So I do most of the work on this blog and other little business with my morning coffee in the garden — my office.  I wander around with hundreds of tropical birds screaming at each other and amazing smells from flowers hitting me from every direction.

Every natural color that is possible is all around me — and not just the flowers — many of the plants have pink leaves or red leaves or yellow leaves.  It is as if I am walking around in own private Garden of Eden, with so many beautiful  temptations.

So would walking around in this garden be called moving meditation?  I am fully present in the moment, regulating my breath, noticing my  surroundings — being part of my natural surroundings.

Breathe deep.  Stretch.  Letting it all come in.

Even though I am living and working in a Paradise, right now I have a few stresses going on from some financial obstacles thrown at me back home in the US, and the loss of a dear friend’s beautiful daughter.  It is affecting my sleep and making me a little tense, so this time is important.  It really is a healthy healing process, and one I can recommend.

In the center of my garden is my actual office.  A little Asian gazebo with power to run my laptop and still feel the world outside.  I am a very lucky guy to have this place  to work in.  By the time I am ready to sit down and hit the keyboard, I am already relaxed.  I can feel the creative juices flowing around and I am ready to pour out my reactions to things in my many emails; daily blog postings and business reports.

Sometimes I get distracted by the sound of a particularly loud bird.  Probably looking for  companionship from another of his kind.  I understand that.  Been there.  Done that.

I have spent years past working in cubicles, or in crowded offices with interruptions of the artificial kind — phones, loud talk, yelling, screaming, hysteria over the daily crisis.   Spilled coffee, bad jokes, idiot bosses.  I know now I was not meant for that world.  And mid-day of my old work life, I would gobble down a tasteless hamburger washed down by the sugar water of a Coke.  Now, in my garden office, it would be a sacrilege to eat anything other than fresh fruit.

I write to many friends back home encouraging them to think about living in a place like my home here — there are lots of wonderful places all over the world outside of those terrible grinding cities.   I usually write about how it is all so much cheaper to live in a place like this, but the truth is that this is not what is so valuable.  What is truly valuable is how much better life is away from those places we were taught to live in.  Don’t wait for permission.  Make a plan of escape and then do it.  Shake off the shackles and live.

OK, for those of you that find it totally impossible to do the right thing and think you must stay stuck in the big cities working too hard to pay oppressive taxes and dealing with the daily tyranny of work, I will offer you my secret website.   I have shared this with very few people.  It is located HERE.  Make sure you are somewhere alone and quiet, then follow the simple instructions, and make sure your sound is way up.  Give yourself two minutes and you will feel like a new person.  Do this every morning.

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