This summer, my garden has provided me with such pleasure. I’m not a great gardener. Heck, I’m not even a good gardener. But somehow, herbs managed to grow as well as some carrots, tomatoes and…weeds. Lots of weeds. Here’s a young girl who took her gardening a bit more seriously:

Alexandra Reau, of Petersburg, Mich., tended to her rainbow chard.

Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs.

While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
Read more at The New York Times

Creative potential abounds, even in the most unlikely situations. One would think a boy with a terminal illness would not have the energy, let alone the know-how, to produce such sophisticated and impressive artwork. It reminds us: we are all creative. Convince yourself otherwise and you won’t produce. Allow your inner child to express and you may have the next Picasso:

A terminally ill boy who was not expected to live past six-months-old, has stunned doctors by surviving and holding his own art exhibition.

Leo Haines, aged five, was born with cerebral palsy and a terminal condition affecting his lungs and heart.

Doctors told his mother Marianna Haines, 26, that little Leo would die in his first year. But his fighting spirit saw him through and after spending his first brithday in hospital, Leo was able to move home.

The talented young artist, from Taunton Somerset, England, began painting alongside his grandmother Marianna Thomas, who quickly recognised his talent.

Leo now has 40 unique works, reminiscent of the American abstract artist Jackson Pollock, featuring in their very own art exhibition where they are being sold for charity.

His grandfather, Brian Thomas, 59, said: ‘My wife, his grandmother, is a well-known local artist and it started with Leo joining in, basically uninvited, into her work.

‘So she used to get him a canvas and set him up with paints on the floor and it just went from there.

Artistic Leo, pictured here aged 3, is able to concentrate on his work for over an hour at a time

‘It began by getting him to recognise different colours and mixtures and shapes. Now it is his favourite pastime.

‘I suppose you’d call them impressionism - they’re definitely inspired by his choice of colours, and I think he’s got a very good choice in colours.

‘And they’re really quite good. The first day of the exhibition a man came in and got halfway down the wall and turned to me and asked, ‘Are you Leo?’ - quite seriously.

‘He thought they’d been painted by an adult, and I pointed him to the other wall which tells Leo’s story. He immediately bought a painting. We’ve got about 40 in the exhibition, and they represent two years of Leo’s work.’

Leo was born with cerebral palsy and terminal pulmonary vein stenosis, a condition that means the veins running from his heart to his lungs will become eventually blocked, killing him.

Doctors told his mother, a care assistant from Taunton, Somerset, he was unlikely to survive past six months old, and in the first year of his life Leo’s family was told nine times to prepare for the worst.

But Leo, who suffers from intermittent deafness, battled through and eventually moved home, where he developed a fascination for art as part of therapy to help him communicate.

Now he creates dazzling abstract works full of feeling with sweeping colours on black backgrounds.

Leo’s grandfather, a retired electronics and communications worker, added: ‘Amongst his biggest problems is the ability to communicate because he has cerebral palsy.

Little Leo’s work has been likened to Jackson Pollock’s paintings such as ‘Number 17, 1949′ pictured

‘One of the ways we actually got him to communicate is through activities - painting is one of those things that he can do.

‘My wife’s taught him a sort-of no boundaries approach. It has been great for Leo - it’s got him communicating. He has at least three sessions a week, and in the winter four or five.

‘Some children of his age would not concentrate for more than 15 minutes, but he loves painting so much he can be absorbed for an hour and a half.’

Source: Daily Mail UK

Just the other day a friend told me about an argument he had with a good friend. He was distraught about it and didn’t know what to do. Unfortunately, his friend didn’t want to talk about it with him - and didn’t want to talk to him - which only furthered his upset.

The only advice I could come up with had to do with the concept of acceptance: there are certain situations in life that can leave us feeling horribly in limbo. Sometimes all we can do is accept that awkward space. And let it be.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy and sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering I rush to them. They will give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resilience to push on.

- Helen Hayes

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

- Carl Rogers

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

- Madeleine L’Engle

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

- D. H. Lawrence

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

- Melodie Beattie

Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves.

- Bonaro W. Overstreet

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reported response: “By God, she’d better!”)

- Margaret Fuller

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we watch the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico unfold, many of us feel helpless and angry. How could this happen? What can we do? Who will pay for this? Can this ever be undone? Not positive news, this is true.

In response, today, I decided to post a baby animal born in LA Zoo; a thriving, beautiful creature that symbolizes hope and grace.

On April 5, 2009, a male Masai giraffe was born here at the L.A. Zoo! He’s currently in the giraffe habitat with his parents, Neema and Artimus. Able to stand shortly after birth, calves can grow four feet during their first year. When full grown, giraffes can reach a height of 18 feet, making them tallest land mammal.

