Category: Ruminate
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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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Being Human: Living Like a Hunter and Gatherer at Home
I’ve been reading a book called Being Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness by Charles Foster. And it has definitely had an impact on the way I interact with our landscape. In Being Human, the author and his son attempt to travel back in time by way of a thought experiment and lifestyle…
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Lush Living
If I were to sum up my life right now in one word it would be this: LUSH The garden is coming into peak season with cabbages sizing up, the first peppers appearing, herbs branching, and flowers blooming. The foliage is now so thick in some places that my garden “rooms” feel as enclosed as…