Lessons...

 December 17, 2025

We’re fully into the last month of this year. Thousands of people are already celebrating Hanukkah, and Christmas Eve is a week from today. The past weekend was one filled with heartbreaking news from across this world of ours. News that made you stop while you tried to breathe and tried to make sense of it all.

One can easily become jaded. One can wonder, well, hell, what’s the point, anyway?

The point could very well be that from the dawn of time when we humans first walked the surface of this earth, life has proved, time and again, to be short and uncertain for us all. Over centuries we have learned through trial and error how to grow, how to change, and how to survive, thanks to the varied devastating and sundry twists life can throw at us.

Survival is a multi-faceted concept. It doesn’t just mean physical survival. There are emotional, spiritual and intellectual aspects of surviving. But we’ve discovered, over time, that we also need to do more than just survive. We yearn to do more than just survive.

We need to thrive.

Life doesn’t give us very many hall-passes. It doesn’t often make it easy for us. Life is doing its job, fulfilling its purpose to try us, to teach us, to shape us. Life is the road we must travel in order to become the best people—the best us—that we can be.

Nothing in this life is a given, not even the next moment. Life will make you or it will break you.  If you learn the lessons given, that will help. Generally, you won’t have to repeat the exact lessons. And while life may not become a whole lot easier with each lesson mastered, it will become a bit more manageable.

Just don’t give up. Don’t quit.

I am pleased to report that we have a drop curb installed now, so that when, in the spring, they return to do the landscaping to restore my original walkway (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), I will have a nice, unfettered way to get from my house to the street.

I understand how hard it is for those who are not personally affected by mobility disability to wrap their heads around just how profound can be the challenges of those who are. Sometimes fate offers up a helping hand in this regard.

This past week, the machines and the road crew returned to “finish off for now” that gap between the end of the pavement and the curb. There was at the beginning of the week a deep, though somewhat narrow chasm between the two. When they arrived to do the work, it was this past Monday which is my daughter’s day off. A crew chief knocked on our door and David went out on the porch to see what he wanted—which was for our daughter to move her car so they could do that bit of work. As the gentleman left our porch, he walked down our temporary walkway (leading to the neighbour’s driveway), and thanks to a bit of ice, darn near ended up on his butt on the ground.

When he regained is balance, he looked at my husband who proved eloquent in the moment. David said, “Just imagine how difficult it is for a disabled woman to walk that path.”

It seemed, David said, to impress upon him the state that they had left us in. I absolutely don’t doubt my husband’s assessment.

I’m not sure what all they’re going to do beyond filling those two abysses on either side of the curb. But by the end of day yesterday, there was a gravel path taking shape between my house and the road, and it was aligned with the drop curb.

Looking ahead at my social calendar, the only day I’m going out in the next few days is on Saturday, and with my daughter. She can “spot me” on our makeshift path and get me safely down to her car.

And to prove that I am not always as logical as I would like to be, I can tell you where we are going on the 20^th, just five days before Christmas. As we did last year, we’re going to a very large mall in a city about a half hour away. Why, you may ask? Well, because it’s nearly Christmas.

And they have a Cinnabon store.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Choices...

 December 10, 2025

Forgiveness isn’t a gift that you give to others. Inasmuch as someone you forgive to their face may be surprised, or moved, or perhaps even eventually changed by the grace you display during the course of offering that forgiveness? Well, then that might turn out to have been a gift to them.

But in fact, even then, that gift isn’t given to them by you.

No, as in all other cases with forgiveness, that gift is given to them by themselves.

Forgiving others who have wronged us is a gift we give to ourselves. This kind of gift doesn’t come under the heading of “luxury item”. No, it’s a necessity of life, one vital to the maintenance of a healthy psyche, spirit and soul.

When you forgive someone for something they have done, for some hurt or injury that you suffered, that forgiveness is a blessing to yourself.

You lift the burden of that hurt from your soul. The negativity of that past injury no longer weighs you down. Your forgiveness of another mends your heart and restores your spirit. It even makes room for more love!

Unforgiveness, on the other hand, has nothing whatsoever to commend it.

All this I know from my own personal experience. I have lived a life of bitterness where I held closest to my heart all the horrible, bad things that had ever happened to me. And I have also (and am now) living a life of forgiveness and self-care.

Please believe me when I tell you the latter feels so very much better and lighter and happier than the former.

Christmas time is approaching. And while we call it the festive season it, like many occasions that are important to us, is far more complex than that.  We human beings are more complex than that.

Many people find Christmas very difficult. It’s difficult for the homeless, and for those who are alone in the world. It’s difficult for those whose means are spare. And it’s difficult for those who have lost loved ones—parents, children, grandchildren, life mates. Christmas is one of those occasions when the sorrow of lost loved ones seems to be the heaviest to bear.

Scripture tells us to be kind to one another. That simple message is one that doesn’t contravene any “ism” you may believe in. It should be the easiest of all concepts for humans to embrace. Despite recent examples to the contrary humans have a strong bent toward being kind, doing good, and lending a helping hand.

I truly believe there are more people in the world who would rather do good than there are those of ill will. It would be a lot easier for more people to know that as fact if the “rotters” out there weren’t so loud all the time. But it is what it is.

Being kind isn’t hard once you get the hang of it. It doesn’t have to cost money, though it can. It mostly, however, costs a thought to be so, and a moment to do so. But those two things are easily afforded by most everyone.

And here’s the best thing of all. In fact, it’s great news!

Being kind is a choice that anyone and everyone can make. It’s not hard. The only raw ingredient needed is the deliberate thought to choose to be kind. Period.

This is a busy time of year for so many people. But if we take a moment to simply open ourselves up to the desire to be kind, we’ll find something almost magical. Before we know it, there will be an actual opportunity to do so—by holding a door, or letting someone precede you in a check-out line, or even something as simple as offering a smile to let someone know it’s all going to be ok. Because it will, you know.

And that nice, warm, inner-peace-happy feeling that comes in the wake of that simple act of random kindness?

Well, that’s just one of the many cherries on top of life’s cake.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

December....

 December 3, 2025

Congratulations, you made it through to December! There was a time when my making such an announcement might qualify as pure silliness.

These days, not so much.

Many of us here in North America are about to experience the coldest temperatures of the year, to date. Yes, we’re entering into a period of what I call “the sub-zeros”. And before you ask if I mean Fahrenheit or Celsius, don’t. Because when it gets this cold, it doesn’t really matter the scale we use to measure. Teeth-chattering is teeth-chattering, in both of them.

Our latest grocery run saw us stocking up on a few “oven ready” freezer meals, some family sized and some individual. We don’t eat a lot of processed foods in this house. We just never have, really. When we do purchase some, we are careful to pick ones with the fewest unpronounceable additives.

In recent years, both David and I have found that on any given day, and at any given time, one of us might feel a bit chilly and in need of a hot meal. Now sometimes, I can whip that up without difficulty. But then, there are the other days when I simply can’t.

Before daughter and I headed out to get our groceries, David asked me to add one more item to the list: Red River Cereal.

For those who don’t know, it’s hot cereal—cracked wheat and rye and flax—mixed together that you then measure out, add water to along with the proverbial pinch of salt, and simmer until it reaches a state of “doneness”. It’s served usually with milk and a bit of sweetener, the same as those more common hot breakfast cereals: oatmeal, oat bran, cream of wheat, and cornmeal.

As a child I’d never been offered this particular porridge. It never graced my mother’s kitchen shelves. Once married, of course, we had it then because it was my husband’s favorite. I recall the first time I bought it and was getting ready to make it. I opened the box and poured out a cup of it. I stared down at the raw cereal for a long moment. Then I looked up at David and said, “I now understand the name.”

He asked me how so. And I told him that what I was looking at looked like what one might dredge from the bottom of the Red River.

Yes, friends, I have always been a smart ass. It truly is in my genes.

In fact, the cereal is named for The Red River of the North, that flows through Winnipeg Manitoba, which is where this cereal was first created in 1924.

I told David, of course, that I would be happy to add it to the list, but with a caveat. I didn’t know if I would find it as I hadn’t seen it in some time. However, while it wasn’t at the store where we get most of our groceries, it was at one of our alterative stores.

And now I’m shortly going to make a pot of this porridge up, as we are entering into those damned sub-zeroes—and because my husband asked me to.

And after that first pot, I will set about experimenting on how David can easily cook it for himself in the microwave. Yes, there are microwave directions on the package, but they didn’t look convenient.

By that I mean, and for example, experimentation with oatmeal showed me that three tablespoons of regular three-minute oatmeal (we don’t get the instant stuff because, well, processed) and a half cup of water, stirred together in a microwave safe cup requires one minute and four seconds on high in our microwave to render a cup of oatmeal ready for milk and sweetener.

It will likely take a few tries before I find just the right formula to produce a satisfactory cup of hot Red River cereal that David can make on his own.

But that is the very definition of time well spent.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury