A few days out of the city; sitting under the trees by a little lake; picking fresh raspberries, lettuce and green beans from the garden…

And then – eating the food we’d just picked…

Heaven!

Back in the late 1980s, I took part in a Tai Chi class – sort of a moving meditation practice that is well known in many parts of Asia.

One of my friends who spent years in China talked about seeing hundreds of people in parks, early every morning, all doing Tai Chi in unison. It sounded immensely powerful to be in unison with others doing the same centuries-old moves.

If you read last week’s feature article, you might recall that I had an awakening about a different way (for me at least) to look at “surrender.”

Let’s just say that, until recently, phrases such as “Surrender to higher good” or “Let go of the need to control” did not resonate with me (to put it mildly). Those phrases sounded like a cover story for “I lost,” “I gave up” or “I abdicated my responsibility.”

“We could go to see the Chihuly exhibit. You wanted to see that, right?” my friend asked a few days before I visited her in Seattle.

“Sure,” I said. Pause. “What’s a Chihuly?”

Back in the day, a popular movie called The Sting, featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, was about a “sting” operation in which two lower-level bad guys got revenge on a higher-level bad guy by sucking him into a cleverly disguised trap.

In a commencement speech to Harvard graduates, the author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling said, “As you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life,’ I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.”

So why would an incredibly successful author like J. K. Rowling, British author of the Harry Potter series, choose to speak about “The Fringe Benefits of Failure” to a Harvard graduating class?

When a little book called Very Good Lives by J. K. Rowling caught my eye, I was surprised to read the sub-title: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.

Each year in June, in my home town of Camrose, Alberta, an event called Jaywalkers Jamboree is a very big deal. A visit to my home town brought back a flood of memories from the very first Jaywalkers Jamboree in 1957.

It was such a radical idea. Close off Main Street. Bring merchandise outdoors. Whaaat?

I am old enough to remember seeing Julia Child on TV. She was amazing in her day. She famously introduced French cooking to a North American audience, and hosted one of the first ever TV cooking shows.

This week, I’ve been remembering two Julia Child incidents...

When I was growing up, we kids got tired of hearing our dad’s story about how, when he was about 12 or 13, he had a job to sweep dust and chaff from around the local flour mill owned by Mr. Byers.