Free Your Mind… It’s OK to Relax!

July 8, 2016December 19, 2021 / Laura Lee Carter / 9 Comments

One of the BEST lessons I have learned from my husband Mike is how to truly relax. I have a natural guilt around sitting around spacing out. If you are anything like me, you will first need to be convinced that it’s OK to relax.

Consider the long and arduous history of mankind on this earth. Yes, they had to keep busy looking for food and protecting themselves from anything that wanted to eat them, but I feel certain they also knew how to relax. I just can’t see a caveman or woman being all stressed out over their to-do list. Primitive tribes today still know how to spend hours doing nothing.

It’s healthy to relax, stare off into space, and enjoy this present moment. In fact, it can even be ‘productive’ in its own way. Did you know some of our most creative ideas came from spacing out? Ask Newton. That’s how he first noticed gravity.

So the next time you are feeling pressured to get too many things done, remember relaxation can be very good for you. De-stress and embrace the ‘F’ word, FUN! You do enough. You are enough. You have enough…

I’m a newcomer to rural southern Colorado. After two years I decided to compile a short journal about the ups and downs of moving from a good-sized city to rural America to build a passive solar retirement home: A Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado

Please share this information with your friends if they are considering similar life changes. Feel free to contact me directly to discuss any of these challenges…

To order your own signed copies of any of my books. Cheers, Laura Lee (email: MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com)

What does freedom mean to you?

July 4, 2016July 4, 2016 / Laura Lee Carter / 5 Comments

Today I am feeling a tad bit more patriotic than usual, perhaps because I finally live in the right place for me in the good old USA. Having finally found MY perfect place, I appreciate my freedom even more than ever!

I appreciate the freedom to choose and receive a great public education, to find jobs I have enjoyed mostly in public universities, the freedom at age 49 to find my perfect mate, the freedom to save up for retirement in a reasonable way over decades, and then my ultimate freedom to choose the best place to live out the rest of my life.

Since I have lived in a number of other countries, I appreciate so many freedoms that others simply do not have. As a single woman, I enjoyed so many freedoms not available in other countries, and as a married woman I have been free to define myself separate from my marriage partner.

I have done the research. This is the BEST TIME to be alive in human history, and especially as an American woman! We live longer, healthier and freer than anyone else, and yet it sometimes seems, all we do is complain! Yes there many things wrong in the world, and unfortunately we are constantly bombarded with this news. But please take a moment today to appreciate what we generally take for granted. We are a country with free public education, freedom for women, safeguards for children, great medical care, and best of all, the right to VOTE! You’ve just got to love that!

Journey Back to Self, Finding Home…

June 22, 2016November 6, 2021 / Laura Lee Carter / 13 Comments

I saw a great profile of one of my favorite human beings last Sunday on CBS Sunday Morning. Richard Gere has been a bit of a guru for me ever since he found me at exactly the right moment, in the midst of a tremendously depressing afternoon in the summer of 2004. From the television, he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hang on, it all changes.” That was enough for me, and he was so right!

Richard now works as an advocate for the disadvantaged of the world. He recently played a homeless man in his film “Time out of Mind”, twelve years in the making. He also works to bring attention to the terrible plight of immigrants worldwide: People without a country.

I find Richard has a knack for asking the important questions, questions like, “Where am I safe in this world?” and “How did I end up here?” And then he said, “We’re all about our stories…”

fe truth I have been focused on lately is how so many of us seem to find a way to return to our original or true self through the chaos that midlife can be. For example, the constant questioning of how I ended up so unhappy with my life at age 49, led me to rediscover who I am, and what I needed to accomplish before I died.

I see now I was in search of a new sense of home and comfort within myself. I was looking for my place in this world.

What did I love and want more of in my life? What parts of my life did I need to jettison RIGHT NOW? What voices in my head were leading me to unhappiness, and which ones were wise and compassionate?

Finding the right voices to listen to has led me to this place in rural Colorado, where the birds sing me awake each morning, and…

“the sun pours in like butterscotch and sticks to all my senses.” Thank you Joni!

How did this happen? How did I end up here, feeling so fortunate?

It’s a long story, one I can now share with you in my new memoir!

The wildflowers are lovely at Cordova Pass!

