I am my own country,
just a visitor in this one,
passing through on my way
to home.
In my country I am enjoined
to be kind, to be honest, to share,
to dare to be fair, and to care
for those I pass on my journey.
I am my own country.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
My dear Humoristians –
Go out there and live this day like this is the last day you have to live. Show kindness with wild abandon. Look for every opportunity to express Love. Share laughter with people in desperate need of a good laugh. Lift hearts. Bring joy. Give hope. Let every hour be your finest hour. Treasure every moment you’ve been given.
Go out there and work your magic!
Karen
I want to share a healing I had this week.
Monday night I discovered that there had been a weird billing error – well, TWO weird billing errors, actually – one from my insurance company and another one from the optometrist’s office. The errors had resulted in the wrong person getting charged for one of my visits to the optometrist – a bill that should have been covered by my insurance, in the first place. When I first learned of the snafu(s), I was pretty stressed, and a little angry on behalf of the innocent family member who’d erroneously been listed as the “guarantor” for my bill.
I couldn’t get to sleep, and eventually came downstairs to read this week’s Bible Lesson Sermon and pray about this situation. This passage from Science and Health was helpful: “We can, and ultimately shall, so rise as to avail ourselves in every direction of the supremacy of Truth over error…” Soon I was filled with this feeling of joy and well-being and it felt like Love was laughing with me about the absurdity of it all, and reassuring me that all was well.
The next morning I woke up early, and at exactly 8:00 am I called the insurance office. A man named Loren answered the phone. I asked him if he had time to hear a really weird story, and he said he did, so I began to lay out the problem I was having with this bill. He listened and every now and then interjected some comment or question. He was very patient with me as I pulled out all the cards from my wallet, trying to find the one with my ID number on it, and when I thanked him for his patience, I could hear the smile in his voice as he told me it was okay. At one point I apologized for being so chatty when I knew he must be tapping away on his keyboard and trying to figure out what the problem was – and he laughed and said he was fine – he was good at multi-tasking. He was kind and patient and had a sense of humor, and in a short time he’d pinpointed the problem and assured me that I didn’t need to worry about this anymore – the insurance company would take care of the bill for me. I asked, “So I didn’t do anything wrong?” And his voice smiled again and he reassured me that I’d done everything right. I told him I wanted to give him a good rating, and he thanked me for that and said he would try to send me through to his manager. I started laughing. “Yes, I am Karen and I want to talk to your manager.” He started laughing then, too. (He was able to transfer my call, but it was never picked up – so I’ll find some other way to give Loren a high rating.)
At 8:30 on the dot I called the optometrist’s office, and a woman named Savannah picked up. When she looked at my account she said a note had already been made there by the insurance company and that I didn’t need to worry about this bill anymore. “I don’t need to worry about this? It’s taken care of?” I asked. And she said yup, I could just throw this bill away. Then I asked her if I could have something in writing about this – I told her I am Karen AND a Virgo AND a boomer – basically, “I’m the trifecta of annoying” – and she started laughing and said she’d send me an email. Within minutes after we’d ended our phone call she had sent an email telling me that the bill was being sent back to the insurance company for payment and I didn’t need to worry about it.
It was such a lovely untangling. There was so much joy and humor and kindness involved in the whole experience. I’m really grateful for this opportunity to prove Love’s power.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
Little jewels from the last couple of days:
I pull into the Fred Meyer parking lot and park off to the side near the gardening center. As I’m getting my shopping bag and backpack-purse out of my car a tall man – probably a little younger than me, with the build of a retired quarterback – returns to his truck. His truck is parked near my car. He is wearing a red hat and I’m pretty sure I know what it says on it.
I feel suddenly impelled to exchange a greeting with him, but I let the Cosmos decide what’s going to happen here, and finish getting out my stuff. When I go to get a shopping cart in the little cart corral, he’s pushing in a small cart. His red hat does, indeed, say what I thought it would say.
