Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Explore and connect with the niches and nuances of the earth, the sea and sky, our bodies, minds and souls—the places where joy resides. Come away with new understanding of life and how its beauty and powers make us inwardly hum, how gardening or stargazing, touching something wild, listening to the sounds of silence, learning and loving, just simply being, all feed our emotional wellness and craving for joy.
• Meet and read the personal reflections of over 40 artists and individuals from 20 states, Canada and Australia who share the ways and places in which they found fulfillment or simple contentment in life.
• Find nuggets of insight, supportive research and notable quotes that will help illuminate your own sweet spots of life.
• Stretch your mind and nurture your creativity through more than 150 listings and links to actual places, activities and resources for turning the discovery of joy into an everyday affair.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781458208033 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abbott Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2013 |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d) |
Read an Excerpt
LIFE IS FULL of SWEET SPOTS
An Exploration of Joy
By MARY O'CONNOR
Abbott Press
Copyright © 2013MARY O'CONNORAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4582-0803-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1The Earth
* * *
The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power.... The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
–Ota Kte, Native American author
Walden Pond is a seemingly unremarkable kettle-hole of a pond tucked away in 2,680 acres of forest in Concord, Massachusetts. Made famous by author and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, its pristine and tranquil shores and waters own a place on the map as a National Historic Landmark. It is also a starting spot for our own understanding of the Earth as a rich and powerful source of joy—a place that is good to touch and walk on.
Thoreau was drawn to the pond and its surrounding woods as a place where he might confront only the essential facts of life while learning what it had to teach. He got permission from his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to use a piece of land that Emerson owned, and on that bit of land built himself a cabin, moving in on the Fourth of July, 1845. He chose a spot on the side of a hill, offering a front yard in which strawberries, blackberries and "life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod" grew. It was there in this 10' x 15' shingled and plastered house with its brick fireplace, garret and closet, a window on each side, two trap doors and a door at each end, that Thoreau lived for two and a half years.
The tiny cabin was a quiet place where he could live simply and comfortably, albeit without the so-called comforts of life, while observing and writing about the wildlife and the earth around him. In the end, his journal notations became the fodder of his classic Walden and the substance of a philosophy of living that is referred to even today.
Thoreau saw nature as a force that will steer us right—if we just let it. He tells us this in his essay, "Walking," a favorite read for anyone who has ever succumbed to the magnetism of nature. If we are to nurture our health and spirits, we will take his advice and spend four hours a day at least, usually more than that, "sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements."
Take Twenty Minutes a Day
Appreciate the splendor of nature. This, after all, is what Thoreau would have us do. Look up and around, look to the west, to the wild, to the hills and to the fields. There is so much to discover—so much more of the earth and the heavens than we have allowed ourselves to see—so many sweet spots.
The good news is that we don't need to spend two years living in a cottage by Walden Pond as Thoreau did, or even four hours sauntering daily through the woods, in order to appreciate all the earth offers. If we look at the research findings of University of Michigan Professors Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, we would be delighted to know that twenty minutes is all that it takes to benefit from an increased vitality. As they theorize in their studies, natural setting shave a positive influence on both mental and physical health. It all comes down, they say, to brain function and to what they describe as "soft fascination"—a state in which the brain is left free to wander and to soak up pleasing images. With a scenario such as this, respite and revitalization can be found in something as simple as a stroll along the beach or a walk in the woods.
Nature, as University of Rochester professor of psychology Richard Ryan suggests, is an underutilized resource; it is something within which we flourish. "We have a natural connection with living things.... It is also fuel for the soul." Given the extent to which we live and work in built environments, he concludes, it is critical that we find ways to make it more a part of our lives.
As it turns out, while research such as that of the Kaplans and Ryan lays the scientific groundwork for describing what happens when humans come into contact with nature's finery, sometimes it is unvarnished stories of the personal encounters of others that capture our attention in ways that drive the truth home and make us think. Consider this anecdote told by Last Child in the Woods author Richard Louv about his early tree-climbing days:
It was frightening and wonderful to surrender to the wind's power. My senses were filled with the sensations of falling, rising, swinging; all around me the leaves snapped like fingers and wind came in sighs and gruff whispers. The wind carried smells, too, and the tree itself surely released its scents faster in the gusts. Finally, there was only the wind that moved through everything.
Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Make Life Your Garden
Looking closer to home than the woods, we find that plants and flowers fit nicely into the role of building a sense of well-being. Often, while we're not even watching, they manage to weave their way into our unconscious minds as a source of both spiritual and physical renewal.
There is an old Japanese saying that some people like to make a garden of life and to walk only in its paths. U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Kunitz came close to making this the case when he declared in his ninety eighth year that all he wanted to do was to write poems and be in the garden. Reflecting on a century of doing just that, he wrote of his tendency to brush against the flowers while walking in the seaside garden of his Provincetown home, anticipating the fragrant eloquence of their response.
His love of the garden went beyond its ultimate gift of bloom, beyond the rose, just ready to unfold, and reveled in the broader comfort of a kind of relationship that could be "transacted wholly without language." The spruce represented the rising of the sun; even the snakes brought satisfaction as they became so accustomed to his stroking that they seemed to quiver in a kind of ecstasy.
Create a Theme Garden
The beauty of backyard gardens thrives on attention and creativity, on hours of picturing and planting, weeding and pruning. But it's not until we step back and admire and appreciate both the inherent and resulting fruits of our labor that we fully appreciate the feelings of peace and serenity they bring. It is a sensation of joy that creators and followers of such popular garden themes as Japanese and English, butterfly and hummingbird, midsummer night, secret and faerie gardens alike, invariably affirm.
Japanese Gardens
Stones, water and plants, all arranged to give the visitor a sense of peace, harmony, and tranquility, are often seen as the core of an Oriental-themed garden. Additional elements, such as moss, koi, tea houses, gravel gardens, reflective ponds, lanterns, bamboo, stepping stones and aesthetically pruned trees, may complete the picture. But it is such intimate traits as subtleness, natural beauty, moderation, and human scale that the judges of Sukiya Living, Journal of Japanese Gardening, tend to look for and favor when they rank North America's top 25 Japanese Gardens.
English Gardens
If we want to make anything grow, then we must understand it—and likely have green fingers. So admonishes Russell Page, British landscape designer and author of the classic The Education of a Gardener. Green fingers, he writes, are a mystery only to the unpracticed. The fact is that seeds and plants and tree
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LIFE IS FULL of SWEET SPOTS by MARY O'CONNOR. Copyright © 2013 by MARY O'CONNOR. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements.................... xi
Introduction.................... xiii
Part 1 - Drawing on Nature....................
The Earth.................... 3
The Sea.................... 31
The Sky.................... 53
Part 2 - Tapping into Our Bodies....................
The Vista of Sight.................... 71
The Pulse of Sound.................... 95
The Essence of Touch, Taste & Smell.................... 117
Part 3 - Stretching Our Minds and Souls....................
Frontiers of Wonder.................... 141
The Heart of Giving.................... 163
The Spirituality of Life.................... 185
Afterwords - Finistère.................... 209
More to Explore.................... 213
In Their Words.................... 249
About the Images.................... 251
Notes.................... 257