Monthly Archives: June 2012

Make More Time

June 29th, 2012

 

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Seven months ago I wrote a piece titled There’s Never Enough Time. It’s probably boring, so you don’t have to read it again. The premise is simple: there’s never enough time to do the things you want to do. So, start quitting the projects you aren’t crazy about and have more time to do the things you love.

 

Okay, it turns out I was wrong.

 

This weekend you will have more time. If you haven’t heard yet, this weekend will have more time, or more specifically, one more second.

 

In order to keep up with the spinning of the earth and the atomic clocks calibrated perfectly to match all the order of the cosmos, the wisest scientists our society has to offer have decided to give us an extra second. You know, in order to maintain order.

 

Interestingly enough, we stayed with a friend in Portugal whose son is one of these specific astrophysicists. I was delighted by the idea of someone spending twenty years researching and dedicating their lives to the addition of one second. I will do a lot of things in my life, but I’ll never be able to add more time to it.

 

So, this weekend, you’ll have more time. Use it wisely.

 

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Why You Need a Desert Life

 

June 20th, 2012

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A trip to the desert is not comfortable. The browbeating heat of the day aggressively contrasted by the quick, temperature dropping nights… the life sustaining nectar we call water- a foreign element to the sands and winds… The rare people, plants, and animals that call the desert home, understand a barren lifestyle most of us only see in films. Without beating a dead camel, the desert has little to offer life.

 

Of course, unless you are a rainforest.

 

The past few years has been a boom for the fine folks who study mineral dust research. It turns out the Sahara Desert, specifically a tiny little spot called the Bodele Depression, supplies the winds with enough mineral dust to float across the Atlantic Ocean and settle pretty in a corner of South American known to some as the Amazon rainforest. Without this mineral dust from Africa, the Amazon would cease to exist.

 

Not many people choose to live in the desert. The landscape does little to support and promote life. But all is not lost! We need the dry times and strange wastelands in order to have the oppostive, and so the rainforest, with all her diversity, creations, mysteries, and life can only exist with the help of the dead and barren.

 

This charming reminder serves a few purposes:

The world is more connected than we realize.

What you do here impacts people and things far and wide.

Embrace the dry and barren times, as they may be supporting your rich and abundant times.

If creativity were a landscape, the artists haven would be the rainforest.

To have a rainforest you must first have a desert.

 

 

Meg and I just recently spent a few weeks in Morocco, where we played tourist and camel trekked to the Moroccan/ Algerian border, camping in the dunes of the Sahara Desert. Currently in rural northern Portugal.

 

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