To Be Vulnerable is to be Alive…

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Dear Reader:

Happy Memorial Day! Our family celebrated this important holiday yesterday at Mandy and John’s home, since some of the family had the day off Monday and some didn’t. Like Saturday….it was a day filled with bouts of an appearing (teasing sun) and then sudden bouts of rain throughout the day/evening in Mount Pleasant.

As far as vulnerability and life goes in our family….both drones to the Queen Bee (Eva Cate) cousin Rutledge, and brother Jake, intuitively, understand that making oneself “vulnerable” playing princess with the Queen works in the life preservation category, as well as, enduring dangerous neck chokes of affection.

The one thing that endures after a battle, conflict, or war is love. It is never destroyed. When grief strips us down to the very core of our souls we realize that “Vulnerability is the price of love and life.” The day we were born we started our journey towards death.: We all want to “be” and “fear the idea of non-being.

Popular spiritual author, Madeleine L’ Engle in her book, Walking on Water, shared this true story of a friend during World War II.

“During the Second World War one of my friends was an English woman who was married to an RAF officer. Daily she walked with vulnerability, not knowing whether or not his plane would be shot down. One day he was allowed an unexpected leave before a dangerous mission and came home to London for a brief visit with his wife and three small children. Joyfully, she left him at home, took all their food coupons, and went shopping to prepare as festive a meal as could be procured in wartime London. While she was gone there was an unexpected daytime raid, and her house was hit. Her husband, her three children, were killed.

During the rest of the war she worked hard, was helpful to many other people, did her passionate grieving in private. Ultimately she met a man who fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. It was, she said, the most difficult decision she had ever had to make in her life. If she did not marry again, if she had no more children, she was safe, she could not be hurt again as she had been hurt. If she remarried, if she had more babies, she was opening herself to total vulnerability.

It is easier to be safe than to be vulnerable.

But she made the dangerous decision. She dared to love again She dared to live again…with all its vulnerabilities..

…………………….

 We will all arrive at a crossroads one day where we can either lay down and roll over, self-absorbed in our own personal tragedies, or pick ourselves up and get back in the game.

Two examples:

John Milton, Paradise Lost, could have retreated into passive blindness and self-pity instead of trying the patience of his three dutiful daughters and any visiting friend by insisting that they write down what he dictated. Beethoven could have remained in the gloom of silence instead of forging the glorious sounds which he could never hear except in his artist’s imagination.

So until tomorrow…Sometimes the very impetus  of overcoming obstacles results in a surge of creativity. It is in our responses that we are given the gift of helping God write our story.

Happy-Memorial-Day“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

“Land of the Free Because of the Brave…and Vulnerable!”

Let us always remember, on this important remembrance day, that Memorial Day for families who have lost loved ones fighting for our beautiful gift of freedom, doesn’t arrive just once a year, instead every day for them is Memorial Day..

 

 

 

 

*Before I drop some snapshots into the memory box….we all had a nice surprise by the selection of our own Kaitlyn Swicegood in the current (June) Skirt Magazine as one of  Seven Females That Have Earned Their Very Own Place in the Sun. (Her picture was taken upside down for her yoga background and experiences.)

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 Memories of Memorial Day 2016


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About Becky Dingle

I was born a Tarheel but ended up a Sandlapper. My grandparents were cotton farmers in Laurens, South Carolina and it was in my grandmother’s house that my love of storytelling began beside an old Franklin stove. When I graduated from Laurens High School, I attended Erskine College (Due West of what?) and would later get my Masters Degree in Education/Social Studies from Charleston Southern. I am presently an adjunct professor/clinical supervisor at CSU and have also taught at the College of Charleston. For 28 years I taught Social Studies through storytelling. My philosophy matched Rudyard Kipling’s quote: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Today I still spread this message through workshops and presentations throughout the state. The secret of success in teaching social studies is always in the story. I want to keep learning and being surprised by life…it is the greatest teacher. Like Kermit said, “When you’re green you grow, when you’re ripe you rot.”
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