Create the life you want.

There’s a reason that gardening is a metaphor for living. Actually, there are dozens. Today, I finally attended to the rock garden. It was vastly overgrown with weeds. Over the years, my neighbor’s lily of the valley has intruded into this garden, the weeds that never seem to die but that need pulling every year have wended their way everywhere and the plants I want have just extended their own tendrils as far as they can. It was chaos. As I worked, every metaphor for living

I'm off this week, so I'm remembering this one: I saw a man on TV who is color blind. Completely color blind. He sees no color. It's rare but not unheard of. No color. All his life. Imagine that! I did. It got me to wondering about this: Is the world we see the same regardless of who is looking at it? When I see green and you see green, is the color we see independent of us? Or is green the name we both agree on while we look at the same leaf but you have your green and I

In her book The Correspondent, Virginia Evans’s narrator observes the general truth that we will all be forgotten in a relatively short time saying "...so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, will be reduced to the blood in their veins..." Her point is not lost on me, as I fondly remember my grandparents, some more so than the others, but I do not recall knowing my great-g

I’m enjoying my art appreciation class. It’s my third one. I take it with others over age 50 who, like me, have joined the Lifetime Learners Institute, a program offered to our cohort by our local community college. It’s staffed by volunteers. Classes are offered in a wide range of areas from art appreciation to military history to short story reading, as well as classes on current events, Asian brush painting and the Beat poets. A minimal registration and individual course f

I remember being so excited back when I discovered Prodigy in the 80s , an online forum for chatting with people of similar interests, checking this new thing called e-mail, and searching for all kinds of information right from my own computer in my own home. I thought this was just incredible. It was like having an entire library right at my fingertips, right on my own private computer, right in my home! Among other interests, I recall being part of a group who self-selected

Mary Oliver asked what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life ? It is, you know -- precious. You are precious and your life is precious, too. So is our one world. You get this one world. We all do. One world. One life. Take care of both of those things, as they are one and the same. Treasure your life like the precious gift that it is. Cherish your world like the precious satellite that it is. There is no plan B. Take care, good loving care, of yourself, your spa

Think of all the advice you’ve heard about seeing. What you see is what you get. It’s hiding in plain sight; open your eyes! Don’t believe everything you see. A picture is worth a thousand words. I know it’s true – I’ve seen it with my own eyes. We rely heavily on our eyesight, more so than any of our other senses. I think that works against us for several reasons but mainly because we can be easily fooled or misled by what we see. It’s important to remember that. We see what

E Every cloud has a silver lining. Certain adages are repeated over and over – thus becoming cliché – because they are generally true. Nearly 400 years ago, John Milton wrote a poem he called Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle in which he wondered if “a ‘sable cloud [did] turn forth her silver lining on the night?” The phrase eventually became commonplace in the cliché, every cloud has a silver lining. Here’s the point: seeking some evidence of hope in the midst of gloo

I am tired. It’s not because of anything I’ve done, like a good long run or hours of yard work. No, I’m tired because of an accumulation of recent events in life. It’s important to recognize when life is tiring you out. Because that happens. It’s real. Good things, hard things, all the things – doesn’t matter. There are times when it’s exhausting. So when you feel tired, pay attention, and don’t underestimate the impact that life has on the psyche and the body. Sure, we all h

Having just spent the week with a brand new lens in my right eye which corrects my vision and is crystal clear and my decades-old lens in my left eye which has needed glasses for over 30 years and has still got a well-developed cataract has been – may I say it? – an eye-opening experience. All week, I’ve been shutting one eye then the other back and forth like a child playing with a fascinating new toy. Cataracts are a normal part of aging. Yes, I’ve aged to the point of havi