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

What is it that you do first? Are you the first one up in your home? The first to load the dishwasher, pay the bills, embrace new music, or make a reservation at a new restaurant? I was on a walk in a large, beautiful garden, and passed by a section of August lilies and…

Ryan Brasier is one of my favorite baseball pitchers. He’s a very normal looking athlete who made the most of his talent and helped the Boston Red Sox win a World Series. But at 35 years old, his career had seemingly come to an end and the Red Sox released him. But what happened next…

One the consistent teachings of world religions is those with whom we have conflict, have something to teach us about ourselves and have an equal measure of the “divine” in them, as we might perceive we have in ourselves. Marcus Aurelius, the 2nd Century Roman Emperor, once put it this way: “But I have seen…

How do you begin your day? Are there specific things you eat, words you read or say, or even a certain emotion you nurture? Because in many ways – as we know – these choices set the tone for everything that follows.  The tennis player Novak Djokovic, for example, drinks a glass of warm water…

Yves Klein is a painter who wanted to focus on one thing in his work as an artist, namely to paint a single color. He picked the color blue and eventually created a shade of blue no one had ever seen before. It’s called the “International Klein Blue.” We find strength and purpose when we…

The great photographer Herni Cartier-Bresson once said, “photography… fixes forever that precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are constantly vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can bring them back.” I recently came across a lovely book of photographs by Richard Quinney called, Things Once Seen,…