A New Way To Look At A Sunset

 

Sometime in April, a beautiful flower, the color of a brilliant sunset, begins springing up out of the ground. Having no idea what its actual name is, I decided, a couple of years ago, to name it "Sunset Burst."

The other day, I was looking out the window and enjoying the pop of bright color that this unusual wildflower provides in our front yard meadow, and began contemplating the symbolism of the sunset.  In terms of life stages, most people consider a sunset to represent the last years of one's life.  The end of something. 

And not with a happy connotation. Many people, fearing death, add dread to the sorrow when occasion has them facing this ubiquitous life metaphor. 

But as I was thinking about it, I wondered: does a sunset, so full of glory in its show of color and sunbeams radiating low in the sky, have to stand for something as morbid as the end of life? .

Now, if you're a believer, you may consider the end of life on earth as the beginning of a much better life in a much better place. While that's good and true, it's not where my mind went as I gazed upon that flower. 

My first thought was of the brilliant colors, of both an actual sunset, and of the flower which I've named after it. Just like a sunrise, a sunset glows with color, a display which is multiplied when there are clouds present. I love bright colors. The sight of brightly-colored objects awakens my soul, and sparks joy inside of me.

Some people prefer the dull tones of various shades of brown, or of a black-and-white scheme. That's fine. To each his or her own. But such people better prepare themselves, because I have yet to read or hear a testimony of someone who visited heaven who did not mention fields of flowers which painted the landscape with all colors of the rainbow, and more brilliant and more beautiful than anything that can be found on earth.

And that makes total sense. Light ultimately comes from our heavenly Father, and what is light but all the colors of the rainbow, hidden inside a yellowish-white shaft? 

Light also signifies, the world over, an end to darkness and a revelation of truth. .It's a beginning. 

Just like a sunset. A sunset may be the literal end to a day, but it's also a beginning.  

A beginning of a time to rest and relax. 

A beginning to several hours of stillness and peace.

A beginning, even, to a brand new day. It signals the end of this day, and all of its worries and regrets and mistakes and frustration.  It provides a cushion during which you can ease away from all the negativity, and set the intention to create more positivity the next day. 

So the next time you glimpse a sunset, remember that the age-old metaphor doesn't have to apply. 

Remember that a sunset, with all its delicious shades of color, can indicate a fresh start to life,  a new beginning.

Peace to you, and may blessing abound in every area of your life.

Celebrate This Time Of Renewal...

 

As I write these words, spring is in full swing where I live. Many of our spring plants are even going to seed now. Some of the bird species that make a brief stop here on their way to more northern climates have already come and gone.

The bumblebees, carpenter bees, and honeybees are out in droves, sipping from the delectable nectar from all the blooms.

If you live up north, spring may be just beginning. Wildflowers are just now beginning to sprout out of the ground, or to bud. The ground is slowly turning from a dull brown to a brilliant ardent color. And the landscape is turning from gray to various shades of green as leaves begin to bud and grow.

Likely as not, spring rains have begun to fall, washing the sky and bringing a fresh, clean scent to the air. Insects are beginning to hum and buzz. Frogs have begun calling out ot potential mates.

Wherever you live...whatever climate you live in...I want to encourage you to get outside and immerse yourself in the new life.

Get off your phone, step away from Netflix, and gift yourself the experience of the beautiful reality of God's creation, of nature.

And not just nature, but nature as it awakens from the long sleep of winter.

Likely as not, you, too, have been dormant during the past several months. Perhaps you've been sheltering from the cold. Perhaps, like me, you suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and so have had to trudge through the annual depression that sets in when the sun is not as bright, and low-hanging clouds persist above you, day after day.

As I write these words, winter is over. Temperatures are rising, the sun is bright. And the landscape is exploding with color, beckoning you to join with it, to experience spring in all its splendor. 

And I encourage you to obey the call. Spring reminds us that life continues on, and that, like the earth renews itself every year, you can renew yourself. You can make new choices. better choices, perhaps, than you made last year.

Moreover, nature in springtime calls us back to simplicity, to a slower way of life.

Perhaps the best reason to get out and enjoy spring? There's no better therapy than an outdoor walk on a beautiful day. There's no easier way to drop your worries and regrets, and to completely immerse yourself in the present moment. 

Peace to you, and may blessing abound in every area of your life.

A Fresh Look For My "Texas Hearts" Series!

