Independence Day

Alo Sentio

It’s Latin, and when loosely translated to English, it means nourish your emotions. They are your rudder, and they let you know whether you are closer to your soul’s longing, or farther away. If you feel pain, you are focused on the wrong thing. Find something that makes you feel good to focus on, and things will be better in your life. Focus on things that make you feel pain, and you will find more things that make you feel pain. It’s really that simple. If that thought makes you angry, then try to figure out why you are protective of your pain. What does it bring you? What is the payoff? Sympathy? Being “right”? Preserving relationships with people who are also feeling pain about something? Figure out what the payoff is, and then ask yourself:

What do I want more? Happiness or the payoff?

The purpose of this blog is to bring visual beauty, uplifting thoughts and emotional support into your inbox. It is also a platform I am giving myself to express my own feelings about things in a way that I hope will validate yours in some way. Validation is hard to come by sometimes, and I am hoping to give you some. I am also hoping that what I write will make even just one person feel less alone. And maybe it will give you a laugh. I would love that.

I moved “alosentio” from its dedicated site to this one to save some moola, but I lost all my comments in the process, and although this blog has been active since 2019, all the dates are the same. Oh, well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wish we had it. Doesn't feel that way to me often. It feels as though we are jostled side to side by a very few people who have made promises and broken them with numbing regularity until they have broken us. The original Independence Day was supposed to free us from such people, so that we could celebrate this day with the stuff I remember from childhood. Fireflies and big, bad thunderstorms that we who were brave enough would leave the shelter of the kitchen and go out onto the screened-in porch and watch with Dad. I was always half afraid the lightning would travel sideways and set me on fire, but I went out and sat under a trusted arm and learned to love rather than fear the thunder.

In what feels to me like an increasingly graceless world, nostalgia is what links me with people of a similar age in a happier way than that we are both on AARP's inescapable and relentless mailing list. Things like riding out to some secret vantage point in jammies to watch the fireworks. Jammies with feet. Watermelon that had seeds. Running through the sprinkler. Drive-in movies! In jammies with feet. I miss the idea of innocence. I can't find it so much anymore.

I feel for the much younger generation (a SURE sign of imminent old age) that they don't remember some of this stuff. Slip 'N Slides! Those watery vinyl things that cracked so many ribs. People still do all these things in summer, I know. But it was BIGGER then, and not so drowned out by the un-innocent things that accompany childhood these days. I like to remember summers when people held ice cream cones instead of devices.

Sweet memories keep the floor under me sometimes, and I feel lucky to have lived in more innocent times than these. I hope the young can build their future nostalgic moments with real things over machines, with nature over screens, with wonder and occasional awe over cynicism. And I hope for this battered country that we can lose the fear of each other, find the love that is at the core of real freedom, and let the storm pass. Maybe we can stop judging and hating, start listening, reach for understanding, and see with love. I am softening to forgiveness in my own life, and I wish for all of you the same softening wherever it will serve you best. Have a delicious, glorious, innocent, wondrous Independence Day.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Alo Sentio

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