“It’s getting colder!” I observe – weather is always a good place to start, right? He smiles and agrees with me. I notice him glance at my little Fiesta hatchback and I’m sure he’s taking in the bumperstickers there: “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD. NO EXCEPTIONS.” “MAKE AMERICA GREEN AGAIN.” And whatnot. He glances back at me and smiles. I’m pretty sure he knows we’re from different tribes.
“Do you need a cart?” he asks, offering me the one he just put back, and I smile back at him and thank him, and take the cart from him into the supermarket. I’m still smiling as I enter the store. There is kindness in every tribe.
I pick up the items I need to pick up and check out, then head to the Starbucks counter. The barista – tall, Black, with a longish goatee dyed flamingo-pink – steps up to take my order. I love this guy. He never fails to make me smile. He asks what I’d like and I tell him this will be my first coffee in a month. He gasps. “Honey!” he exclaims in horror, “We need to fix that for you!” While he’s making my pumpkin spice latte he regales me with tales of his dogs and his husband and his grocery-shopping experiences. By the time he hands me my latte I have had a whole day’s worth of laugh out louds. He is like a one-man comedy show. As I leave, I tell a couple of the workers who are sitting at the exit that “I love that guy!” And they nod their heads and laugh. They get it.
I go to the Target parking lot to take pictures of the autumnal trees and then go in the store to explore what they’ve got in there. As I’m browsing I wander down the coffee aisle and see there are a lot of coffee options for Keurig owners, but we are not Keurig owners – so that’s not going to work. There are also, though, bags of ground coffe, and I think, “Oh! I should get one of those French presses and press my own coffee!” So I ask a man stocking shelves if he knows where I might find French presses. He’s really helpful – tells me his wife uses a French press every morning to make her own coffee – and then clicks into his Target device and tells me what aisle I can find French presses in.
I proudly bring my French press home…
The next morning I’m back in Target to return the French press. I tell the customer service lady what happened: “I came home and showed my husband the French press and he said, ‘Karen. We already have two of those.'” The customer service woman starts cracking up and, as she’s efficiently taking care of my return for me, suggests maybe I should buy one for every day of the week. I love people who make me laugh.
On the way home I decide to turn onto Allen West Road just to see what magic I can find there. And there’s that amazing pumpkin display I remember seeing last October! Darla, the owner of Eagle View Farms, comes out to greet me, a big smile on her face. “Karen!” she calls – she remembers my name! It’s so good to see Darla again. It’s our annual reunion, I guess. We talk about her son, Adam, who was in my eighth grade class a couple decades ago – a very cool person – and laugh and chat and laugh some more. She’s covered in mud. She says she’s been cleaning out the gutters while her husband went shopping. I say, dreamily, “Sounds like a Hallmark movie,” and she laughs out loud.
I snap some pictures of her display, and then buy a big yellow pumpkin from her. I ask her how much – there are no signs indicating the price – and she says, “Seven dollars.”
“How much REALLY?” I ask. And she insists it’s seven dollars. Right. So I write her a check for ten, she calls me a stinker, and I ask her how much it really is. She admits it’s ten dollars.
We hug one more time – mud and all – and I drive home with a big yellow pumpkin and my heart full of humanity’s goodness.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
I’ve been feeling a little off-kilter lately – maybe feeling the tension of the political season and the stress of the folks around me. I love autumn, but there are certain aspects of October in our country that can be… challenging for those of us who live here.
Anyway. I got a message from my friend, Emmy, daughter-in-law of the late great Pete Schoening, asking if I was available to meet at the Shambala Bakery in Mount Vernon, Washington, today – and I was! And we did! And it was so wonderful to chat with Emmy again – she’s one of those people I feel an instant kinship with – funny and kind and honest. We always laugh when we get together.
As we were eating our brunch, a customer in a baseball cap and a Grateful Dead shirt came through the door. There was something whacky with the door – we’d noticed this when we came in – and when the customer noticed it he started examining the hinges and the frame. Emmy and I realized he was going to try to fix it.
