Category: Change

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12 Tiny Things

What does it mean to “nourish our roots?”  That question could be answered in myriad ways, but one constant is that to effectively nourish, said ‘nourishment’ must often be ingested in small bites.  When I water the garden in the summer, the plants do much better when I give them a steady, small stream of water over time rather than if I just dump a whole bucket on at once.  And interestingly (and not surprisingly) when I meditate I get a lot more out of five minutes than I do out of an hour.  Because when I try to do an hour?  It doesn’t last.  But five minutes?  That I can handle, even days at a time.  Tiny doesn’t have to mean insignificant.  Tiny can actually mean commitment and impact, if we let small things be enough.  Because when enough builds, we find that we have a strong root system.  A foundation that won’t crumble.  A sustainable way of operating in the world.  Less overwhelm in a culture that often feels out of control.  Continue reading “12 Tiny Things”

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Where the Magic Happens: Practicing Radical Authenticity

Here we are at the end of another December.  A time for looking back over the past year and looking ahead into the new one.  Some of us will indulge “one last time” before beginning a strict diet on January 1st.  Some of us will set lofty goals to exercise 6 days a week at the gym that we hate.  Some will get out a blank journal with the intent of getting up early every single day to write down three positive thoughts.  New years resolutions come in many forms, and sometimes they even stick for awhile.  Benefits have been seen by setting one’s sights on making change with the turn of the calendar year.

But.  So often it’s the same old same old every year.  The diet starts strong and tapers off by February.  It turns out we still hate the gym enough to stay home more often than not.  “Thinking positive” starts to feel like pulling the wool over our eyes and avoiding the root issue.   New years resolutions can be useful in setting a path forward, but they also fail a large percentage of the time.  They don’t do what we really want them to do.   They don’t change what we want them to change.

Do we throw in the resolution towel then?  Stop setting goals since we just fail at them over and over again?  Embrace our negative thinking since that’s what feels real?

Maybe.  Actually, I propose we do all of those things.

Continue reading “Where the Magic Happens: Practicing Radical Authenticity”

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Health, Healing and Patience

I’ve been sick for three months.  Sounds terrible, right?  It’s not been awesome, that’s for certain, though it’s not like I’ve been bed-ridden or in the hospital for weeks or anything.  I got a cough in September, just after my second book was published and launched, which developed into bronchitis, which in turn didn’t respond to antibiotics (since it usually doesn’t….being almost always viral..), and vaporizing eculyptus, drinking gallons of tea, trying to rest, and all the usual home “self-care” remedies just didn’t have much impact.  My family got tired of the incessant coughing, and for good reason – it’s hard to relax when your loved one is up half the night, especially when you live in a small house.  After too many days of cough syrup in an attempt to get the rest I needed to heal, I landed in the emergency room on Thanksgiving day – I woke up disoriented and with a pretty solid case of vertigo and nausea.  Turns out I was dehydrated, and after an IV of fluids, another clear chest Xray and a negative strep test, they sent me on my way, feeling less dizzy, but still coughing.  Continue reading “Health, Healing and Patience”

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One Year Later

It’s getting to be peak autumn color in Minnesota this week, and everywhere you look, it’s gorgeous. The leaves in the back of my house are blazing yellow and orange, and they create an impressive reflection on the lake when the light is just so and the air is still.  It’s kind of like the water is on fire with the vibrancy of the season.  Of course, this time of intense beauty is fleeting, only lasting a few weeks each year, but then again, it does come back around every year. We just have to make a point to pay attention to it when it does show up.   It’s always interesting to me that such intense beauty can co-exist so easily alongside the things that shake us to the core.

Continue reading “One Year Later”

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Giving Energy and Paying Attention

There’s a difference between giving your energy to something and paying attention.  It can be hard to distinguish sometimes, since these days there are things screaming at us all the time to “look at me” and “pay attention to me” and so forth.  The media generally does whatever it needs to do to get people to take notice.  It is generally considered a good idea to keep up with what’s going on in the world, to be an informed citizen.  Etc.

