EMBRACE THE PRESENT AND FIND CALM AND JOY—EVERY DAY Living Lightly offers a year’s worth of opportunities to commune, in the deepest and most beautiful sense of that word, with your self and your life. Featuring timeless wisdom, inspiring quotes and simple, practical strategies to help you boost your happiness, Living Lightly invites you to explore how your mind works, understand and express your feelings and be reminded that you are much, much stronger than you realize. Living Lightly is a great way to start or end the day.

The busy person's guide to mindful consumption How do you reduce your impact when you don't want to compromise your lifestyle? How do you live lighter when you're juggling the motherlode of life? How can you become more mindful of how and what you're consuming? In a previous career, Nicola Turner's job was to convince us to buy more - and now she uses this insight to help us consume less. With her unique ability to keep it real, Nicola shares how her family now lives with less stuff, less waste and less impact. It's made life simpler, saved heaps of time and money and created a healthier, happier family. Filled with do-able ideas and practical hacks, Living Lightly is for everyday people who want to simplify their life and reduce their impact but feel they're just too damn busy. It's all about making simple changes that work for you - and not letting perfect get in the way of good.

From the author of the best-selling The Joy of Less, a handbook for mindful minimalism that provides a philosophy and instructions to lighten up every aspect of our lives--in just 5 or 10 minutes a day.

Your Invitation Awaits… You’ve tried harder. You’ve been more intentional. You’ve done everything “right.” In your search for meaning and purpose, you’ve placed your hope in many different things—only to find yourself at a turning point, quietly asking, Is this it? Is this all there is? If the direction of your life is leading you away from peace, contentment, and true fulfillment, Emily Lex has some great news to share with you: God is offering you a better way. A way of real rest. A way of quiet confidence. A way to free yourself from expectations. A way to become the person he created you to be. A way to learn his unforced rhythms of grace. Do you breathe a sigh of hope when you hear this holy and gentle invitation from Jesus? “Come to me… Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” If so, then you are ready to accept his offer to recover and renew your life. Start your journey today.

Divided into three sections, Hope, Human and Wild profiles the efforts of three caring communities to preserve wilderness and reverse environmental devastation. They include the reforestation of McKibben's home territory, New York's Adirondack Mountains; solving traffic and pollution problems in the densely populated Curitiba, Brazil; and how the citizens of Kerala, India have demonstrated that quality of life doesn't depend on overconsumption of resources. This edition features a new introduction that revisits these places and explores how they've changed over the years.

Inspired by her iconic 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, New York Times-bestselling author Jen Hatmaker explores the spiritual side of a simpler life and the way our choices affect our spirit, our loved ones, our community, and the earth in her new gift book 7 Days of Simplicity: A Season of Living Lightly. In 7 Days of Simplicity Hatmaker shares from her own experiences in living lightly, “finding deep delight in exactly what you have and where you are, never letting anyone shame you out of simplicity or contentment.” Throughout the book are excerpts of Jen’s own journey to offer hope, humor, facts, and encouragement for the reader with a fresh look at how our own daily choices affect the sustainability of our lives and God’s earth. The book confronts our desire to compete in the all-consuming consumer-goods game calling the reader to slow down, catch a breath, live with intention, and live like today is all we have, because those small ripples eventually make big waves for everyone.

Built in 1976 by the Cape Cod-based New Alchemy Institute and designed in partnership with Solsearch Architects of Cambridge MA, the Ark bio-shelter was conceived as "an early exploration in weaving together the sun, wind, biology and architecture for the benefit of humanity." The structure's integrated ecological design features provided autonomous life support for a family of four, providing for all food and energy needs, managing all wastes, and enabling a new and symbiotic relationship between its inhabitants and the ecosystem of their home. The Ark deployed many then-experimental technologies that remain emblems of sustainable design today: solar heating with mass heat storage, a high-efficiency wood stove, a wind turbine generator, composting toilets, and a passive solar agri/aquaculture greenhouse. It embodied design approaches that were being explored in numerous environmental building experiments of the era, including passive solar orientation, super-insulation of walls and roof, and minimizing of exterior surface and edges. Four decades on, humanity faces many of the same environmental challenges addressed by the Ark, though now with a greater sense of urgency, a reduced sense of individual and community agency to tackle them, and an expectation of diminished lifestyles. This study of the ground-breaking project offers an alternative approach to meeting a challenging future: a spirit of critical hope, embodying adventure and possibility, with creative collaboration between science and society, and among governments, communities and individuals. Published to accompany the exhibition celebrating the Ark?s 40th anniversary, the publication is illustrated with dozens of original drawings and period photographs, and features a wealth of background materials.00Exhibition: Confederarion Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, Canada (22.10.2016-30.04.2017).

