on FIRE to INSPIRE!

My social media sabbatical has been a game changer!  It has gifted me with focus, clarity, insight and TIME!  It has launched me in a whole new direction.  I set out to clear my head in prep to write a book and lay the foundation for my coaching practice.  While I have made serious headway with both, the course I am charting is looking much different than I anticipated!

When the idea of a book came up, I thought it was going to be a memoir for my daughters...to give them a way to know a bit of my past and theirs and to share some of the lessons I gleaned along the way.  Then along came Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old climate change activist from Sweden!  She has rocked my world and for that I am deeply grateful!  She has awoken in me the young environmental activist that side stepped a life of passionate but frenzied, anxious activism in pursuit of peace and purposeful service in a world that seemed to be screaming out for so much help.  It was this fiery quality in me that propelled me to mountaintops taller than I ever imagined my skinny legs could carry me and to spiritual heights that were equally as profound.  It was this same urge that inspired our move to the Pacific Northwest to reconnect with our love of land...and then again to rural Wisconsin to try our hand at some regenerative farming practices in hopes of passing these along to our daughters and bringing healing to our little corner of the world. 

While the book will still be a memoir of sorts, the intended audience has changed significantly.  I am writing for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the climate crisis and is desperate to find their place and purpose in all of it...and I am writing for the person who is stuck to their couch, their job, their specific life circumstances because the weight of it all feels just too overwhelming but the desire to do something lays just beneath all that weight.  I WANT TO BLOW FIRE ON THAT DESIRE AND IGNITE ACTION!  The world needs all of us to live full out right now!!

Our kids are screaming out for us to do something NOW so they can do something, anything!, later.  They want things we have foolishly taken for granted...clean air, clean water, cool winters and warm summers, seasons they can count on!  They want the chance to pursue their dreams too and they deserve that chance! 

I have pursued the road less traveled and have thrown myself all in when it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to many standing in observance.  I have learned what it takes to pursue a difficult course and make radical changes.  I want to use these well-honed skills to help people change their lives in a way that I can only hope and pray might play a small part in slowing the phenomena we have  come to know as 'climate change'.  Greta's voice helped me to see what has been driving me at my core through all of these crazy maneuvers through life.  She and all of the young activists around our beautiful and aching planet have unleashed the flames within my heart!  I am on fire to inspire and have no time to lose!  Won't you join me?

Oh, in case you were sensing it too, 'slowandsimpleliving' might have served its purpose.  I have loved the name and what it has given to me but it may well be time to move on to something a little more fitting for the things I feel inclined to write about!  Stay tuned!

---