Feeling Daily Gratitude Changes Everything!

snowy Winter Solstice

I wonder what percent of Americans ever stop and think about their lives on Thanksgiving, or as far as that goes, on any day. What a crazy, busy group we are! I’m retired so I have more time for contemplation and meditation, but I have also found a way to improve every aspect of my life. It may sound too simple to really work, but it truly does, and it only takes five minutes a day!

Go here and stop, look and listen…

At first it may feel silly or even uncomfortable, but give it some time. At first you may feel too busy or distracted, but keep trying to let go, breathe and take these few words into your heart and mind. No, I am not selling you anything, I’m trying to help you appreciate and enjoy your life more completely.

I started watching this video everyday about ten years ago. I now have it almost memorized, and yet I still need those five minutes of guided meditation to remember exactly how wonderful my life is. And the best part is my life has gotten so much better with this simple gratitude practice! Appreciation of all the amazing people, pets, your surroundings, and your life leads naturally to improving your life.

Trust in the universe leads to ever better quality of life for you and your family.

“It is enough to be grateful for the next breath.” ~ Br. David Steindl-Rast

I wish you all a glorious THANKSGIVING! Let’s give thanks for so many amazing blessings!

A message from Gratitude.org: “On Thanksgiving, I pledge to overcome the illusion of ENTITLEMENT by reminding myself that everything is a gift and, thus, to live GRATEFULLY.”

What High School Reunions Can Bring Up

I just received a reminder that my 45th high school reunion is coming up soon. My first response is I simply cannot believe that I graduated from high school 45 years ago. How did that happen? So I turned to my yearbooks to try and remember something about high school.

I hated everything about high school. I hated my home life and how I felt at school. The best way to describe me looking back from my 45-years-later perspective is flat affect. I just kept wondering if my life would ever get better. I remember at high school graduation singing that German song from Cabaret: “Tomorrow belongs to me…” over and over in my head.

These days I am so glad I hung in there! Everything got better in college. I went to Colorado College, the one where my father taught. As soon as I got there I felt like I fit in much better. For the first time I was constantly around fellow eggheads, and finally completely academically challenged. Slowly through the past four decades I have become more at home in my own body and freer to become my true self.

The hardest battle you will face in life is to be no one but yourself, in a world which is trying its hardest to make you like everybody else!

Now I see this maturation process as peeling the onion of my soul. At first I only felt safe taking off the most outer layers, exposing my true self very slowly and carefully, so afraid of what others might think or say. When I finally got some counseling in my early thirties, my therapist noted how often I said, “People think this…” She would challenge me with, “Who are these people?” It was not easy, but I have finally found my true self in the midst of too much feedback from others, and far too many rules in my own mind.

I have never attended a high school reunion, but I am seriously considering it this time. We live only a couple hours southwest of Colorado Springs now, and I am quite curious. Perhaps I should go find out who I went to high school with, because I suspect none of us are anything like we were in high school.

For a REALLY FUNNY take on high school reunions, go here!

I am a professional photographer, writer and psychotherapist whose midlife crisis included a divorce and soon after the loss of my job and career as an academic librarian at age 49. However, I found all of these misfortunes supremely fortuitous eventually! Everything wonderful in my life flowed from losing my past life and changing up everything possible. I started my own dating service, which led to meeting a new and much improved life partner, and then in ten years we followed our dreams to build our own passive solar home in rural southern Colorado…

No surprise that I now see midlife difficulties as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for personal liberation! I have written & produced a few books about midlife change. Don’t miss my latest about leaving the city life far behind!

How do we find home?

When the full moon woke me up in the middle of the night this past weekend, I started thinking about all of the places I have lived and visited. Actually it all began with trying to remember exactly which years I lived in Colorado Springs. This may seem strange, but when I started writing down all the places I have lived or stayed at least a week or two, it added up to six U.S. states and ten plus foreign countries. I lived in four different towns before first grade. No wonder at the ripe old age of 60 I was ready to settle down and stay somewhere for a while.

original_photo_Thailand_1973cropped[1] (2)
My young explorer self in Northern Thailand around age 19

This didn’t start out as a life plan for me. Things just worked out this way. Wherever I went I would stay a couple of years and slowly the urge would arise to move on. I remember when I got my first professional librarian position at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the director ask me not to stay forever in my first job. He needn’t have worried. I was out of there in exactly three years.

I used to kid with myself about “Moving on to greater failures…” Of course it helped that I didn’t marry until much later, and never had kids. I simply had no interest in all that. I wanted to see the world, exploring both the world outside my door, and the more interesting one inside my own mind.

Laura and the dogs 1997
Sitting with my first set of dogs, Mica & Calla, in 1996

I also picked up a few college and graduate degrees along the way. For quite a while I wanted to teach Chinese history at the college level. Then, after learning Chinese and getting an M.A. in Chinese history, I decided I was sick of China and university teaching was too limiting in its depth and scope. Since Naropa University was located right down the hill from University of Colorado in Boulder, I walked down there to find a whole new perspective on life and psychology, transpersonal psychology. This was my spiritual home, and I have been pursuing it ever since. This is something you can study anywhere and everywhere. Human and animal behavior is my thing…

decking-comanche-home-with-mountains-in-backgroun

But still in all of that moving from here to there, I never found a place I could truly call home. What does that mean? To me it means a place where you will die knowing that you truly belong. That place where you can see your ashes blowing in the wind, and know you are finally home.

