a new time culture

In order to be creative, productive, effective, enthusiastic, and inspired we need downtime or me-time in between all the tasking we have become so accustomed to.  Whether meditation time, gardening time, family time, beach time, hiking time, art time, poetry time - it doesn't matter.  But it's better if it's right-brain time to balance all the left-brain thinking we do so much of.            

This country has not been terribly supportive of the need for personal time because we believe that time is money, time is scarce, time is of the essence, time is precious, and time should not be wasted.  Hence companies don't invest much in their employees' well-being through increased vacation time, and a culture of guilt has formed around taking time off to the detriment of our mental health  (here an earlier related post - enjoy your weekend, really).

In contrast, most Europeans receive between four and six weeks of vacation time on top of all those long religious holiday weekends they have, while we have to scrape by with two lousy weeks unless you have built up serious seniority.  But all these underlying beliefs depend on your perspective.  My husband's company employed a young man for a few months who, before quitting, inquired if he could work part-time instead of full-time because he needed more me-time.  He was willing to take a substantial pay cut in exchange.  I think the younger generation is ready to take their time back.  There is an actual organization, TakeBackYourTime.org, that promotes cultural change to that effect.  Take note, it's coming.

If you are an employer you are in the enviable position of being able to experiment with allowing more time off and experiencing for yourself if it makes your staff more creative, more enthusiastic, more balanced and relaxed, and ultimately more productive.  I believe that two weeks vacation with productivity at half-mast is a bigger waste of time than offering more time off and seeing your staff work at full throttle. 

your gift to the world

Imagine receiving a beautifully wrapped present.  You are undoubtedly delighted, full of hopeful and curious anticipation of what's in the package.  And when you open your beautifully wrapped present, and it's just the right thing, your eyes light up in joy and you break out in a big smile.  Wow!  You feel so grateful and fortunate.  What a wonderful surprise!

What if you saw your life as a gift? A fabulous chance, a miracle, an opportunity to experience this beautiful world.  Then your life couldn't possibly be drudgery, or hard, because it would be sacred and wonderful and miraculous, and full of sparkly "what ifs." 

What if you saw yourself as a gift to the world and to others.  In the form of who you are, how you are, how you do things in your own unique ways. 

What if you saw everyone you interact with as a gift to you?  In what they show you, the insights they offer you, the opportunities they bring to you, how they are and who they are through what they do in their interactions with you.

Then life becomes an endless succession of fabulous encounters and opportunities, full of meaning and magic and curiosity about what's next.  What are your particular qualities that make you a gift to the world?

my personal junkyard

Not all blog posts are about pretty pictures.  My son said that my trunk looks like a junkyard, and he is right (and I cleaned it up for this picture).  

There are the egg cartons to return to the farmer where I buy my eggs.   Batteries to return for recycling to Best Buy.  Plastic flower pot to return to the nursery where I bought some perennials recently.  A whole big pile of reusable cloth bags, a wine carrier, and two cooler bags for my shopping trips.   Cardboard boxes and gently used packaging material to be dropped off at my local shipping center.   A plastic bag stuffed full with recyclable plastic bags to be dropped off in the supermarket plastic bag recycling bin.  Another bag with a few cans and beer bottles to be redeemed at the supermarket bottle center.

I am passionate about reducing my pile of true trash, true trash being the residual cast-off items that go to the landfill because they can't be recycled or reused.  I can't stand waste.  Everything that's put into the garbage increases our overfilled landfills, my personal carbon footprint, and requires more manufacturing - of egg cartons, plastic flower pots, plastic bags, and packaging material.  Take a look here at some reflection worthy recycling and trash facts; and here an earlier post on reducing your trash contribution.    Please mind your trash.

dizzying complexity

Our qi gong practice this past Sunday was memorable in so many ways that it couldn't possibly be illustrated with a photo.  Even if I had been able to take a video it wouldn't have captured half of the experience. It stimulated my senses so completely that I was only able to be in the moment, being and experiencing, and feeling and seeing and smelling and hearing.