Native to Kenya and Tanzania, giraffes can reach a speed of 35 miles per hour. Their kicks are so powerful that they’re capable of decapitating a lion.

Giraffes communicate with one another through posturing, movement, the way they carry their tails, retreat and sometimes vocalization, which can include moos, bellows and whistles.

Source: PetLvrBlog

Ah, that elusive idea…finding yourself. As if you’ve lost yourself in some cosmic game of hid and seek and you are both the seeker and the hider…or something like that!

These quotes will remind you that finding yourself is at once easy yet seemingly impossible at times.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.  ~Thomas Szasz, “Personal Conduct,” The Second Sin, 1973

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you’ll discover will be wonderful.  What you’ll discover is yourself.  ~Alan Alda

Never mind searching for who you are.  Search for the person you aspire to be.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.  ~Dr. Alexis Carrel

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.  ~Julien Green

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.  ~Anaïs Nin

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.  ~Richard Grant

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

All men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.  ~Michel de Montaigne

If you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found.  ~Author Unknown

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  ~Henry David Thoreau, 1854

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.  ~George Moore

It is good to feel lost… because it proves you have a navigational sense of where “Home” is.  You know that a place that feels like being found exists.  And maybe your current location isn’t that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it.  ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com

Okay, so Memorial Day threw me off a little this week. It sure feels like Wednesday! Not to worry - inspirational quotes can help any day of the week. Today, we look at the idea of releasing. Many of us hold on to anger, pain or even bad habits without realizing the answer lies within. Here are some reminders:

“Sincere forgiveness isn’t colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don’t worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time.” Sara Paddison

Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste, as to what ought to be said, write for the pleasure of it — whether slowly or fast — every form of resistance to a complete release should be abandoned. ~ William Carlos Williams

“I heard an Angel singing

When the day was springing,

“Mercy, Pity, Peace

Is the world’s release.”” William Blake

“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear.” Amelia Earhart

“It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” Alan Cohen

“Our repeated failure to fully act as we would wish must not discourage us. It is the sincere intention that is the essential thing, and this will in time release us from the bondage of habits which at present seem almost insuperable.” Thomas Troward

“Orgy Porgy, Ford and fun. Kiss the girls and make them one. Girls at one with Boys at peace. Orgy progy gives release.” Aldous Huxley

“Unto this wood I came As to a nest; Dreaming that sylvan peace Offered the harrowed ease- Nature a soft release From men’s unrest” Thomas Hardy

“At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.” - Eric Idle

You might be experiencing it as you read this (though I hope not!) Boredom is so commonplace that we don’t think of it as a mental state from which can learn. But there’s a way to embrace boredom, even grow from it. And what better way to start the week (Mondays can be notoriously boring!) then with some tips on how to use boredom to your advantage!

This is from The Happiness Project, a blog we’ve referred to several times on Only Positive News. Check out the site when you get a moment!

One “little thing” that can be a source of unhappiness is boredom. Sitting in traffic. Doing laundry. Waiting in a long line at the grocery store.

I’ve found that the more I focus on my boredom or irritation, the more I amplify that feeling. Here are six strategies I use to “re-frame” the moment; even if I can’t escape a situation, by re-framing my emotions about it, I can transform it.

– Put the word “meditation” after the activity that’s boring you. (This is my invention.) If you’re standing in a slow line at the drugstore, you’re doing “Waiting in line meditation.” If you’re cleaning up after a party, you’re doing “Cleaning meditation.” Just saying these words makes me feel very spiritual and high-minded and wise.

-– Dig in. Diane Arbus wrote, “The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true.” If something is boring for two minutes, do it for four minutes. If it’s still boring, do it for eight minutes, then sixteen, and so on. Eventually you discover that it’s not boring at all.

In my life, I’ve found that if part of my research isn’t interesting to me — for example, studying the Dardanelles campaign for Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill — I read a whole book about it, and then it becomes absorbing. The same principle holds when doing boring or irritating tasks, like washing dishes.

– Take the perspective of a journalist or scientist. Really study what’s around you. What are people wearing, what do the interiors of buildings look like, what noises do you hear? If you bring your analytical powers to bear, you can make almost anything interesting.

– Find an area of refuge. Have a mental escape route planned. Think about something delightful or uplifting (not your to-do list!). Or maybe review photos of your kids on your phone; studies show that looking at photos of loved ones provides a big mood boost.

– Take your time. I realize that when information bores me, like trying to understand a change-of-service notice from the cable company, I try to rush through it. This makes things worse, though, not better, because I feel not only bored, but also impatient and confused. Now, when I have to make sense of something that’s both boring and bewildering, I deliberately slow myself down and take all the time I need. My resolution to Put myself in jail is helpful.

– Most important: always have something good to read!

How about you? Have you found strategies to deal with boredom?