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I’ve been struggling with an illness for the last 2-3 weeks – some days I wake up thinking, “oh yeah, today’s the day I’m not going to feel like coughing anymore” just to wake up, like I did this morning, at 3:30am with a cough that was just annoying enough to keep me from sleeping anymore.  I’m really tired, my five year old woke up crabby, and I let my energy go where it wasn’t helpful as I lamented not being able to go for the hike that I wanted to go on today.  The shadows were dark this morning, for myriad reasons.

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Continue reading “Giving Energy and Paying Attention”

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On Family

I really wanted to wear a green dress for my wedding.  I found one in the sundress section of a catalogue shortly after we set the date, (September 8, 2007) and I was determined to be different. It was from a catalogue because I don’t care for shopping in any form, and wearing green seemed like a fun way make a statement.  To be contrarian.  To be different from America’s typical run of the mill wedding detail.  To damn the wedding culture man, as it were.  A way to make sure people understood I was doing it my way.  Etcetera.  

The green dress was a no-go.  My mom and I visited a few wedding dress shops, and I ended up getting a white one instead, still simple, still from a catalogue.  But it was white, and from the “wedding dress” section.  

I also wanted Nick and I to say our vows in a field down by the Big Sioux River.  I love nature, the prairie, feeling the wind on my face, looking at the sky.  I wanted to step into marriage on my own terms, and at the time, one of the ideas that made me feel like things were on my terms was having the wedding in a field of prairie grass down by the river. We didn’t do that either, and thinking back I’m not sure I ever actually suggested this idea out loud. The ceremony was held in the church I grew up attending, with my future father in law presiding. So, at the end of the day, I wore the white dress and had the church wedding.  And I’m glad I did, because my wedding wasn’t just about what I, the bride, wanted at that point in my young adulthood.  It was about grafting a new branch onto the family tree.  It was about public commitment to a new way of being in partnership with another human. And it was a commitment to a new way of being in relationship with a new group of people – an extended family. Continue reading “On Family”

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Hiking Naked

Originally posted on Heidi Barr:
Knocked off her feet after twenty years in public health nursing, Iris Graville quit her job and convinced her husband and their thirteen-year-old twins to move to Stehekin, a remote mountain village in Washington State’s North Cascades. They sought adventure; she yearned for the solitude of this community of eighty-five… Continue reading Hiking Naked

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Year In Review: Really?

Yes, this is a post about 2016, a classic “year in review” run-down, a “hey look at me, this is what happened in my life” kind of post.  Because this is my website, so I can do this sort of thing.  If you have a website, maybe you can do the same.  If you don’t have a website, you could even do this on a piece of paper.  The point is to find the clarity in the messes, the good among the catastrophe, and the pattern that flows through the chaos.

Danielle LaPorte posed five questions to herself, and they seem like good ones to ask as I reflect on the past year.  So I’ll go ahead and borrow them — here they are: Continue reading “Year In Review: Really?”

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A New Better Off: Living the Good Life

Courtney E. Martin, in her new book called The New Better Off argues that our society is moving away from what was once considered “the good life.”  For years, people said things like “well, I want my kids to be better off than I was,” and often times that meant hoping those kids got a steadier job, or a nicer/bigger house, or into a better financial situation.  But perhaps there’s a cost to putting all of life’s meaning under the old definition of “better off.”  In her introduction Martin says,

…what’s more, some of the things we have associated with success actually endanger our health [and leave us unhappy.] Underneath the appearance of uplift, a complex [success] story weighs us down. This could play out in a number of ways…like when people set aside authentic career ambitions in favor of more lucrative paths; or when a father knows his colleagues better than he does his own kids; or a mother leans in so hard she falls flat on her face.  Pressure and debt, missed get togethers, living for the weekend, living someone else’s dream. “Better off” left uninterrogated, can be fucking dangerous.

Continue reading “A New Better Off: Living the Good Life”