Experiences are always fleeting - here now, then gone and replaced by another here now.  We try to capture many with photographs.  But they only convey what we see with our eyes.  A video adds sound.  However, this included so many other impressions.

We practiced outside in the shade under big old trees, a gentle breeze wooshing through the trees that gently caressed my skin, the perfect temperature barely making an impression, neither too cold, nor too warm.  The many garden flowers and grasses gently stimulated my sense of smell in a complex symphony of scents.  Two baby squirrels scampered back and forth along the fence ahead of me.  A deer appeared in the bog below, while the teacher's voice guiding us through the qi gong movements mingled with nature's sounds.  I felt the slightly uneven terrain under my soft soled shoes and repositioned my feet for better balance.  The complexity of the experience was almost dizzying, and words can never convey it all.         

Life becomes so amazing and precious when we manage to experience it in all its glorious complexity, if only for a fleeting moment.  It's a meditation in and of itself to stop and take it all in, and it's way more interesting than counting from one to ten and starting over.  Try it sometime and be awed.

a fish out of water

By now we are all familiar with the benefits of shopping locally.  When you purchase what you can in your own community you support people, your local merchants directly, instead of the corporations of the big box stores, and strengthen the fabric of your downtown.  Shopping locally for produce puts money directly into your local farmers' pockets, not the supermarket corporation.  Here a post on localism and a related post of voting with your $. 

Permaculture (here a post on that), a fairly new agricultural system, has always worked with native plants.  Now we are beginning to expand our awareness to the benefits of using native plants in our gardens - gardening localism.   

Plants that naturally evolved in a particular habitat are inherently hardier, which means more resistant to weather extremes and more resilient to pests.  Native plants have stronger genetic material than hybrids, and are biologically more diverse.  Perhaps you have heard that Peru's staple, the potato, comes in almost four thousand different varieties!  Now that is biodiversity.  Each potato variable developed within its own little ecosystem of weather and soil conditions, and thrives in that particular small patch of land.  A hybrid, on the other hand, was developed in a research facility, out of context of particular local soil and weather conditions.  When such a hybrid is introduced into an out-of-context garden ecosystem that plant is like a fish out of water.  

ka ching!

It may be an old hat for you, this idea that your thoughts create your reality, or it may be a novel idea worthwhile pondering.  Or maybe you never thought about it at all.  But if you're not entirely convinced already that your thoughts and beliefs are responsible for your physical reality think about it in reverse and read on.  

Say you're just coming back from the grocery store, how did that bag of groceries manifest in your house?  A few days ago you must have thought, "The fridge is getting pretty empty, I really need to go shopping."  Then you made your shopping list and off you went. It's pretty easy to trace back how the grocery bags on your kitchen counter originated with an idea in your mind.  Without those thoughts, if your mind had been completely empty regarding the state of your fridge, no groceries would have appeared by magic.

 Same if you're planning a vacation.  You think of it first, research where you want to go, make the arrangements, pay for your trip - and voilà, you're on your way. The first part of this manifestation process is all always mind work.

 It's funny that we are less convinced of this method when it comes to things like wealth and abundance, or health, or love and friendship, or recognition.  In reality these manifestations are just as real and tangible as the groceries in your fridge because you can clearly look at your life and see what you've got. What's your life like?  Do you have what you want?  Do you have the love you need?  Do you have the abundance you want?  If you have tons of friends,  life's serendipity didn't just send them your way.  You must have thought and done something to attract them.  Same with abundance.  Inspecting how you talk will give you a clear indication of where you're at with regard to abundance.  If you say things like, "It's not always easy," or, "I just have to work harder," you are not expecting it to come easily to you, and then it won't.   

