Hope Leitner, Realtor®, CRS

An old man used to meditate early every morning under a large tree on the bank of the Ganges River in India. One morning he saw a scorpion flailing helplessly in the strong current of the river, tangled in a complex network of tree roots.  The old man immediately reached out to rescue the drowning scorpion. The panicked animal tried to sting him, but the man persisted. For several long minutes his hand darted back and forth, evading the scorpion's plunging stinger as he tried to rescue it. A passerby on the riverbank saw the struggle.  "Hey, old man, what's wrong with you? Don't you know that you may kill yourself to help that dangerous animal?"  Slowly the man turned his head to gaze calmly into the stranger's eyes.  "Friend, is it the nature of the scorpion to sting. Why should I give up on my own nature for fear of his?" Maintaining the compassionate nature in a world that sometimes bites and strings can feel like a struggle...

There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in our galaxy. There are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. A new estimate published in the journal Nature  recalculates the number of trees on Earth to three trillion. The latest estimate of the planet's tree population exceeds the number of stars in the Milky Way by more than 7 times the previous estimate. This means there are 422 trees for every person on the planet. Next time you take a deep breath, remember you have a small forest of trees helping to fill your lungs with clean, fresh oxygen! 

Here is a thought-provoking story, from the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland that challenges the old adage that quality is better than quantity: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced; all those on the right would be judged solely on the quality of their work. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". When grading time came, a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" grou...

A couple moves into a new neighborhood. The next morning, while they are eating breakfast, the women sees a neighbor hanging laundry outside and says, "Her laundry is not very clean; she doesn't know how to wash correctly. Maybe she needs better laundry soap." Her husband looks on, remaining silent. Every time the neighbor hangs laundry to dry, the woman makes the same comments. A month later, the woman is surprised to see nice clean wash on the line and says to her husband, "Look, she's finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her." The husband replied, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows." Sometimes what we see when looking at others depends on the window through which we look.