June 18, 2016June 21, 2016 / Laura Lee Carter / 3 Comments

To celebrate our two year anniversary of moving to this beautiful part of Colorado, we drove up to Cordova Pass yesterday. As usual we had no traffic on the way up there and only met one other couple along the way.

Cordova Pass, at 11,248 feet, lies on the western shoulder of the West Spanish Peak, east of the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The drive up the pass can be a bit rough at times, but I enjoyed moving through the various eco-systems, and did not even know that we might be able to camp up there sometime. They have a bathroom!

We had heard that mid-June is a great time to see wildflowers up there, and they were right. These Blue Flag Wild Iris were everywhere…

…along with lots of Golden Banner and dandelions.

Along the way at the lower elevations we saw lots of these beautiful bushes in bloom. Thanks to my botanist friends I now know these are New Mexican Locust. No wonder I never saw them up north.

Lots of great views near the top of the pass…

…and the trees along the road were florescent GREEN!

Then there is this very cool arch cut into a dike on the other side of the pass. We had to stop so Mike could study the geology of the whole thing, of course.

Our drive down the North Fork of the Apishapa River Valley, down through Gulnare and Aguilar, was lush and so beautiful! This is one of the few places I have been in this country where everything seems exactly like it might have been a hundred years ago.

And I loved this cool looking Teletubbie village up on the hill!

Bye Bye!

Enjoying a Celebration of Never Moving Again!

June 17, 2016January 31, 2020 / Laura Lee Carter / 5 Comments

Today marks two years since we left our perfectly nice home in suburbia for the adventure of a lifetime. It may not sound like such a big deal to move to small town USA to build a custom solar home in the southern Colorado foothills, but it was for us at age 60!

We moved to Walsenburg on June 17th 2014, to sleep on the floor of this hundred-year-old rental, moving in the next day and staying there for 13 months while our new home was forming far too SLOWLY 20 minutes west of town at 7,000 feet. Mike worked as the contractor and purchaser of all things when we found the builder was not taking competitive bids, but just hiring his local friends.

Then on July 30th, 2015 we moved into our new home, HOME AT LAST!

For weeks after that move we just sat and stared out the window, mesmerized with the awesome views out our front windows, too exhausted to do anything else. We finally made it to our goal after many, many challenges and so many days of absolute stress.

Why did we do it? Our trip to Pueblo yesterday answers that question quickly. Being in cities always ruins my day. We need to go there occasionally to buy certain things, but the stress, the heat, the traffic, the bad air and bad manners of other drivers always convinces us we will never live there again!

We have no patience with cities anymore, and why should we when we have a magnificent place where we can escape them?

Today we will drink a toast to surviving all these many changes and challenges, and also to never moving again! Instead we will try to get our patio finished this summer, enjoy the great wildflower displays everywhere, the cool mountain breezes each evening, and offer encouragement to others who have found their new home in this small slice of heaven.

Want to learn more about our experience of moving from the city to the country to live a quiet, relaxed life? Check it out here!

Why write about yourself and your experiences?

June 13, 2016October 31, 2017 / Laura Lee Carter / 10 Comments

As I begin working on my next book, a journal of retirement, I wondered why anyone would find this story interesting. I have certainly had more interest in this blog than I ever expected, with over 50,000 views so far from over 25,000 visitors all over the world! I so enjoy seeing those from other countries taking an interest in our escapades in rural southern Colorado.

Of course the next question is why blog at all? Why do some wish to share their daily lives and lessons with others, while most can’t even imagine it?

In this particular case, I thought there might be some who would like to see what it feels like to choose to leave a nice suburban home in one of the “best retirement cities in the country” to move to a rural area with little traffic or shopping, but so much amazing natural beauty and lovely silence. And as I read the posts I wrote a couple years ago, when considering this gigantic change for myself, I do find my thoughts and worries interesting in retrospect.

I guess what interests me the most is the psychology of changing something major in your life, especially past age 50 or 60. Why do some take the risk and go for it, while others stay home and watch TV? I guess it just comes down to personal taste, but also a gigantic fear of change.

I was full of fear the day we sold our nice home in Fort Collins. I really did not know what to expect, and I admit it, parts of our experience down here have been quite discouraging. But now I know we made the right choice for both of us. Sometimes you just have to take the big risk, leap, and build your wings on the way down.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we had planned, to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell