Free to Be Me

Shrek the Third and Sammy Davis Jr. both proclaimed a similar message decades apart: "I gotta be me!"

At the end of the Shrek movie Arty says to the crowd, "You're telling me you just want to be villans your whole lives?" Captain Hook replies, "But we ARE villans, it's the only thing we know." Arty responds, "Didn't you ever wish you could be something else?" An animated tree chimes in, "Well it's easy for you to say, you're not some evil enchanted tree." Another tree adds, "What Steve's trying to say is, it's hard to come by honest work when the whole world's against you." Arty, "Okay, fair enough. You're right....I'm not a talking tree but you know a good friend of mine once told me that just because people treat you like a villan or an ogar or just some loser, it doesn't mean you are one. The thing that matters most - is what you think of your self. If there's something you really want or some one you really want to be, then the only person standing in your way is you. ..... Each of you is standing in your way." The crowd responds, "Ohhhhhhh."
A moment of enlightment. .............
I've gotta be ME!
And the gift of each new day is that I get a chance to create a new me.

A Tree's Brilliance

I was driving down the road late this afternoon and caught the sun dancing across a variety of red, orange, yellow and brown leaves dangling from the tree branches. I thought, "what amazing fall colors we are experiencing this week - even amidst the drought." The colors were truly brilliant. And then it dawned on me...the trees are in a death stage. A stage when the leaves wither and die and are blown from the branches they covered for the past 8 months. Isn't it incredible that these once young green fleshy leaves can have such flaming vibrant pigments pronounced here at the end of their life?! I can only hope that I die with such enthusiasm and excitement when dust returns to dust.