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Freshly picked mulberries in a bowlLast night, as Chris and I were walking in the back meadow, near the woods, we discovered a mulberry tree. We had been looking at a wild blackberry bush and talking about when the blackberries might be ripe when Chris looked up and saw a nearby tree covered with what appeared to be blackberries. Chris ate a couple and declared them to be good. I was praying that they weren’t poisonous.

Once home, a little research revealed that the berries were not blackberries, but mulberries. More research showed that they are quite rich in resveratol, a natural anti-oxidant, along with an abundant amount of vitamins.

My last blog post was about the pleasure of baking bread. The recipe I used was from Mother Earth News and had almost no kneading, yet did not have the long rising times of typical no-knead bread recipes. I promised to post the link to the recipe online if Mother Earth News had it posted […]

After watching the Walton family in their simple, yet very fulfilling lives, I was inspired to bake some bread. I had a recipe for Mediterranean Tuna Panina sandwiches, and I wanted to use a special bread.

I baked a recipe from Mother Earth News. It was for a basic sandwich bread and I followed the recipe except that I substituted 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour for part of the unbleached all-purpose flour. The recipe was very easy and involved almost no kneading.

Sometimes we hear a few words, have a chance interaction, or get an unexpected result and suddenly our world shifts, our perspective changes and we feel the impact of something powerful. We emerge lost in thought, awed, perhaps confused, or perhaps glowing with sharp clarity. From the experience, we’ve become a different person.

The first strawberry of the season; it was magnificent and unexpected. I looked at it for a moment, feeling such a quiet, reverent joy from seeing it that I hesitated to pluck it from the plant.

One of the biggest points for me personally was when she said that the people who succeed stop “over thinking.” That is a real issue with me. I tend to analyze, research, find 100 different possibilities, list all the problems that may occur, identify another 100 things that I need to learn, and then do nothing because I can’t decide what the “best” course of action is.

Sometimes our sense of empathy can be too strong. Just being in the same room with a negative person can leave us feeling depressed, vulnerable, stressed or, at best, vaguely sad. No matter how hard we try, we end up being deeply affected by the negative person’s emotions.