Absolutely no simple living happening here! This is a place for rumination, cultivation, curation, and creativity in pursuit of the complex, organic, authentic, dirty, imperfect, layered, rich, lush life!
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Tabula Rasa and the Imagined Garden
Our winter white landscape makes it all too easy to impose impossible garden dreams on this seemingly empty canvas. But this is not the blank slate it appears as now. This landscape was in a 20 year relationship with prior caretakers. Under their nurturing, it became a beautiful lawn-covered park and deer refuge, overlooking stunning…
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Contemplating: The Colony by Annika Norlin
It doesn’t matter if you have a busy, successful life in the city or the a quiet, communal life in the country, The Colony by Annika Norlin demonstrates how wrong both ways of living when they limit your horizons. There is nothing romantic about The Colony. It doesn’t have any great answers. And it doesn’t…
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A New Chapter
My on/off relationship with maintaining a blog is back on. But this time it’s personal. No more cross-selling or clickbait. No more size specific headings, bullets, numbering, and short paragraphs tailored to the two minute attention span. No more stock photos. This time, the ads are off and consumer-driven content is quelched. Frankly, I just…
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Lost and Found in Translation
Will I ever understand? Or will I always be searching for some illusive answer to a question I can’t quite formulate? With my 50th birthday upon me, my reflections keep circling the skimmed stone ripples of this question current. When I was younger, I thought age would bring wisdom. I thought experience would bring knowing.…
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Living in Awe: Taking the Long View
Today marks two months since we closed on our new home. It’s only half furnished and the garden won’t go in until after the first few frosts. Yet, I already feel completely at home here. Our thrilling birds eye vantage is energizing and mentally expansive. It reminds me to take the long view (when it…
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Hindsight: Our Human Super Power
Hindsight changes everything. Our capacity to reflect back on and rearrange our past, to put things that already happened in new perspective, is one of our most powerful and creative human tools. We can rewrite our experiences with with more depth, color, and complexity (as many times as we want). In fact, doing so is…
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Loss of Identity: Emotional Aphasia
A lifelong prolific writer suddenly can’t string together a sentence. Each time she tries, her chest becomes heavy with the weight of the ideas she wants to capture and convey, but can’t. Then the fire starts in her lungs, scorching her from the inside as she searches and searches for words that become harder to…
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Inviting Magic
Strolling down Chartes street, in New Orleans, I spotted a painted sign with a tea cup and saucer hanging above a shop door. Like a moth to a flame, I flitted in that direction. As I approached it, I read the name “Bottom of the Cup”. Then, in smaller lettering just below the saucer, it…
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Alternate Reality
This month, work took me to the windy city. Though sleep was hard to come by while there — with the sirens sounding, cars racing around at all hours, and industrial equipment turning on and off all night long — the change of scenery was still wonderfully refreshing. I also enjoyed the opportunity to engage…