a blog about the beauty that's everywhere

Wonder of wonders are essential oils, don’t you feel?  You can get a magical bottle with the essential oil of cedarwood or sandalwood or cypress or eucalyptus and, come nightfall, pour a few drops of the oils in your lovely bath. Perfect ending for those days you aren’t privileged to spend among trees. I love [...]

This is quite an amazing album of sound recordings by Jonathan Goldman, sound healer, using luminous Crystal Tones singing bowls.  I promise this will change the very nature of your day when you listen.  Leave it playing on repeat and see if you suddenly realize you are in theta state.

This woman, Christie Marie Sheldon, is doing amazing work in raising consciousness.  Check out Love or Above, her toolkit with audio downloads of energetic tools to help you let go of your focus on energies like worry or fear and instead to focus on energies of love and joy and peace.  There’s a choice, and [...]

Suzanne Vinson is a wonder of love and vitality being expressed through creativity. To walk in to her studio in the Ginter Park Community Center in the north side of RVA is to walk in to a place where ALL THE LIGHTS ARE ON. I am grateful for her and people like her. Here’s a [...]

You may not seem to be doing anything much in the way of production, like clocking work hours or acquiring goods, or writing Pulitzer Prize winning books. Imagine, though, that there are qualities in you that are very tree-like. You stand with roots deep in the ground, soaking up water, soaking up earth energy, with [...]

Oh, my goodness, the possibilities are endless with these.  The photos or illustrations could be of anything, yes?  DIY House Lanterns Fellow Fellow | Apartment Therapy.

Apartment Therapy has a nice little primer on nurturing yourself:  Ways To Use Your Home To Manage Stress & Stay Healthy | Apartment Therapy.

This is rather a wondrous book by James Nestor, filled with practical and often hilarious advice on being-ness.  The full title of the book is “Get High Now *without drugs” and has, according to the book cover, “over 175 sensory trips and tricks for visual stimulation, compressing time, lucid dreaming, meditation and more.”  I am [...]

Hey now, a gathering of goddesses!! I am pretty sure we’re all going to love the world these women are dreaming up for us.Oprah on Stillness and Meditation – Oprah Visits Fairfield Iowa, a/k/a TM Town.

Walk into the place where you live and see if it is dark. See if the tv is on, if the dishes are stacked in the sink. Smile at the room, as though you are Aunt Bea from the Andy Griffith show and are about to fix everything. If you have an apron, this would [...]

Do you know about rosewater spray?  It’s one of those essential ingredients I keep stocked in my home and in my portable altar.  It basically smells like love. So you can spray it on your face, your sheets, everywhere.  I always spray it in the room before an energy session.  It raises the vibration immediately. [...]

Here’s me on my latest camping trip in California.  (Not really.) This is my blog, yes? So, just in case you’re thinking: “What the what is a blog?”  A blog is sort of an online stream of consciousness which you update on a periodic basis.  Several times a day/ a couple of times a year, [...]

Flipboard.  This is my all-time favorite app on the iPad.  It takes all the overwhelm of different sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and transmutes them somehow to beauty, calm and joy.  More photos, less words.  It’s available for the iPhone now, and although the smaller screen viewing won’t be quite as glorious as the iPad [...]

I was walking by the ocean today with some dear and lovely friends and found myself thinking of this word, “still.”  And it seemed, at its essence, to be about presence.  Being fully present.  Or maybe it was just the ocean whispering sweet nothings to me. adj. still·er, still·est 1. Free of sound. 2. Low [...]

Oh, this is glorious.  Women are showing their bellies.  And in doing so are pushing past the idea that one’s belly needs to look a certain way in order to be beautiful.  In fact, it becomes very clear that each one need only look how it does look and that, my dear ones, is deeply [...]

Here are books that fill me with light:

What do I want for myself? I want to learn how to pare from my consciousness all that is not gratitude. I want to cease praying for anything I do not already have, but pray only to say thank you, and pray to learn how to hold more gratitude. What do I want for myself? [...]

My children are here! Smiles are pouring from me.

Enjoy this pure love… http://youtu.be/AQj213NQG8c

Miranda July made this website a few years back for her book, “No One Belongs Here More Than You.” The book, of course, is wonderful and amazing, as it would have to be. The website is seriously my favorite ever. I just wanted to add it here to my on-line scrapbook of wonder.

This video had me weeping.  I think it’s time.  

This artist, James Gulliver Hancock, is engaged in an attempt to draw all the buildings in New York.  So cool. Check him out.

Where have I been?  This website, 20 x 200, has been around since 2007, hooking up artists that want to sell their cool stuff, and people, like me, who love their cool stuff and want to go to there.   This is “Day 1, Vintage Erasers” first of a 365-day project by artist Lisa Congdon. [...]

I am reading this really lovely book by Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (aka SARK), called Glad No Matter What:  Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity.  And I am reading it very. slowly. It’s all about being willing to feel deeply.  And to feel eight things at once, deeply.  And to know that though [...]

