Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Simple Living

Happy May Day

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When I was a kid, every May 1, I accompanied a friend’s family in their festivities. We made homemade baskets, filled them with flowers, hung them on neighbors doorknobs, and ran away. Since it wasn’t my family’s tradition, I never understood why or what we were celebrating.

It turns out that May Day was traditionally a pagan holiday practiced throughout Europe in honor of the end of the dormant winter months. Festivities varied from country to country, but dancing around a Maypole with ribbons or streamers has been a common activity in modern times.

May Day is a simple, fun, and earth-friendly way to celebrate the beginning of spring and share some of your blooms, plants, seeds, or handicrafts with your neighbors. Want some inspiration for homemade baskets? Check out these resources:

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Attention Needed

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“Our attention is pure energy. It transforms whatever it comes into contact with,” writes David Servan Schrieber. “Animals and children know this far better than we do. Over and above food, warmth or money, it’s attention they’re really looking for when they come to us. And they bask in our attention like the sunshine….

“The ultimate proof that our attention is valuable is all the money spent on attracting us by advertisers and TV channels. ‘Look at me!’ they scream. Yet we are never sufficiently conscious of the rich resource we have.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about attention, namely the things that I’m paying attention to and the things that I’m not. In the last few months I’ve had significantly less writing time than usual. Too often when I finally get to sit down in front of my computer, I feel paralyzed. Where to begin? My mind zips through a list of ideas bursting with potential and a bigger list of projects simmering on the back burner.

Sometimes I long for a freelance writing coach to step in and help me navigate the push and pull of this work-at-home life, someone to tell me what to squeak into the diminutive windows of writing time I’m able to eke out at the moment.

Of course, there’s no such person. This is my journey. My path. I must decide which projects deserve my attention. The consequences feel weighty. As Karen Maezen Miller writes, “Whatever you pay attention to thrives; whatever you don’t pay attention to withers and dies.”

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:

What are you paying attention to right now?

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Pruning Season

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We moved into our house a few years ago in mid-February. A couple of weeks later, a neighbor knocked on the door holding clippers, a miniature saw, and a book on caring for roses. “It’s pruning season,” she said, gesturing toward my backyard, which is teeming with rose bushes.

I’d never pruned anything before. I watched as she demonstrated the technique on a few bushes.

“Cut off anything that’s dead or diseased, anything that’s skinnier than a pencil, and anything that’s growing inward,” she said, as she snipped, clipped, and sawed on a bush.

I spent more than a month pruning the roses that spring, examining each plant before making any cuts. Each one felt like a jigsaw puzzle.

Several weeks after her demonstration, my neighbor walked by and saw me hovering over a bush in the front yard. “Don’t worry. You’ll get more confident when you see them grow back this summer.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Where would you cut this one?” I asked tentatively.

Amazingly the roses bloomed that summer. I wandered among them in the evenings, watching the heads close in the fading light,  examining their thorny branches. I already dreaded February’s life-and-death deliberations of which branch would stay and which would shrivel in the yard waste bin.

Then in January, I walked through the city rose garden. The plants, which were gigantic walls of roses in the summer, were pruned down to almost nothing.

A month later, when I returned to the garden with my clipping shears, I had no fear. It took me less than a week to trim all of the bushes, and they were significantly more pruned this time.

Sure enough, by mid-June, my backyard was full of gigantic blooming bushes.

At first pruning felt counter-intuitive to me. I was sure I would hurt or kill the plants by cutting them back so far. But as I return to the garden this year, the process feels more intuitive, and even like an apt metaphor for life.

Sometimes you have to be fearless about cutting out what you don’t need to make space for more things to grow.

[This is an updated version of “Learning to Prune”, originally posted March 2, 2010. It’s pruning season once again, and I’ve found myself thinking of that post. We’ve had some spring-like weather around here, which feels just perfect for pruning – not just the roses, but the house, the closets, the cupboards… It may be a busy week.]

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Car-Free is Carefree

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Sometimes I miss the family car, especially when my friends seem to so effortlessly come and go, while my husband and I are plotting out our trips, negotiating whether we can fit all of our groceries in our bike trailer, and opting to stay home at times rather than trek across town after dark in the rain. But recently I came across a few more reasons to celebrate the car-free life.

We started 2011 with the highest gas prices ever in January, averaging $3.01 a gallon. In December, John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil predicted that gas will reach $5.00 a gallon within two years. More conservative forecasters predict that it will top out at $3.50 to $3.75 sometime this summer.

Of course, being car-free doesn’t make us entirely immune to high gasoline prices, since they trickle down into the cost of everything that’s transported. But it sure is nice not to have to pay for it at the pump.

And if high gas prices aren’t enough to make people want to park the car these days, accidents may make more think twice.

On December 9, NPR reported that five children a day die in car crashes. They are the leading cause of death for children, topping home accidents, illness, and poisoning. “I think it happens so frequently and with such regularity that we’ve lost focus on how important it is. And I think that we’re so reliant on cars to get us from Point A to Point B that we’ve sort of accepted it as the price of doing business. ” Ben Hoffman, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, told NPR.

NPR focused on the National Transportation Safety Board’s new recommendation that children ride in rear-facing car seats until they are two, citing that toddlers are five times safer facing backward than forward.

Or, of course, you could also just stay out of the car altogether.

Living car-free doesn’t make us immune to accidents either. We are fortunate to have an extensive network of off-street bike paths in Eugene, but it’s impossible to avoid riding our bikes on the streets altogether. And as much as I love walking, I’m all too aware that it can be risky. I know two pedestrians who were hit by cars – one fatally while walking down the sidewalk and another who was hit while crossing with the light at an intersection. But I do feel a little safer avoiding the highways. And the more people who choose to travel on bikes, on foot, or on public transportation the safer we’ll all be.

So at this moment, the car-free life really does feel like a carefree option.

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A Year of Meditation

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You will be far more productive in the ensuing hours if you begin the day by spending five minutes actively engaged in doing nothing at all. – Karen Maezen Miller

Last year at this time, I resolved to do something that seemed radical at the time – nothing. I made a commitment to sit for 15 minutes every day and meditate. Why? We’ve all heard that meditation can change our lives. Sometimes the claims read like an infomercial. It’s supposed to prevent and cure everything from anxiety to heart disease. And MRI scans show that in the long-term, meditation can even change the way the brain functions.

But I was looking for something less dramatic. I felt unfocused and impatient. I was spending too much time multitasking and surfing the Internet. I was restless.

I’m happy to report that during 2010, I sat down nearly every day and did nothing for 15 minutes.

There are lots of ways to meditate. I simply sit, close my eyes, and pay attention to my breath. Thoughts and emotions invariably come and go, and I try to simply take note of them and return my attention to my breath. Sounds simple, right? Sometimes it is. Other times, it’s not.

Has meditation revolutionized my life? It’s hard to say. I feel more focused, relaxed, and at ease at the start of 2011 than 2010. But there’s nothing dramatic about meditating. It is what it is – resting, paying attention, simply being. In other words, it’s not something you can easily measure or quantify – at least without an MRI machine.

That said, it’s a practice I’ll be continuing it into 2011. It gives me a chance to rest, and I find that I take those moments of sitting into my days. When I’m feeling impatient or angry, I’m more apt to recognize those emotions as fleeting and to breathe.

Did you stick with your New Year’s Resolution for 2010? Did you make a resolution for 2011?

10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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