 Long ago and far away, in a land called "Clueless Newbie Indie Author," I paid someone who charged only $40 per book cover to create the book covers for my "Texas Hearts" series. 

In case you don't know, no pro book cover designer charges that little to create book covers. And, I got what I paid for. 

They weren't terrible, but...

Looking back, I now know that she didn't understand the nuances of book cover design. First, a series should have a thematic look to it; for example, the same fonts used for the title, the same or similar backgrounds, and so on. One reason for this thematic look is that book-selling websites will group novels in a series together on a page, and it's a lot more appealing when the books all resemble each other.

Second, covers should reflect the genre. While it's eye-catching, her cover for the first book in the series, The Envelope, looks more like a cover for a YA fantasy or action-adventure novel.

Third, floating heads look strange. The covers for Going Home and Benita's Dream both have floating heads. 

I've broken the rule...

There's a piece of advice running around the self-published author community, and that is, unless you've actually taken classes to learn how to be a profession designer, you should pay someone to design your book covers.

I've never taken any such classes. I don't even consider myself artistic. But it's been years since I paid someone to design my book covers for me. And, if I do say so myself, the covers have turned out well. 

How is this possible? Three things.

**1. Studying other book covers in my genre.

**2. My husband's willingness to learn basic skills in GIMP (free, open source image manipulation software).

**3. My learning my way around Canva.

All of that has led to...

New book covers for my oldest series.

Here they are, in order. I've linked each cover, too, so if you haven't read the series, you can check them out in the Amazon store. 

Which is your favorite cover, and why? Tell me in the comments below! 😀

This Christian Women’s Fiction Novel Will Grip Your Heart!

 A long time ago, I suffered from an eating disorder.

Much closer to the present, I suffered from guilt and fear over whether I was “in God’s will” for my life.

My latest book in the “Pine Mountain Estates” series addresses both issues.

George and Rosa are back!

If you’ve read my “Texas Hearts” series, you’ll remember George Marima and Rosa Manriquez. The former was from Zimbabwe, and the owner of the M&M Motel in Fort Worth, Texas. The latter was a former strip club dancer who was freed from her life when…

Nope, sorry. That’ll spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the story yet. 😉

Anyway. Guns and Rosa is the romance story between forty-year-old George and thirty-five-year-old Rosa.

They make a comeback in my latest “Pine Mountain Estates” story, Rediscovering the Mountaintop, which occurs over twenty years later.

The gist of things.

A couple of recent events have Rosa wondering if a couple of major decisions she made long ago didn’t send both her and George down the wrong path. Afraid she’s been out of God’s will for years, she flees her home and goes to Pine Mountain. There she intends to take a retreat at Peter and Liz Tanner’s (Grace on the Mountain) rental cabin to figure things out.

Then Dalia shows up at her front door, bearing a welcome basket that Allie Whitlock, who lives down the mountain, is too ill to deliver herself.

Severely underweight, she’s been insisting to everyone she knows that she has her health under control. She has an equally compelling reason for her self-abuse as Rosa does for leaving her husband in the lurch to struggle alone with a slowly failing business.

Only, in Dalia’s case, she’s doing what she can to stop herself from making the wrong decision in the first place.

The conflict.

Both women want to be left alone. Both women are sure they can figure things out for themselves.

Not only are they wrong, but it seems an invisible hand keeps guiding them to cross each other’s path. And it’s a good thing, because…

…one of them is playing with death and doesn’t know it.

Rediscovering the Mountaintop will be available for purchase on June 14, 2023, but you can click here to preorder the novel.

Is It Menopause, Or Is It The Weather?

There’s a lot of to-do around menopause these days, with more women than ever before suffering from hormone imbalance-related symptoms starting as early as their late thirties. and continuing into their mid to late fifties. There’s so much noise around it, that for the past decade I’ve been convinced that all of my mental and physical problems have been stemming from my body not producing enough estrogen and progesterone.

Now, I’m not here to negate the possibility that some of my symptoms have resulted from hormone deficiencies, nor am I here to belittle any problem any of my peri- or post-menopausal readers might be suffering from.

But I recently discovered something about myself that I wanted to share, because I believe the truth of it will help some other women who are in their forties and fifties.

My Big Discovery.

Before I get into That Big Discovery, I need to share a smaller, related discovery I made a couple of years ago. That discovery was that the sensitivities of Highly Sensitive People become more acute with age. In the recent past when I spoke on the topic, I mentioned that due to my extremely sensitive nervous system, changes in the weather affect me both physically and mentally.