How much has music served your life? How much has music helped you today? it’s only a note away. Sing, dance, be free…save yourself, like this wonderful and creative boy:

When asked how long he has loved music, 8 year old kidney transplant survivor Rishi Nair will told the Today Show’s Bob Dotson – “Since I was zero.”  Maybe that’s why this remarkable boy, who prefers to go by his superhero name The Peaceful Warrior, was able to find the power to make the world better in his music.

As Rishi puts it, “My special power is to fight fear, sadness and pain with music.”

This superhero was born with no working kidneys.  He was stuck in Seattle Children’s Hospital, tethered to machines, until his mother gave him one of her kidneys, just a few days before his fifth birthday.

“I could hear him shout,” mom Mary Lyn Nair recalls to Dotson. “ ‘I’m free! I’m free! I’m absolutely FREE!’ They took the IVs out and he asked, ‘Where’s my drum?’ ”

That freedom is only temporary, Mary’s kidney will not last forever.  Ten years is the minimum, according to Rishi’s doctors.  While Rishi’s family can only hope that another solution can be found before the kidney gives out, in the meantime they’ve decided to focus on their little boy’s irrepressibly joyful spirit.  And their getting a little help from his friends.

In the years before his kidney transplant gave him his freedom, Rishi learned how to play instruments from all over the world.  He was even taught how to use the Australian didgeridoo by an Aborigine.  Lots of remarkable people have helped Rishi learn to use his superpowers, including Grammy winning composer Mateo Messina, who met Rishi when he was visiting the hospital to entertain the children there.

Mateo, like everyone else who meets Rishi, was instantly drawn to the child.  He asked Rishi to help him compose a song in the “Symphony for Superheroes” that he was writing.

“We both had an idea what the song should be about,” Mateo says. He nods at Rishi, who proceeds to sing: “When I play the world feels better … Everyone is soothed.”

Mateo and Rishi performed their work with the Seattle Symphony, and that one performance raised $189,000 for sick kids whose families can’t afford treatment.

Just a couple of superheroes out saving the world.

Watch him in action!

Here are a few tips I came up with to make some positive news into you life, your home and your community:

1. Pick up Trash - It may seem small but every time you do it, you’re displaying a sense of concern and pride for your community. Others may notice and realize that people do care.

2. Sing a song - Singing is a natural way to shift your energy. Like dancing, you can only feel so down when you sing. Sing around others - don’t be shy. The more we’re able to openly express ourselves, the more it gives others permission to do the same.

3. Clean up your Mess - Cleaning a messy area in your house does wonders for your mind and soul. Purging old stuff, airing out a room, refreshing a space - all can do more than hours with a therapist!

4. Listen - We often have a tendency to overthink, our minds whirring away like a blender. When you talk to somebody today, genuinely listen to what he or she has to say. Give your mind a break. Validate others. Listening is a practice that opens us up and quiets the mind.

5. Share good news - even if it feels forced, tell someone about a positive event or thought you had today. By doing this, you set a trend - being positive, even about something small, creates a ripple effect. Positivity can be contagious.

Here’s my example today:

My friend Vince came over for coffee today. I forgot how nice it is to sit down and chat with someone in the morning about any old thing. It gave me a chance to reconnect with a friend and enjoy those smaller moments in life. Plus the coffee was delicious!

That’s my positive news! Nothing earth-shattering, right? But I wrote about it. I experienced it. You read it. Its that trajectory that can change the world, I do believe.

This story is a great example of people making the most of out of difficult economic times as well maximizing space in a trying real estate market. What can you do to make the best of a limiting situation in your life? How can you think outside of the box and optimize your space better?

They spent a lot more than a penny doing it up, but turning the public toilets into a home was a true labor of love.

For nearly a century the Victorian WC was used as a loo by visitors to the beach at Scarborough.

Now the distinctive building has been transformed by Tracy Woodhouse and her partner Graham Peck into a cosy house, with magnificent views overlooking the North Sea.

Now named Lookout, the single story building, built into the cliff overlooking the resort’s famous North Bay, is widely admired by local residents who have witnessed its reincarnation.

Miss Woodhouse, 45, said: “Some people joke about it. At work they’ll say things like, “Oh yes, you’re the couple who live in a lavatory.”

“But we now have a lovely little house with a sea view that used to be a loo. We understand the amusement it causes. It tickles us, too.”

The public loo, which became an ammunition store during the war, was closed down in the 1990s and for a few years became a seasonal cafe.

When the lease became available five years ago, the couple, both factory workers, decided it would make a perfect home. A local architect produced plans which maintained the character and style of the building and the council backed the scheme.

The Lookout has stunning views out over the North Bay in Scarborough

Boarded up: The delapidated public toilet before being bought and converted

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1271229/Scarborough-couple-convert-15k-public-toilet-seaside-home.html#ixzz0nXoSY4Rs