The principle for manifesting a new job, abundance, health, or recognition is the same as for manifesting the bag of groceries or the gas in your car.  It starts with thoughts, beliefs, and intent.  Some things take longer to manifest, some manifest right away.  If you're thirsty you'll manifest a glass of water very fast, almost instantaneously.  If you're sleepy you'll go to bed pretty quickly.  If you were down and out and wanted to be a millionaire, even if you were to act like one and turn your belief system around right now, it might take a while before things were visibly moving along towards that goal.  

Think about what you think about, then create something fantastic.  If you're a skeptic try it with something small to test the theory.  

a smörgåsbord

Today I will serve you an eclectic buffet of posts from the bottom of the Deep Living blog archive, a treasure trove of pick-me-ups for a lonely night, a few stray minutes during lunch break, instead of watching your favorite Netflix show, or while surfing the net.   This blog has been in existence for over six years and I'm not even sure what I'll find when I go digging. So here goes...

We all have too much stuff, and not all stuff is created equal.  I found a post from 2015 about what makes stuff meaningful.  

One of my favorite posts, also from 2015,  is a reflection on the power of Now, and the dumbfounding realization that the past actually doesn't exist.  Huh?  Here is the post.

During the Ebola crisis in 2014 I reflected on the mystery of Ebola in particular, and illness in general, at least as we see it from our Western medical perspective.  Food for thought.

By design we don't have a clock in our living area, and in 2013 I reflected on forgetting your watch and experiencing time differently.

In January of 2014 I pondered the choice of our thoughts and how that is so crucial to how we perceive life and our lot in a post called it's your choice.     

Bon appétit!

what's the rush?

During a recent conversation a friend mentioned that he has always been called Joe, although his given name is Joseph.  I mentioned that the nickname thing seems specific to this country.  He nodded and said, "Yes, what's the rush?" A while back in Greece he had asked a new friend with a long first name, "So, what do I call you, Theo?" The friend replied, "Theofilos." 

My mother-in-law sometimes shortened my husband's already short name Brian to Bri.  Some people have tried to call me Sue and I have always gently corrected them, "I'm Susanne."  

First name abbreviations are just not a thing in Europe. We have time.  What's the rush to make us into Sues, Joes, Theos, Petes, and Mikes?  Is time worth so much money that we gain some by abbreviating a first name? 

here's some fabulousness

Wow, it is so easy to get dragged into the go-go-go and work-work-work mode of this culture.  If you don't make a conscious effort to raise your frequency - fabulous emotions have a higher frequency - you sink because you get thought by your subconscious beliefs (our subconscious informs 85% of what we do!).  

We need inspiration on an ongoing basis to remind ourselves of the magnificence of this earthly existence, and if yours is not wondrous you can learn methods to make it so.  To inspire people you need to be inspired.  If you're not inspired you lose your luster.

Currently I am reading Mike Dooley's Infinite Possibilities to remind myself how magical this world really is, and how much I'm in charge of my existence by way of what I think and conjure up that way.  I am always inspired by accounts such as Anita Moorjani's amazing (at least in our limited and limiting way of thinking) healing story, and there are many others like hers.  It's just that our Western medical paradigm does not yet allow for acknowledgement and scientific research into how this works. 

In addition I try to go to at least one inspirational conference each year.   Not only do these conferences inspire me personally and bring renewed inspiration to my thinking, they also contribute to freshening my messages to you.  Here a post, divorce is not an option, from one of the previous inspirational conferences I have attended, Omega Institute's Sustainability Conference.  

At the end of June I will be attending Charles Eisenstein's conference,The Space Between Stories, at the Garrison Institute.  Eisenstein, together with many other inspirational authors and speakers, is leading and lighting the way through the chaos of our cultural redefinition.  Civilizations have come and gone, and ours, in its present expression, has made us and our environment sick.   It is no longer viable and sustainable because it leaves not enough room for fabulousness, inspiration, individuality, freedom, meaning, creativity and all those other great heart based values.  I will report back after my return from Garrison at the end of this month.  

Meanwhile, think about what inspires you?  What lifts your energy?  What puts a smile on your face?  What makes you exhale and say "ahhhhhhhh" in delight?