As you may have heard, I recently presented a workshop at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture with a colleague/ friend named Joy Kuebler. Over 20 years of designing public spaces, she developed a fun, unique and effective process of…

I got a new woodstove!

Today’s challenge was getting the 200 lbs. box made of soapstone & cast iron from the back of the Subaru and into the house with the help of my 103 lbs. feldi sister, Linda, and…

We all are on a journey, and the journey takes us places we never imagined... And when we think we want to step into the world to serve, and serve in a role of leading, we may find that the…

So I recently returned from the annual Landscape Architecture Conference, and I now know that Halloween weekend in Minneapolis is a Thing! I also learned a bit about how your internal attitude changes your world.

The conference is driven by…

It's not what I asked for, but I'm finding myself learning to navigate all this space that has opened up in my new life without a pup to hospice. One thing that's oh so tempting is to just mindlessly fill…

This summer I had the pleasure (and the challenge!) of teaching mindfulness to 30 humans, aged 5-14, for our local 4-H day camp!

The biggest surprise was how effective the sound of a mindfulness bell was to immediately quiet the…

Can you feel it? The planets are in retrograde!

Retrograde means the planet appears to move backwards in the sky, as earth passes it on our orbit around the sun.

I say I don't really believe in astrology, but…

Living in a body with RA has taught me a lot about the limits of force and the usefulness of surrender. 

I used to think surrender meant losing, failure, quitting, a total collapse of will and effort… something to be…

So what do you do when things don't go according to plan?

I couldn't get the help I was counting on for installing 300 sq. ft. of Saltillo tile on my new floor, and my experience installing this uniquely Mexican…

Contrary to what most folks think, listening is not a passive intellectual exercise. It's an active, embodied skill, that get easier with practice. 

Our culture values talking over listening. We attend to those who speak up, we praise those who…

The last few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster, as I am in the process of building my little 24' x 30' dream house! 

From one moment to the next I oscillate from completely thrilled and delighted, to panic and…

The world is changing around us at an alarmingly fast rate. 20 years ago, I was drawn to landscape architecture because I believed through this discipline, I could help protect nature and connect people to the environment and each other.…

The mind and body are an integrated mobius strip which influence one another. How we move changes how we think, and recent neuroscience explains this interconnection in ever increasing clarity. As designers, we can integrate this information into our professional…

Neuroscience has come a long way in the last decade. We know so much more than we ever did about the mechanisms of how our brain thinks, perceives, calculates and comes up with new ideas. It's time to apply some…

 "I am going to be your last teacher. Not because I'll be the greatest teacher you may ever encounter, but because from me, you will learn how to learn. When you learn how to learn, you will realize that there…

I don't know about you but I've got a number of balls in the air. I can juggle a bit, but I'm not great at it, and I also have a limited amount of energy so I need to be…

So, as an American person living inside a light brown body for 5 decades, I have experienced innumerable incidents of bias, micro-aggressions, and overt racism, and I've also been accused of not being black or Latina enough, and I have…

We all have habits. Some are healthy, like flossing, and some are less so, like smoking. But when you think of all that you do, the real question is, what do you do that is NOT a habit? How you…

Here's an excellent podcast by a Stanford neuroscience professor that is (so chock full of info it is almost too much) about how to optimize your brain's ability to learn. It basically hits every strategy that we find in a…