Minimalism / Relationships / Uncluttering / Working Life / Writing/Blogging — 2 comments
03
Sep 10
I’ve been working for the past couple of months on the first of a series of cooking ebooks called The Minimalist Cook; its launch date is September 21st. By a stroke of good fortune I am getting tremendous assistance in the launching process from blogging masters Mary Jaksch and Leo Babauta. There’s a lot to learn from them, and if you are a new or new-ish blogger, it would be well worth your time to check out and join their A-List Blogger Club.
Mary has the blog Goodlife Zen. In a recent post she relates her personal story, which is how she went from a huge financial loss to creating a new line of work and income stream. I really related to her experience, so when she then wrote a post asking readers to share their own rising-from-the-ashes stories, I contributed a condensed version of my own. Later, after re-reading it, I had a bad case of Poster’s Remorse. Yes, my husband and I had a few rough breaks, but that’s life, right? In answer, however, Mary proposed to give me a hand with the launch of my ebook, an offer I accepted wholeheartedly. As part of the offer, she wanted me to write more fully about my personal story, because, like her own, it led to blogging and learning how to set up a related income stream. So here it goes: Continue reading →
Minimalism / Writing/Blogging — 23 comments
23
Aug 10
Monday morning! It’s back to the writing life in my Happy Chair, with the front door open and loads of daylight in the room. It hasn’t happened often enough during the endless slog of unreasonably hot humid weather this summer: a morning temperate enough to open the east-facing front door and simply enjoy the sunshine streaming into the dining room while I write. I sit at the table in one of the four hard chairs, the one that lets me look directly out the door and by unplanned coincidence have a view of the street romantically framed by part of the covered porch and the front garden. In fact I’ve just now deleted a rambling description of said porch and garden, complete with the above view of the dove on a garden rock, because it was veering completely off the topic of writing. Continue reading →
Uncategorized — 1 comment
20
Aug 10
You hear the news and the floor
falls out from under you:
life will never be the same.
Bewilderment. At a loss
to match up what you know
with what you’ve known all along–
and yet it doesn’t happen.
I’m not taking this in.
They want to talk to you now,
all the peripherals,
who think they know but don’t.
Loss they cannot take from you,
no matter how hard they try.
This can’t be happening.
Memory calls directions;
no choice but to keep catching
and jumping on the pain
to wherever it takes you,
down spirals dark in your mind,
across circuits of heart
that still snap and pang so hard
without warning again and
again until the signs
make some allusion to sense:
north, south, east, west, up and down
in a language you know
and yet unknown until now.
Simplicity/Minimalism / Uncluttering — 26 comments
10
Aug 10
One person’s minimalism might be another’s frugal living, another’s owning of 100 things, and yet another’s decluttering project. Some people consider it simply a practical matter for traveling light and others consider it a matter of principle, to leave a lighter footprint on the world. Then there is minimalism and the spiritual, where eschewing material excess promotes connection with God or a higher Self or Being. There is also minimalism as an aesthetic, such as minimalist design, where the walls are white and and clutter is a sin.
Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got all of the above going on to one extent or another, Continue reading →
27
Aug 10
Comments or No Comments? Walking the Blog
The analogy in the title has nothing to do with dogs, but with a plant. The picture above is of an Egyptian Walking Onion, a weird beauty of a plant which sends up a big central onion-domed stalk and loads of little onion-domed stalks around it. It “walks” by sending out horizontal shoots at the top of a stalk; gravity then causes the stalk to bend down to the ground, enabling the shoot to take root. In this way, the onion walks all over the garden and soon there is a large network of edible onion bulbs taking over your garden world. Here’s the Wikipedia entry if you want to know more about this plant.
I’ve noticed that blogs spread the same way: plant a blog, and then a bunch of topics and posts sprout up around it. Comments shoot out from the posts and then Continue reading →