a daily blog on well-being and how to feel better by Mark Barger Elliott…

Did you know there are four “forces” in the universe. Frank Wilczek, author and Noble Prize winner in physics, explains: “Gravity keeps Earth in orbit around the Sun… The electromagnetic force… weaves atoms into molecules. The strong force…. supplies the attractions that make nuclear burning [in the sun] possible. The weak force enables… transformations [to…

“The world is as you are,” observes filmmaker David Lynch in his book Catching the Fish.  If we think about it, how we feel is how we experience life and the world around us.  When we feel happy, life is enjoyable. When we feel at peace, life offers us moments of contentment and satisfaction. But when…

In her book The Creative Habit, choreographer Twyla Tharp points her readers to Leonard DaVinci’s notebooks and how he would fastidiously observe nature and write down questions he wanted to explore. He was fascinated with water, for example, and wrote down these questions: “Where the water is swift at the bottom and not above. Where…

Where does love begin? Here is a story that offers an idea. “When she woke up on the morning of Oct. 25 and read her text messages,” writes Heather Knight, “Robyn Sue Fisher couldn’t stop crying and shaking. She learned from an employee that overnight someone had smashed the front windows of her shop, Smitten Ice…

“Even as the leaves are falling,” observes Katherine May in her book Wintering, “the buds of next year’s crop are already in place, waiting to erupt again in spring…. We rarely notice them because we think we’re seeing the skeleton of the tree, a dead thing until the sun returns. But look closely, and every…

“A person really doesn’t become whole,” observed basketball coach Jim Valvano, “until he becomes a part of something that’s bigger than himself.” Religions, philosophers, writers, repeatedly make the point to be human is to have this feeling something is missing in our lives. That feeling can manifest itself as restlessness, obsessiveness, self-doubt, and at times…