What a thing to notice that yes,  the earth has created this gift of food for me. This animal has sacrificed its life so that I might eat meat.  To appreciate the beauty of the red-tailed hawks that sit on the light posts over the highways.  To think, I really am happy to have a nice roof over my head.  To be grateful for friends and family.  To think,  I am grateful not to be born in the 1500s and have the bed bugs that even royalty had.  To be grateful for walking and running and balance.

Gratitude in American culture is an interesting thing.  There is such a mix of things to be grateful for and things to want more of.  On the one hand, we are one of the richest societies at the richest times in the history of mankind.  By richest, I mean we have the more square feet in our houses, more TV’s, cars, iphones, cell phones, t-shirts and pens (that are designed to work for a short period of time) than anyone has ever had before.

And in many ways, we are not getting our human needs met.  How many of us go without health care? How many do not have a single close confidant?  How many so-called rich people have no real leisure time?  And then there is the disparity of wealth.  36 million people–including 13 million children–live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger.    And then there are children who disdain dinner when really the choice of what to eat includes everything ever invented by any culture anywhere.  (Yes, I’m struggling with my picky eater.)

And being knee-deep in our own culture, of what exists in our own house, in our own group of friends, in our own neighborhood, we often do not notice what we have.

Giving all that, it is SO easy to take things for granted.  It is basic human nature.   But taking things for granted or having sense of entitlement is the buzz-kill of joy.

I myself am en route to gratitude.  There are many, many moments when it is clear to me that I have not arrived at some guru-like gratitude state.

Over the years I have worked at it.  For a while I did a morning gratitude ritual, basically a prayer where I named all the people and things I had in my life, giving thanks for each one.  Last week I was at a lecture by MaryAnn O’Brian, owner of Live Dynamite, and she was talking about the wiring of the brain and how it lays down new pathways for new thoughts.  Her advice was that if you want to reprogram your thoughts, you should repeat the new message every day for a month, morning and evening.  I would say that my practice served to do a similar thing, slowly shifting my thoughts.

Another thing I’ve tried is a gratitude ritual at dinner with my family.  We started with the question “What are you thankful for?”  Interestingly, the whole ritual landed pretty flat until we changed the question to include  “What was good about today?”   The latter really freed the conversation from just being some prescribed list.  That experience reminds me that each of us needs to experiment with what works for us.  We also read from a great book called “A Grateful Heart: Daily blessings for the evening meal from Buddha to The Beatles”.

Despite all this work, I recently had an epiphany. Or was it an “Uh, Duh”?  I realized that when I was thinking about the household work  (and when you have a young child in the house there is lot of it) I was asking the question “what is fair?”.

Asking the question “what is fair?” can make you nuts.  It is basically the same question as: What am I entitled to?  This is a crazy-making question.  In fact, just re-visiting that question makes me feel crazy.  I’ve been letting go of what is fair and asking instead “what do I need?”  And given what I need, what am I able to offer?  Believe me, this is better and sane-making way to view things.  The result has been a happier house and a happier me.

So, what about you?  What are you grateful for in your life?  What kinds of things remind you to be grateful?  And how has gratitude played into what you teach your children?

In theory, that sounds all fine and well!  Right? But what if at this moment you are feeling insufficient? What if you are worrying that you won’t have enough money?  How do you shift yourself into a state of well-being or sufficiency? 

That’s where the practice of sufficiency comes in. 

To me, there two key components to creating sufficiency.  The first is to be ‘present’.  The second is to stand in a place of gratitude and focus on what you do have.  This month I’ll tackle the first. This is a huge topic; one that many a spiritual guru has spent their whole life pondering.  I will just talk about a few basics.

I would also say that a state of well-being has never happened to me instantaneously.  I haven’t gone to a workshop and had my whole personality change.  Rather, it has come slowly and with constant (or at least fitful) pressure.  It comes through epiphanies, practices and things (as I mentioned before) like mind-calming nutrition.  My state of well-being has changed dramatically.  I’ve gone from a constant state of worry and feeling insufficient to one of frequently feeling good.

What does it mean to be present?  It means to experience the present moment: to enjoy and focus on what actually exists in the here and now. In contrast to this, are those times that your mind gets stuck re-living past arguments and things that didn’t go well or worrying about future tasks.  My cat is very good at being present. 

