JESSIE'S VEGAS

"Hope"  by  DeAnn Goodwin This image is about hope.  The gnarled texture of roots and trees represent trials and tribulations we all go through.  Nonetheless, there’s always light and hope somewhere if we look for it. NOTE:  Done with mostly acrylic paint on collage of textured wallpaper.  Halloween cobweb was also used.  "in  Grimm's Fairy Tales , the hero always goes into the forest. It is not itself enchanted, but it contains enchantments and, being outside normal human experience, acts as a place of transformation. The German fairy tale has an unusual tendency to take place in the forest; even such neighboring countries as France or Italy are less like to have fairy tales situated in the forest. The Grimm brothers strongly believed the dream of national unity and independence relied on a full knowledge of the cultural past that was reflected in folklore.  They worked to discover and crystallize a kind of Germanness ...

  You could say I had been on strike! Most workers strike when they are not satisfied with working conditions. In my case, I guess I was no different.  I do not think my strike had been a blatant paint your sign and picket  the employer's business kind because ,in this case,heaven's gate was my employer. Rather, I had slowly just started praying not as long ,as often or as fervently.  I also had the problem of not knowing what to pray for. I had experienced miraculous events in my life. Were these not enough to carry me through any further storms? I was just tired of the same old problems, the same old injustices and maybe all this would not have mattered so much if I had at least felt good.  I had been running an uphill battle for awhile, working full-time, fighting schools for adequate IEP's,(Individual Education Plans), running to doctor appointments for my kidsand then trying to keep dinner on the table.  When my health started suffering an...

70 Years Young #flipagram made with @flipagram Music: OneRepublic - Counting Stars http://flipagram.com/f/ffiS0NuJbb

Over the course of the last year, I have emailed a woman with terminal cancer. She was an incredible human being. I was cleaning my "mailbox and decided to keep her letters. Carey,  October 1.2013 I was talking to Christie tonight. I was going to make cobbler for people but I found myself buying the ingredients for chocolate chip pumpkin bread. When Syd was in the hospital the last time we could only visit 3 x a week. They would not help her with hygiene and she has never been able to wash her hair. For some reason, not being able to see her much and then when I did see her seeing her look like a homeless person put me over the edge. I did not sleep for two days and my heart was breaking! I told Heavenly Father it was the silliest thing in the world, but I had washed so many peoples hair over the years and no one would wash my little girls hair. It was already bad enough that we had a second daughter experiencing psychosis, but now this? I was pacing and pacing. I had already s...

  Sometimes the first few years of a nurses career are the most vivid. Like the time I collected my first 24 hour urine sample. By the end of the shift I had about 20 of those clear plastic 8 oz pee sample cups stacked neatly in the fridge placed in the weird brown shelf-thing the lab had sent up to house them in. The nurse I gave report to giggled as she showed me how the brown shelf-thingie actually turned into a big JUG when you expanded it!!! I was supposed to pour the pee in the big brown jug, not collect little pee cups. And my poor patient who was interrupting their urine stream trying to fill cup after cup! I was shown that the upside down sailor's cap was actually a urine vestibule that fit in the back of the toilet so the patient did not have to perform the small cup ritual over and over and risk getting their hand drenched in their own urine. WHEW!!! Luckily my patient giggled too.  My patient was a lady dealing with end-stage renal disease and she needed all the la...

"There is in all of us an apparently infinite, and certainly, ultimate need for a rich, abiding, trustworthy love. This is a love that reaches in and through the self, outward to others, and upward to the highest in the universe. In the ordinary world, even the world of religion, this craving finds extremely rare fulfillment. But a dawning understanding is the key to its creative source and the beginning of its increase and transformation:that man was known and loved profoundly even prior to mortal birth;that love, indeed, drew him and his Eternal Father together in a sphere of perfected light and glory; that he, distinct from all other beings, animate or inanimate, in the universe, is chosen and begotten spirit of the Divine...there is a flame that is rekindled when a prophet testifies in the 20th century as Jesus Christ did in the first, "God is our Father" AN intuitive flash dissipates theological and psychological speculation. A luminous nostalgia arises in us. A...

I rushed out the door to work the other night and grabbed a vest.  It was my 2002 IHC vest from our Idaho/Utah days. I had forgotten that there was an emblem of the paralympics on the lapel until a clerk at the checkout stand brought it up to me when I was buying milk on my way to work. "Did you see the paralympics?" he said. "That must have been something else!" "You, know, at the time the paralympics were the only sporting events we could get tickets to at the last minute.  I was surprised that the hockey game I saw was the most inspiring sporting event I witnessed in my lifetime.  One guy only had an upper half, his lower half was completely gone.  When he came out on the ice in his sled, the crowd roared! I do not know if I have ever heard a more enthusiastic crowd in my life." "I wish I could have seen that!" the guy behind the counter said. As I got into my car, I was suddenly grateful to have had that moment brought back to my mind.  S...