Loreen's blog

It's amazing how many times in the last week I've announced, "I'm new!" Most of the time, it's less of an announcement, more of an apology: "Sorry, I haven't the slightest idea about the answer to your question; I'm new."

There's always an internal call to slow down in Winter, and it feels especially important after a full, fast-paced holiday season.  Even with the warmer-than-normal temperatures, our bodies and minds can still take advantage of the extended hours of darkness to repair and restore, ourselves and the personal spaces around us.  When attended to, this can be an incredible time of renewal.  There are as many ways to approach this time as there are people, of course.  In general, however, we have found ourselves offering support fr

We're often asked for help with gift giving, especially around Christmas-time.  Everyone seems to have so much to do, so little time, so many people who seem difficult to gift.  This reality always makes me wonder about this idea of gifting, about what it's really all about.  "It's the thought that counts" is something we've all heard -- and I think it's true, just possibly not in the way most people hear it!  What do I mean?

While "some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, Halloween as we know it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)" The name of the festival historically kept by the Gaels in the British isles is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end” and is most often thought of as a time when the division between the worlds of the living and those who’ve passed is thinnest.

One of the simplest joy s of this holiday is found in beautiful ornaments adorning our trees, each year retelling the stories of Christmases past… There’s something so powerful and beautiful in the experience of reconnecting to ourselves and our families in this way: special events immortalized in an ornament; sweet smiles shared while listening to "White Christmas" sung by Bing; a moment of calm enjoyed as we gaze at the lights on a beautiful tree; each allowing “now” and “then” to mingle in a magical way.

To us, the clock is one of the most fascinating human inventions. As we seek to consistently measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units if the day; the lunar month and the year all sorts of science, poetry and philosophy come into play. Devices making use of gravity or the force of springs or even the changes in atmospheric pressure are all represented; regulating each for accuracy has been a different challenge. What is time? What is a minute? We can answer this with science, we can experience its elasticity with our minds and hearts… All this technology -- and art!