A comprehensive guide to small-space secrets and real-life solutions for living in 1,200 square feet or less. The Little Book of Living Small shows readers how to make the most of limited square footage—with grace and style—and serves as the cheerleader readers need to help themselves feel satisfied and proud of their choice to live with less. In addition to exploring both the motivation behind choosing to live in a small space, as well as the practical, everyday advice for managing a tight footprint, The Little Book of Living Small also includes case studies: 12 style-savvy, small-space dwellers open their doors and share their design secrets. Author Laura Fenton covers a range of homes including studio apartments, one- and two-bedroom houses, a tiny house, a co-living space, and even whole houses. Stylistically these homes range from urban, rural, minimalist, and country, with the unifying thread that they are all real homes of less than 1,200 square feet that offer clever solutions that readers can use in their own homes. Laura Fenton is the lifestyle director at Parents magazine. With more than fifteen years of experience, her work has appeared in major publications including Better Homes & Gardens, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, and on leading home websites including Remodelista.com, HGTV.com, ElleDecor.com, HouseBeautiful.com, Refinery29, and elsewhere. Through her writing she has explored the topic of living small for more than a decade. She lives small with her husband, a photographer, and their son in Jackson Heights, Queens, in New York.

Susan Vogt knew she had far more stuff in her closets than she needed. So, for Lent one year, Susan took action: she gave away one thing a day for forty days. But what happened during that penitential period surprised her; she became so addicted to identifying unnecessary things in her life that she continued the practice for a full year. Then she began letting go of other baggage--some physical, some emotional--and found that, far from feeling poorer, she felt freer and more fulfilled than ever before. A spiritual place had opened that allowed Susan to unclutter her mind and deepen her faith. Blessed by Less offers encouragement and inspiration for all who are burdened down by "things" in their homes and hearts but don't quite know how to begin the process of letting go. Susan includes tips for beginners and challenges for those who've been simplifying for years. Rather than making readers feel guilty for all the stuff they've accumulated, Susan gently nudges them to see all that they have to gain--physically, emotionally, and most of all spiritually--by living lightly. Practical from start to finish, Blessed by Less shows how one woman's journey into a simpler, less cluttered life can also be our journey and how taking a spiritual perspective on the matter can lead to abundant blessings we would have otherwise missed.

As adults, we have more responsibilities than we could have ever imagined growing up. Learning the work of marriage. Navigating the bumpy terrain of parenting. Maintaining social relationships. Facing grave hardship. Finding contentment in our career. As the years pass by, we sense how the good things in life are so often eclipsed by stress. We find ourselves doing everything we can just to endure adulthood, all the while wondering whether we are actually enjoying it. This is exactly why Dr. Anthony T. DeBenedet decided to write Playful Intelligence: The Power of Living Lightly in a Serious World, to show readers how playfulness helps us counterbalance the seriousness of adulthood. “Five years ago, my life was becoming more intense and stressful,” DeBenedet says. “My relationships, clinical work as a physician, and basic interactions with the world were blurring into a frazzled mosaic. Going through the motions became my norm, and every day brought busyness and exhaustion. I thought about whether I was depressed. I didn’t think I was. Anxious? Sure, but aren’t we all anxious on some level? I also thought about the lifestyle factors that could be making me feel this way. Was I getting enough sleep? Was I exercising regularly? Was I eating healthy? Was I playing and remembering to be playful?” Today, we live in a taxing world. The endless pressure to keep up with our responsibilities and the daily headlines swarming around us can be overwhelming. DeBenedet’s work comes at a time when stress, uncertainty, and intensity levels are high. Playful Intelligence shows adults that there is a way to live lighter—and smarter—as we navigate the seriousness of adulthood. It’s not about taking life less seriously; it’s about taking ourselves less seriously. The book’s core chapters are devoted to exploring the effects and benefits of five playful qualities: imagination, sociability, humor, spontaneity, and wonder. By examining playfulness as a sum of its parts, readers will gain a working awareness of its power and be able to apply playful principles to their own lives, bringing the magic of childhood back into their day-to-day existence. The book also offers practical suggestions on how to make life more playful in nature.