That Big Discovery I recently made? The weather has been affecting me more than I realized. Here’s how I figured that out.

As I write these words, it’s the middle of March. From early February until now, the weather changes from day to day and from week to week have been even more extreme where I live than they usually at this time of year…which, by the way, has always been the most difficult part of the year for me to get through. It’s gone something like this: A week of winter weather, including highs in the thirties and sleet, ice, and snow falling from the sky. Then, within two weeks of that, a few days in a row of sunny days in the sixties or even high seventies. Not five days later, it’s in the forties and raining.

For an entire month, all I wanted to do was sleep for the rest of my life. I wished I didn’t have a husband and son to take care of, and I didn’t care if I ever wrote another blog post, crafted another novel, or produced another video.

My digestive system went whacko along with the weather, making it even more difficult to drag myself through each day.

And though I realized some of it, particularly the depression, had to do with the weather, I thought most of it had to do with my hormone levels having fallen to new depths.

My lightning bolt moment.

It was another dreary, cloudy day. Not cold, as the predicted high was to be in the near sixty, but humid, therefore chilly. I not only felt fatigued, but also had realized that I’d gradually been feeling more depressed over the past couple of days.

Then, I get into a conflict with my teenage son. We mostly get along, and knowing he’s also Highly Sensitive, I’m usually careful to speak to him calmly and respectfully. But on this particular day, I was on edge. As was my son, I could tell within a minute of his starting a conversation about his “need” for a waterproof case for the camera I’d given to him for Christmas.

Emotions began to escalate, and I lost all my patience. I snapped.

He got upset and stormed out of the house.

Then, the answer hit me like a lightning bolt: the atmospheric insanity was what had been sucking  all the energy out of my body.

To confirm it, I turned to my husband and asked if he was feeling the weather. Was he tired or headachy?

Maybe a little tired, he replied, and definitely depressed.

Well. I know this might shock some of my readers, but neither my husband nor my son is post-menopausal. Their emotional state had nothing to do with a lack of estrogen and progesterone.

What was going on with all three of us?

Our serotonin levels were down.

Serotonin does more than I realized!

Now, I’ve known for quite some time that lack of serotonin is what causes Seasonal Affective Disorder, anxiety, and depression. Something about sunshine encourages the production of our happy brain chemical, and when clouds cover the sun for a long period of time, it can lead to negative thoughts and emotions. I’ve noticed this happen in my husband and son, as well as in myself.

I’ve also suspected a connection between low air pressure and serotonin production.

But that day, more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It can be the clearest day possible, but if the wind is from either the north or the east, it affects my mood. And not only my mood, but also my energy levels.

I realized that low levels of estrogen and progesterone weren’t causing my fatigue. it was, instead, low levels of serotonin.

A quick search the next day cemented my new knowledge, as I discovered that proper levels of serotonin are required for the adrenal glands to function well. Low serotonin therefore leads to low energy and sleep disorders.

The good news is, there are several natural ways to raise serotonin levels relatively quickly. That fateful day, I spent five minutes sniffing rosemary essential oil, and just like that, my energy went back up and my digestion began to improve.

I had suffered needlessly for several weeks.

The issue of serotonin for health is so important that I’ve decided to write a whole other post and make a whole other video about it. For now, I want to close by addressing my fellow late middle-aged women who have been suffering from what are typically considered symptoms of hormonal imbalance, even when they are endeavoring to live as healthy a lifestyle as they can. 

I want to encourage you to start paying attention to the weather, how you feel on cloudy days, when the wind is from the north or east, (or, I guess from the south if you live in the Southern Hemisphere), when a storm is brewing, when the humidity is high. You might just find a pattern. 

You might discover that many, if not most, of your problems have had nothing to do with your hormones, and everything to do with the weather.

Peace to you, and may blessings abound in every area of your life.

March 2023 Book of the Month: “Hatching The Nest Egg.”

A lot of young adults are hoping to achieve financial independence before they hit age fifty, some before they hit age forty. A lot of older adults wish they could quit their lifelong careers to do something different, or retire from the work force altogether, but are struggling with their finances. 

At the very least, many people in their fifties and sixties at this moment were hoping to retire within the last, or next, couple of years, but the recession has thrown a wrench into their plans.

