Old timey photos

I found treasures today in a small suitcase stored among boxes upon boxes of old photos my dad had stored. In this suitcase were wonderful pics of my parents going back to their baby years, early pics of my brother and me as infants and toddlers, AND underneath these, photo journals my grandmother had made when she was a girl!

As an example, she recorded a vacation she had taken with her three sisters to a farm -- little photos glued onto black pages with writing in white ink telling the story. These books are off the Richter scale of charming. In another book I found photos of a pre-WWI Cavalry officer pasted in next to his calling card; an unnamed woman in a lovely long dress and straw hat looking over a 5-bar farm gate and smiling broadly; young women in voluminous bathing dresses splashing in a lake ... I simply must find a way to digitize these books and share them. So much work ahead!

American School Detachment, Univ. of Manchester, England. My granddad (Tuttle) must be in this photo. My other granddad (Winger) went to the Sorbonne after WWI.

 

My dad, Max A. Tuttle, Jr. aged 18 - heading off to war.

Raise your children for their own times

A good tip for detectives

How can you tell if a suspect is lying?

• When people are remembering events, their eyes move to the left.
• When they are inventing a story, their eyes move to the right.

Good to know, eh?

Would you trust this woman's testimony?

How I think

My recent Facebook word cloud from Wolfram-Alpha.

Reflections after reading "Proof of Heaven"

A couple of weeks ago I read "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife" by Eben Alexander and I was shocked to discover that his experience of heaven (the part he called "the Core") exactly matches mine, as published in my book "Creative Spirit Musings" (see the very last story for my description). 

Alexander also talks about a "Gateway" area which precedes the Core, which looks like a charming valley full of happy people in colorful, peasant-like dress. I have "flown" over that exact scene many times in my visions or dreams. 

Several ideas or principles started to occur to me after I read Dr. Alexander's story, and I decided to capture them here. These are just jottings, stream-of-consciousness-style, with no hierarchy and no attempt yet to make them into a coherent argument or treatise.

1. We are too bound up by our idea of playing out roles we feel are assigned to us (in the family and other relationships). Whereas all we need to do is to love, emanate love, for others, and relationships will work out fine.
2. We already own all there is in the universe (co-own might be a better word). Take care of what you have right now and don't worry about the rest. If you need more it will come in the right time. Coveting "stuff" makes our spirits shrink.
3. There is a purpose to being on earth, which has to do with love and growth, but I am unable to articulate it broadly enough yet.
4. We are all part of one vast fabric of power and existence (love) that exists in many dimensions. To flow with it is better than to fight against it.
5. We do not lose our individuality (after physical death) but our individuality is not characterized by ego, in its essence. 
6. More to come. 

Angel Nebula

Children do not thrive in "self-reliant" N. Korea

Welcome to the "Communist state one-man dictatorship" of North Korea, where children are born to lives that are nasty, brutish, and short - to borrow from Thomas Hobbes (q.v.).

From today's news:

The United Nations says that more than a fourth of all North Korean children are stunted from chronic malnutrition and fully two-thirds of the country's 24 million people don't know where their next meal is coming from.

The U.N. said Friday that its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that 2.8 million North Koreans "are in need of regular food assistance amidst worrying levels of chronic malnutrition and food insecurity."

Read the UN news article.

Be the type of person you want to meet

Actually ... I am. But I enjoy meeting people who are different from me because I can learn so much from them and enjoy new things with them that I wouldn't have thought of.

Also, making the effort to get along with people who are different from ourselves helps round off our rougher edges.