I have a story that might work as a metaphor. Recently, I was driving to Chicago to see family.  They were predicting a big snowstorm with freezing rain, which is not exactly what you hope for when you plan to drive 400 miles.  We very carefully looked through the weather reports and planned our trip so that we would drive at the safest time. 

On the way, we came into pockets of heavy snowfall and sometimes rain.  At the same time, no snow or ice ever built up on the road.  (I think we were riding the front edge of the storm.)  I repeatedly found myself stressed out about the driving conditions. 

The here and now of the situation – the being present of it – was that everything was fine.  There was no snow or ice built up on the road.  The snow and hilly landscapes of that part of Wisconsin were beautiful.   My son and husband were in the back seat watching DVDs.   Everyone and everything was fine. The feeling of worry or insufficiency came from imagining what would happen if the snow did build up.   A future – I might point out – that never came.  And one that – if the moment came – we could have probably handled.  It also came from imaging judgment. What would people think?  How could I have been so stupid?  (Who are the mysterious judgmental people anyways?)

To me, that makes a good metaphor.  For how often do we expend our energies worry about futures that may or may not come?  (That is not to say that we can’t take action and prepare.)

So, how does one get to be present?  What helps is a practice.  Sufficiency is certainly not the inventor of the idea of being present.  This is something that spiritual teachers have been talking about for centuries.  Buddhism with its practice of meditation comes to mind as an excellent example.

Being present is very frequently found through being aware of the body.  I just went swimming this morning.  It was just me, the feeling of muscles working, water flowing over my skin and the quiet of being under the water.  Exercise often helps with being present.  (Running on a treadmill while watching T.V. – maybe not as much.)  Artistic endeavors help keep me present.  This is particularly true with painting and its quite observance of what is:  the angles, shapes and colors.  Play keeps us present.  Really, much of the joy in life is found through being present.

There are also exercises to practice being present. 

Breath is a powerful and simple way to come more into the present moment.  Ideally, breath comes from both diaphragm and the chest.  Interestingly, breathing in different ways causes different emotions.  Breathing in and out of your mouth is more likely to cause an emotional response such as sadness or anger.  Breathing through your nose is more calming. 

So try this.  Close your eyes and breathe deeply.  Don’t force it.  Focus your attention on the breath.  When your mind wanders, just bring it gently back.   If you have an emotion, just allow yourself to feel it.  Try putting your hand on the place where you feel your breath – such as your heart or your belly.  Focus your attention there.  Spend 5 minutes breathing and noticing.  How do you feel afterwards? 

Here is another thing to try.  Again close you eyes and breathe deeply.  Begin to notice the body.  Where does your body hurt?  Notice the feet, the legs, and the knees. Continue to scan your whole body while breathing.

Another method is from an energy healing modality called BodyTalk.  While BodyTalk has healing properties of its own, I have also found it to be a good tool for being present.  In a class called BodyTalk Access you can learn some basic methods for the non-healer to use on their own.  While these are a little wacky-seeming and call for breathing and tapping, I have found them to be powerful.  I have had a tendency to get into a revved up state, which can be hard to break out of. This has been one of the fasted ways to cut through that state.  My friend and healer Barb Bredesen brings BodyTalk Access to town from time to time.

So, what about you?  I KNOW that I am not the great expert on being present.  (Just because you can talk about something does not mean that you have conquered it!)  What do you know about being present?  What do you do that helps you stay grounded?  Share your experiences with us!

Check out my quotes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune article on ‘Living with less, on purpose’.  The main article is here: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/110441499.html?page=1&c=y

There is a section with tips on how to downsize here: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/110441494.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUHPYDiaK7DUiacyKUbPi87EK_g:D_GD7EaDh_0c:aD:aUr

According to author, fundraiser and global activist Lynn Twist, we hear the message that we are not enough and that we don’t have enough nearly 2000 times a day. 

Do we believe that message?  As a culture, it seems to have taken root.  One place I hear it is in the number of times I turn on the radio and they are talking about the bad economy.  How many other things are going on in the world that we don’t hear about because we are so frequently focused on money?  And OF COURSE, it is true.  There are people hurting.  My 21-year-old nephew was just telling me how many of his friends can’t get a job. The true unemployment rate is easily 10%, which means some 30 million people are out of work. 

