books

A Simple Practice for Protecting Your Mental Clarity I was in class, packing up after our yoga practice. Around me, other yogis were doing the same—rolling up their mats, chatting, heading off to start their days. And I watched, as I always do, with a mix of fascination and quiet concern. Nearly everyone was doing [...]

Imagine your life as a container–specifically, a bowl. While this might seem like an unusual comparison, it offers some interesting insights about how we live and what we choose to keep in our lives. As Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Similarly, the more [...]

Let go, celebrate life, and allow joy. I didn’t notice how hard my year had been until I started on the final edit of my book, Follow Me Here. It all started last May, my favorite month of the year. Behind the scenes of everyday life, I would discover what grief feels like. It began [...]

There’s a last time for everything. Sometimes, but not always, we get to choose when that will be.

While working in my office one morning, I glanced out the window at the solar water fountain in the birdbath and realized I was just like that fountain. Have ever watched one? When the sun is out, it shoots water out into the air a foot high. The water sparkles and shines in the sun [...]

I was ready to record a batch of videos. I always write a bunch of scripts and record all the videos at one time. That way, I only have to do the setup once. After forty-five minutes of setup time, I was ready to begin. But my test video was beyond terrible. The lighting was [...]

And this is why that’s a good thing… For a few years, I had a real live assistant named Stella. I shared her time with a few other people in the office, but it was the first time in my life I could turn over some of my work to someone else with the assumption [...]

Many years ago, my mentor told me that a bird flying into the sun becomes invisible to its predators. She was reminding me to hide in the light while pursuing freedom, creativity, and enlightenment. Now I get it. And it’s all because I have learned that to have really clean floors, I need to sweep [...]

The radio and then TV show This Is Your Life was designed to show people that they had many people who cared about them, had a bright future, and had made a difference in people’s lives. Intentional or not. But it did something else. It showed how seldom life turns out how we thought it [...]

Time doesn’t change us. It just unfolds us. — Max Frisch Even though there is no time, past, present, or future, it’s how we experience life—as an unfolding, a transformation. We can either view transformation as something to fight against or embrace it. And it’s easier, in the long run, to embrace it, to think [...]

We’ll never complete anything, never climb a hill, never figure out something we don’t know how to do until we get started. And sometimes the thing that looks the most daunting is actually the most creative. Fearing what might happen or not happen is a shadow.

I was trying to print out something, but I didn’t hear it printing in the next room. Since it was a new program, and I had already judged it to be “behind the times,” I figured it was the program and didn’t check the printer. It took two days and multiple tries before I checked [...]

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. — Robert Louis Stevenson How many times have you tried to change someone, or even yourself, and failed miserably? Without knowing a single thing about what happened or what you were trying to do, I know why it probably didn’t work as well as [...]

You can dissolve any problem. Yes, this is a preposterous statement. Any problem? Yes, any problem. Eventually. But there is a price to pay. Not in money. But in paying this price, you don’t give up anything. You will get something. Because what you want is not something you hold in your hand. It’s something [...]

Not If It Was Never Lost In May, I lost two things. In September, I found them both. Yes, I looked for them, but when I couldn’t find them, I considered them both gone and replaced them. After all, they were only a garden trowel and a paring knife. I found the knife after our [...]

I’m a design show junkie. Fashion design, furniture design, house design, garden design, food design, even Lego design. Who cares what it is? When I find a design show to watch, I get all tingly and excited. Watching the creative process is exhilarating and inspiring. And some designs that come out of that process are [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

While the Soleis traveled as slowly as possible, the Eos was moving as quickly as it could. So fast sometimes, Meg wished that it would slow down. Like Stryker, she didn’t like ships either, and for many of the same reasons. Mostly, she hated the rocking and rolling. No matter what she did, she constantly [...]

Shifting Stories: Sampling Books, One (or 2) Chapters at a time. Your imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. —Albert Einstein Now that you have the basic tools, are you ready to get started? Each week has a different focus, but the imagination exercises each day will remain mostly the same. [...]

An evil tyrant. A rebellious uprising. Will her destiny prevent total destruction… or send everyone to their doom? Her gift of shapeshifting may have disappeared, but Meg Porta won’t let her new home perish. Clinging to a slender thread of hope, she’s forced to fulfill her mysterious part in an ancient prophecy. But when the [...]