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Today is my dad’s 94 th birthday. He is still alive, lives independently, (against our wishes) drives, (against our wishes) and, along with his companion Wanda, just placed very well in another bridge tournament. He called yesterday to tell me they had gone out to listen to live music downtown Winst

It was nearing 10:00 pm when I looked up from my project. I had no idea it was that late. Darkness had fallen. I hadn’t eaten dinner. My water glass was long emptied. The cats were roaming, but where? As I stood up from my short stool, I was stiff from being in the same position for…well, I really d

In year two, we hope to feature a guest blogger once a quarter. Today we feature Carrie Stepp Graves as our first guest blogger. We couldn't be more excited to let Carrie tell us how she is turning the messy into marvelous. BE NICE. You may think that this skill sounds a bit trite. Really? Are we fo

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Rumi from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing ,

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You! Here we are at the end of Year 1 blogging as LiM 2 —Life is Messy, Life is Marvelous. There has been a lot of messiness in our own lives this year and many marvelous moments! That said, we cannot let this important anniversary pass without saying a heartfelt “THANK Y

My first big failure was in college. I completely flagged a class. Yes—an ‘F’—in an elective at that. I don’t think I’d ever truly failed at anything prior to that. Of course there were those things at which I wasn’t that great (like math, in general, and calculus, specifically) but in high school,

We were sitting around a large dining room table, stuffing envelopes with invitations to a charity event. Another “stuffer” broke through the idle talk with a tangential comment: “So, Amy and Rhea, I read all your posts every week and I think to myself, ‘Yup, they are right on,’ and then I go back t

Where is the fine line between paranoia and wisdom? Between obsessive thinking and listening to your gut? A friend of mine lost her job recently. When she called, she was in complete shock and could hardly breathe. “ I had no idea this was coming,” she sobbed. “ I just bought a new house for God’s s

“We’re here to take care of each other.” The message was so simple. David Wheeler, father of six-year-old Ben, whose sweet young life was lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, wisely and generously handed us the meaning of life in less than 10 words. There was not a dry eye in the a

I get the bug every year about this time. The Spring Cleaning Bug. The pillow that falls in my face every time I open the linen closet, the pillow I would so casually crunch back onto a shelf without even a second thought, that pillow falling in my face, as of yesterday, caused groaning and cursing.