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My woodland cottage.

My woodland cottage.

"Our life is frightened away by detail...simplify, simplify."

"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

"I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite."

Henry David Thoreau

For comparison, my cabin is thirteen feet wide by twenty feet long, eighteen feet tall, including the sleeping loft. There are windows on all sides. A cast iron fireplace is at one end. A deck overlooks a small creek below. There is room for a desk chair and a love seat which is ample room for any company I may wish to entertain. And outside I can sometimes hear the train whistle eight miles away through the night woods.

SOME FAVORITES

Since becoming a member of VT, I've become even more fascinated by the world we share. I love when I run across someone’s site and they add a few of their favorite websites to their Homepage - here's my additions. Oh, and if you haven't done so, you might enjoy clicking your cursor over the What A Wonderful World title - sound on, too.

SKY FILLED POSSIBILITIES
Inspired by Wild Orchid's 2004 Christmas page.
(Sound on for this link, too.)

U.S. DEMOCRACY?
Wonder what the rest of the world might be thinking of us? Don't discount this site--it has over 2.5 million hits on it!

THIS AMERICAN LIFE
If I had only one radio program to send out for people to experience what is most real about the people of the USA, I would choose This American Life. It speaks not of our celebrity-filled world, but the lives of the rest of us—(mostly) quite ordinary people.*** It speaks of who we are, naked, with and without the mask. TAL is ironic, serious, touching, humorous, profoundly revealing, irreverently honest and hopeful, and decidedly entertaining; then again, after a few hours of listening to this program you may possibly be thinking to yourself: And these are the people who elect the most powerful leader of the western world?
REVIEW
Read Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet’s Review of This American Life.

ALTERNATIVE RADIO
This is my favorite station for social commentary.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE
For the strange new world we live in, this is the best site I've found that covers the workings of our communications in the virtual world of VT and on other sites. One article addressing the subject of email courtesy is: E-Mail Communication and Relationships

COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION
When people can get over their diagnoses of each other--their judgments, evaluations, criticisms--and connect to what's going on in each other, conflicts which seem impossible to resolve seem to almost resolve themselves.
~Marshall Rosenberg
developer, Non-violent Communication, or Compassionate Communication

My best friend is a trainer in this approach toward communication. My life has been profoundly influenced by her sharing, our disagreements, our arguments, and our new understandings over the meanings we make of what it is to communicate as member of the human community. NVC has contributed greatly to these new understandings. This approach is, overall, the best antidote to "baboon consciousness" that I have come across. (No offense intended to the baboons.)

DEMOCRACY & FREEDOM
I found this from the _rudolph j rummel_ site to be a fascinating view of what we are currently doing on the planet as homo politicus. You might want to start on the PERSONAL box reading his short biography before proceeding into the bowels of this site.

TOLERANCE
No explanation needed.

SLANG

***There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
—C.S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory