Category: Inspiration

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Who’s packing your parachute?

Charles Plumb

Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience!

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”

“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.

“I packed your parachute,” the man replied.

Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude.

The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”

Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he had looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers.”

I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said “Good morning, how are you?” or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor. Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. He also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory – he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason. As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachutes.

I am sending you this as my way of thanking you for your part in packing my parachute.

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HOPI Projection and Wisdom

Floyd Red Crow Westerman

“We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense, America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth. It’s the Hopi belief, it’s our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it’s likely that you will not make it.

Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila… Grandfather.

We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real than most of us believe.

The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy, you’ve got to drink good water. … Water is sacred, the air is sacred.

Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree.

We are all from the earth, and when the earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted, then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting.

In the Hopi prophecy, they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me, it’s not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. It’s not negative, it’s evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it’s time, nothing stays the same. You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection.

You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. It’s never something like the end. It’s like life, there is no end to life.” ~Floyd Red Crow Westerman

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Making Biscuits 1938

Making Biscuits 1938

The poster of this wrote:
A young girl making biscuits in 1938. Look at this picture. We really think we have it bad in today’s world. This is the generation that did make America great. Tough as nails. Worked hard. Made the changes necessary to work their own way out of poverty. There was no welfare, food stamps, public housing. They had to pull themselves out of their own situations.

(Tom:)
Yes, in Australia and other countries too!
Hard times create tough people.
Tough people create easy times.
Easy times create soft people.
Soft people create hard times.

Harden up people!
Resolve to then do the following.
Raise your confront!
Raise your communication level!
Raise your ethic level!
Raise your competence!
Raise your production!

Only a high confront individual with their ethics in, being highly competent and productive and demanding the same of others is a solid building block of first a family unit and thereafter, society.

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The Carters

The Carters

In 1927 in Plains, Georgia, a three-year-old boy named Jimmy Carter lived next door to an auto mechanic, Francis Smith, and his pregnant wife, Allie. That August, Allie went into labor, and Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, helped deliver her daughter. The next day, little Jimmy went next door and peered into the crib. The baby inside was named Rosalynn.

As a teenager, “Rosie” had a fierce crush on Jimmy, but he was three years older, and apparently took little notice of the shy kid next door. During WWII, he left town to join the Naval Academy. One day in the summer of 1945, Jimmy returned to Plains on vacation. While riding in the rumble seat of a friend’s Ford, he looked toward the United Methodist church and saw Rosie, now seventeen and all grown up, standing out front. He was gobsmacked. Jimmy hopped out of the rumble seat and asked her to the movies. She jumped right in. He came home that night and told his mother that the baby she’d delivered seventeen years earlier was the girl he was going to marry.

This week, Jimmy and Rosalynn will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary. Theirs is the longest marriage in presidential history. They have known each other for almost one hundred years.

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Thinking of axioms

My friend Sean has a few;

My mother’s axiom, however, is my all-time favorite: “It’ll be okay.”

It might sound like a simple phrase, but my mother said this often. Whenever things were running off the rails. Whenever a girl broke my heart. Whenever I lost my job. Whenever I cried. Whenever I had a common cold that I believed to be, for example, tuberculosis, she said these words. I needed her to say them.

She also said: “Cleaning your plate means ‘I love you.’”

And this is why I was an overweight child.

I could keep going all day.

This one is from my elderly friend, Mister Boots: “That smartphone is making you stupid.”

My grandfather said: “Anything worth doing is worth waiting until next week to do.” Then he’d crack open another cold one.
Said the man named Bill Bonners, in a nursing home, from his wheelchair during an interview: “I never wanted to be a husband, I really didn’t want that. But I just couldn’t breathe without her around me.”?? (I love this one.)

Mister Bill died only four days after his wife passed.

And one childhood evening, I was on a porch with my friend’s father, Mister Allen James who was whittling a stick, and he said: “Boys, if you marry ‘up,’ you’ll have to attend a lotta parties you don’t wanna go to. You wanna be happy, marry someone who knows her way around a supermarket.” I never forgot it.

On the day of my father’s funeral, a preacher came through the visitation line and said: “No man ever truly dies. Not really.”

I’ve said this at a few funerals myself because I believe it.

Said the seventh-grade teacher named Miss Rhonda, who was passing around a basket for students to place cellphones into during an presentation I was doing at a public school:
“Playing on your phone in public is like peeing in a parking garage; unless it’s a life-or-death emergency, it’s gross.”

From my pal’s father, Mister Jimmy: “When you’ve loved a good woman, all poetry starts to make sense.”

From my father: “A man is ugliest when he’s jealous.”

And I love this one, from my uncle, the Missionary Baptist preacher. “The secret to happiness is to not want anything.”

And this one: “When you’re older, you’ll realize that being right ain’t nearly as fun as getting along is.” Elderly Mister Tommy said that while we were fishing.

Said my friend Louis: “I like cats better than dogs. Dogs don’t judge you, or hold things against you. A guy can be a real jerk and still be a dog guy. But if you’re not nice to a cat, he’ll burn your house down while you sleep.”

My aunt’s immortal words: “I can tolerate a lot of things, but ignorance ain’t one of them.”

And my friend, the hospital chaplain, who died last year: “I never met a man who was dying that wasn’t at peace with it. There’s something mysterious that happens, I can’t explain it. That’s why, even if I were an atheist, I’d still have to believe in Heaven. Not because I’ve seen it myself, but because I’ve seen the people who’ve seen it.”

And my friend, the author, who once told me: “To be a writer is to be a homeless guy who can type really fast.”

My friend, Lyle: “Don’t try to hit a home run, just sit down, eat a hotdog, and let someone else strike out.”

From my old boss: “When you’re a kid, you wanna be an adult so bad you can taste it. But when you’re an adult, all you are is fat.”

A deacon once told me: “Biloxi, Mississippi, was invented by Episcopalians for Baptists.”

My granddaddy once spoke about choosing friends: “Don’t ever go fishing with anyone who you wouldn’t let marry your sister.”

And this one’s from me:

I hope you never forget the people who made you the person you are today. I hope their words stick with you. And may I forever remember my mother’s gentle wisdom, no matter how bad life seems, no matter what kind of sadness surrounds me.

“It’ll be okay.”

Because I believe it will.