Last weekend I traveled to Western North Carolina to visit my parents.\u00a0 The area had been recently hit by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which dumped multiple inches of rain, causing catastrophic flooding and destruction.\u00a0 My parents, fortunately, came through just fine, thanks to a goodly amount of preparedness and a fortunate location high on a hill.\u00a0 A solitary tree was blown down by the hurricane-force winds, crushing a portion of the property boundary fence my dad had built.\u00a0 He and I worked together to repair that fence, spending a few hours hiking up and down his steep property to put it back in working order, if that\u2019s the right term.\u00a0 The fence is made up of short metal posts and hundreds of feet of plastic coated electrical-looking line.\u00a0 It was complicated extricating the fence wire from under the downed tree, untangling it and reattaching it to the posts.\u00a0 For the most part, there are four strands of fence wire, but the upper portion has five for some reason and my dad puzzled over why he originally built it that way.\u00a0 At the time, I was hot and sweaty and battling the jungle-like undergrowth and steep terrain, and I told him to let it go, whatever reason that caused him to install five strands in one portion of the fence and four in the rest, was in the past, and really of no concern now.\u00a0 My dad really enjoyed that, the Zen of fencing.\u00a0 I think that far beyond the fence on that steep hillside, that is good advice.\u00a0 Not to dig too deep into Zen, but letting go of past things, putting events and behaviors behind you can be a release.\u00a0 Letting go of everything isn\u2019t truly possible.\u00a0 We are all the sum total of our experiences, and holding on to some is not only good, but it defines us.\u00a0 But letting go of little things, things that don\u2019t matter, can be very good.\u00a0 In the movie The Lion King, Rafiki whacks Simba with his staff and when Simba asks why, Rafiki replies, \u201cwho cares?\u00a0 It\u2019s in the past.\u201d Perhaps we can all do that, make our lives simpler by letting go of some of our baggage, and looking forward instead of looking back.\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly worth a try!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last weekend I traveled to Western North Carolina to visit my parents.\u00a0 The area had been recently hit by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which dumped multiple inches of rain, causing catastrophic flooding and destruction.\u00a0 My parents, fortunately, came through just fine, thanks to a goodly amount of preparedness and a fortunate location high on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.harmonyulc.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}