Diamond-Cut Life

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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Having noticed unusually high readership of my last post How To Save Money On Gas, I’m going to soon write a sequel with more tips on that topic, including from readers, via comments.
But man does not live by gas alone. We need our spirits to be fed, too. Enter poetry. This poem of mine, a [...]

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I got up before dawn this morning and went running at first light in Mount Tabor Park, near our house. Near a 100-foot tall Douglas Fir tree, I heard unusual scrabbling noises, so I stopped in my tracks to investigate.
I saw an adult raccoon spreadeagled on the tree at about waist height, looking over its [...]

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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 blogosphere colleague Brandt Smith of Wealth and Wisdom commented on yesterday’s post on hybrids and electric cars in a way that intrigued me. He was responding to my belief that electric cars and hybrids are the only cars that have a future in our carbon-constrained world.
“Ahh, a topic for the engineer in me. . [...]

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I was delighted to find this morning that Andrew Brown, the Oakland Athletics pitcher who was the subject of my recent post on cool commuting, wrote me in response. When he says some of his fellow A’s are now also using BART,  I’m impressed as always by how much we influence those around us with [...]

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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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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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Living sustainably takes an ongoing focus. It takes mindfulness. My experience is that all kinds of things, but especially addictions, destroy that mindfulness.
Years ago I was smitten with a man, a man beautiful inside and out, who was — you guessed it — unavailable. I obsessed about him for weeks, neglecting other things in [...]

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