And at the same time, Americans, at least middle class Americans, have a lot of material wealth.  In fact, we probably have more material wealth than any culture in the history of mankind.  For example, is a 2400 square foot house (the American average) a really big house?  If you look down the street at your neighbors, then no.  But if you looked around the world or looked at our past, then yes. The average house of today is twice the size of one in the 1950s and twice as big as those in Europe.

Lynn Twist would argue that many of us are stuck in a paradigm of scarcity.  We hold this viewpoint of scarcity regardless of our actual reality. 

To counter this belief in scarcity, there has come a new movement, called the sufficiency movement.  At the heart of this movement are questions like:  ‘What is enough for me?’ ‘How can I stand in a place of feeling my enoughness on a day to day basis?’  As Lynn Twist says, there is no one right answer.  Everyone needs to explore what is true for him or her.   What sufficiency offers is a place to have deep dialog around these questions.

The birth of this movement comes from several places including Lynn Twist’s book, The Soul of Money.  For many years Twist was in charge of fundraising for The Hunger Project, an organization that was founded on the premise that it is possible to eradicate hunger worldwide.  What Lynn noticed was the extent to which people at either end of the financial spectrum seem to suffer from money. 

So let’s imagine a couple Americans and how sufficient they might feel. Adam has just lost his job as a mechanic. He has a wife and three kids and a savings account with $3000 dollars.   Adam, if left on his own, might really be on the street in a few months.  Adam has serious fears of there being not enough.  Are these fears warranted? 

Now let’s imagine Bob.  Bob has a 3000 square foot home.  Together, he and his wife make about $250,000 dollars a year, although Bob carries the bulk of the financial responsibility.  Neither of them has lost their job or are about to loose their jobs.  In their stock portfolio they have about half a million dollars.  When the stock market falls, his stomach drops with it.  Will he be able to get his kids through college?  Will they have enough to retire? Bob too suffers from fears of ‘there’s not enough’.   Or more precisely, ‘There won’t be enough’.    Now, what about Bob or the guy who makes even more than Bob?  Are his fears of ‘not enough’ reasonable?  What’s surprising is how many people like Bob there are out there.   Lynn Twist talks about them in her book and I know a few of them myself.

The Soul of Money talks about the basic principles of sufficiency and it’s opposite, scarcity.  According to Lynn, there are three major myths of scarcity:

• There isn’t enough for everyone
• More is better
• This is just the way it is. 

 This leads to thinking like the following:  There isn’t enough for everyone so there must be winners and losers and you better be a winner or else you’ll get left out in the cold.  Whatever you need to do so that you and yours have enough is OK.  More is better. More stuff is better.  We need to hoard so that we’ll have enough for tomorrow.  And resignation:  That’s just the way it is. It can be argued that this belief system is at the core of everything that is wrong in the world. 

The tenants of sufficiency are the opposite:  I have enough.  I am enough.  I can create enough with what I have.  Particularly when I live life from this very moment.   Lynn Twist describes it this way:

“Sufficiency is the radical surprising truth about life. Sufficiency is the state of being, the state of knowing, and the state of relating to the world that there is enough. And when you lift the veil of scarcity, when you get out of the chase for more and actually pay attention to what’s already there, you start to see that life meets you exactly where you are and gives you exactly what you need. It’s not an amount of anything. It’s a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of living.”

Does living from this perspective sound like a pipe dream?  Here’s something to consider.  In recent years Lynn Twist has created the Pachamama Alliance.  This is an alliance with an indigenous people of Ecuador called the Achuar.  What I know about the Achuar, leads me to believe that they live from a place of sufficiency.  And I believe that all humans used to live as they do.

To me, sufficiency breaks out in a couple ways. 1) What exists in our mind and the way we view the world.  2) What actually exists in the world and how that affects our perspective. 

One of the things that the Achuar have over us is a great community life.  While I believe you can achieve a mental state of sufficiency no matter what your circumstances (think of people like the Dali Lama), having better circumstances certainly helps.  And living within community can make life easier and safer.  If our friend Adam has community, then when he looses his home, someone will take care of him and his family. 

So, now that you know what sufficiency is, how do you get from a state of scarcity to a state of sufficiency?  Tune in for my next article when I talk the practice of sufficiency. 

In the meantime, check out the Global Sufficiency Network.  Currently there is a great, free tele-class going on called the Power of Enough.  Or locally, my colleague Jen Kochevar is offering a class called ‘Getting to the Heart of Money’. 

Until then, happy travels everyone!

