The Invitation By Oriah Mountain Dreamer, a Native American elder

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting in your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit in pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tip of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from God's presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Both happened at a local thrift store, where I both donate and buy. It's the ultimate in recycling — I give the many clothes my four kids constantly are outgrowing, then shop there a bit to replace their play clothes, grab some work clothes for my mason husband and snag some unique goodies for myself. Who benefits? The organization. The environment. My family. My outlook.

Incident #1

One afternoon, as I lingered over a very cool chair considering its possibilities, I overheard a conversation between a salesperson and a woman with at least four kids in tow:

"I'd like to buy these four pairs of socks. Could you possibly consider cutting the price?" the woman said.

"No, I'm sorry, we can't adjust prices...we have a 'no haggle' policy," was the reply.

The woman sighed and said to her kids, "I'm sorry, I just don't have enough to get these today. Maybe next time."

An older girl with the woman whispered, "But mom, their socks all have holes in them..."

The woman shook her head and said she'd come back later.

I looked at them all -- not very different from me. Lots of kids, a mom just trying to make ends meet. If construction were to dry up any more than it has in this town, or if I were to hit a dry spell with my work, I might not have money for socks, either. And here I was, looking at a chair I didn't need. I had $20 in my pocket.

I walked over and discreetly stuffed it into the woman's hand. She looked at me, mouth open. "I bought a coat here last week and there was a 20-dollar bill in the pocket. Maybe somebody upstairs wanted you to have it. Grab the socks before someone else does — they're a good bargain!" It was a white lie, but I didn't want to do anything to embarrass her. She thanked me, bought the socks, and in so doing, did me the best favor anyone had in a very long time. My husband was laid off at the time, but the woman, in her gracious acceptance, made me feel rich in spirit.

Incident #2

When my youngest child finally passed the age of carseats, changing tables and sundry other baby-raising paraphernalia, I bundled up those things to which I hadn't attached too much sentimental value and headed off to the thrift store. I stopped in the bakery next door first, where I got chatting with the very young cashier. She was quite obviously pregnant. "An unexpected blessing, you could say. I wish my parents felt the same, but I was stupid. And now my boyfriend and I have a baby to raise, but we'll be okay," she said. She was on her way over to the thrift store on break, so she walked out with me. We chatted about due dates, labor and all the other things Women Who Have Become Mothers gab about. I asked her about the baby's room. It turned out that she needed all the things I was going to donate that day. I asked her to pull her car up next to mine, opened my trunk and offered her my stash.

She burst into tears. "How did this happen? How did you know?"

I didn't, of course.

What these two incidents have in common is the way they happened. I was in a place that exists to meet needs coming and going. An opportunity presented itself both times. And I happened to be listening. I wonder how often the universe presents these delicious chances to feel so good? Yeah, yeah, I did it to help. I'd love to say I did this stuff because it's just the right thing to do, yadda yadda. But let's be human and honest here. There's something else: I like feeling useful and generous, and I admit it. Why is that so bad? So I felt like Mother Teresa for a few minutes — it's okay. She'd think that was grand.

The best part was, as Tom mentions in his blog, the feeling reverberates. One kind act begets another and another. It wasn't like I handed over everything I owned; neither gesture hurt in any way. But the feeling it produced changed my outlook. After all, I remember both these women, and that was at least five years ago. Unexpected, unplanned giving — those small "random acts of kindness" — is addictive.

I have an elderly neighbor on a fixed income who, I'm certain, gives something to someone every single day she breathes. And she speaks nothing of it, ever. Even our neighborhood's squirrels, chipmunks, birds, rabbits and dogs benefit from her soft light. She is awake and aware of opportunities, and she acts on them whenever possible.

When the news tells of a cynical world full of corruption and greed that's rewarded with bailouts and tax breaks, turn the tv off and then listen. Really listen. See what you can do, right there in the moment. I promise: You will always feel better if you can give something, anything, to anyone — and I don't mean money, necessarily. It could be just a few spare minutes with a child. Or maybe you tell the checkout lady that, gee, she should wear pink all the time because it lights up her face. Or maybe you pick up something a stranger drops. Little courtesies are the hors d'oeuvres of life, and you can serve them up anywhere.  Let the universe use you for good whenever you're able. And if someone tells you you're a sap or an idealist, or calls you "naive," just know that you, in all your secret selfishness, feel better than they do.