Enter my book, Hatching the Nest Egg: Achieve Super-Early Retirement Without Side Gigs, Gambling, Or An Above-Average Income. In it, I talk about the two best ways to get out of debt, teach a financial management strategy that is superior to using a budget, and reveal the investment strategy that has kept my husband and I afloat since 2014 (my writing business currently doesn’t make nearly enough to pay the bills). 

Yes, we experienced a big dip in our assets like everyone else. Because, what else is going to happen when EVERY investment vehicle tanks at the same time? But we likely haven’t lost as much as many people. We are also now recovering (however slowly and gradually), and probably more quickly than a lot of people, thanks to this strategy.

And, if I do say so myself, it’s a better strategy than what Dave Ramsey recommends. 😉

Click here to check out the book. I keep the price low to make the decision to buy easy.

You're welcome. 😉

Unexpected Visitors

When you live in a rural area, you get all kinds of four-legged visitors during the night. Where we live, we have seen evidence of deer, coyotes, armadillos, rats, mice, possums, rabbits and raccoons on our property (and sometimes we see the actual animal during the day). We have smelled the evidence of skunks having been nearby (and are happy to say we’ve rarely seen one nearby during the day!).

We recently had a downfall of rain, and then sleet, the latter of which fell for several hours, two days in a row. One morning, after the sleet had melted off the path from our house to the garden, I was walking next to it to avoid slipping on the muddy quagmire when I spotted, in that very mud, a kind of track  that I hadn’t seen before.

It was too big to belong to either a possum or raccoon; besides, I know for certain that raccoons leave little claw prints along with their paws. And it was the wrong shape to belong to a coyote. That left two other possibilities, both of which were equally thrilling and chilling.

My worldly-wise teenage son immediately shot down one of my guesses. “Bears don’t have retractable claws,” he informed me.

So I had my husband look up an image of mountain lion tracks.

He did, and I had my answer.

A mountain lion had come at least within twenty feet of our house the night before, perhaps even passed by the front of it.

Welcome, or not?

People who live in rural areas and have outdoor pets don’t like either mountain lions or coyotes. I myself don’t like the idea of cats eating rats, or coyotes and mountain lions attacking the deer and rabbits. I look forward to the day when the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat [Isaiah 11:6].

And even if you don’t have pets (like our family), you’ve heard the horror stories of predatory wildlife attacking people. So to have discovered that one such animal came so close to our house was a bit disconcerting – even though I know that mountain lions, or panthers as they are also called, are among the shyest of the predatory animals in North America and do their best to stay out of sight of humans.

On the other hand, I’ve always liked cats, and appreciate their grace and quiet stealth. And the fact of the matter is, until Yeshua returns to create a perfect, non-violent world, mountain lions and coyotes do a good job in helping keep down the population of the herbivores. There’s nothing inherently scary or evil about predatory animals…as long as you respect them for what they are and behave wisely in relation to their proximity.

Unexpected visitors of the two-legged kind.

Just as there are animals we’re not sure about, so there are certain people in each of our lives about whom we can say the same. We welcome with open arms the overtly friendly ones, or the shy ones who, once we begin talking to them, turn out to be kind people with generous hearts. Those are, shall we say, the rabbits and deer of our lives. They are the ones who are easy to be around, the helpful strangers and the friends who let us cry on their shoulders when we’re going through a crisis.

But other types of people pass through our lives, as well. People who grate on our nerves, who challenge our every belief and opinion, or who seem aloof and distant, and therefore unapproachable. I’m not talking about those who deliberately hurt you, just the ones who seem to have been placed in our path just to make our road a little bumpier.

And we wish weren’t there. Wish we could avoid them.

But what if God sent those people in your way? What if without them, you could not grow into the person God wants you to become?

No one likes to be challenged. No one likes to have to step out of their comfort zone and approach someone who seems unapproachable. But what if, by accepting these challenges and choosing to take the risk of extending a hand of friendliness toward the aloof person, you find a new ally in life? Or, at least, you discover new strength and courage, and gain new wisdom, either about the world or about yourself?

The coyotes and mountain lions and – Lord help us, raccoons! – of our lives aren’t our favorite people to be around. We’re not sure we can trust them, not sure they won’t hurt us.

But they’re here for a reason.

You’re here for a reason. And have you ever thought that you might be somebody else’s coyote, mountain lion, or raccoon?

So, learn to expect the unexpected visitors of life, and to accept their presence. Because God is doing something to you and for you, through them, and God’s end is always, always, the best end that could ever be.

Peace to you, and may blessing abound in every area of your life.