No More Ponies

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, reading paperback fiction books was one of my absolute favorite things to do. My home was filled with books, periodicals, and several types of music. My mother would go to a popular New Orleans department store and buy specific books for each of us. My older sister and I would get so excited when she came home from work with those paperback books. Oftentimes after my sister finished reading her books, I would read them. She is almost four years my senior, so her books had a more mature subject matter. This one specific book has stuck with me. Well, not the book because I do not remember all the details, but there is a line in the book that has stuck with me. The book is entitled *There Must Be a Pony* by Jim Kirkwood. The main character, Josh, has a dream, and if my memory serves me correctly, he was in a barn, and there were just mounds and mounds of horse manure. As he was shoveling through the manure, he exclaimed that underneath all this shit, there must be a pony.

Isn’t that just like life? There is one situation after the other, and we’re convinced there must be a purpose to the repetitive frustrations we experience. We are only in the third month of this year, and the challenges have been overwhelming. I felt so discouraged last night that I uttered the words Jesus said prior to his crucifixion: “Let this cup pass from me.” While writing this blog, I’m in a hospital family waiting room with a loved one as the patient. I just feel like I’m being dragged by life from one problem to the next. This cycle used to be intermittent; however, since 2020, I’m perpetually shoveling endless piles of manure. I just want to experience a few boring days. You know, those days where nothing in particular has to be done and nothing in particular is going on. I’m mentally exhausted from shoveling piles of manure as an activity. I want this cycle to end. I refuse to accept this as my life path. There has got to be more. I want to wake up without problems pounding on my chest and just embrace the beauty of the day. I want to enjoy every moment of every day to the fullest. I’m ready to put the shovel down and stop shoveling through problems and issues. So, unlike Josh, I’m going to stop looking for a pony and instead experience life through a prism that allows me to reframe problems as situations that require enhanced life management skills.

 

Is There Value In Emptiness?

Is there value in emptiness. That sinking feeling that kind of starts in the stomach and moves up through the chest into the throat and in the eyes and sometimes leads to tears. Today I had a fairly good day at the office. I had some boxes and bags of clothes that belonged to my father who passed away in February of 2022. The exterior of the boxes were marked dishes. As I was opening the boxes, I thought you live your whole life and then the things that you valued end up in boxes in storage units and that's it. I just kept unpacking, and my brother was there, and he had gone through several bags of things that had also been in storage for a few years. Both of us was going through the motions of sorting and clearing through things my brother wanted to keep, give away, or donate.

Later we did our usual talking on the way home. I dropped him off and felt gratitude for our banter on current events. When I arrived home, I got off to myself and had dinner then this feeling of deep emptiness just permeated me, and I thought God is there a purpose for emptiness? Is there value in feeling hollow? Immediately the thought came just sit in it. Sit in the emptiness. Don’t fill it with an activity. Don’t look at social media. Don’t look at the television just sit in it and allow it to move through you as you start to reach for better feeling thoughts. Allow the emptiness to just guide you to a better feeling thought. I realized in the moment that emptiness is not sadness. Emptiness just is. It is a space inside of a space and in that space of being hollow I can start to recognize and accept that it's OK to feel absolutely nothing. It's OK to feel the heaviness in my chest to feel tears welling up in my eyes it's OK because this too shall pass but, in the meantime, I'll sit in it and just as it consumed me allow it to dissolve it's OK all is well.

BEWARE OF DISTRACTIONS

 

A few weeks ago I started a YouTube channel called Serendipity Shena. You might think what a strange name. So what does the word serendipity mean? "Serendipity in American English is  (1). an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident, (2). good fortune; luck".  I believe life is full of opportunities whereby we unintentionally find valuable discoveries by chance. I wanted to create a space for me to share two things I love talking about politics and religion. I know these two topics alone have destroyed countries, marriages, friendships, and the list is endless. However, I enjoy taking political and biblical information and applying it to everyday life. The first video for the channel was approximately two weeks after the recent inauguration of the United States president. The word that permeated my mind within the initial days post-inauguration was distraction. People that I had conversations with were becoming fearful. frustrated, and hopeless in a short period. I wanted to share my thoughts and created a video. 

The inserted video is totally my opinion. Peace and Richest Blessings.

MAGICAL EXPERIENCE

 Living in Southeast Louisiana our world revolves around weather events. We have become experts at living with hurricanes and flash floods. Our winters consist of at most ten days with morning temperatures in the mid-forties. So, imagine the shock when meteorologists forecasted four inches of snow on January 21, 2025. The snowstorm brought ten inches of snow to New Orleans, tying the record set in 1895. The snowstorm also brought near-blizzard conditions to the city.

