Category: Inspiration

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.

“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

Be careful to whom you pay attention!

Now THAT is one helluva wise and kind woman!

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.