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Meditation

   Written by on February 20, 2014 at 11:57 am

Well, I’m back from my fishing trip and I was pleased to find out at least a couple of you missed me. I took my cane pole and a can of worms and just sat on the riverbank and meditated on our beautiful world. Every now and then a fish would interrupt my meditation and I’d have to take a break. On the other hand, stopping meditating to catch, clean and eat a few fish started a new line of meditation.

There are few things as satisfying as feeding yourself, using nothing but your own ability. That goes for growing a garden, fishing, and hunting, raising pigs or anything else. It may not sound like much to you city folks who haven’t gone fishing, planning on living off what you catch, but you learn several things.

You start the week sort of lazy. You eat a cold corn pone and just enjoy yourself. It doesn’t matter if you catch anything. It is all about good old Mother Nature, God and the universe and the realization that you are just a speck in an incredible creation.

After a couple of days, the grub you packed in is gone and you start to change.

The first time your stomach growls you think, “I’m hungry.” It is a pleasant feeling but in reality you aren’t hungry, you just have an appetite.

The longer it goes on the more important you think you are in the universe. Catching that fish quits being a pleasant hobby and gets serious fast. You can munch a few cattail roots, pick a few berries and maybe find a few nuts the squirrels and bears missed but the hungrier you get the more important that fish gets.

Then when you finally catch that fish and have to wait while it cooks you start to think: I can do anything.

This is where we are messing up with our kids, grandkids and the poor folks. We are just handing them everything and we are robbing them of the chance to learn what they can really do. We are giving them just enough to kill their initiative but not enough so they can learn to be successful.

Lo Quasious, who is the only person in Stump County who has left and lived anywhere else, has some really scary stories about how folks are raising their kids these days. He says they take them to baseball, soccer and other sports. They visit museums, art galleries and operas. They expose them to art culture and take them to help in soup kitchens. All of that is good but he says they aren’t making them clean their rooms, help around the house or get jobs.

He says there are folks with 25-year-old children who have never had jobs and whose Moms and Dads are still giving an allowance. These parents have robbed their children of the pleasure of success using nothing but their own hands and brains.

They tell me it is now considered child abuse to take a keen peach switch to your child’s behind when he is bad. When are they going to realize that the two biggest abuses you can inflict on your child is rob him of the chance to fail and to rob him of the chance to succeed when he is small.

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