The V-Word

“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.” -Zig Ziglar

Success feels a bit like a hallucination. I am so accustomed to the doing and the trying that for so long has characterized the incremental progress of Good...

“The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.” -Vince Lombardi

Tomorrow is the big competition for the local Willamette Angel Conference, but in some ways after tonight’s VIP reception, I feel like I already won. First, how cool to be on the guest list of the VIP reception. Better still was...

Listen to the enlightening views on shamanic sexual healing by BABA DEZ NICHOLS, speaker and teacher on the sacred traditions of spiritual sexual healing and founder of the Sedona Temple and School of Temple Arts. Release the guilt, shame and fear about sexuality and discover the grace of tapping into the sexual power we all hold to manifest your deepest desires.

“Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body” -De Saint-Real

I am reminded over and over that health is greatest and most essential possession of all. Sadly it is often in the throes of illness that this reflection comes so clear. You never feel so well as the days after you recover from feeling so badly. There is nothing taken for granted about pain-free movement after a bout with a bad...

 

“Worry is the dark room in which negatives develop.” Church Billboard

We have been visited by our dreaded spring malady of poison oak again. We live in the midst of acres of forest and fields that is owned by the oak. We may pay the mortgage, but there is no question about who owns the space. All of my children react to the plant in differing symptoms and intensity. Over ten years I have...

“Life is the fruit she longs to hand you, ripe on a plate. And while you live, relentlessly she understands you.”~Phyllis McGinley

I have four remarkable children. Becoming a mother to each of them has taught me more about how love changes you from the inside out than anything else in my life. In the twenty plus years of celebrating mother’s day with my children, I have often struggled with...

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde

The day was consumed with preparing for one more speed pitch later this week as a finalist for the Willamette Angel conference. I should have been more prepared, but for last minute meetings that change the shape of the slide deck, now all my words are out of order. I work to stay calm and focused. I don’t want to add stress to my recent...

"Love isn't an emotion or an instinct-it's an art. " -Mae WestDone with conviction and commitment, the way great artists approach their masterpieces, our loving relationships sculpt us into the highest and best form of ourselves. This is their only job and their highest purpose. Through love we entrust our loved ones to mirror and elicit from us the aspirations and values that we have expressed so that the commitment to the relationship transmutes into a commitment to ourselves.

Today was a clear and beautiful spring day in the Willamette Valley, the kind that makes you reevaluate the idea of work and what we do with our time. The kind of cool breezes mixed with warm sun that calls you outside. I walked my funny dogs through the woods and listened to a poem by John O’Donohue called Beannacht, which means Blessing in Gaelic.

 

As I listened over and over again to the...