Month: September 2013

by

Eking meaning from my first black eye

carol shinerIt was just before lunch and I was happily striding down Chestnut Street, rushing to fetch that Volvo we’re either going to keep or sell.

I never made it to the car. Catching my toe on a loose brick, I planted my face on the brick sidewalk. Luckily for my face, my right hand broke the fall a bit. Not so lucky for my hand. Sure changed my plans for the day. Instead of reading, writing, walking and playing with our granddaughter, I spent the day at urgent care and radiology, icing and resting. I was incredibly lucky — no broken bones, just a very sore hand and my first ever shiner.

I will also admit to a shaken psyche. One of the ways I calm myself when shaken is to try to make meaning from the event. Writer Carolyn Myss suggests that we treat the unexpected in our lives as a form of spiritual direction. The fall was certainly unexpected — what might it direct my attention toward? Continue reading →

by

How travel opens windows on the ways we live

Living in a 16 by 18 foot room is easier if you have the means to travel.

Susan Ager reminded me of that with a comment to a Facebook update I posted last week about connecting in Vienna with a friend from Boston.

Susan’s right, of course, and not just about the fun and freedom attached to hightailin’ it out of the country now and then.

It’s also about getting a glimpse of how differently people relate to their stuff, their space and the people around them.

One of my first eye-openers on this front came more than 30 years ago. Continue reading →

by

Keep the car?

Part of our original downsizing plan was to let go of the car once we got settled in Boston. We haven’t done that yet.

We love the easy access we have to great public transportation. For the most part, we delight in using that. And, for the times when a car could be really helpful, zipcar is readily available. Still, we’re not ready to let the car go yet.

In the heart of Boston a car is not always an advantage. One either finds parking on the street or pays serious money for a dedicated parking place. Sometimes really serious money. We’ve opted for street parking. It can be complicated. The other morning, for instance, Bill got up to move the car by eight AM for the street sweepers. He could only find parking at a meter, which meant I had to move it two hours later. Luckily the street sweepers had finished with our street and I could get a place right in front of our house. Whew! Safe – until we use it for something or the streets get swept again in two weeks.IMG_2420

Is this how I want to spend time? Doesn’t downsizing and simplifying suggest we should give up this car we don’t really need. What about our commitment to a sharing economy? And what about lessening our carbon footprint? Continue reading →

by

Resources for downsizing, intentional communities and the sharing economy

If you glance at the horizontal navigation just above the photo stretching across the top of the page, you’ll see a new addition: Resources.

Now that Carol & I have been at this for about a month, we’re beginning to accumulate books and links and other stuff we think you might be interested in.

We’ll update the Resources page regularly and invite you to help us make it useful, either via comments below or via email. I’ve pasted the first paragraph of the resources page here to give you an idea of what you’ll find there:

As we encounter useful resources along the paths of downsizing, living in an intentional community and exploring the sharing economy — among other things! — we’ll share them here. We’ll pass along resources we’ve used ourselves or are recommended by trusted friends. We get a small cut of any books you purchase from Amazon.com via the links below, but we have no financial stake in any of the other products or services listed.

by

Are we losing our habitat?

The other day I walked to the Museum of Science to see a movie about coral reefs. I’ve been intrigued with reefs ever since reading an article in the science section of the New York Times a little over six years ago about the death of many coral reefs and the efforts to restore them. The article brought tears to my eyes. Coral reefs, sometimes called the rain forests of the sea, are diverse communities that shelter a vast array of species. If any one of those species is at risk, if the diversity gets lost, it puts the whole community at risk. If the coral, the habitat of the community, dies off it threatens the species who live there. Many scientists quoted in the article were pessimistic about our ability to reverse the dramatic loss of reefs in recent times.

Coral_reef_in_Ras_Muhammad_nature_park_(Iolanda_reef)

Wikimedia Commons photo by Mikhail Rogov

The movie, a visual delight, was more hopeful, but also suggested that reefs could disappear in our lifetime. The opening scenes confirmed an intuition I had about human communities and coral reefs.  The scenes flashed back and forth between cities packed with people and traffic moving in all directions and reefs with schools of fish streaming in all directions. Point made: Community is our human habitat, our coral. Continue reading →

by

There’s a baby in the kitchen

It wasn’t that unusual over the years to walk into our kitchen in the morning and find someone we didn’t recognize.

baby in the kitchen2We were lucky that our kids felt free to invite their friends for extended stays. And in Florida, the sphere of visitors expanded as Carol’s brother, Jim, and his wife, Karen, brought friends to help them sail the boat they kept at the end of our dock.

Still, I can’t remember walking into our kitchen and finding a baby we weren’t expecting!

That’s happened a couple of times at the Friends House, most recently this weekend with the appearance in the kitchen of 13-month-old Alice and her parents Brittany and Andrew. Continue reading →