Create Clarity, Comfort, Connection … and Simplicity in your home

Who thought Carmen Shenk’s book about kitchen simplicity could change your thoughts about your own home?

I love how this book helped me see my home through the author’s lens of simplicity and how it jump-started new ideas for me about how to better organize my kitchen. Even now, weeks after I finished the book, I am still evaluating how I set up my kitchen, what’s necessary and loved, and what is just taking up space. I have a renewed energy for my de-cluttering efforts. I also loved Carmen’s approach of keeping her home a haven, and actively keeping out the negative energy that abounds in the world. Keep reading

Jim Decker, Artist, at the Kennebunk Community Market

Many Saturdays you’ll find me at the Kennebunk Community Market with my books. There are a lot of other vendors there, of course, one of which I am going to talk about today.

Jim Decker is a Maine Artist who paints a variety of images ranging from animals to people to landscapes. He is often in the space opposite mine, so I am privileged, not only to watch Jim work, but to gaze at his paintings that are on display.

What inspired me to write about Jim is the way he connects with all different people of all different ages. I was also struck recently about how children seem to gravitate to him, and how kind he is to them. I have seen him put the paintbrush he was just using into the hand of a girl and encourage her to paint the painting he was just working on. Keep reading

My fat jeans are too tight!

I am working on losing weight (yes, still; yes again) and it occurred to me that although misery loves company, maybe victory does, too.

Also, I know that accountability is a very important component of achieving any goal–at least, I’ve discovered this truth applies to me.

I decided a week ago that it was time to dust off my Weight Watchers food scale.

I am a health coach and I talk to people every day who say they want to weigh less, but they are not really doing much (if anything) about it. I offer to help them and they decline. Why do they do this?

Because they already know how to do it.

And, let’s face it. Isn’t that the truth? We already know (probably on many levels) what is best for us. We just don’t act on that information. Keep reading

When the unthinkable happens

It’s hard to imagine the unthinkable, the loss of a child.
Unless you don’t have to imagine it.

Unless it has happened to you.

Then you don’t have to imagine it. You are living with it every single day.

Two women who have been through want to help others who have also experienced this unfathomable loss get through it, too.

Meet Laura Diehl and Melanie Delorme. Both are mothers who have lost a child.

Laura Diehl is known for extending a light of hope to bereaved parents. Through her writing, speaking, and coaching, she walks with grieving parents in their place of darkness, without judgment or shame, to learn how to live a life of meaning and purpose again. Laura found herself in a place of suffocating darkness after the death of her daughter, Becca, with no one to turn to for help in navigating out of the deep pit of grief. Today, as a bereaved mom living a life of fulfillment, purpose, and destiny, Laura invests her time in helping grieving parents journey from a place of brokenness to becoming a re-purposed vessel in a way that honors the life of their child, instead of living in the shadow of their child’s death.” Laura Diehl’s books are available here and wherever books are sold. Keep reading