the thawing process

Perhaps you were a quiet child.  Calm and compliant.  Perhaps you preferred stillness to movement.  Silence to conversation.  Books over people.  Thinking over talking.  Slowness over urgency.   You kept the hard, dark and scary things to yourself knowing that expressing them would rock the boat.  And rocking that boat may put your survival into…

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kind of blue

January.   (sigh)   If you’d ask Thoreau about how to manage a blue season, he’d say   “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”   That’s quite a different…

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Ground and Notice

  When you read this, your imagination may go into hyperdrive. You may imagine a mystical being floating through my gardens at dawn like a backyard Gandalf who converses telekinetically with the maples and the marigolds. Or you may see a more grounded, earthly being like Wendell Berry, a poet deeply connected to the land…

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have you tried pipe cleaners?

“You look like you’re on a mission”. Out of breath and not really in the mood to chat, I reluctantly slowed down, stopping about 10 feet away from the person who called out to me. I replied that I was walking at a good pace to burn off some nervous energy on a brisk January…

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rewiring thought patterns – hidden beliefs exposed (part 4)

  Once upon a time, it was believed that our brains were wired by our early experiences as young children and then hard-wired by the time we reached early adulthood.  We bought into this with our exclamations of:   “I can’t help it, that’s the way I was born.“ “I’ve always been this way.” “You…

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words in action – hidden beliefs exposed (part 3)

  Richard Rodgers of the Rodgers and Hammerstein songwriting duo was the creative force behind the sentiments in the Sound of Music classic, Something Good, a song that was not in the original stage version but was written additionally for the 1965 film. Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could. So somewhere in my youth…

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stop, drop and breathe!

Have you ever noticed that there seems to be a common reaction to moments of sudden increased tension, unexpected news, or times when we’re nervous, frightened or otherwise overwhelmed?  We hold our breath.   You might recognize that you tend to hold your breath in the following situations: ~ a car stops suddenly in front…

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mind clutter

Somewhere along the bumpy evolutionary path,  we have became chronic over-consumers and collectors.  It is absolutely no surprise then that ‘clutter happens’.  And more clutter means more to manage. Now as the cooler days and crisper nights have us now reaching for sweaters, socks and fleece blankets, ’tis the season to pack up and put…

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