About Me

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United States
Why Marbles My 1st blog attempt Was an answer to a promise I made to my eldest son when I handed him a jar full of marbles. The marbles were from a collection saved by my mother over the years of my childhood, and I must admit that if left to me I would have already lost all of my marbles. My son asked if I could jot down some of the ways these marbles were used I told him I would write down as much as I could remember and send it to him later. I am the supreme procrastinator of all time which resulted in him sending me a reminder at which time he promised not to lose my marbles and I reassured him that I would get busy and tell him and his children how the beautiful round bits of glass and minerals were used for amusement and competition. My Response2 blog arose out of frustration with the attitudes and lack of respect for our country, our traditional ethics, and educational system. Rons Lyrics and Poetry started just because my scribbles needed a place to rest.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Action creates Reaction in a ripple effect. In that respect when we choose to act to solve a problem we have to be aware of consequences of the ripple. If it causes an effect we find undesirable, we need to look for a different Action for our solution.

FEAR

Fear: Fear is only helpful in the case of immediate danger to your own or another’s existence. Reaction to fear is a retardant to accurate perception of events and choice of action as it causes “flight, fight, or freeze

EXPECTATIONS

Expectations: Plan to your best ability, Pray about all major decisions, Act diligently and in a timely manner, If it doesn’t turn out the way you want, don’t do it the same way again, Don’t expect life to be fair. Be Thankful regardless you may not be able to see what is really the best answer for all.

Proverbs and good sense

The main source of good sense marbles is the book of Proverbs but there are always a few little marbles that get misplaced in everyday life. Generally they are the ones that don’t reflect the best light or prettiest colors and are what we call mistakes. Some of our most important lessons come from the mistakes and failures made during our game of marbles, but these are the ones that do not get passed down from generation to generation. We all need mistakes, to learn how to overcome adversity and to recover from the wrong turns we are capable making during our lives.

POEM wed Mar 17, 2010

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

HOW FAR WE HAVE COME,
IN SO SHORT A TIME.
AWAY FROM THE REPUBLICI ONCE CALLED MINE.
AWAY FROM THE VALUES WE ONCE HELD DEAR,
MOVING TOWARD A PLACE
COMMON SENSE SHOULD FEAR.

PROCRASTINATION and my Blog to My son Tod

Being a procrastinator has its advantages, and in this particular case it gave me time to think. This little endeavor of explaining a simple child’s game could be used in more than one way. I could just explain the game as played during my childhood but the phrase “He’s lost his marbles” kept haunting me. How many use-full (more or less) bits of information have been lost over the centuries in passing teachings from life experience and parents onto our progeny. If we were to look at these things as something to collect and pass on rather than just using and discarding, we might save our family some time and trouble.
The main source of good sense marbles is the book of Proverbs but there are always a few little marbles that get misplaced in everyday life. Generally they are the ones that don’t reflect the best light or prettiest colors and are what we call mistakes. Some of our most important lessons come from the mistakes and failures made during our game of marbles, but these are the ones that do not get passed down from generation to generation. We all need mistakes, to learn how to overcome adversity and to recover from the wrong turns we are capable making during our lives. Passing our marbles on to our children is and should be an obligation of parenting, but in our current society that’s not always possible, due to instability of relationships and divorce, one of my murky colored marbles. Hopefully I can be as forthright as possible but I must admit that some of my most dingy and icky colored marbles may become lost forever and good riddance to them.
About Me

Ron Burres
I am a child of the 1940s' and growing up I was taught the importance of: God, Honesty, Integrity, Responsibility, The balance of cause and effect. I eventually came to believe that: Competition creates achievement, Success is a product of smart thinking and hard work. Innovation and creativity are products of individual freedom. We all have the right to believe and practice our religion or not. Each person is unique in talent, ability and in contribution to society. In the freedom to express myself, and the right of my neighbor to do the same. A country and society divided against itself will eventually crumble and fall into weakness. Common sense is the best aid in decision making, and that without it most plans are destined to fail. True education promotes the discovery of truth. Indoctrination promotes actions based upon unsustainable falsehoods. That it makes more sense to believe in God, eternity, grace and forgiveness than in the nothingness of atheism because of possible resulting outcomes.

Toss and Capture

The game of marbles...Toss and Capture
Toss and CaptureI still remember my introduction to the game. I had to be a very young boy just starting my schooling. We lived about 15 miles outside the town on a farm that dad was managing. I had just started the first grade and the only school was in town. My grandparents had moved into an apartment about three blocks from the grade school and that was where I would wait for mom and dad. I’m quite sure the game Grandpa (my dads dad Agustus Burres) taught me was a defense to pass the time with an over active six year old. Pass the time it did we would play that game as often and for as long as it took for mom and dad to come in from their work on the farm to pick me up. The game of toss and capture that Grandpa taught me was a simple. . He would set the game up by covering the sofa with a nice soft Pendleton wool blanket so we wouldn’t lose our marbles behind the cushions and then the game would begin. One marble would be placed towards the front edge and in the center of the sofa, standing back about five or six feet (this increased as I grew), we would draw marbles out of a big gallon jar and take turns tossing at the marble in the center. The one who finally hit the center marble got to keep the collection of marbles that were missed shots. We repeated this process until all of our spare time was used up. The one that amassed the largest collection by the end of the play period was winner for that day. All the marbles were returned to the jar ready for the next day’s challenge.

