“Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.” -Ashleigh Brilliant
I have always been restless and prone to being busy. I love my work and have, for so long, confused who I am with what I do that most days I find myself doing from dawn until late into the night. Consequently, it has taken me years to learn the true value of rest. In this way, I am a...
“When we really let go, we become everything. At that point, we are identified with all things: the flower, the oak tree, the morning star.” -Dennis Genpo Merzel
This season I encourage you to celebrate the holiday season in the deepest way possible, and instead of accumulating more, focus the season on the practice of letting go. Start with the physical world and do a holiday closet clean out...
“Judgments that constrain your giving are the very demons that are keeping you from receiving.” -Martha Beck
Sometimes life demands that we bleed. It isn’t enough to feel our painful stories echoing around in our heads; and even the familiar spasm in our backs behind our hearts is not sufficient to release the historic injuries of our childhood, so deeply ingrained that they become us. Sometimes...
“The chemist who can extract from his heart’s elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.” – Kahlil Gibran
This last week has been punctuated by an emotional injury that feels like a pinched nerve between my neck and back. It is odd that this unique but persistent pain still catches me off...
Contributed by A. R.
(November’s Key to Gratitude Contest Weekly Winner)
Before each meal my little family says ‘thank you for this day, this food and _______’. It could be an A in chemistry for my daughter. Finding the lost wrench for my husband. Its little things – like forks, dirt roads, ice. We have to actually stop and consciously think about our answers. I have a neighbor with MS, so as I’m...
Rare are the true healers, doctors who are not only skilled in their craft, but generous with their attention. Jerome Hobbs was a studied and skilled acupuncturist and naturopath; but it was his gentle manner, easy laugh and abiding curiosity that made his patients well. I was blessed to be one of his long time patients seeing him at least monthly over ten years. I can still close my eyes and hear...
Contributed by Grady Tude
(November’s Key to Gratitude Contest Weekly Winner)
When my wife died suddenly and unexpectedly at only 58 years old my life unravelled. After a few months I began my slow return to reality from the daze and haze of shock and legal bullstuff. My life seemed to be in shambles, pointless and simply too much trouble to continue. In retrospect, and awareness,I can say...
For many years when my children were small one of their favorite birthday rituals was the bouquet of balloons I would bring them, one balloon for each year of their life. We would make a family circle around the birthday child and they would let go of the balloons one by one, making a wish and letting it fly up into the sky. Sometimes they would let go them all at once with a giant wish, standing...
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” -William Penn
Early this morning when my 15–year-old daughter who shares the daily morning makeup and hair routine with me, turned towards me, straightening iron in hand, to do my hair; for a few minutes time stood still. I like to think of myself as close to my teens, but honestly, we don’t talk much during those morning makeup sessions,...
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.” -William Blake
Falling in love is easy; our biological imperative to mate kicks in naturally opening our hearts and flooding our nervous system with the euphoric experience of idealized connection. In these early moments of love’s embrace, we receive love viscerally. Every exchange is charged with the energy of passionate recognition and the deep...
One of the songs that stuck to me most closely as a child was 500 miles. I may have learned it at summer camp, but the gist of it is a journey song that takes the singer hundreds of miles from his home. Three times up and down 20,000 feet and I am hundreds of- thousands even, miles away from home. I have never been to Vermont and it as beautiful, even in the dark as I have heard.
It is compared...
I have owned an iPhone for years and have been hanging out on the edges of technology thanks to the young tech-savvy employees in my business and my kids, whose childhoods grew up on continuous, even if controlled, doses of the web world. I am just competent enough to be dangerous is what I always say and grateful that I have young people around me most days to show me the way back to digital...
