After I pulled out the peas I had diligently planted and tended because their season was over, a lone sunflower remained. I smiled at it, wondering how it got there. Perhaps a bird or a squirrel or even the wind left a single seed to grow sheltered and nourished by the peas. It smiled back [...]
Words and actions have lasting effects… In 1969, having been in California for a year and moved from one job to another, I ended up working as a bookkeeper at Capitol Records in Beverly Hills. It was the place everyone in the industry came to get records, and celebrities often dropped by. One time I [...]
Is Your Twig Too Big To Fit In The Hole? This might help… A movement caught my eye. A flutter up. A flutter down. It was a wren with a long slender twig trying to get it into the small opening of the birdhouse. Up-down, up-down. Holding a stick in its beak wider than the [...]
This might help— I don’t think I want to meet the person who knows all the answers. I believe I would be suspicious. How could they be so sure? Did they cause the problem? Are they trying to ruin people’s lives? Do they know all the facts? Our brains are designed to filter out what [...]
I opened the drawer where I keep candles and flashlights and realized that I still had two beautiful scented candles waiting for me to use them. It reminded me of my mother’s candle drawer. Actually, not just one drawer, two big ones stuffed with candles of all sizes and shapes. She never lights them. Even [...]
Habits are wonderful. Except when they aren’t. The habits I like are the ones that keep me in line, moving down the road towards where I want to go. Habits I don’t like are like ruts in that road. Ruts can be challenging to get out of, especially when we do the exact opposite of [...]
Last summer, I watched wren families move into a nesting box. First, they took out what was already in the box. They were so industrious. For hours the wren would pop in and then pop out with old nesting material in her beak. She’d toss her head to throw it and then pop back in [...]
Why want what we already have? What a glorious year we have had. All of us. Yes, glorious if we choose to look at it that way. The glorious part? For the first time in our memory, the world has shared an experience that affected us equally. But the living of it and its aftermath [...]
Fixing broken things is not an activity that most of us enjoy. The plastic knob on my mixer broke off, and I didn’t celebrate that I would need glue, a clamp, and time to fix it. What I said to myself was, “I can live with it. Who needs a knob anyway?” But the shower [...]
On the way to yoga, I saw a man walking down the street proudly displaying his political affiliation. It was not mine. So for a split second, I judged him. And then I judged myself for judging him. A few blocks away, I stopped judging us both and thought about perception. Yes, my favorite topic. [...]
The answer is yes; you’re probably doing everything backwards. Which makes life much harder than it needs to be. It’s time to stop working against ourselves. The way to do that is to be flexible before strong. I mean this both literally and figuratively. I’m serious. Being a business and life coach for almost thirty [...]
Once upon a time, a coach I was working with told me I could be another Tony Robbins. I said, no. I had no desire to be the person who I would have to become to do that. He didn’t understand, and not long after that told me he couldn’t work with me anymore. Well, [...]
While walking one morning, I had a magical experience. As I turned the corner onto the next street, the world went silent. Not nature. The world. I made no sound. My feet were silent. My breath was silent. It was if the person I call me wasn’t there. I was a camera moving through the [...]
<img src="https://www.becalewis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/WhoDoWeFollow-1024x536.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="536" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3837" / Leadership lessons from Harry the squirrel. We name our squirrels. Harry Peanut is a young gray squirrel with a bounce in her step and a very distinctive way of approaching and eating the peanuts we leave out for her. But most importantly, she is a wise [...]
On Monday, March 23, 2020, my satellite clock went crazy. Or I did. Because we didn’t agree on the date. I thought that it was March 23, but a glance at the clock on my desk told me it was March 24. I believed that to be true for an entire day until I looked [...]
It’s an interesting term: Sheltering in place. What place? That is the question. Where in our thinking are we sheltering? What are we believing? What are we accepting as truth? Are we allowing ourselves to fall into this current pandemic of fear? Because that’s what this is. Fear attempting to force us into separation. Shelter [...]
For years, while sitting in a tiny church in Venice, CA, I stared at this quote on the wall. “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.“— Mary Baker Eddy. I did not truly understand what that meant. But more than anything I wanted to. It was a promise, and I [...]
Lurking in the shadows of our lives is a fear—and a resistance—to showing up. And yet, since we are here on earth, we agreed to show up.
Not just as a person that takes up space, or lives life as something to endure, but showing up to the something that you, and only you, are here to do.
With a date like 2020, there is no way to not go to the symbol of seeing clearly. Maybe this year could begin a whole decade of seeing clearly. As a human race, we certainly need clear sight to heal separations between people and nations, and to repair the damage we have done to our [...]
As much as we might wish it, nothing stays the same. It never did. And now, everything changes so quickly, and often, it may feel impossible to keep up both physically and emotionally. Often we pretend it isn’t happening, thinking that if change doesn’t affect us directly, perhaps we can sit it out. We may [...]
You’ve seen them everywhere. Storage units. Places to store our stuff. The stuff we aren’t using. The stuff we are afraid to throw away. The stuff we have no idea what to do with, so we keep it. We pay for it to sit there. Perhaps never to be seen again. But Life Storage is [...]
(Mom and dad right after they met in 1945. They were married a few weeks later.) If my dad were still with us, he would be ninety-nine today, October 8, 2019. Many things have changed since my father passed away ten years ago. One thing that has changed is I have written many more books [...]
Standing in the middle of cornstalks over eight feet high, I was feeling quite content. It was the end of the corn’s growing season, and I was removing all the cornstalks that had already produced corn. I wanted the remaining stalks to have more light, air, and nutrients so they could complete what they started. [...]
Discouragement is something everyone faces from time to time. In my last post, I talked about the need to shift, or pivot, or change our minds. But something that often gets in the way of doing that is the feeling of discouragement. So, as promised, here are some ways that have helped me, and my [...]
We’ve passed the halfway point in our Say Yes year. It’s time to look at how that’s going. A crucial thing that we are learning is that in order to say yes to what we want, we have to say no to things we don’t want. That’s not too hard. But sometimes we have to [...]
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
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