HONESTY AND TRUTH

Friday, April 9, 2010

another marble:Honesty is not always truthfull.

It is very easy to confuse honesty with truth. In fact all honesty requires is belief, while truth requires searching for the facts and being able to move past perception to understanding and accepting the truth. The age old example of this is: When our ancestors said the earth was flat they could honestly say it was possible to fall of the edge if you went to far. Today we can actually see the truth. Views of the earth from outer space prove the fact that the earth is round. When we make choices during our life we choose to do the best we can under particular circumstance and we base the decision on our "belief system" or on our collection of perceptions and truths. Question the sources that make up your beliefs.

FAITH

Keep the faith, you never know how God plans to bless you and your circumstance.

GIVING

Give freely and expect no return.
Give to your ability not to your harm, fulfill your obligations, God, family, then strangers.

Blog Note

For: 1lifes marbles
When I woke up this morning my head was filled up and roaring down the road. It’s spring 2010 and I’m staring at things personally I would have never thought possible when I was in my 20’s. I’m seeing things coming to fruition, in my society and country, which I have feared. Seeing them as probabilities since my 40’s and did nothing but grumble and complain (two very ugly marbles). In keeping with my analogy of marbles, there are a multitude of marbles involved, in both my personal bag and that of my country, that have brought myself and country to their respective situations. The marbles involved in both are: Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust and most of all Prayer. There may be some more but if I think of them I’ll add them to the mix as we go.
Much as our bodies are made up of cells and the health of our body is determined by the health of the individual cells as they combine together. The health of a society is made up and determined by the health, actions and perceptions of the people in the society as a group. If the marbles of Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust are not polished and cared for bad things can happen. Most generally these marbles become cracked, tarnished and chipped away because we continue to go through time on a series of slippery slopes, thinking “just this once won’t hurt or matter in the overall theme of things”. Wrrrrooooong! Just as the body can become increasingly ill through lack of proper nourishment, ingestion of wrong foods and putting it in position to accept illness from other people, our society or Nation can react and become ill for the same reasons. Fortunately, or not depending on what you believe, when we don’t know how to fix our circumstance we can use the bigger marble (PRAYER) to Hope things can be repaired. The more Faith and Intensity of the faith, the more likely you are to attain results and answers.
Personally: It’s much easier for me to look back in the face of time to see what happened to my marbles and why things are, and to some extent the what and why of today. With the passage of time, to help clarify the importance of decisions made and the ripple effect of acting out those decisions, we can learn. If it’s too late in the game to really affect our own circumstance we can perhaps help someone else. If I have a huge regret in this life it is not doing something about all the other things I wish I had done differently.
To find one’s self in the last few years of life without the means to care for the physical needs of myself and my wife is a devastating situation to say the least. Lacking the health of body I would like to have, in order to put up the good fight to fix things, is equally frustrating. Believe me when I say, even if I were someone who did not believe in God, I would be praying.
There have been so many junctions, in my seven decades, I might have taken different turns for better results. The beauty of retrospect is that we can only surmise what the outcome may have been. That view is only helpful if a similar situation occurs again in our life. The fact is that when we make a choice to act, it is the best we can do at that particular time. If we knew better we would do better. Most of our decisions are based on what we really believe to be true not on what we think might be true. Occasionally we act on false thinking, hoping for results that will work out.
We can’t and don’t always act on fact as we know it, sometimes when we act on what we think maybe possible, great things can happen. If mankind didn’t have the ability to use his imagination there are a lot of good things the world would never have known. That is a fact that keeps adding to our pile of mistakes as well as our heap of rewards. I believe God made us in his image and to this day we as human beings try to create new things. I believe that God must be a curious god, even though I was taught that He was omniscient. I believe that, at times, when He looks upon mankind he has to say,”Self what was I thinking”. The fact that He gave man a free will can be viewed as a blessing or as a curse, but that’s how he made us. Free will was a gift allowing us all the ability to be surprised by the outcome of our choices.
My results have been very mixed throughout my life. Retrospectively, I have found that the worst were caused by selfishness and a desire for immediate gratification, two more damaging marble wreckers. These two wreckers have led to circumstance that have cursed and blessed at the same time. These traits are very difficult to overcome if they are not acknowledged and one should use them as a filter in making decisions. The blessings from them are quite accidental and occasional while the curse of them is general and without fail will occur in some form or another. The curse of these bad guys, in my life, took the forms of hurting people I love or loved, the loss of relationships with friends and family, the loss of self respect and the respect of others. They have caused me to lie, cheat, and steal in one form or another and to move away from being who I wanted to be as a person. These traits are erosive to one’s life course and should be watched for with absolute diligence. Vice’s very seldom are solitary in one’s life. We make the mistake of thinking a little mis-deed won’t hurt anything or anyone, but they do and almost always lead to forcing one bad choice after another in terms of good ethics and standards. The correction of these situations are most generally going to cause you a lot of pain, and that is inevitable when you finally see the folly of your actions. In my life I have lost contact and relationship with family, children primarily, whom I still love but don’t have the energy to reach out to. I am, I guess relying on the hope that the truths kept hidden will be shown to all in the afterlife, another one of those belief structure deals base in faith and hope.