Manfred Max-Neef is a Chilean economist, author and scholar that  has spent much of his career asking the question:  How do you bring economic growth to financially poor populations that makes a real improvement in these people’s lives? (He rejects the idea that conventional economic growth does this.)  He developed a theory of fundamental human needs that says the following:

We have 9 and possibly 10 basic human needs.  These are: 

• Affection
• Subsistence (Having enough to eat, a roof over your head, clothes to protect you from the elements, and access to basic health care in the foreseeable future.)
• Protection/Security (You will not be harmed in the foreseeable future.)
• Understanding (of the world around you, formal or informal education)
• Leisure
• Creation (creating, building, inventing)
• Participation
• Identity (Understanding who you are and your place in the world.)
• Freedom
• Transcendence (Spirituality, being connected to something larger than yourself.  This need may not be universal.)

Unlike other theories, these human needs are not hierarchical. (Although subsistence has more weight.)  For example, let’s say a person – George – is a successful lawyer.  He has three houses, 13 pairs of scissors, and 72 pairs of shoes (so definitely enough money to meet his subsistence needs).  He also has no life partner, few close friends and therefore gets very limited affection.  And he works so hard that he has almost no leisure.  George’s basic human needs are not being met.  This can be a surprising way to think about this in a culture so focused on money.  

What Max-Neef also says in his theory is that these 9 or 10 needs are the same across all cultures and time periods.  What changes is how these needs are satisfied.

Needs can be satisfied in different ways with different levels of effectiveness.  Some things – which he calls synergistic satisfiers – satisfy several needs at once. For example, buying a sweater satisfies the need of subsistence, but knitting a sweater also fulfills needs like identity and creation.  Some satisfiers are what he calls violators or destroyers – because they inhibit our ability to satisfy other needs.  T.V. satisfies our needs for leisure.  But – depending how it is used – it can inhibit getting needs like affection, identity, and participation met. 

So, now that we understand more about the theory, I challenge you take a look at each of these needs.  Ask yourself this question:  On a scale of 1 –10, how well do I think each of the above needs are being satisfied? Which needs are the most satisfied, which are the least satisfied?

What Max-Neef and people like Mother Teresa notice about (middle & upper class) Americans, is that despite all our money & stuff, many of us are not really getting our human needs met.  In fact, Max-Neef would probably say that our stuff itself – our cell phones, plasma TV’s, shoes, etc – is frequently a violator. 

For me, there is often some thing I am working on in my life.  Right now, it is a need for more community – family community – community that works for both our three-year-old and us.  

Community would seem to be a serious synergistic satisfier.  One that in general Americans are not getting that much of compared to the rest of the world.  For example, we are the country with the least number of community meeting spaces.   

In community we create security: there are people to lean on when times are hard and people to lend a hand so that not every service (babysitting, home repair) is paid for in cash.  Certainly there is participation, affection and identity in community.  

So, how could I create more community?

It is a curious thing to try to look beyond the lens of our own culture when we consider how our needs are being met.  For example, I could fill my days with play dates and classes.  And certainly I have some fabulous relationships that way.  But play dates can also be complicated. There are naps and temper tantrums and scheduling conflicts that make it harder to get my little man to the appointed location at the appointed hour.

Now let’s imagine a different level of community.  What about having a community of neighbors.  One of my associates talks about having neighborhood connections like these in his ‘hood in Minneapolis.  And when I lived in Spain, what I noticed was that people didn’t so much as make plans on a Friday night as show up at the neighborhood bar, their own ‘Cheers’ so to speak.

Let’s take it to another level.  What if I imagine a Yanomamo village like the ones I studied when I was anthropology major.  Their village was a big circle with a wall around the outside, housing on the edges, and a central plaza in the middle.  I can see mothers working side-by-side while their children run together in the village center.   I would no longer be pressed upon to play pirate over and over by my son.  I could do things like have a shower (well maybe not in a Yanomamo village) and cook dinner and someone would be there to step in.  Undoubtedly this level of community also comes with it’s own problems.  And you’ll have to wait a long time before you catch me living without a flushing toilet.   But wouldn’t it be great to have playmates for my son within a web of people who lived near each other and looked out for each other. 

So, that is my story.  As you think about your own needs, I encourage you to notice the perspectives through which you view them.  What kind of synergistic satisfiers (or things that satisfy multiple needs at once) are being or could be employed?  Where are the violators in your life?  (Mine has got to be the T.V.) 

