The ethos of Little House on the Prairie may be more relevant now than ever. Here are six life lessons that may just help us all to get through.

With everything that’s happening in the world right now, it’s easy to feel deluged, to be overcome with fearful thoughts and swept into depression or paralysis. What can you do when it feels like there’s nothing you can do? Read on….

We are hard-wired to connect the dots. We want the difficult events of our lives to make sense and have meaning. It can be difficult, if not impossible, however, to see the connections and patterns and meaning when we are in the middle of the muddle. This is where the value of having an “objectified me” comes in.

Well, congratulations to us. We made it into another new year. And regardless of how you may be feeling about this fact, I think we should all be feeling damn good about ourselves for having slogged through what can only be described as the weirdest—if not the worst— two years in recent history. We’re here. We are, ipso facto, badass.

Here it is, another fall in masks; another season of uncertainty. I am beyond sick and tired of this horrid virus. But there is another equally concerning virus going around: It piggybacked in on Covid, opportunistically coming in the door that the physical virus opened. It is the virus called Fear.

Surrendering is getting out of your own way. Far from giving up, true surrender is liberation: freed from a limited perspective of “it must be this!” surrender opens us to something more.

Procrastination. Perfectionism. Proving. People Pleasing. Passivity. Paralysis. What do all these things have in common? They are all very sophisticated ways designed by your inner Protector to keep you safe from emotional risk. Unfortunately, they also keep you from living the life you want. But there’s a way through.

By practicing awareness and non-judgment, you create space. You provide some breathing room between an action and a reaction and in this space, in this pause, something new can emerge—an insight, or a bit of compassion. This is the beginning of transformation.

As with all trauma, pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to become incredibly small. All the details and to-do lists evaporate and life slows to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”

Living authentically means being your true self: not some idea of who you are, or who other people think you are or “should” be. It means embracing some things that might feel risky or like flaws. It means dropping the façade and bringing all of yourself to the game.

This past week I received two newsletters. The first, from writer Maria Popova in her exceptional weekly offering, Brain Pickings, shared an excerpt from author Katherine May’s book, Wintering, about the quiet, difficult seasons of life and how to allow them. The second, from Eileen at our local, fabulous bookstore, Rebel Heart Books, described the loss of her husband’s parents to COVID-19 in February.

When I was giving birth to my daughter, there came a point—about twelve hours into my unmedicated, at-home, every-90-seconds-a-contraction back-labor odyssey—where I was done. I looked up at my midwife, bleary and exhausted, and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” She smiled, beatifically, and said, “Okay. Let’s do something else.”

We’re almost there my friends. We’re at the finish line of 2020: the craziest, weirdest, most tumultuous, contentious, painful, scary, exhausting year that most of us have ever seen.

It all began at Madame Stacy's. I stared at the tarot cards on the makeshift table. They represented the state of affairs in my little world. In the center of the spread was the Hanged Man — my current situation.

One of the most difficult challenges in this being human business is facing what is. This is especially true when what is, sucks. I’m talking about times when life presents you with things you didn’t order and don’t want: like everything in 2020.

I live in Southern Oregon, in the valley where, a few days ago, two towns burned to the ground in one of three wildfires that surround our beautiful valley. It's worse, even, than the fires we had in 2018. Or 2002. And those were dreadful.

“There is a mantra I love that can help enormously with this process we call Life. I saw it written on a whiteboard in a yoga class one day and I have adopted it as one of my Core Principles for Living. Here it is:

As my faithful readers undoubtedly know, I am a porch-sitter. My porch is where I sit and watch the sunrise, express my gratitude, speak my prayers, and think my thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say this month. My mind and heart are troubled by what I see and hear: Division, anger, violence, finger-pointing, hypocrisy, grandstanding, virtue-signaling, and a whole lot of agitated herd behavior. It’s truly disturbing.

One of the more obvious and trying aspects of this pandemic we’re floundering in is all the things we can’t do. This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen.