Dinner with Maeve and Jen, my dear dear friends from Calgary

This series of photographs were taken by another good friend, Nadine Foster, who is a talented photographer from Calgary. I worked on the photos in post-production myself. The premise: my girlfriends and I had decided on treating each other to a lovely evening of wine and fine foods instead of Christmas presents. But I tricked them: I asked Nadine to come along for a surprise photo shoot; I wanted to give my two close friends a special gift before I moved to Switzerland (which is next week! wow it's almost here!!) and we had a lot of fun playing models for once!

We went to eat at Vero Bistrot in Kensington. It was probably one of the best meals I've eaten in Calgary. Thank you for a fun night Ladies, I love you!!!

I will leave you with this... a little lesson of life that I read today:

(Richard Swenson is a former medical doctor who has written a book by this very title: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives (NavPress, 2004).)

Swenson suggests that the only adequate way to live well is to protect the space that exists between people and their human limits. He calls this space “margin” and says this space has largely been lost to us in contemporary life. We know it as the disease of overload. Ironically, as we spend our energies trying to overcome our human limitations, we lose the very possibility of the thing we seek after. In the search of a bigger life, we find that life gets squeezed, diminished, small. We push hard, hoping for a breakthrough, but the horizon keeps receding. What to do?

Swenson’s antidote is simple: restore margin. If we are to experience joyful, healthy, and meaningful lives then, in Swenson’s experience, we need to fully own who we are. We need to learn the lessons of the creation we are part of: the supplied-for, blessed world we live in. Jesus talks about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field and their sense of happy limitation. Take a lesson, he says. The irony here is that in accepting our human limitation we actually become more connected to the bigger reality we are part of, the more we hunger for. The truth is that only in our smallness can we find the largeness of a God-blessed life.

Ciao!

Colette