And let me know what you discover!

Happy Trails!

Bad things happen.  The stereo breaks.  You are a bad, distracted driver and some guy flips you off.  You say something stupid.  But the question is: How long does it bother you?   Do you go ‘woops’ and move on?  Or do you spend hours or days worrying about it? 

Being happy was traditionally an area of struggle for me.  In the old days I would have spent hours worrying about one of the above.   Looking at my ancestors, I can say for certain that I have not been blessed with ‘happy genes’, so I have had to work harder than some people at it.

Both professionally and personally, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what makes you happy.  To me, there is a lot of different aspects to creating happiness:  the food you eat and how that creates a solid biochemistry, whether or not you feel your life has purpose, whether you have lots of unresolved past trauma that interferes with your current life, whether you exercise, how much time you feel ‘present’, how affected you are by the messages of anti-sufficiency that are prevalent in our society, and lastly how much ‘the stuff’ of your life allows you to focus on what is important to you.  More on all of these at a later date.

One of my early stops in my quest for happiness was in nutrition, so let’s start there. This is one of the most poorly understood areas of mental well-being.  It is also a physical foundation to your state of happiness.  This is a HUGE topic, so I’ll just give you a few tips.  But before we get to the tips, I’ll give you a couple potentially new truths to consider. 

New Truth #1:  Real, Naturally Processed Fat is good for you!

What?  Are you out of your mind?  Yes, over at Nutritional Weight and Wellness, where I used to teach nutrition, and in books like Good Calories, Bad Calories or The Swartzbein Principle, they teach us that any fat that is a natural fat is good for us.  That means butter, avocados, coconut oil, nuts, olives, maybe even lard are healthy.  In fact, we can think of fats as being a building block to your body.  As they say over at Nutritional Weight and Wellness, 60% of your brain is fat and every cell in your body has a membrane of fat. 

What are not good for you are highly processed fats.  The worst of these are trans fats.  Look for words like ‘hydrogenated’ or ‘partially hydrogenated’ in a product’s ingredient lists to avoid these.  But fats like corn, canola, cottonseed, and soy are usually also highly processed.  Highly processed fats go through an insane chemical process, using things like Hexane, a gasoline-like solvent.  They do this to get the fat out of foods that really don’t have much fat in them.  If you think about corn, does it really have much fat?  No! 

So, when looking for good fats, think about buying fats (preferably but not necessarily organic) processed in old-fashioned ways.   To make butter for example, you shake cream.  Simple enough, right?  Olives – high in fat – are almost always naturally processed.  Another way to tell if something is made naturally is to look for words like ‘unrefined’, ‘cold-pressed’ or ‘expeller pressed’. 

New Truth Number 2:  Refined Carbohydrates are a lot like Sugar

So what makes up the food group called carbohydrates is vegetables, fruits, legumes and grains.  When I say refined carbohydrates I mean things like bagels, bread, pasta, muffins, scones, and even white potatoes.  Why is this important to understand? Because all carbohydrates are essentially turned into sugar by your body. Refined carbs, because of their very high sugar content, dump a lot of sugar into your blood stream and this upsets tip #1 -Balancing your blood sugar.

 Ok, so on to some tips. 

 1)     Balance your blood sugar. 

 For many of you this simple statement – balance your blood sugar – will be an overhaul of your entire philosophy of eating.  Perhaps you have spent years thinking that Cheerios, skim milk and a banana was a healthy breakfast.

A banana is actually pretty high in sugar.  After my three-year-old eats a banana, I can see him begin to act up.  Likewise, when I act up – like when I am particularly impatient and a little crazy with my son – I can frequently trace this to having eaten something sugary.  (With my challenging genes, I’m highly sensitive to sugar.)

So balancing your blood sugar is an important first step to calm and even moods.  By eating this way you are also more likely to get all the nutrients your brain needs to work well.

So, the way to balance your blood sugar is to think about eating your carbohydrates with fat and protein.  And now that we know (or are considering the idea) that fat is actually good for us, we can feel free to eat some good fat.  Want some butter with your potato? Go for it!  It will actually help balance your blood sugar.  And adding butter to your broccoli will assist your body in absorbing the fat-soluble vitamins. 

