Freakanomics podcast this morning about the enormous value of social trust and social capital – basically, how much people in a society trust strangers, and how many contacts you have in your phone (I totally lose on that one – even when I had Facebook, I didn’t have that many).

I want to live in a place where most people say that strangers can be trusted.

Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not what love is all about. Loving behavior doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behavior nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.

Susan Forward, Toxic Parents, p381 (via fromonesurvivortoanother)

There’s something about seeing vehicles from far far away that sets something inside aflutter, like that Trabant with Serbian plates in Iceland or German RVs in Patagonia, that guy on a BMW bike in Turkish hostel riding from Germany to Saigon, or a car from Saskatchewan in Nicaragua.

We rarely get self propelled visitors in our neck of the woods (unless they are boats), but this beat-up RV with French license plates at a our grocery parking lot was another nudge and untimely reminder about how another world exists and is only one shift of priorities away.

And yes, I did look up their blog about their travels – lemondeestaeux.wordpress.com