I probably don’t weigh myself as often as I should, when I’m being conscious usually around once a week, but in the last year I’ve stayed away from the scale and of course have put on some weight. I should know better, weight control has been the battle of my life and can’t say that I’ve won it. I am still quite overweight but did manage to lose a large amount of weight 3 years ago (70 lbs). After years of self-torture and anguish I have finally reached a place where my weight loss efforts are more about how I feel physically than about how I look, but it’s such a very complicated issue for me…

Hi, Rocky, in my humble opinion I think you and Frannie are in perfect agreement. I think it’s the actual word “God” that can be offputting, it is so loaded, I fought that for a long time because it was hard for me to separate it from religion. What you describe in your moments of understanding, acceptance, wonder and transcendence is God to me, I don’t presume to say that’s what it should be for anyone else, but these experiences have always been rooted in a deep sense of connection to the energy of all living creatures and that’s the thing that is impossible to name or to describe and by default gets labeled as God in my book… Yikes, I need to go do some serious thinking now :)

Carol, that was beautiful. It may be simply a question of my being inarticulate about the term “good”, I use it to refer to something that I feel to be primordially familiar, comforting somehow, so I infuse the judgement of good on it when it is simply an energy that I know, interesting…

This is exactly what I feel, Frannie, I too was raised in Catholic school dogma all the way thru high school and it only served to make me either fear it at first as a young child and then to rebel against it as a teenager. It’s taken me years of just being open to life to come back around to the concept of God.

LOL, sorry, Phyllis, didn’t mean to be presumptuous, guess I might have gotten carried away because I do take comfort in this. I am by no means a religious person, all the opposite, but certainly spiritual, and recently after going thru a renewed soul searching (I keep joking with my friends that I am re-living my adolescent identity crisis in the last couple of years) I have come to see and feel an all pervasive “good” at the core of things that I have decided is what I consider to be God.

Exactly, Frannie. What I know for sure is that in the end, when you peel back all the layers on everything, no matter how complicated, ugly, or whatever they may be, ultimately what’s at the core of every single thing is good, is God. And that’s something we can all take comfort in.

Wow! what a life she is living and how grateful we should all be for her life’s work, so inspiring.

Awww, BG, thanks! What a wonderful thing your friend has done, music can be so emotional, nostalgic, happy, sad, sappy and sophisticated all in one shot, makes a perfect gift, doesn’t it?

Hi, Kelly, this post reminded me of the time that I decided to make a couple of CD’s for my husband for Christmas, I put all the songs that remind me of him or of some special time in our lives in chronological order and titled it “Javier & Dora, the soundtrack of our lives”, haha! It turned out to be 2 CD’s so I photocopied a picture of us on our wedding day to use for the cover of the first one and a picture of us 18 years later on the 2nd. He loved them and we have both listened to them endlessly.

EKA and Ms Dee, you guys have totally swept me up into the spirit of things! Thank you! I’ve been walking around gripped with anxiety about work and money and other nonsense, just reading about your plans and your attitudes reminded me how much I truly love this time of year and how wonderful it will be with my family around :)

Great subject, Christmas parties certainly seem like a small sacrifice in light of what your son is going through, Beverly, completely understandable. But I also think that the idea of maintaining Christmas spirit in times like these is very important. My business has been hit hard, we are struggling like we never have before just to try to stop the bleeding, never mind trying to actually make some money. And I have often resented the inane practice in my business to dole out lavish gifts to clients. I am a very generous person and I love giving, but when I WANT to give, not when I am forced to give. So this year my husband and I have decided that no clients get gifts, if that’s going to cause them to not give us their business then so be it. But we are definitely going to try to be as generous as we can to our employees (not like there is so many of them any more, we only have 6 left…), and more than that, I have been spending time trying to figure out how to make whatever gifts we give them as meaningful as possible. I really think this holiday season is about expressing the love and appreciation you have for the people that are most important in your life, maybe that doesn’t mean it has to be done lavishly but it does have to be done sincerely.

LOL, honeychild, you wouldn’t commit! but now that you say you will I sing your praises as well :) Oh, yes, those photographers are insane and someone in definitely going to get hurt someday. I haven’t seen the film but I will, thanks for pointing it out, but I live in Malibu and have seen first hand how out of control the situation is. It’s such a vicious circle, because if people would just stop buying all the gossip rags then those idiotic photos wouldn’t fetch the kind of obscene money that they do. I remember one day being at the local shopping center when I saw a herd of people running towards a store, I swear I thought that there was some sort of awful emergency happening, turned out to be an emergency only by Malibu standards- Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson were shopping together, the crowd of paparazzi swarmed all around them as they got into Paris’s Bentley and the car drove off, albeit slowly, with a pile-up of human beings on top of it… insane. I would have almost felt sorry for those people if it weren’t for the fact that those two court the limelight so damned much.

Ms. Dee, that’s EXACTLY it! you got it, that’s why I say it means a lot to me that you would be interested in seeing it, your comments are always so insightful.

Thanks, Ms Dee, love hearing this! especially coming from you.

Hi! yeah, I know, it’s hard to really sum up everything that the film tries to encompass, I run into that a lot! The Gandhi/Mandela reference was in terms of giving you an idea of who Brigitte is really, we do touch upon a few issues relating to these leaders in the film but it’s not necessarily focused on them. But mainly we point out a whole lot of dysfunction and disconnection in people’s lives with the hope that they will stop and take a look, granted, it’s opinionated but in a positive and hopefully healing way. So funny about your sex addict documentary, maybe I’ll get lucky and the world will all of a sudden focus on peace and I won’t feel compelled to do mine, haha! The reason I’m involved in this, besides the fact that the content resonates with me, is that after spending as many years as I have producing commercials for multi-national corporations I kind of feel like I have sold my soul to the devil :) This project was a gift coming my way because it allows me to use the skills I’ve honed for the last 20 years on something that I find a whole lot more meaningful than a freakin’ Bud Light commercial…