The second thing to do to balance your blood sugar is to avoid sugary foods.  Since we just learned that refined carbohydrates, like a big plate of pasta, are actually high in sugar, we should limit them as well.

So, eggs with a side of grapefruit would be balanced.  Cheerios and skim milk – not so much.  A big plate of pasta – no.  Some meat balls with a small side of pasta and a salad – yes.  Want to learn more?  Check out the classes at Nutritional Weight and Wellness or pick up a copy of the The Swartzbein Principle.

Tip # 2:  Eat your animal protein

So, the eco-friendly who don’t eat protein for social justice and environmental reasons are not going to like this, but protein is an important building block not only for your muscles and your immune system but for your brain.  There is actually a physical brain structure that allows us to feel good moods and think clearly. In particular, protein is a building block to neurotransmitters – the brain chemicals that are a big part of this brain structure.

Close to 1 in 10 Americans are on anti-depressants.  Anti-depressants mostly work on the neurotransmitter, serotonin.  Serotonin helps us with things like concentration, good moods, and clear thinking.  Low levels of serotonin lead to more worry and obsessive thinking.  Another important neurotransmitter, Dopamine, actually affects your sense of self-esteem.

That right, there is a physical infrastructure in our brains that affects how happy and how confident we feel.  And that infrastructure is built out of the food that we eat.  And the very best source of one of the most important parts of that infrastructure – the neurotransmitter – is animal protein. 

And yes, I do care strongly about the environment.  And to that end, I try to buy my protein from animals that are humanely and sustainably raised.

Tip #3: Eat Real Food

Ok, so this may be obvious.  But all the weird chemicals they stick in highly processed foods – Twinkies, Oreos, ramen noodles – interfere with both our mental and physical health.    I would also say, consider organic foods as being more real than conventional food (as well as more expensive).  For example, conventional chickens are bred so that they have huge breasts and can barely walk.  You see pictures of them sitting in their own poop which then requires that they are fed large amounts of antibiotics to keep them reasonably healthy.   So a happy chicken, bred sustainably and organically, is not only better for the planet, but is better for you. So eat as real as you can!

Tip #4: Make sure you are getting these important brain nutrients

Here are a few nutrients important for solid moods.  While one would hope that you could get them out of food, sometimes you need to supplement. One note on supplements:  all supplements are not created equal and some are pretty darn unequal.   Make sure that you are getting yours from a good and knowledgeable source such as a nutritionist, chiropractor or a Coop. 

• Vitamin D, considered the sunshine vitamin because our bodies can make it in the sun, is very important for good moods.  Look for Vitamin D3.  One good source of Vitamin D is our old friend butter, particularly high quality butter.
• Omega 3s or Fish Oil!   So the companion to our neurotransmitter is the receptor.  Without proper receptor function, the neurotransmitter cannot work properly.  One building block for receptors is Omega 3s found in things like fish oil. Omega 3’s can be found in fish, grass fed beef and organ meats. Because of all the issues with our food supply these days, many people opt to get their Omega 3 in a fish oil supplement. 
• Don’t forget your vitamin Bs!  (That’s all I have to say on this topic.)

 So, this is just the tip of the iceberg on this topic. One of the classes I taught at Nutritional Weight and Wellness was Balanced Foods for Balanced Moods.  This is an excellent two-hour class on the subject, taught all over the Twin Cities.  If you are curious how I can say something as blasphemous as ‘Fat is good for you’, Good Calories, Bad Calories is an amazing story of how we came to our current understanding of nutrition.  The Swartzbein Principle is an excellent book on how to eat a ‘balanced’ diet.  And The Mood Cure is an excellent book on how to augment your brain chemistry. 

 So what have you noticed in your body?  How does food affect your moods? Let me know!

 Wishing you Happy Brain Chemistry Everyone!

A tomato that travels a week or two before arriving at your table looses much of its nutritional value.  According to the USDA website, “Research suggests some fruits and vegetables may lose as much as 50% of their nutrients within 3-5 days.”

The earth, as we are learning, is equally straining under our conventional farming practices. Clearly, a vegetable that travels 400 or sometimes as much as 2000 miles to reach us, burning fossil fuels along the way that contribute to climate change, is not good for the planet.  In conventional farming we also uses fossil fuels and chemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers that run off into streams, kill wildlife, destroy our lakes here in Minnesota and elsewhere and eventually make it back into us and our children.  Also not good.

So, what should we do in the face of such craziness?

