Living an Audaciously Mundane Life

Max taught me this and boy! what a gift mundane life is. Thank my love. 

Jason McBride has a beautiful piece on this topic: 

When the game is rigged, the only way to win is not to play.

If you want to live a life of contentment and happiness, you need to be brave enough to fully enjoy a mundane existence.

You have to live an audaciously mundane life.

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My grandparents left little in the way of an inheritance when they passed. They were never rich, but they were some of the happiest people I’ve ever met because they knew how to be happy with enough. They knew how to find the small joys in life.

They were extraordinarily ordinary.

None of them ever ran a marathon or took a trip around the world. My dad’s mom kept a beautiful flower garden, and my mom’s mother raised a variety of vegetables in her backyard.

My grandpas would take me for long drives around the Idaho countryside on hot summer afternoons, telling me stories about their lives and showing me where our people used to live.

When my grandparents weren’t entertaining grandchildren or on road trips staying with relatives, they played cards or dominoes with their neighbors and friends from church.

There were no cruises or sports cars.

For most of human existence, that was how we all lived. We worked, played, and then we died. Life used to be simple.

The truth is, it still can be. If you are willing to lower your expectations and open your eyes, you can lead a wonderful life just being ordinary. Instead of longing for a life you’ve seen on Instagram, you can go outside and watch the sunset where you live for free every night.

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From the outside, my life looks dull. I spend most of my day working on maintaining our home, raising children, and writing to pay the bills.

But in our home, there is always laughter. We have enough food to eat and live in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Every day, I cook and clean — and every day I see something wonderful.

I may not ever be able to retire or visit all of the places in the world I long to see, but every day I draw breath, I can find contentment in my life and wonder in a world that is always changing, even as it rotates through the same four seasons each year.

It takes a certain kind of audacious courage to love living a mundane life. But if you’re brave enough to give up a life of endless striving and chasing hits of outrage, you can find peace and happiness in the ordinary.

 

This Tree Wants to Be Struck by Lightning !

When lightning strikes a tree in the tropics, the whole forest explodes.

“At their most extreme, it kind of looks like a bomb went off,” said Evan Gora, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Dozens of trees around the one that was struck are electrocuted. Within months, a sizable circle of forest can wither away.

Somehow, a single survivor stands, seemingly healthier than ever. A new study by Dr. Gora, published last week in the journal New Phytologist, reveals that some of the biggest trees in a rainforest don’t just survive lightning strikes. They thrive.

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From 2014 to 2019, the system captured 94 lightning strikes on trees. Dr. Gora and his team visited sites to see which species had been struck. They were looking for dead trees as well as “flashover points,” where leaves are singed as lightning jumps between trees. From there, the canopy dies back, and the tree eventually dies.

Eighty-five species had been struck and seven survived, but one stood out literally and figuratively: Dipteryx oleifera, a towering species that had been struck nine times, including one tree that had been hit twice and seemed more vigorous. D. oleifera stands about 30 percent taller than the rest of the trees and has a crown about 50 percent larger than others, almost as if it is an arboreal lightning rod.

“It seems to have an architecture that is potentially selecting to be struck more often,” Dr. Gora said.

All the struck D. oleifera trees survived lightning strikes, but 64 percent of other species died within two years. Trees surrounding D. oleifera were 48 percent more likely to die after a lightning strike than those around other species. In one notable die-off, a single strike killed 57 trees around D. oleifera “while the central tree is just happy and healthy,” Dr. Gora said. Lightning also blasted parasitic vines off D. oleifera trees.

The clearing of neighboring trees and choking vines meant struck D. oleifera trees had less competition for light, making it easier to grow and produce more seeds. Computer models estimated that getting struck multiple times could extend the life of a D. oleifera tree by almost 300 years.

Before the study, “it seemed impossible that lightning could be a good thing for the trees,” Dr. Gora said. But the evidence suggests that D. oleifera benefits from each jolt.

“Trees are in constant competition with each other, and you just need an edge relative to whatever is surrounding you,” said Gabriel Arellano, a forest ecologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study.

The physical mechanisms that help trees survive intense lightning strikes remain unknown. Different trees could be more conductive or have architectures that escape damage, Dr. Gora suggested.

- More Here