Two Years, 100 Newsletters, A Road Trip, and Remembrance

This week we are celebrating with you 100 issues of the weekly Powers of Homeopathy newsletter. Woohoo!!

Thank you to those who have been with us from the very first and to those of you who have joined somewhere in the last 100 issues! Your feedback and comments are always welcome and we are looking forward to the next 100!

Please feel free to share the newsletter with family and friends. I love checking each week to see how many people have signed on to learn about homeopathy…and life…through the newsletter. You make my day!

The Most Read Number One Newsletter Topic??

Just for fun, we looked up the top 10 most popular newsletters, and guess what? Poop wins! Three out of the 10 most popular newsletters were about diarrhea, Norwalk virus, and potty training. I guess we are all looking for a ‘natural way’ to help when elimination rules our lives. That’s an interesting metaphor actually if you stop to consider the implications of a statement like ‘elimination rules our lives.’ When we have problems eliminating that which we no longer need, we are very uncomfortable. We are reduced to responding to elimination only! Nothing else matters.

Here’s the full list of the top 10 newsletters:

1. I Got the Chicken Pox for Christmas
2. Water, Water, Everywhere
3. Flu Panic in Calgary
4. Travelling? Time for the ‘TD’ Talk (Traveler’s Diarrhea)
5. JIC (Just In Case) 2013: Homeopathic Remedies to Have on Hand
6. Sacred Spaces
7. Norwalk Virus? Again? Really?
8. Help! I Need Somebody!
9. Potty Talk
10. Here Comes the Sun, and I Say “It’s Not All Right” (for Some of Us)

What was your favourite newsletter? Write a comment on our Facebook page. We’d love to hear from you!

Road Trip

My husband, Ron, and I have just returned from a week-long road trip that took us from Calgary to Vancouver Island with stops in between to visit with cousins never met and siblings well known. The story behind the road trip is long, interesting, complicated, and filled with twists and turns that you would think of only in a work of fiction. But as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. One day, Ron and I will have to write collaboratively on a book about this most recent adventure. Today you get the Reader’s Digest version!

The mission: to meet all the cousins on Ron’s father’s side of the family to let them know that their aunt is in a lodge and Ron is in guardian/trustee for her care. In meeting the long-lost cousins, Ron also had the opportunity to see his father through their eyes. (Ron’s father died in 1971 of wounds and injuries sustained in World War II.) For Ron, his dad was a vague memory and a mystery…someone who left shortly after the youngest sibling was born. Growing up without a dad was simply that…kids tend to accept life the way it is without wishing it were any different. But we happen to have a son who had a keen interest in all things historical about a grandfather who served in World War II. For as long as we have been married and since our youngest was four years old, the quest has been on to ‘know’ who Leslie Arthur Powers, father and grandfather, was.

In the eyes of the newly met cousins, Ron’s father was a war hero, the first man to drive onto the shores of Dieppe in an army tank, only to be captured and held as a prisoner of war. In the eyes of the cousins, here was a man who deserves to be held in the highest regard, who served his country in a war that took the lives of so many. For Ron, until last week, his dad was a man who left his mother and their four children. He was a man who was told by medical doctors to drink to forget his years in action and his imprisonment on foreign soil. No bitterness, no resentment. Simply the way it was.

Ron and I are very grateful that we had the opportunity to see everyone now…rather than putting it off yet one more time. We are reflecting deeply on how our perceptions of another person can be so skewed in one direction, especially when we only know a part of a person’s life story…and then only through our own eyes, which can too often be filled with judgment. Others can be viewing us in the same way! We are neither saint nor sinner…simply human…with a need to love and be loved. That is the only legacy we can really leave behind…the only inheritance we can leave our children and the world.

There are no accidents. Synchronicity is remarkable. Our road trip ended the day before Canada remembers those who served in both World Wars. November 11 is always Remembrance Day. For both Ron and I, we will continue to consider and reflect on what it means to be family and what it means to consider changing our perceptions and judgments…about each other and ourselves within a family. We left the conversation this morning by simply agreeing that gratitude and forgiveness are likely the way, the how to of change.

“Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.”
— Jean Houston, A Passion for the Possible

What Has Homeopathy Got to Do with It?

I asked Ron, “How do you think I could use what we have learned on the road trip in a newsletter about homeopathy?” His reply, delightfully unexpected and surprising in its insights:

“We took our dad as just a dad, not as a war hero. Lots of family members take their parents who use homeopathy for granted too. My dad…we didn’t realize that some people think of him as a war hero. Comparatively, some people think of my wife as an angel sent from heaven but family members just think of her as mom or sister…you’re not…you don’t get the rewards you think you should get at home. We don’t appreciate what we have when it is all around us. It’s only when they’re gone or missing in action that we need them…or we miss them.”

So to all of you who talk about homeopathy with family and friends, who use homeopathy with family, friends and pets, who read the newsletter, who share the newsletter with others…thank you. You are appreciated and you are changing the world…one remedy at a time.

Yours in health and healing,

Donna