Some people grow their own vegetables – which is great!  But as the tomatoes that grew in my yard last year and cracked for lack of water can attest – a big garden is not my perfect solution.  Other people join CSAs (where you have a contract with a farmer for the summer and receive a box of produce each week).  This is a great solution for those who love to experiment in the kitchen with whatever produce is in season that week.  It is also a great way to support local and sustainable farming.  However, with the crazy busyness of being a Mom to a three-year-old and an entrepreneur, this is also not for me.

So, my summer and fall solution is to go to the farmer’s market.  Now for those of you who have been going for years – I’m sure this is a no-brainer.  For me, on my journey of living more sustainably, being a farmer’s market regular is new. 

On many Saturdays, I ride there on my bike through the Richfield streets and the little woods by the market with my three-year-old in tow.  We usually see ducks and sometimes an egret.  We buy a really yummy ham and cheese crepe from a French vendor, I get a little exercise (not so easy when you’re a Mom), we buy our veggies and my son plays at the playground.  It’s a great way to spend the morning. 

The quality of the vegetables is great, frequently better than the organic ones I buy from the co-op.  They taste great! The price is doubly amazing. A couple weeks ago I bought a very large container of cherry tomatoes, 3 green peppers, 2 onions, a bag of red potatoes, and 6 corn for less than $15 dollars.  If you’ve gotten used to the prices of organic vegetables as I have, this seems crazy!  Also available are farm-fresh eggs, meats and cheese.

The one thing I will say about going to the farmer’s market is that not all vendors are equal.  Some things are truly local, and some things are not.  Most things are not organic, because of the high price of  getting an organic license, but many farmers are actually using sustainable farming practices.  I ask questions and use my intuition to decide whom to buy from.  If you see a stand with bananas in Minnesota you can be pretty sure its not selling homegrown products.  If the product is not yet in season, there’s another red flag. 

The farmer’s market season is at full throttle right now – with many vegetables just ready for harvest. For more information on finding a farmer’s market in Minnesota go to http://www3.mda.state.mn.us/mngrown/?gclid=CP6c1d3-iaMCFRDyDAoduC8ocw.  For national information go to http://www.localharvest.org/.

Happy Vegetables, Happy Planet, everyone!

How I want to rest, the round of my belly cradled
in the warm sand, on a long expanse of quiet
seashore, knowing the fish are unencumbered,
flitting in unison, clear of a black sludge never unplugged
from the ocean floor.  I want to rest, the warm sand

sifting over my half-open palm, knowing that on the other
side of the blue-green earth the leopard, tummy full,
one thick paw hanging down from a branch,
is fine.  To rest under the whole of a clear, blue, untorn
sky, knowing my child is happy, giggling so his whole body
shakes, leaning on the stomach of his daddy.  To drift

between layers of sleep, half-hearing the seagulls
and the rhythmic roar of waves knowing they are ALL
fine.  And if I told them of children who spent all day
in flip-flops with a chisels, hammering the brown
riverbeds for coltan, or seven-years-olds who plucked

the scratchy hearts of cotton with bare fingers,
they would pause their full-bodied laughter,
their forks hanging over full plates.  They would look up
with brown and blue and black eyes, stopped
with the slapped look of shock.  This is how I want to rest.

By Nicole Lynskey

Real life is real, is ‘IS’.   There is my three-year-old who is crying and yelling on the basement stairs.  There is parade of papers – bills, letters, advertisements, magazines – that want to stack themselves around the house.  There is the Creole fish, steamed peas and boiled potatoes to get on the table for dinner. There’s the going to work so that we can get the fish, peas, and potatoes on the table.

Then there is this thing called Life Purpose that many of us life coaches like to talk about.  Richard Lieder, author of numerous excellent books on the topic of purpose, puts purpose into a formula for us: Calling = Gifts + Values + Purpose.  (OR if I remember my algebra correctly we can say that Purpose = Calling – Gifts – Values!) Hey! Some of you might say — I’m just trying to find the steamer for the peas!  What does that even mean?  And who has time to worry about life purpose?

The thing about life purpose otherwise framed as ‘The point of my life’, ‘why I’m on the planet’ or ‘why I want to get out of bed’, is that the closer you get to it, the happier you are.  What’s useful about thinking about purpose is that — in the clutter of everyday lives and worries, birthday presents and parties — we can use it as a compass to create lives filled with what we really care about. 

In my life, I’ve been both completely out of purpose and in purpose.  At my most off-purpose, I worked as a computer programmer in the corporate sector, in the suburbs, for a retail company.

So, let’s take a look at that in light of Richard Lieder’s work.  Putting aside the formula for a moment, the core of what he says is that to find purpose you must use your gifts – the things you are good at that you also love doing – in a way that is in alignment with who you are and what you care about. (Before we look at my example, I just want to make it clear that there is no right or wrong values or right or wrong lives.  Each of us is just looking for a life that fits us.)

So let’s look at my example:

My Gifts:  They are centered on coaching and creativity, not around computer programming.  While I was skilled at programming, I pretty much hated it.

In alignment with who I am:  I’m not corporate – with financial bottom line and therefore security being a big value. And I’m not suburban.  I am a city girl and have values that go with that: arts, community, diversity, etc.  (Suburban values might be more like: independence, privacy or maybe family or security.)  While the people I met here were perfectly lovely people, they were not my tribe.

In alignment with what I care about:  Their mission was to sell electronics and make money.  Again, not so much what I’m about.

So, what did that mean for me, personally?  I was miserable and it was affecting my physical health.  I remember barely being able to stay awake during the afternoons.  I used to go to the corporate cafeteria to get the face-sized M&M cookie just to try to get me through the day.   I also remember coming back from vacations with this huge feeling of dread.  I felt trapped.

The other thing I will say about purpose is that there is purpose with a small ‘p’ and purpose with a capital ‘P’.  Small ‘p’ purpose is found by creating purpose where you already are.  Mixed in with this, is also a place for us to be grateful for what we already have. 

I had a client who was a great example of finding purpose where you are.  She was working at a job she thought was OK but not her life’s calling.  After working with me to determine her core values, she decided to take one value per week and try to find a way to honor it.  So, say, kindness was your core value: you could find ways to be kind to people at work.  Or say creativity was:  you could look for ways to incorporate more creativity in your existing job.  What happened for my client was that she became very successful and valued in her current job and came to like it much more. 

Or you can decide, as I did, that there is no salvaging your current career and that you need something entirely new.  You can go off and look for Life Purpose with a capital ‘P’ – something that is entirely in alignment with who you are, what you care about that uses your gifts.  Richard Lieder would say it is your calling. 

It took me a number of years to totally give up being a programmer and the secure salary that went with it, and the path from where I am now to where I was, was not particularly straight. 

A big part of what I am up to these days is a vision of bringing together life coaching and environmental education.  After the birth of my toddler son I felt compelled to become a part of the solution to the environmental crisis facing the planet.  While the financial aspect of this is still a work in progress, and things have there up and downs, I feel like I am now, finally, completely aligned with who I am, what I care about and what I love to do. 

In this work I get to use my key strengths.  I definitely am working for something I care about – the planet and in particular the kids who will inherit the planet.  And I get to work with people who really are my tribe! 

So, getting back to the peas (the everyday, concrete) and purpose (the abstract).  In trying to manifest my environmental/coaching vision, I notice both come into play.  I have spent hours with a wonderful book on finding purpose called Wishcraft by Barbara Sher coming up with visions, timelines, and flowcharts describing my project, which for a while wall-papered my office walls.    

All those charts and timelines were a great way to get me started.  And in the real world of real projects and real people, they have also long gone by the wayside.  Which is probably good since all that dreaming in my own head lead to some pretty crazy ideas.  In Wishcraft she also talks about finding the touchstone or core of your vision.  While the original plan has not been followed, this core vision is alive and well and has manifested itself in a couple of projects.

Both this core vision and my experiences in the actual, real world, with real people, help to keep me on track.  For example, one thing I’ve realized is I want to be engaged in this work as a coach and not as a political activist.  The former energizes me and the latter wears me out.  Each of us has a limited time to spend on the earth.  (And if you are a mother of a three-year-old, then your time feels even more limited.)  The closer you get to your purpose, the more powerful your impact will be. 

So, this is where I am on my purpose path.  Where are you?  Do you get to use your gifts in your work or in other aspects of your life?  Do you spend your time working on things you care about?  Do you get to spend time with your tribe?  Have you gone after a purpose with a capital ‘P’ in some big life dream or have you found small ways to incorporate your gifts and essence – your small ‘p’ purpose — into your life?