I didn’t know how I would find that place or if it would find me, but it did. At first I did not recognize this Pinon-Juniper woodland looking up at the Sangre de Cristo mountains as my place. I only knew I was home after we built solar here and then got comfortable for a few years.

sparkling-snowy-buddha-garden-with-spanish-peaks-behind-1

I know every morning when I go outside and marvel one more time at the perfect silence of the sunrises and sunsets here. I know when I work in my native plants garden, collecting interesting plants from around the region. I know when new birds stop by to feed and drink or when a stray Road Runner peeks in my window.

yellows-purples-and-pinks-sunrise

I know because every time I return home I think,  Wow! Do I really live here?

Buying a Home in Rural Southern Colorado

paula's ranchette

I have always found real estate interesting. I suppose it’s a part of my natural nosiness. I like to see how others live and what they choose. Mike knows the construction trade inside and out. That’s why we went with a friend to look at a small property yesterday. She wanted to get our opinion on a darling little ranchette not too far away from us.

This property is relatively new, well-built, nicely detailed inside and landscaped, with great views of Greenhorn Mountain and the distant Sangre de Cristos.

Buying in rural markets is so different than cities. Be sure and check what the property’s access is to water, electricity, phone service, and what kind of heating and septic system it has. This cute little ranch on a few acres has a giant garage and studio space, fully fenced, but it does not have access to water on the property. Most city people can’t even imagine that! Water will have to be trucked in.

Sunflowers on a county road

The good news about properties down here? The cost is about one quarter of what they might cost up north, near any metro area. I can see this property being priced at $500,000 to $600,000 if it was anywhere near the Denver/Boulder metro area. Access to jobs is everything in real estate.

The realtor informed us that sellers here usually have to accept contingencies on sales. Their average time on the market is about one year. We see many come down here, buy a house on impulse, and then need to sell a year or two later. Yes it is amazingly beautiful here in the spring, summer and fall, but the winters are so WINDY and can seem very long with most city distractions (restaurants, shopping, etc.) at least an hour away.

The truth is, most have no idea how or if they will adjust to rural life. My advice? Make sure you like spending a lot of time alone or are on the same page completely with your life partner. You need to get along very well in these circumstances. Make sure you enjoy nature, things like bird watching, plants, hiking, biking and lots of silence. If you have little appreciation for clean air, morning silence, amazing sunrises and sunsets and a pristine natural setting, don’t buy a rural home, especially if you crave any sort of human-based distractions.

decking Comanche home with mountains in backgroun

Our house being built in 2014 -2015

memoir of retirement 2016Mike and I left suburbia in 2014, after living in cities for most of our lives.      We wanted to try out solar living with spectacular views of Sangre de Cristo mountains. We moved here to live close to nature, to try out passive solar living, and to build the kind of home we chose to live in for the rest of our lives. We came in search of a far more quiet, peaceful, healthy and inexpensive lifestyle than cities could offer us. We have received so much more…            Would you like to know how we ended up here? The ups and downs of our year-long building process? My fears in our first year here? Why we love it so much now?

Please send me an e-mail to order your own copy — Laura Lee:  MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

imgp9788

The past two weeks have been filled with disappointment, anger and misery for me. First I learned that the main distributor of my books is ripping me off, then I learned how desperate our president is to remove our access to affordable health care, and then I got really sick. It seems “the system” can get you wherever you are, and my bad times seem to always come in threes.

I’ve written enough about the Amazon situation, and my printer informs me that it “appears to be under investigation by Amazon.” Please just work through me to purchase my books and leave them out of the equation!

On the access to affordable health care front, I need to say that Obama’s plan has been lifesaving for us. Since neither one of us is fit for employment, and we aren’t yet 65, we have found a plan in the past few years that at least tries to keep our premiums at a reasonable rate. We are limping along until age 65. Now we have to wonder why our government is acting so hateful towards a couple of elder Americans who have worked hard all our lives, and just need a little bit of help to make it into Medicare. Mike’s problems are most certainly related to his nine years in the Navy, but (of course) the Navy kept no records of his exposure to a number of toxic chemicals and radiation. No records equals no VA assistance. It’s a long story. You don’t want to hear it…

Me, I just struggle to breathe, plus a number of brain injuries. Then last week I caught a really NASTY bug. I knew within days that this wasn’t just your standard food poisoning. It felt much more virulent and toxic. Come to find out it was C Diff. Stay away from this one, although you really can’t because it’s everywhere! This disease has pretty much controlled my life for the past 12 days. I guess my immune system isn’t as strong as it used to be.

 Isn’t it strange but interesting how severe illness can make you think? For some reason lying in bed feeling crappy makes me think a lot about my life. Then I watched a fascinating movie on this topic. “The Hero” is the thinking person’s film about facing your own death. Sam Elliott plays a 70+ actor who receives a terminal diagnosis. The entire film is about how he deals with it. I love Sam Elliott and his willingness to tackle tough topics in a realistic way! One critic called this film “cinematic zen.” I agree.

None of us get out of this alive and I have decided to get comfortable with that fact sooner rather than later.

The Las Vegas Massacre: Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing…

Have you seen this yet? If not, this is The Onion‘s take on how pathetic we all are to feel “helpless” as we witness another mass shooting in our country:

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

It happened before and it will happen again. The only conclusion to be reached? This is how we wish to proceed… The NRA owns our Congress. Bought and paid for. Good to know.

“If any ask us why we died. Please tell them that our leaders lied…”                                              from ‘One by One’ by Chumbawamba, 1997