“In my own worst seasons, I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.” – Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, essayist […]
When you think of luxury, what does that word bring to mind for you? It instantly gets me thinking about 2,000 thread count sheets and a mattress that feels like sleeping on a cloud. The time and ease of mind to luxuriate in them. Food […]
Being able to navigate the overwhelming nature of distress is complicated by the way it focuses our attention right down to a pinpoint, confining us to a very small parcel of real estate in our mind. In this reduced space our entire field of vision […]
While the idea of honey straight from the hive and milk straight from the cow has great appeal, I’ve always been way too leery of microbes to mess with that. Pasteurization all the way for me. But it turns out honey doesn’t need to be […]
I was still a few miles from home when out of the blue and for no predictable reason I hit the wall. My energy was instantly gone like someone had siphoned all the gas out of my tank while I was looking the other way. […]
“Hey, there’s a sunset,” Gail says. No one was expecting this. We’d spent the last few hours of the afternoon with rain dropping pleasantly on the screen house tent, water spattering our arms through the netting. When it came time to cook dinner we’d all […]
Are you the person you were a year ago? Did you mean to be different? It’s actually strange to think of who we were one year ago and in what ways we may or may not have changed, either by happenstance or by design. I […]
I had this week’s post all planned out. It was going to address the dread uninvited guest who shows up at the holiday party, hangs around too long at the buffet table then follows you home. You know who I’m talking about… Food Poisoning. Given […]
That phrase, “Just getting through the day,” has always seemed like a lousy way to live, and yet that’s often my sense of how it’s done, how we talk about it, how I do it, using little stepping-stones of pleasure to keep me moving along. […]
Mastering ChangeYou may not have asked for it, but it happens anyway. Being a human being is to be in constant conversation with change. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus kind of said, our lives are like rivers. You never step in the same river twice. […]
It’s hard to think too far ahead into the future without feeling a certain amount of despair about humanity’s prospects but then someone like 29-year-old Boyan Slat comes along and makes environmental repair feel totally possible. How can it not when this young Dutch inventor […]
For over a year I watched a house by the golf course go through a head-to-toe upgrade. It was already a cute house on a corner lot in a quiet part of town but by the time the owners artfully staged two pairs of crocks […]
Be cool. 