-Me-In. We were in a tiny house -- kitchen, living room, jacuzzi, and feather bed.

And then . . . at 4a.m. as I sat out on the deck. I heard a noise. It didn't sound like deer, or a dog, or any familiar creature. But surely it had to have been.

Right then I thought Camp Tuck-Me-In was the right place for me after all.

--me strauss Letting me be

Extraordinary

It's always been my road that I'm walking. No one would argue that fact. I've never walked in a straight line. My road will attest to that. I've walked this road when I was too tired to crawl. I've walked this road when I was really dancing and half skipping my way to the next curve to see the other side.

I've wondered whether there is one part of the road that my feet have never touched and never will. I've wondered whether the trees alongside the road think of it as their road too.

I've spent years trying to find another road I might take. I've conjured other roads that were flatter, more hilly, and even dreadfully straight. I've always known that my destination is rare and one of a kind. How could my life be so twisted and tred upon any other way? Since I was old enough to know the idea of future. I knew mine held something extraordinary. Nothing ordinary seemed the way.

But I've never asked myself where exactly this road is going and how it came to be mine. Maybe it's time that I figure out what my road is about. It is the amazing reason I get up every day.

me strauss -- Letting me be

Golden Future

It is nightfall on my dreaming. I an worn at the good things that are happening. I have no understanding, I have no grounding. I want to know, yearn to know. Where have my colors gone? They didn't fade. They've been replaced. They've been lost from my view.

These happy things, these happenings have turned everything golden.

So I sit by the golden water and wonder. What is it exactly is calling me? I take the calling deep inside me, spelling each letter of the word seriously. Is it the word calling or is it that I've always known that there was something waiting, something for me to do?

Why have I always had this feeling, this knowledge, this purpose for being?

I write in my journal thoughts of a golden ring. I lock in my eyes the golden future others say belongs to me. Sitll as the pool, I close the book and look outward. I stare inside and our of me. I stare at the golden water. It's minutes. It's hours. . . . lt's me watching a liquiid future with a gentle sun shining on it.

A golden future, that's still only water that I can walk up to, but it will not hold me.
Dreams on water seem tenuous and not considered.
But water gives life as sure as I breathe.
I stare at the golden water and see my life there before me.

--me strass Letting me be

Hole in My Imagination

I have two big brothers, but they're 8 and 9 years older. Because of that gap, I have the traits of a youngest, an oldest, and an only child. All three are right-brain thinkers in a left-brain world. That has blessed me with an ability to observe, to see patterns, and to imagine futures.

I can conceive ideas, simple and elegant, that people are drawn to. I can draw beautiful, compelling pictures with words. If I still myself and actively listen, I can touch the words people need to explain what they're feeling. When the stars are just so, I can take on their feelings. I can know how they'll respond to the tiniest breeze even when they don't know that they've felt it.

I can imagine. I can envision. I can see inside of me and outside of me at the same time while I sit out in the universe.

I've traveled around the world 7 times. Yet this week I found that I am a small town girl with a hole in my imagination.

When I was in college my nephew was born. When he finished college, he traveled to South America. When he went, I asked myself, "Why didn't I ever consider that? Why didn't I ever think about going to an Ivy League school? Why didn't so many things ever cross my mind as possible?"

I started imagining bigger things from that day forward. I lived with the biggest imagination of anyone I knew. I scanned the universe constantly for possibilities.

Still I can't imagine what I can't imagine.

If I never encountered anything close to the ideas of kestrel, kaleidoscope, or kingdom, how would I come to imagine them? How do I imagine what I imagine? All things come from the bits that my experience, my curiosity, and my teachers have shown me.

Most of my teachers didn't know what to do with me. They let me learn on my own. Someitmes they let me teach them. My dad was my only mentor. It wasn't from lack of looking, that I never found another. I was late connecting my head, heart, and feet.

Now a teacher tells me of something I've never imagined, wouldn't know the first thing about, and don't have the method or means, I don't think, by which to make it happen. Yet she sets it in front of me as if it is the next step in a natrual progression.

Few things have so completely captured my attention, as this puzzle.

Oh, but for that small-town hole in my imagination, I would know what to do now.

--me strauss Letting me be

A Light in a Colorful Sky

What dream it was. I awoke expecting the sky to be an entirely different color, and the day to be swirling with new ideas. Well, my head was swirling with new ideas, but the sky was it's usual blue and the clouds were their usual white.

But the dream was still with me in my head.

I had been walking a long, long road, trying desparately to find my way to a place familiar. I was overwhelmed, overtaken by color and darkness and the feeling that I was where I should not be. Then a voice, one I was coaxed into approaching. I'm not sure why I went over to talk to this lady. But the lady started telling me what my future needed to be . . .

She said she saw me as a leader of leaders, a light in a colorful sky. She said those that I needed must be mature and have their own means, so that I might ask them a question of my life.

The question is what still stays with me now as I ready to dream tonight. It was "How might I serve them as a leader so that I might bring wealth into my life?"

She called me a leader of leaders, a light in a colorful sky.

The strangest part of this dream was that I was not sleeping when it transpired.

-me strauss Letting me be

The Light in the Meadow

When my very best friend, Craig, and I were about 12, we went exploring. We took two bananas and a few skipping rocks we'd been collecting. We followed the riverbank to its end past the Schneider's red brick house. At the end the ground was wet from the water, and we saw a dead carp -- a gold one -- that had washed up to die exposed in the wet mud. We stood a few feet from it, at the end of the river looking back toward my house over the water, pretending we were aliens and wondering what might be in those boxes down the riverbank across the grass.

After we skipped a few stones over the water, we'd decided to go on into the forest. Maybe we'd finally find the perfect location for that treehouse that every kid dreams of. Or maybe we'd just dream one up where we wanted it.

On this day we were talking of King Arthur and Merlin. We were wishing Merlin could make us into falcons. We imagined ourselves flying over the trees, looking for a mouse for our dinner. We checked out every tree, every hole, every bush around, above, below us. I even picked some yellow buttercups. Partway into the peninsula, we saw the amazing band of light shine down between the trees.

Craig took my hand and we walked slowly toward the lighted meadow. Nothing special or different was there. Only the light had made it special. We ate our bananas and watched as we sat under a nearby tree.

It was a young adult novel. It was sacred. It was 12-year-old romantic. I'll never tell whether that was time he kissed me.

--me strauss Letting me be