Goodbye November

 Park City ~ 1984

You can't buy 

HAPPINESS

but you can 

buy a 

LIFT PASS

Mother of Pearl

Monet came over today to drop off my boots she borrowed to go Christmas tree cutting in Alpine, Wyoming

And she helped me choose a new color of paint for my living room while she was here...

I Am Love

Preslee isn't the only one that is glad Max is back...

Markus is too and they both were home sick from school today so they played stick hockey ALL day 

Markus was telling us about being scouted for the Colorado Thunderbirds after his game

And we had yummy gelato while Max got his haircut

My first day off after a 6 day streak

Your Life Is Magic

the clearer you get the more you notice

Max came back from Boise today, with a 5-0 loss, and a shoot out win 5-4, a shut out win 3-0 and a close win 3-2 where he had the game winning assist. Coach Mac said, "Bucky played a great game today." He was sick from staying up too late at his sleepover before he left, but Preslee brought him over flowers, lemonade and gummy bears. :) He also told me about Myles' concussion that caused him to pass out, Willie's broken collar bone and Bronson's hurt shoulder. This is the year players decide how committed they want to be to hockey. And while it adds a new air of excitement to the sport, it also carries challenges both inside and outside of the rink, which require more introspection than most players have yet to experience and it comes down to making smart choices about the people you hang out with, the stuff you put into your body and your focus on excelling as an athlete. As simple a task as it may seem, these matters become increasingly complicated as players get older.

John LaFontaine has coached at Minnesota prep school powerhouse Shattuck-St. Mary’s and now leads the Muskegon Lumberjacks in the United States Hockey League. On the topic of teaching players how to make positive decisions, for the most part, there are no cookie-cutter answers. Every player is different. So what he advises instead is for the players to truthfully reflect on themselves.

Asking yourself the right questions

“With the world we live in, there’s a lot of distractions, that’s for sure,” LaFontaine said. “There’s a lot of things that can steer people in the wrong direction.”

The first step to staying on a healthy path, and keeping the right people in your life, comes from three questions LaFontaine asks his players to deeply consider:

• What is your passion?
• What are your goals?
• How do you stay focused on working towards those goals?

Answering these questions is vital to moving one’s career forward in a positive way, and eases the temptation of a variety of vices or distractions outside the rink.

“We put so much stress and focus on kids that it becomes, ‘You’ve got to present yourself in a way to get attention,’” LaFontaine said. “‘Twitter this and Facebook that.’ You get disappointed with that focus because that’s not what life is about.”

Being a better teammate

To illustrate the importance of what life and hockey is about, LaFontaine tends to focus on the culture inside his locker room – making sure he knows his players personally, and that his players know each other the same way.

“We want you to understand what it means to be a teammate and understand what it means to care about others instead of only yourself,” LaFontaine said. “That means being in the right place and doing the right things.”

LaFontaine quickly learns which players will look him in the eye when speaking to them, which ones carry themselves with confidence and which ones are struggling to get out of their comfort zones. That’s why he advocates teaching players how to learn about each other, imparting the same values they should look for in friends in and outside of hockey.

“There are some players that have so much confidence it’s scary,” LaFontaine said. “They learn to just take care of number one, so their focus is a bit different. You need to learn humility and sacrifice.”

He says the key is to make sure players have an agenda to get to know each other, especially as some 16-year-olds begin to flourish on the ice and can end up on teams with players two-to-four years older than them.

Build healthy habits

The final issue LaFontaine covers with his players is how to create a beneficial schedule when they are given increased freedom.

“There has to be structure,” LaFontaine said. “If you play for this team, what are the expectations of you to stay on the right track? Eating right, getting your right amount of sleep, preparing the right way, coming to practice focused so that you can get better at practice.”

A lot of it comes down to trust. If players are setting good goals, acting as good teammates and keeping a tight circle of friends, there is less cause for worry.

For LaFontaine, that’s the end goal.

“As they get older, you’re going to let them see if they can handle responsibility,” LaFontaine said. “You want them to be able to handle responsibility.” 

I'm Grateful

I'm not grateful for this or for that...
I'm grateful.

If I See You

Only now...I can't help loving you

Max is on his way to Boise today for hockey. 

Happy Thanksgiving

"A simple THANK YOU has magic...

it warms the heart

and creates a moment

of connection and peace

between two people."

Be Your Own Happiness

Fall walk to the park today

while Markus was on his way to Colorado with the Outliers

I took him to get his haircut this morning before he left and out to breakfast at 3 Cups

As we talked about driving to Colorado, where just two weeks ago the Wight's were on their way to a hockey tournament, Markus said that he wasn't nervous about driving there. He said he was going a different route though so that he wouldn't have to drive by the same highway where his friends parents were killed. When I asked him about how he was feeling, he said excited. There's nothing more exciting than peace.

Identity

As you lose identity, you discover yourself

Monet turned 49 today, and my dad had an emergency cholecystectomy due to his gall bladder rupturing and about 20-30 gallstones. He also has pneumonia and a collapsed lung. After spending the day with him at the hospital, we went to dinner at Sea Salt to celebrate life. 

