Good morning blogsters.

It’s a crisp morning here. The Rio Grande valley’s got a hazy look to it at daybreak from all the wood fires cranking up on the San Felipe, Santa Ana and Santo Domingo Reservations. Our own village is contributing with wood-smoke from the chimneys, though it probably hasn’t drifted into the Rio Grande valley as yet.

The aroma of pine wood burning these early fall mornings always gives me a cozy, satisfied feel of peacefulness in the crisp dawn

I’ve said the aroma ‘gives’ me that feeling, but it really isn’t so. Nothing really ‘gives’ us anything we don’t choose to be given.

My blog entry of a couple of days ago talked a bit about that. The fact that we are responsible for how we respond to all manner of sensory input. We just rarely examine why those feelings are there and acknowledge that we’re making a choice about what they’ll be.

One of the frustrating pieces of human interactions for me during a lot of life was the general concept that’s crept into our belief systems consigning the responsibility for our feelings to others. To their behavior, attitudes and remarks.

“You make me feel thus-and-so when you do thus-and-so!” is merely a means of attempting to control how others behave, but it involves a personal abdication of our own power over ourselves.

Human beings love power. Especially the power to influence others. When we abdicate power involving our happiness, our state of mind, a fair assortment of humans will gladly take the reins and apply the spurs. They’ll have a burst of joy in believing they managed to help someone have a bad moment or day.

But the bottom line is, nobody owns our feelings. Not our spousees, not our bosses, not our pet cats.

Every moment of every day we make our choices about how we’re going to respond to any event in our lives. Those events don’t control how we feel about them.

We do.

Jack