Those three ideas in the title of this post are pretty much the heart and art of living well today. They are also the focus of Issue 4 of Epicurean Living.

For any newcomers, Epicurean Living is a free PDF magazine I create about philosophy, gardening, homesteading, creativity, and ecology. You can open and read, download, share, print, totally ignore, or keep it to yourself.

It’s your choice. Because life is all about choices – those we make, those we don’t, those we let others make for us, or take away from us.

My choice, in this complicated world, is to find beauty even in hardship and pain. I choose to see opportunities for growth in challenges, to make meaningful and impactful positive changes when I can, and to try to be a more loving and understanding person than I was yesterday (even though I often fail).

I’m not hiding my head in the sand and pretending problems don’t exist. I’m also not pretending (even to myself) that there will be good solutions to our problems or that they are solvable at all.

I wholeheartedly believe things are going to get even harder in the near future. I believe that the most likely outcome to the path we are now on is the downfall of the human species and the decimation of incredible diversity that took billions of years to create.

I believe that if people think today is bad… just wait for ten years from now.

Well, that is unless we…

There are so many possible answers to plug in after those three dots. I bet you’ve already thought of lots of them.

That’s because the future is not hopeless.

We can change the world even if we start with a small section of our yard, our lifestyle choices, our community, our minds — and grow out from there.

You somehow magically found your way here to my funky, little, non-optimized one-woman show of a website/magazine — because you are open to alternatives. And that’s what this issue of Epicurean Living is all about.

Alternative ways of living, thinking, seeing, being

Like sunlight, this little magazine is my gift to anyone who happens to find out about my homegrown act of creativity and needs some complex optimism (or pretty photos from my homestead) in their lives.

Note: You will also have to endure two plugs for my two books because I’m still trying to get the word out that they exist!