Diamond-Cut Life

I’ve read that the average wedding in the U.S. costs $20,000. (I wonder how many fights ensue over getting it all paid off?) Portland’s green wedding of the year, that of our friends Noelle Studer and Eli Spevak, was long on community, short on materialism. The joy and vitality were palpable.
Here Eli and Noelle [...]

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I had an exhilarating swoop into the heart of the diamond-cut life Saturday night when I bicycled all the way home from my mother-in-law’s house.  (For newcomers to this blog– welcome! — the diamond-cut life is happiness chiseled down to its essence, with excess consumption stripped away).
I felt free and strong as an eagle bicycling from far [...]

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A major predictor of a person’s happiness is the number and quality of relationships in that person’s life. And money can be a make or break in any type of relationship — marital, parent-child, friend-to-friend, dating and courtship, roommates and housemates.
I believe that when we put relationships and integrity first, money and healthy finances [...]

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I am blessed to be in a truly happy marriage. My husband Thor and I take deep delight in each other, and deep trust. But my life has certainly not always been this way: I’m a survivor of two divorces, many more break-ups, and staggering amounts of emotional pain.
My, how things can change. Specifically, [...]

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Guest post by award-winning journalist Colleen Kaleda:
My husband and I recently bought a 96 year old house in a close-in neighborhood of Northeast Portland. If our land could talk — oh what would it say? Perhaps that it wants to shed its excess pavement.

Our sidewalk still has hand-forged steel rings where horses used [...]

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Happy Fourth of July! It’s our nation’s birthday. I’ve posted Ideas for celebrating below, based on this basic life-principle we all tend to forget:
A nation starts its life in the beginning as land, as earth — before people arrived to populate it. And that land, the soil, water and things that grow on it, are [...]

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My carpool-pals don’t just help me save gas money and carbon emissions, they also pass good information on to me. Thanks to my baseball-loving ‘pool, I’ve learned about Andrew Brown, the relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics who uses his bicycle and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get to the ballpark for [...]

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Running is just about the most natural sport possible, the sport our pre-Industrial ancestors did, the one that doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. You’d think that fun in the time of global warming would make liberal use of running — and it would, but you’d need to rethink Hood To Coast.
Hood To Coast is the [...]

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With Summer Solstice and the first day of summer coming up on Saturday June 21, my theme this week will be earth-friendly recreation, or Fun In The Time Of Global Warming.

Professional work tends to keep us up in our heads, thinking so hard we practically get divorced from our bodies. I really hate that about [...]

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You have probably read by now that our country has been getting dramatically more obese for twenty years now. Most people I know seem to want to lose weight and be more lean and fit. Diets, though, are famous for non-lasting results and nasty backlash effects.

My philosophy of the diamond-cut life naturally has a different take on weight loss and dieting than the mainstream culture does. (I’m

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