Aria, Monet and Kailey

Connection

My sister Monet came to watch Max's game tonight 

Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard and valued - when they can give and receive without judgement. 

And She

loved a little boy

very very much

even more than

she loved herself.

The Heart

wants what it wants.

There's no logic

to these things.

You meet someone

and you fall in love

and that's that.

Today Will Never Come Again

Be a blessing.

Be a friend. 

Encourage someone. 

Take time to care. 

Let your words heal,

and not wound. 

This Too Will Pass

Wight Out

This too will pass, this sadness over seeing where Bob and Dawn Wight used to sit in the bleachers, but they're no longer there. At the Brighton game last night, all the teams that attended wore their white jerseys in honor of the Wight's. There was a banner there for all to sign, and a donation table for those that wanted. It made me want to be a better person, beginning today, I'll treat everyone as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extending to them all the kindness, care, and understanding I can, and do it with no thought of any reward. My life will never be the same again.

What's in a name??

Philosophy gets a bad rap for asking and answering pointless questions. Here’s an example of the kind of question Max was writing an essay on today: Is the chair you’re sitting on real or not? Most people roll their eyes at such a question because the answer seems obvious. Of course the chair exists; you’d be sitting on the floor if it didn’t. It seems like a waste of time to even ponder something so obvious.

When you look up at the sky, everybody knows exactly what you’re talking about when you reference the Big Dipper. But what exactly is it? Is the Big Dipper actually a concrete thing? Of course not – it’s seven stars billions of light years away from each other. It’s a pattern that humans recognize, not some external object.

Chairs, houses, baseballs – all of these things are like constellations. They are patterns that we observe, and then we give those patterns a name, for easy reference. Our words do not reference actual unified “things”, any more that the Big Dipper is some independent “thing” floating around in space.

This theory is not without problems. Things start getting more difficult when you’re talking about living things. At some point, when you start removing particles from a human, you might actually end up taking something additional out of existence – namely, life. When we reference beings and/or consciousness, the boundaries get a lot more difficult to establish. Am “I” my brain? Am “I” fully explained by my heart? I delivered a baby last night that was 23 weeks and lived for just a few seconds. Although the mother didn't know that she was even pregnant, she was having a hard time grieving someone she didn't know existed until a few minutes before she came to the hospital.

I’d say the human mind is extremely effective at carving up physical reality into bite-size pieces. It names stuff and distinguishes “this” from “that”. And thank goodness it does, because we’d have a very difficult time navigating the world without boundaries. 

high school musical

Aria was in High School Musical last night at East where the actual movie was filmed

Monet and I couldn't take our eyes off of her, she shines like a star and will go far...

Positivity Pledge

Today I promised to no longer allow negative thoughts or feelings to drain me of my energy. Instead I am focusing on all the good that is in my life. I will think it, feel it and speak it. By doing it I will send out vibes of positive energy into the world and I will be grateful for all the wonderful things it will attract into my life.

Gratitude unlocks the windows of heaven

November Gratitude:

• Sunshine
• the moon last night
• truth
• pomegranate
• cranberries
• a simple thank you
• Autumn leaves!
• Cubs Winning
• tidy closet
• doing what I like
• liking what I do
• making memories with my boys
• Hockey Family
• remembering the entrance to sanctuary is inside me
• pom-pom beanies
• simple meals
• being in the moment
• riding on the back of a shopping cart

To Think Of You Is To Smile

Jaxon turned 13 yesterday

and even though these boys were mourning the loss of the Wight's they still wanted to be together to find comfort in each other. 

A Line of Solidarity

{In a moment of silence}

 From tonight's game

Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind, the goal is to find it. Buddha

Remembering Two Lives

The most beautiful people I have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These are people like those I had at work with me, who have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. I was surrounded by my nurse co-workers when I got the call at work, I felt shock and disbelief that these two hockey boys were now orphans, in another state without anyone knowing who to call as their closest relatives. As Coach Solomon, who was at the hospital with them both so aptly put it, "I feel like I've lost my family members."I know that it is Veteran's day but I spent it

Remembering Dawn  and Bob Wight today

who lost their lives in an automobile accident on their way to a hockey tournament in Denver early this morning. Their son Karsen, was life flighted to the hospital while their son Kyle was taken by ambulance. The tractor-trailer hit them head on just outside of Laramie, Wyoming.

Karsen started power skating lessons with me when he was 5 years old

and his brother Kyle when he was 8

Markus and Karsen have been on teams together for six years

they have had sleepovers

and playdates

and they have been hockey brothers for a long as they have been playing hockey

they both played up on the Squirt Lightning team when they were Mites

They have traveled to, and won tournaments together

Including the Park City tournament for the past three years

When Markus came with Max to pick me up from work, I told them the unfathomable news. They both just sat in silence. Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Not a career. Not wealth, or intelligence. Certainly not status. We have feelings for one another to survive with dignity.