Lewis and Clark Pay Attention
August 31, 2008
As I write this, Southern California has just ended its second week of triple digit temperatures. The intense heat changes the way we live and alters the rhythm of our days. We are up earlier to walk the dog while the park is still cool. We spend a lot of time indoors in the air conditioning. We’ve been eating better. We don’t want to heat up the house with the stove – so it’s salads and chicken from the grill. And, as I don’t want to head out in my black car two or three times a day, I find myself thinking more about what I need to do and combining trips and make lists.
My Mother’s Garden
August 31, 2008
Clients come to me in distress and I work with them on Purposeful Living.
In the main, they get it. Sometimes, though, when I get to the part about doing what you need to do when you need to do it, my listeners eyes glaze over and I know I’ve lost them. I get the response that it doesn’t seem like much “fun” to find your purpose and do what you need to do. In fact, it sounds rather Calvinistic. It sounds like trudging uphill in the rain with your head down – oblivious to your surroundings.
“Where’s the joy?”, someone asked once. “What about fun and having a good time?”.
I never really knew how to respond except to assure my listener that I do have a lot of fun and joy in life and I enjoy getting my purpose accomplished.
Sometimes, I tell them about my mother’s garden.
The Natural Law of Attrition
August 31, 2008
I’m cheap and proud of it.
I use and re-use things carefully. It pains me in particular to waste food. The Buddhist/Catholic in me wants to find a way to airlift leftover rice and veggies to the Sudan.
I’m one of those obnoxious houseguests who will walk up behind you while you’re washing your dishes in your own damn sink and turn off the faucet.
Unfortunately cheap is a great word, like gay or liberal, that I can’t use anymore. I have to call myself a minimalist or a Voluntary Simplist and use words like frugal and responsible instead of stingy. I don’t hoard; I “re-purpose”. And I live in fear of being accused of not creating abundance. That’s worse than being accused of not having a sense of humor. It’s actually politically correct for me to be cheap. I just can’t say I am.
Top Ten Reasons to get out of bed in the morning
August 31, 2008
1. Bedsores. (A painful reminder that when you hang around in one place for too long it starts hurtin’).
2.You’re needed. (And you won’t know how or why unless you start the ball rolling).
3. You have much to offer. (No matter how bad things are. Some of us are gurus; some of us are cautionary tales. We all give in one way or another).
Everything I need to know in life I learned from my dog
August 31, 2008
I was mooching around the Self-Help section in my local Barnes and Noble the other day when I got to thinking about the first Self Help book I ever read. Most of the early ones were actually based on psychology and written by psychologists.
Remember “I’m OK. You’re Ok.”? It actually had pie-charts and you needed some intelligence to get through it.
I remembered, too, that during the rise of the Feminist movement in the Seventies the greatest of all self-help books were feminist books. Heady political stuff. These books actually changed the course of lives. How well I recall my first Consciousness Raising group. It was full of scary looking women in black Mao slippers carrying well-thumbed copies of Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Self”.
Top Ten Remodeling Tips
August 31, 2008
My husband and I just completed our first remodel. It was a period renovation of a Victorian Gingerbread Craftsman. (I’m so thrilled I can talk about it in the past tense). We haunted architectural salvage houses for just the right windows, bid on eBay for period-correct light fixtures, spent an entire afternoon driving all over L.A. for a screw that they stopped making in the thirties and generally worked ourselves to the point of insanity. We tiptoed up to the line but never crossed it.
So here, ripped from the headlines so to speak, are my
Top Ten Tips for Remodeling.
Read ‘em and weep.
Bright Shiny Objects
August 25, 2008
How many bright shiny objects can you juggle at one time?
If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, you’re under siege from Bright Shiny Objects.
Every time you check your e-mail, open magazine, network or check out a competitor, you’re faced with a multitude of them.
They glimmer and twist in the light and you just have to have them.
Top Ten Things to Build a Bridge and Get Over
August 21, 2008
God must love Top Ten lists because she made so many of them. They crowd my Inbox daily. They’re right up there in popularity with offers to refinance my house and stock up on Viagra. Top Nine Lists are few and far between and Top Eleven lists unheard of. But for seem reason there seem to be ten nifty answers to pretty much any problem or life situation you can come up with.
In search of my own Top Ten favorites I had a hard time coming up with something that hadn’t already been worked over. There seems to be a plethora of Top Ten lists designed to pump us up; increase our confidence and build self esteem. I thought it would be nice to let some of the air out. So here are my:
Top Ten Things to Build a Bridge and Get Over.
Procrastination. I’d love to, but…
August 21, 2008
When a good friend asked me to contribute a little something for her newsletter it seemed like a great idea. When I cleared the decks and sat down to write it seemed a great time to color-code my closet or whip up a crab casserole. As an enthusiastic writer, who has nevertheless had writing blocks in my life which have lasted longer than some World Wars, this business of avoiding doing something that I really want to do used to mystify me.
Another take on addiction
August 4, 2008
Zen Master Yasutani, in his “Eight Beliefs in Buddhism”, said that a person commits suicide because he cannot live in the way in which he would like. At first glance, this seems a little cold-blooded; such a selfish explanation for a devastating act which can hurt so many people.
But when we think about it, we realize that it is true.
When someone is in such suffering, despair, pain or anger that they decide not to continue living, they are not accepting their life just as it is is at this moment.
They want something other than what they ended up with. They also are not accepting the possibility of change, either in their circumstances or in their own responses.
I think Yasutani could have extended his observations to addiction.
Notwithstanding physiological and biochemical changes which can eventually occur in the body, each addiction begins with one wilful act.
It is usually an act which we choose because it takes us away from life as it is just right now.
If we feel empty and unsatisfied we may try to fill the hole with shopping or gambling or eating. If we experience ourselves as not smart enough, funny enough, interesting enough - or just plain not enough - we may try to change the way we are through drugs or alcohol.