How cool is that?
Pretty soon the customer had borrowed tools from the server-cashier-cook, and retrieved some tools from his truck, and was working on the door.
I asked Justin, the customer-handyman, and Heidi, the server-cook, if I could take their picture, and they graciously agreed. Then Heidi went back to work, Emmy and I finished our brunch, and Justin finished fixing the door. I observed to Justin that he’d done a really nice thing there. He said that he couldn’t just let that door stay broken. He wanted to make it good for Shambala.
Laughing with Emmy, and watching the man in the Grateful Dead shirt fix the door, helped settle me this morning.
There are good people in this world.
Request for those who join me for conversation on my political posts: Please refrain from name-calling, condescension, and personal attacks. The people you encounter in the comments are all my friends. I love it when my friends come on to my threads to bounce ideas off each other, debate, and learn from each other. I expect all my friends who join in the conversation to treat each other with kindness and respect.
I enjoy exchanging thoughts and beliefs with my friends. This is how I was raised, I guess. My mom was the youngest of ten very opinionated, very intelligent children with a wide range of beliefs: Methodists (the church they were raised in), atheists, Unitarian Universalists, Christian Scientists, Republicans and Democrats. And when we’d meet up for Thanksgiving at Grandma’s house in Portland, the dialogue was lively, stimulating and raucous. It was also full of laughter and humor, respect and love. People could disagree with each other without putting each other down – without calling each other “stupid” or “deplorable” or “deluded.” I learned so much from these gatherings! It was so fun!
For many years, my mom and dad belonged to different political parties. On election day, they’d cheerfully get in the car together to drive to the polling booth, knowing that they were cancelling out each other’s votes and laughing about that. They loved and respected each other, regardless. (Around 1981 – when all the air traffic controllers were fired by Reagan – my mom joined Dad in the Democratic party and became more vocal about politics than any of us.)
I have friends and family from a wide-range of religons and non-religons, beliefs, and political parties, and I love them all.
Honestly, I was feeling pretty down today – dismayed at the direction the world seems to be headed; and disappointed in myself, too – feeling like I could have been a better mother, wife, daughter, teacher, friend, in my life.
The thought came to me to get out of the house and find a quiet corner somewhere where I could do some self-reflection and have an internal conversation with the Cosmos.
When I started out I wasn’t sure where I was going to end up, exactly – but as I followed the nudgings of the Cosmos I found myself at Pacioni’s in Mount Vernon. I sat in a booth in the back and ordered a half a veggie panini, listened to the soft background music and the sounds of friends talking and laughing. Watched the rain drizzling outside the front window.
I realized I missed Mom. I thought about how I could always tell her what was in my heart – and she never judged me or my words. She always saw the best in me. I missed that.
When I was done with my panini and had paid, I tidied up my table, put on my coat, and started for the door.
And this is when I saw that two of my favorite people – a couple in my local community – had been sitting in there, eating their lunch, too! We all gave each other hugs and talked about children and granchildren and the state of the world, and how we maybe can’t change the big things in the world, but we can be kind to the people in our community, the people we come in contact with – and I told them they are two of the people that do this really well – and then they said *I* did this! They said I was the perfect example of this! They said they’d been talking to one of my former students a while ago and my name had come up in the conversation and my former student had said that EVERYone should have a Karen Terrell for a teacher.
I teared up. I stood there, in front of my friends, and I teared up. They had no idea the gift they’d just given me – it was the exactly right thing I needed to hear just then. To know that someone thought I’d made a difference – to know that someone thought I’d done something right in my life – this was huge for me.
And I realized that the mother-love I’d been missing was right there with me – being expressed to me by my beautiful friends.
The Cosmos led me exactly where I needed to be today.
“Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.”
-Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 393)
I finally gathered my courage and watched Leave the World Behind on Netflix. I’d been reluctant to watch this movie because I’ve been feeling fragile lately – bombarded on the internet and television with images of disease and death, destruction and war and inhumanity – and I didn’t feel like I was ready for any more emotional breakage right now. But as I’ve been processing the movie in the last couple days, I’ve felt myself gathering courage, building a sort of steely resolve. If the people with financial and political power want us to isolate ourselves from each other, want us to be fearful and distrustful of each other, want us to cower in paranoia so that they can control and manipulate us – then, hell no! I am not going to isolate myself, or be scared or cowering.
I am going to be part of the resistance movement.
Wikipedia says this about “resistance movements“: “Resistance movements can include any irregular armed force that rises up against an enforced or established authority, government, or administration. This frequently includes groups that consider themselves to be resisting tyranny or dictatorship.”
In the textbook for Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes (on p. 29): “Christians must take up arms against error at home and abroad.They must grapple with sin in themselves and in others, and continue this warfare until they have finished their course.”
Note that Mrs. Eddy isn’t saying we should arm ourselves with assault weapons or bazookas. She’s talking about another kind of warfare all together. She writes in Science and Health (p. 225): “A few immortal sentences, breathing the omnipotence of divine justice, have been potent to break despotic fetters and abolish the whipping post and slave market; but oppression neither went down in blood, nor did the breath of freedom come from the cannon’s mouth. Love is the liberator.”
I’m going to take up arms of love and joy and hope against the would-be tyranny of hate and fear and despair. I’m going to consciously reach out with joy and kindness and patience to my fellow earthlings. I’m not going to let the images of war and hate we’re constantly bombarded with on television and in social medial deter me from my mission of kindness. I’m not going to let the advertisements and commercials filled with images of disease keep me shackled in fear and isolated from others. “Hell no! We won’t go!” there.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
***
P.S. As I was pondering “resistance” the climactic scene from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle came into my thoughts. In this scene the protagonist, Meg, is resisting the hate and tyranny of IT. She’s been told she can fight IT with something she has that IT doesn’t have – and she’s trying to figure out what that is. IT is trying to get control of her thoughts, and she’s starting to lose the battle:
“…as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT…
“With the last vestige of consciousness she jerked her mind and body. Hate was nothing that IT didn’t have. IT knew all about hate…
“‘Mrs. Whatsit hates you,’ Charles Wallace said.
“And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, ‘Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,’ suddenly she knew.
“She knew!
“That was what she had that IT did not have.
“She had Mrs. Whatsit’s love, and her father’s, and her mother’s, and the real Charles Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.
“And she had her love for them…”
“She could love Charles Wallace. Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them…
“I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you.
“Slowly his mouth closed. Slowly his eyes stopped their twirling. The tic in the forehead ceased its revolting twitch. Slowly he advanced toward her.
“‘I love you!’ she cried. “I love you, Charles! I love you!’ Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms, he was shrieking with sobs. ‘Meg! Meg! Meg!’
“‘I love you, Charles!’ she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’”
– Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
T’was the day after Christmas and all o’er the earth
people were waking to find there still seemed a dearth
of peace on our earth and to all good will
– we wondered if the promises would ever be fulfilled.
And then a someone shouted, “Hey! I have a thought!
Let’s celebrate Christmas every day – let’s celebrate a lot!
Let’s keep kindness and sharing alive in our hearts –
not just at Christmas, but in all the year’s parts!”
And we thought this was wise, and we thought this was good,
so we celebrated kindness all over our earth’s ‘hood.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
My dear Humoristian hooligans,
Today may you love the hell out of the world. May you open the floodgates of Love and let Love water the weary hearts athirst for kindness and caring. May you refuse to allow fear and hate to steal your hope and courage. May the bigots, bullies, and busybodies be transformed by your open hearts and good will to all. May the stodgy, stuffy, and stingy be transformed by your irrepressible joy. May you bring laughter to those in sorry need of a good laugh, and hope to those ascared of the future.
Go out there and work your magic, my friends!
Karen
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 