The New Year 2025 came in with a terrorist attack and many beautiful souls lost their lives and suffered horrible injuries on historic Bourbon Street. The city of New Orleans was numb. Even thinking about it now is earth-shattering. So, the shock of receiving a large amount of snow last month could only be described as magical. It felt so light and airy easing the heavy solemn mood that had eviscerated the city commonly referred to as the Big Easy. We had no experience with driving or walking in the snow. It didn't matter and we didn't care we just enjoyed the magical white stuff that was falling from the sky, The experience was magical.

ROTTING IS A GOOD THING

The older I get, the more I start to take inventory of my life and wonder what would be different. What would I have done differently? Where would I have lived? Which places would I have visited? What things have I achieved in life? What have been my biggest successes? What are my failures? As I approach another birthday, I'm thinking about how I can move beyond my limitations. How can I get unstuck? How can I become less comfortable with not planning, not doing, or being? How can I intentionally and on purpose create a meaningful and joyous life? How can I soar above the clouds without turbulence? Why is it so difficult for me to do something as simple as socializing and enjoying the moment? Am I stuck? After living deep in the crevasses of grief and family illnesses for the past four years I feel afraid to plan. I feel like I’m holding my breath and if I exhale some undesirable situation will manifest. I feel like my life is engulfed in problem-solving. And then there’s the business of managing a company and the issues associated with being a CEO. I started living in a space where I felt like the man in the old Duncan Donuts commercial whose life became a revolving door forcing him to say, “I already made the donuts.”  I just had to retreat to doing as much of nothing as possible. I watched series on streaming TV, watched podcasters, and more political programming than was probably healthy. I ate more takeout food than I ever had allowed myself to consume previously. My place of refuge was my home office on the futon.

I actively engaged in what Generation Z calls “rotting”. My intense work ethic would not allow me to engage in bed rotting so I resorted to futon rotting. During my rotting season, I’ve released 35 pounds, become reconnected to my love of fashion, recommitted to decorating my home, and daily exercise routines, reactivated my blog posts, started two YouTube channels, and left a church congregation that no longer met my spiritual needs. In my mind, I felt so incredibly stuck but there has been tremendous movement. My movement was difficult to see because of grief and the duties involved in trying to help someone regain their health. However, the movement and progress that was occurring in my life cannot be denied. All the endless tears were healing. I can get through days without tears or waves of sadness. I’m better because in doing nothing my periods of doing something were more productive. I am still in a place of incredible transition and will continue to engage in movement through futon rotting.

Peace and Richest Blessings.

Are You the Answer to Someone’s Prayer?

 Are You the Answer to Someone's Prayer

Where Have You Been?

 

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Oh, wow my last blogpost was in April 2016. It was a video that I did in the conference room of my old office space. It was a day without makeup, but a lot of thoughts. I was consumed with how great people functioned in the midst of being very afraid and was inspired to do a video. My life has changed so drastically since 2016. Little did I know April 2016 was the last month of my life being settled and mundane. My greatest worries were college tuition for my son and ensuring my company had funds monthly to remain self-sustaining. May 2016 ushered in a tsunami of challenges that still seem to overtake me. I have been walking with wobbly water legs since. Some days I just feel I cannot go on. There are no real respites. I just stop and decide to be grateful, smile, laugh, and encourage others at sporadic intervals throughout a given day. I always make a point of telling others that as I encourage you, I encourage myself.

The people that receive services through the non-profit I have been blessed to steward are my sheroes, heroes and props. They make me laugh and their desire to change their lives gives me strength to catch my breath to be there for them. We truly are helping each other. In the swirl of politics, a pandemic, and mounting societal issues everyone has been living with water legs. So, I was well equipped for the challenges placed upon the world in 2020. Thankfully, today I feel more hopeful than I have been in the past four years. There is no specific event and there is no financial windfall it is just an inner knowing from Holy Spirit that “the storm is passing over.”

The subject Where Have You Been? connotes a sense of missing in action or lost. However, it is in the sense of being lost that I have come to realize that I was actually collecting unfinished fragments of myself that allowed me to truly relate to people that live with insurmountable challenges. I accepted the assignment to help people experience a life of accepting the person God created them to be. Not realizing that to be fully engaged in the assignment required what felt like a total collapse of my life as I knew it. I said to a few people I do not even recognize my life. Where did it go? What happened to it?

Today I know that nothing happened to me or my life. I needed to grow and things that seemed like challenges were designed to strengthen my spirit to be of greater service. Nothing has been withheld or held back. I believe that God is a master mixologist with capacity to take hard chunky pieces and make them like silk. The blending process is loud, resistant, and sometimes parts of us gets stuck on the walls of life in the process. Then God comes and moves the stuck pieces back into the blended parts. The outcome is delicious, tasteful, and aesthetically appealing. Additionally, the completed blend does not display evidence or proof that at one time the ingredients were detached and foreign to each other.

Therefore, the question is not Where Have You Been? but Where Are You Going?