Articles on 'Leisure & Lifestyle' ↓

Over the past while I have been feeling a bit down. My life seems to be on a cusp of change, but I feel that I am spinning my wheels. Do you know what I mean? Have you felt like that? Old patterns are, well, they are getting old.

New vistas are drawing beautiful and powerful images in my mind, but the stress of living in a redundant mental space is wearing on me. I can feel the change but I am caught by habit.

What to do? Well, whenever I am confronted with stasis — whenever I feel stuck in a lifeless rut — I go back to basics. And what can be more basic than nature? Nature has always been my bedrock; it has balance and moves gracefully with change. Nature can stimulate us likewise to regain our own balance, and to accept change with enthusiasm and grace.

And so we went on a trip into the wisdom of nature’s beauty and power. Continue reading →

The clouds were low; silver-grey with blushes of violet to the west, and an intense blue-grey to the east. It was 1994, and spring was about to bless us with some needed rain.

“The garden will love it,” Rosemarie said. I agreed, though not with the same hard-won conviction as my Wife’s, after all, it was Rosemarie who created our garden and it was she who mainly toiled in it.

We had a large garden (and still do) filled with plenty of delicious raspberries, gooseberries, currants of all sorts, and most of the vegetables we needed for the year ahead. For Rosemarie, the garden was her labor of love; her way of connecting to life at its purest, and to who she is at heart.

It was a quiet day, and every living thing seemed to be in their own separate world, including us. I was taking a break from a new painting I was working on, Rosemarie was finishing some planting, and the ravens were dive-bombing Jones, our black cat.
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Desire, and how you respond to it, determines the substance and quality of your life.

Desire is the juice of life. It courses through you like a river, carving its way through the soil of your psyche.

Desire is powerful. It moves and shapes you. But desire can also seduce you. Continue reading →

Ironically, the simplest route to the good life is through a cliche.

How silly is that? We ignore cliches because, well — they are cliche. Cliches are why we invented the word platitude. Why would we look to one for the good life?

Creating the good life should be a breeze. We are intelligent. We have power. We have resources. For starters, we have money. We can buy the good life.

We all watch television. The formula is simple: work long hard hours, earn plenty of money, then buy the good life at your local big-box store. The timing can be tricky, but you can even out the cash flow with some credit.

Of course, stuff happens: lay-offs, divorces, medical bills. Our loans officer though, is always there to help us out with more credit. Thank goodness for compassion. And when our debt erodes our disposable income, well, we have consolidation loans. Life is good, right? Continue reading →