If you’ve read The Not So Big Life, you’ll know the influence that Normandi Ellis, author of Awakening Osiris and Dreams of Isis, has had upon my life. Twenty-four years ago, Normandi introduced me to the Year End Review process. I wrote about the transformative nature of first meeting her, …
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All of us have dreams for ourselves and our lives, but sadly most of us don’t live them because we never take the time to listen, and never pay full attention to what our hearts long to do. That’s why I wrote The Not So Big Life, to help people …
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I would like to introduce you to the Libertyville Showhouse, which was built in 2011 in a northern suburb of Chicago. This brief introduction will give you a taste of what it’s all about. Designed for a family with two kids, this particular house is intended to completely model …
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(Note: This post was originally written in May of 2012, but although my current life is not presenting the same issues, the concepts delineated are as relevant in this moment as they were seven years ago.) There are certain key concepts involved in Not So Big Living that I want to …
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Several years ago, I collaborated with my friend and fellow architect, Tina Govan, to design a house here in North Carolina, on a truly spectacular lakefront property, with panoramic views of the water and mountains beyond. The couple for whom we designed the house wanted a place that would work …
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It’s no picnic to be a perfectionist. It can mean making yourself (and others around you) miserable with constant judgment, correction and impossible standards. But there are ways to begin to see through it. In order to learn something new, something beyond the beliefs and dictates of the personality (the …
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In Chapter Six of The Not So Big Life I explain a different way of looking at everything in your life, by seeing all of it as a kind of reflection that’s showing you to you. All that happens to you and all the people who are a part of your …
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I want to set the stage for this important understanding with a powerful, if disturbing, Sufi teaching story that lays the ground work for appreciating what both our dreams and our everyday life experiences can teach us. Here’s the story, taken from In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky, …
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In the mid-1990s, when I’d been working as a residential architect for more than a decade, I had an epiphany one day while driving though the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. I had started noticing that new houses were getting extremely large, and decidedly unattractive. For miles and miles, …
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