This is optimal living daily episode 814, the art of love, how I came to an inner most life by Diana Lawrence with RowdyKittens.com and I'm Justin Molick. Happy Sunday. Welcome to one of the only podcasts in the world where blogs are narrated to you for free with permission from the authors. It's an award-winning podcast.
Thanks to you, the listener, and I've been lucky enough to have sponsors lately. So I'm just going to jump right into today's post and start optimizing your life. The art of love, how I came to an inner most life by Diana Lawrence with RowdyKittens.com. Here in the woods, it is spring again, the season of love and new beginnings.
The trees are in leaf, the wild lilac is in bloom, and the birds are in the song. All day and all night, the woods are awake with a longing to be in the new. Intermost House is my home in the woods where my husband and I have lived for many years. The house is about 12 feet square and there's no electricity or hot water.
Yet we live a life of luxury. The greatest luxury in life is to live with what you truly love. So many people wish to simplify their lives today. People I meet want to know how I made my way to what I call an inner most life.
The great question is how to make a new beginning at a truly simple life. There are two ways to simplify your life. One way is eliminating the things from your life that don't really matter until you are left with what you need. This is a rational way to proceed and it works.
Experts and practitioners speak of it with authority. There are steps to take and things to accomplish and ideas to exchange. You can really get somewhere this way. The other way is the art of filling your life with what you love most in the world.
Love has a strange, emancipating power that lets everything else fall away. Your heart allows you to sense this mysterious force in some way. Love has the power to displace many things. The art of love.
The way I took was the art of living only for the one thing I love most of all. My passion is contemplative conversation. I formed my home and my life around this one consuming love. It patiently taught me how I need to live and what I need to own and whom I need to know.
It gave direction to my days. It brought me my husband, Michael Anthony Lawrence, whose whole work in life is conversation. My husband and I speak of everything together. We eat and breathe each other's words.
For many years, while we made our way to this place, it was he alone with I alone. Now people come from all over the world to sit here and talk of the things in their heart and soul. The art of love is the art of letting one truth answer a world of questions. Loving one thing taught me to light my home with candles and to cook over the fire.
It taught me what books to read and what pictures to see and what silence to keep. It taught me to sit low and to sleep on the floor. It taught me to understand the high things. It taught me to listen to my feelings.
The currents of the world flow against those who love and long for a truly simple life. Before we came to the woods, we moved more than 20 times. After relentless search of the innermost life, it finally grew out of our need. Embracing grief, we loved and lost and found our way to this simple life.
There are many ways to love. Love has many worthy objects. By what craft can anyone prescribe to another the nature of their love? You may love your work or your studies or a place or a book.
Love is the hard way to simplify your life. I know a man who greatly admires Thomas Jefferson. He has shaped his whole world around that love. His work and life at home are among the simplest, happiest and most inspiring I know.
I know another man who loves nothing better than fly fishing from his finely crafted wooden boat. He expresses his love through written stories of his ventures outdoors and similarly lives a very simple life. I know a woman who lives for her handicapped child. Despite all the complications that has involved or maybe because of them, her love has greatly simplified her life and allowed her to let go of everything else without reservation.
Her life has a heartbreaking beauty now. Whatever it is that you love, the wayless way to simplify your life is to live only for that love. It is by love alone that you truly see and see what truly matters. And when you see how much it matters, your confusions and griefs give way to purpose and freedom.
If you make a way to live with what you truly love, not just with what you happen to have or want, then you may find yourself simply leaving everything else behind. What I've learned, the simple life is a luxury few feel they can afford today. Yet it's only prices to surrender what you do not love and do not need, whether by means of art or science. I've lived a lover's life suffering for and rejoicing in the things I truly love.
It has not been a prudent life or a secure one. I've learned that simplicity for me lies in loving with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind. I've made my way to a simple life by loving the one thing that matters most to me as if nothing else mattered at all. It is spring again in the woods and I've learned that only the simple things return our love.
Together with my husband, I began anew each spring to learn what only love can teach me. You just listened to the post titled The Art of Love, How I Came to an Intermost Life by Dan Alorens with RowdyKittens.com. When misinformation fills the void and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us.
Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on.
Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers in our app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins. Plus it used to cost $499 right now. It's just $199.
And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. Diana is a guest author on the site. She's an inspirational speaker on the pleasures of the simple life. If you can tell and you can find more about her at innermosthouse.com.
I'm going to leave it there for today. Thank you for being here and listening every day including the weekends. And I'll be back tomorrow for minimalist Monday with a post from The Minimalists. I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits.
Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like the show, except more focused on personal finance. Justin hand picks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Remit Safety, Mr. Money Moustache and more, and I read them to you five days a week. So if you enjoy this podcast, come on over and subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily, too.
And together, we'll optimize your financial life. Join us and remember your optimal life awaits.