This is pretty beautiful:  a post from Zenhabits.net on mindfulness. 9 Mindfulness Rituals to Make Your Day Better  

I found this on laughingsquid.com. Such a lovely place to find delight. Aurora Borealis in Finnish Lapland 2011 from Flatlight Films on Vimeo.

My daughter commented on this article, “A Message to Women from a Man:  You are Not Crazy” on Facebook, saying: This is a very smart, very refreshing, and very true article. A must-read for everyone. Yep. She’s right.

I hadn’t ever posted these photos from August when Kenny’s band played at the Boom Boom Room.  So, here they are. Here is Kenny, my son.  You can already tell he’s a rock star.                 Here is Corie, my beautiful daughter.  She thinks this photo is creepy, but [...]

This was on the sidewalk in San Francisco near Kenny & Kira’s house.  What an excellent idea:  to love everyone and every thing, no matter what, even though, anyway.

Oh, wow, I finally came through West Virginia on a day that Blenko Glass was open. All that color. I am forever in love.    

There is something about a road trip, with its vast changing panoramas of field, sky, city, flowers, truck wheels, with its swooping birds and deep possibilities, that lets me hold life a little looser, more delicately, giving it room to breathe.

Soundtrack: “Elijah,” by the Mountain Goats.    

This was a very different sunrise over corn. First it started flashing me its color behind the St. Louis arch. Then over the Missouri River and into Illinois where the colors of the sun spreading across the enormous sky and the fields and the road were all I wanted in the world. Soundtrack to this [...]

I ended up having a flat tire about 20 miles from the Kansas border.  I spent a while here where this photo was taken, calling back and forth with a cow on the other side of the ridge.  Hellooo!  Mooo!!  Helloooo!  Mooo! AAA came and changed my tire to the temporary one I had in the [...]

More America the beautiful. I am driving into autumn, past harvested fields, past telephone lines, black-eyed Susans, cattle fences. Meanwhile Bill Bryson, excellent company on the road, tells me of the bend in the universe. I believe I can see it from here.

Horses. Corn. Blue blue mountains, repeating.

The land flattens out, stretches further. Yarrow grows at the roadside. Treeless, here where you’d have to go so deep for water. Scattered cattle ranches, the continental divide. Ethereal, butter-colored place.

Bleached yellow hills. Green brush. Grey buttes, then orange, then lime, then purple at a distance. Antelopes. Neil Young’s singing on my car speaker seems to come from the land itself. This place we live is beauty layered on beauty. And all our scratching at it with roads and strip mines and leveling of trees [...]

  Just surreal.  That white you see is salt.

“Il pleut,” in French, means “it rains,” but I think there is a French poet that plays with the language so that “to rain” and “to cry” are much the same. I brought Eli up to camp in Mt. Shasta for his last night.  I didn’t know where we were going when I packed the [...]

This always makes trips to the airport feel so thrilling. That is one marvelous fog font.

I use lots of tools for clearing my space and my body energetically, just depending on what feels right at the time.  Here are some of them: Lemons.  Another healer taught me to cut up a couple of lemons and add them to the bath to immediately clear my energetic field of any energies that are [...]

I was walking on the beach in Hatteras one cold January day with my dear friend Martha, and she and I were the only ones on the beach.  Martha headed off for a long solitary walk and I sat down on the sand and gazed out at the water, hoping for dolphins. They came.  Lots [...]

Forget who you are.  Forget why you came here.  Sink down as though you can’t touch bottom and there’s no fetching orange life jacket to strap around you.  Take little shallow breaths as though there’s just so much air.   Never dance.  Avoid laughing.  Think of everything that’s so wrong or that’s happened and all the [...]

…and to learn more about these fabulous people at Fibershed. Here’s an excerpt from the Etsy post which explains the Fibershed Project: In September of 2010, Rebecca pledged for one year to wear only garments made from fiber grown within a 150-mile radius of her front door, just north of San Francisco. Rebecca spins, weaves, [...]

This is the kind of news we can use: the San Francisco Bay Guardian reporting on a potential astral projection near a tree in Potrero Hill.  Here’s what the notice says: NOTICE I’m currently testing my time machine and if all goes according to plan expect to materialize here at 1:30pm on Friday the 19th [...]

I learned about this amazingness on Making It Lovely’s Facebook page. This is sand.  Photographed by Gary Greenberg, who, by his own description, is an artist, inventor and scientist who has devoted his life to revealing the secret beauty of nature. I am grateful for his work, which makes me slow way down, and know, just [...]

My amazing nephew, Tommy, has just started teaching at a school in New Orleans through Teach for America.  Besides being brilliant, he is pure hearted, and his new class is so lucky to have him (as I’m sure they’ve already come to realize).  His classroom is in need of a projector and he’s looking for [...]