Clear Water
What benefit to ourselves, others and creation could we see if we shut everything down one day a week?
America's 9mm Heart Problem.
Some Americans worship at the altar of firearms - acolytes of Smith and Wesson and Remington. On the flip side, many choose to ignore the lessons of history while marginalizing the foundational documents of our country. Both are misguided and ill-focused.
Healing Broken Hearts.
There’s a wound in the human heart that isn’t self-healing producing anxiety, broken relationships, and damaged lives
Margins. Lessons from pages and plants.
Many people achieve great and mighty things by pushing the margins of their lives to near extinction. They may even look impressive with their achievements. Yet there’s little room for things that decorate humanity like peace, love, relationships and revelation.
Casting a Long Shadow.
Remember, success is intentional!
Well, to be perfectly precise, Sir Winston The Great! He’s our ten-year-old, West Highland Terrier. He’s quite the character. Seventeen pounds of pooch with a ton of passion. He’s the embodiment of the phrase, little body, big heart. We were on a walk the other day, and we stopped for a moment to catch our breath. It was quite warm, and the pavement radiated heat like a furnace. I saw and captured a photo I’m including with this post. It made me think of all the years gone by with this big-hearted dog.
Winston is the second of our two Westies. The older, wiser, more cautious Reilly, aka The Wonderful Mister O’Reilly (it has nothing to do with the political pundit!), is deliberate and calculated. He’s never run into a wall chasing a ball. But he has slid off the edge of the couch while sluggardly sleeping on his back. But Winston, well, let’s put it this way, if Winston were our first dog, we wouldn’t have two...
Coffee Crash. How to Avoid a Meltdown!
What if we've been conditioned, even encouraged, to handle big problems with more emotion and intensity than we should? What if, we approached them with the same matter-of-factness as we do when the toothpaste runs out?
I just received a new shipment from my favorite caffeine dealer, Birch Coffee in NYC. I wanted to try their Brazilian roast, so breaking out my Chemex, scale, and kettle, I brewed a batch. I’d gotten up early this morning, so I had extra time to take time. With the warm weather, I strolled out to our patio with coffee in hand, sipping carefully the delightful flavor I’ve come to expect from Birch Coffee. Savoring both the cloudless sky and a delightful breeze rustling the edges of the plants surrounding the patio, it was a perfect morning to enjoy café fresca! But, as in most situations when you’re vacationing in your mind but living in reality, it was time to shuffle off to work.
I’ve been making my way through an insightful book called, Creativity Inc. It’s the story of Pixar by one of its founders, Ed Catmull, full of anecdotal lessons on life and leadership. Being both a fan of Pixar and healthy leading, it’s been a great read. The other night I finished the chapter on change where Ed drills down into the depths of our fears surrounding change. One thing catching my attention was his differentiation on handling small and large problems; he says there isn’t any! Running out of toothpaste isn’t confronted any differently than a crashed computer hard drive storing years of work - but we’ve been conditioned to think there is and so for one we are calm and the other we fuss...
Skunk Boy Strikes Again!
No one likes getting skunked. But once we embrace the fact that getting skunked is part of living, how we handle it becomes the real issue. When we learn or choose to respond rather than react, we allow for process to engage, not outburst. We can control stress rather than letting it control us.
The Art of Bacon.
Life is a lot like cooking bacon. Take time to understand the beauty of both!
A Conglomeration of “Becauses”. Or, How to Keep Your Sanity When Peed On!
Sometimes there's a conglomeration of events for which no explanation exists. It happened…because. But how we respond in those times can make all the difference to us and those around us.
Smooth Operator. The Secret to Conquering Everything!
If you can control your mind, you can control your world. Not the world around you, but the world you live internally. No amount of muscle can do this for you.