Blogging for Sanity

  More than once, as a teenager, I was mistaken for a boy. At the time, it was embarrassing … in fact it still is.  Perhaps it was because when I was growing up, I never learned how to put on make-up or even how to dress like a girl. Truthfully, I chose not to learn.  My mother said I was a “tom-boy” (big surprise), and the whole idea of "style" made me extremely uncomfortable-- "terrified" might be a better word--so I avoided it altogether, preferring instead to dress in comfortable often loose clothes.  Somehow I got it in my head that style and comfort were mutually exclusive.    I didn’t realize it at the time, and the decades that followed, that I was choosing to hide.   Clothes were not about celebrating, they were a way of hiding the feminine part of myself… a part I saw as weak and vulnerable. That way of viewing the feminine changed.  I've spent the decades since understanding that Earth needs the feminine to reemer

Walnuts are in.  Rains have arrived... and we are graced with the beauty and peace of a job well done at the farm.  Truly, I love my life.

My friend and colleague @RyanEliason often describes an experience that took place when he was nineteen years old and encountered a clear cut in a forest that he had enjoyed as a youngster.  At first the nineteen-year-old Ryan was just shocked, as he surveyed the land now scraped down to its clay soil.  As he observed the damage and stopped to let the reality of the situation sink in, the enormity of the loss hit him.   The sacred place he loved was gone forever.  He began to sob.  For Ryan this was a moment of deep truth, of profound awakening—and the experience changed him forever.  Even today, as he tells this story, his authenticity shines through and transforms those around him. In my own life, especially as a sensitive, young person, I braced myself against such a moment for years. To me, these losses seemed so painful that I pushed the experience away, even as I felt a pervasive sadness over the state of the world and worked to “save it”.  This was  more of a depression tha

Squirrel! Another distraction... wasting an hour or more. If "squirrels" invade your inbox, they also invade your life.  This is how I manage my email to save at least 1-2 hours each and every day, and avoid squirrel-chasing: (1) Prevent extra emails from invading in the first place.   Do you really need to be on every single email list for the emails that enter your inbox?  If you take 10 minutes a week to unsubscribe from unproductive or marginally productive lists, you will get hours of time back.  Really, you won't miss anything important--you info-junkie. (2) Use "rules" in your email program to sort into "buckets" for later reading I use Mac Mail and set up "rules"  It is easy to go to the preferences page and set up any rule you want.  One that has saved me hours is to automatically filter mass emails into my "read second" folder--which I then, well.... read second.   I set time aside every few days to read these

My latest book, Entrepreneurs and the New Story: Essential Earth Wisdom for True Prosperity , is available via preorder on Amazon kindle now.  December 31 at 10am pacific, I will be interviewed by Katie Curtin in the virtual Creativity Cafe.

Loretta McCarthy's new book: Discovering Your Heart Voice: Ten Simple Grounded Ways to Access Your Inner Wisdom is now available on Amazon Kindle.  She will offer the book for free kindle download in November.. but in the meantime, you can pick it up for only $2.99

Article: Denise Rushing honored by Congressman Garamendi as one of the "Women of the Year" Thank you, Congressman Garamendi. --Denise

Aligning with a “Big Why” - the dream that comes from your heart - is cited by many entrepreneurs as the biggest single factor in creating focus and taking quantum leaps forward.  This was confirmed in my interview with successful entrepreneur and business coach Ryan Eliason in The Big Why Telesummit earlier this year, I asked him to what he attributed his success.  His answer: committing fully to his biggest vision-- his “Big Why.”   Doing so clarifies what we want and need, helps us identify what needs to happen next, and it helps us more easily say “no” to distractions so that we can say “yes” to the most difficult next step. I am still uncovering my purpose.  I do not always know what it is, but I definitely know when I’m not aligned with it. “I did not know.  Turns out, it is something I discovered gradually”. “When the energy is right sometimes it’s like a magnet you just cannot resist.” “There have been many long years when I personally had no idea what my “big why” was

In the natural world, at the place where grasslands merge into forests or where the shore melds into the oceans or other places where two ecosystems meet, diversity and abundance seem to flourish.  This is known as edge effect An online dictionary defines edge effect this way: The influence that two ecological communities have on each other along the boundary that separates them. Because such an area contains habitats common to both communities as well as others unique to the transition zone itself, the edge effect is typically characterized by greater species diversity and population density than occur in either of the individual communities. In living systems, profound creativity takes place on the edges—where ocean meets shore, in estuaries, where grasslands meet forest edge, in wetlands and tidal pools, along streambanks and in the top few inches of soil.  Why is this?  What can we learn from the edges? Edges are a place where different elements meet.  In human systems, these migh

Once upon a time, nearly 13.7 Billion years ago, we flared forth as light.  We underwent a series of irreversible transformations until we arrived where we are here and now—writing a story about our journey. It took awhile, but that’s how far we’ve come.  We essentially burst forth as light and after changing a bit, we arrived as a living system together with our fellow travellers on a small blue planet in a dark sea of space.  As a result of these transformations, we can now contemplate that flaring forth 13.7 billion years later.  We are energy transformed… contemplating the first energy that flared forth. Let’s pause for a moment and let that sink in. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, in The Universe Story, call our understanding of this epic a “new cosmology” or "the New Story." Stories are about meaning and connection…They help us understand things, they help us connect to one another, they help us connect to Earth when we realize that we are a part of the planet

Sun, my sail and moon, my rudder, As I ply the starry sea, Leaning over the edge in wonder, Casting questions into the deep. Drifting here with my ship's companions, All we kindred pilgrim souls, Making our way by the lights of the heavens, In our beautiful blue boat home. --Peter Mayer, Blue Boat Home A few years ago, our local Lake County Board of Supervisors issued a proclamation in support of the International Charter for Compassion in order to draw attention to the fact that we are all one community.   How we treat each other matters to the quality of our life together.  As our community concludes another season of political campaigning, cultivating compassion is as important as ever.  As I see it, we need to ask ourselves in our deeds and in our language: What are we teaching our children about what it means to be human?     Compassion is not weakness—it is, in fact, a decision to connect and relate with our fellow sojourners, both human and non-human, and in the proce