They're the lazy guy's way of communicating, the equivalent of n in an algebraic equation. In these sentences as in algebra, the objective is to get rid of the n and replace it with something meaningful. And when we're successful, the whole equation—the sentence—adds up more sensibly.

Two n words stand out: "there" and "it." In this post, I'm focusing on "there." (Next week, we'll move on to "it.")

Check out how much better these sentences become when we solve for n:

Bad: There is a dog on the sofa.

Better: A dog is on the sofa.

Aside from the fact that a canine is smelling up your furniture, that first sentence stinks. Everything in the universe is somewhere...either "there" or "here," depending on your vantage point. There is a pencil! There is a chair! There is a superfluous exclamation point!! Are we really asking the question, "Where is the dog?" Nope. We're just saying, hey, a dog is drooling on your couch cushions. Why not say it crisply? A dog is on the sofa, damn it! Get him off! Much more direct than the wimpy, "Ooh, there is a dog...not here, there..."

Try flipping sentences that begin with "there" around, and you'll see that it forces you to come up with action words and concrete constructions:

Bad: There can be no other explanation.

Better: No other explanation makes sense.

Bad: There is no easy way to say this.

Better: I can't find a way to say this easily.

Bad: There are instances when editors are annoying.

Better: Sometimes, editors are annoying.

Maybe it's just me.

P.S.: My dog is always on the sofa.

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When they do turn up, they're typically enslaved into the service of some inappropriate word. Witness the well-meaning "it's" used as a possessive, as in "an apostrophe worth it's weight in gold." Oh, the humanity.

Equally as disturbing is the random appearance of these humble punctuation marks in places an apostrophe should never go -- the dark, dank underbelly of words that are neither possessives nor contractions. "We have dictionary's for sale!" (Don't try that at home.) Makes me wonder if perhaps there's been an appropriation for apostrophes in the president's new stimulus package, and now we have to use them up. (Hey, why not? It includes funding for a butterfly garden in Florida -- why can't they back a few apostrophes? Commas, however, may be excessive.)

Enough of the abuse. Apostrophes, unite and proclaim your simple truths:

• Aside from the possessive kind (you know who you are), an apostrophe is just a placeholder for a letter or two that, for simplicity's sake or dialect, has been left out.
  • "Can't" is just "cannot," where the apostrophe stands in for "no."
  • "Isn't" is just "is not" with an apostrophe instead of an "o."
  • "This post's crazy" has an apostrophe marking the absence of an "i" in "post is."
  • "Ain't" is...well, I don't care what the dictionary says about common usage. It ain't a word.

• Apostrophes do NOT (or at least, should not) indicate plurals of anything.
  • "Way too many mention's of apostrophe's in this post" is just wrong, on so many levels.
  • Same with "$20 million dollar's for the removal of small- to medium-sized fish passage barrier's" (from the original stimulus package, by the way).

• In the case of possessives, think of that little arc as a hand trying to hang onto something -- owning it.
  • "Florida's butterfly park"
  • "Our nation's mounting debt"

Next time you feel compelled to abuse an apostrophe, stop. Get ahold of yourself. Look bravely in the mirror and say to yourself:

• "Can I take away the apostrophe and still make sense without additional words?" If the answer's "yes," STEP AWAY FROM THE APOSTROPHE. It's probably trying to be too possessive, in which case you are being abused by it.
• "If I stick an 'i' in for the apostrophe in 'it's,' does the sentence make sense?" If so, leave that lovely little curl where it is. It's a placeholder. It's -- "it is" -- keeping the t and the s from blurring into some nonsensical possessive mush ("its"), which, in a perverse turn of the English language, also can be a possessive without an apostrophe. Hence all the confusion.
• "If in doubt, leave it out." That's pretty much what the British government has decided, for better or worse.