Cultivating Joy in Changing Times

Yes, it’s true.  Our world is turning itself upside down.  Whenever we humans find ourselves on the brink of a major shift in consciousness, the old paradigm grabs on tightly to try and hold on.  But the new is already underway, so the divisiveness becomes even more inflated.  And sometimes it is hard to know what to do about it.  But I say, ‘Hold your thoughts and actions on what you would like to see.’  Poke your head up out of the sand; there are already plenty of places where we can start to build the new.  Simply doing something, anything, can help us to feel a little bit better about all of this change.  Here are ten things to consider.

1.  For my part, I’m a gardener at heart.  So, I’ve started growing food plants to share.  Frank and I have put in eleven fruit and nut trees this past month.  The last of the bare-root plants, in the nurseries, came into their end-of-season sale, so we jumped on it.  
Several years ago, we adopted an untended parking lot near our home and cleaned up the trash, began to build the soil and now have it blooming from spring through fall with hardy florals and flourishing native oaks.  
During WWII, when the Germans tried to starve the island nation of Britain out, she created her “Victory Gardens,” in every backyard.  With the changes that we are about to experience, food prices may well jump sky high.  Certainly federally funded care programs providing nutrition for the young and the elderly are at risk.  Fruit trees yield the most food per acre and potatoes can be abundantly grown in banks or in bags.  Oak trees have provided native peoples world round with balanced nutrition in easily stored acorns.  As federal funds are further removed from Agriculture, producing our own food may well become increasingly important.  Gardens are bountiful.  They make it easy to give and to share.  And working in them brings us exercise, serenity and great peace of mind.  

2.  Sing and dance or play music.  Music connects us.  It is the song of life and we all move to that rhythm.  I’ve heard it said that if you are not singing and dancing, you are not truly alive.

3.  Align your purchasing power with your ethics.  To get you started, visit Goods Unite Us.  
https://www.goodsuniteus.com/
Or get the book for The Better World Shopping Guide  https://betterworldshopper.org/

4.  Try not to drive or fly, and avoid using plastics, which are made from oil, as much as possible.  

5.  Go to the website DuckDuckGo and switch your search engine to theirs so all of your on-line research and data is no longer being easily and shamelessly tracked and sold for advertisers and others to target.

6.  Write to your members of congress, state and federal.  You can get their postal addresses at  https://www.govtrack.us.  Click on congress for current federal representatives and senators.  Let them know that you expect them to honor their oaths to defend our constitution and to respond appropriately if they’d like to continue to gain your support.

7.  Spend time with friends.  Get together with neighbors.  Host Monday night potlucks.  We may need to depend on each other a lot more in the future.  Forming relationships now and creating community can ease this sort of transition, should it occur.  Plus it is fun.  And if you wish, governmental study groups or affinity groups and forums can be formed.  Visit sites like Choose Democracy at  https://choosedemocracy.us/what-can-i-do/    And sometimes it simply helps to band together and share our feelings and experiences.  
One of my guiding lights, Peace Pilgrim, had wise advice for those with concerns over what the future might hold.  She said, “Stay in the present moment.  Do what needs to be done.  Do all of the good things you can each day.  And the future will unfold.”  For me, her words are a steadying influence. They bring me both direction and peace of mind.  
 

8.  Figure out a way to get yourself laughing again.  Play with some children.  Kids laugh hundreds of times a day.  Adults not so much. Watch and rewatch shows of your favorite comedians so you can laugh.  (I like Kathleen Madigan’s “Don’t Bother Jesus.”  Raised a catholic, she was supposed to first go to her priest for absolution.  She could also appeal to her guardian angelk available 24/7, just for her.  If the situation was dire enough, her priest might recommend a Saint, specific to her need.  If that wasn’t adequate and if she, the repentant one, was really good, she could hang with Mary.  But no one was really ever supposed to bother Jesus.)  
 

9.  Eat clean and get plenty of exercise.  Let those endorphins flow and build your own health and strength for the work and times ahead.   
 

10.  Spend time out in nature, even if it is your own back yard or the city park.  Let nature speak to you and guide you.  Answers to our problems always come to us more easily when we are out in nature.  As John Muir famously wrote, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
 

Okay, one more, and probably most importantly,

11.  Imagine what you’d like to see.  Use your right brain.  Get creative.  (Remember that caffeine holds us in our left brain where we focus only on known solutions and tend to contract around fears about the future and worries about the past.  So consider herbal teas instead.)  Cultivate your right brain potential by laughing, day dreaming, and playing.  This is the realm of cooperation rather than competition.  It is expansive and collaborative and it cultivates and holds you in joy.  
(For more about accessing our right brains, check out Jill Bolte Taylor.   See either her TED talk  at  https://www.ted.com/speakers/jill_bolte_taylor   or read her book, Whole Brain Living at   https://www.drjilltaylor.com  )
(For more about the effects of caffeine on our brain's health and well being, read Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants.  https://michaelpollan.com/books/this-is-your-mind-on-plants/) or read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.   https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-Walker/9781501144325)

We are all in this together, so together let’s find ways to create anew.  
*Love is stronger than fear.  We shift the energy with our mutual support, while listening within to find our unique service.  
*Create something alive and empowering.  Follow your calling.  Share your experiences and knowledge.  Ask for and give help.
*As we gather together in small groups of support and connection, we build resilience and find our clarity.  Doing this is disempowering to realms where fear and division reside.  
*Learn from the children.  They know how to laugh.  We’ve all witnessed kids cracking jokes even right after they’ve been in trouble.  There is always something fun and funny to see and do.  Charge into that.  
*I recently heard that heroes are just ordinary people.  They happened to be at the right place at the right time.  And they just simply held to their values and ethics.  
*Trust in the larger vision.  This is after all the Age of Aquarius.  It holds the promise of harmony, egalitarianism and understanding.  It was the dawning of this age that brought us the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, AIM the American Indian Movement, and The Environmental Movement.  These movements now have deep roots that have firmly taken hold and risen strongly.  They have provided insights and support into the eons of beauty and equality and justice that lie ahead for us all.  But first we have to clear out the old.  And that dying grasp is making one last powerful lunge back into the unsustainability of massive consumption and resource depletion and all that that brings with it.  

Years ago I heard a talk by the feminist, Sonja Johnson.  She was driving into the city to work one day when she passed through an open space of beautiful green forest and meadow.  She was so moved by its beauty that she stopped the car and got out to marvel at the scene.  When she did this, she was swept up in a moment of profound epiphany and compared the truth of nature to the falseness of the city that she had been heading towards.  She found herself realizing and deeply understanding that we are all doing everything all wrong.  And there is truth to this, we have become completely lost in the citification, or the ugly-fication, of the natural world.  And our massive over consumption has become more than critical.  So, yes, things do need to change.  And we are here, older, wiser, ready to create what is new.  And creativity is fun.  It brings us joy.  I’ll leave you with these words from Louis hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life.  

“All is well.
Everything is working itself out for the highest good.
Out of this experience only good will come.
And I am safe.”

Josephine Laing
© 2025

Mites! Yikes! 3, 2, 1 - Gone!

OMG!  I contracted mites!  It has happened to me before, two other times.  But this time I was blessed with the right answer as to what to do.

Most of the time when humans get mites, it is considered scabies and you contract them through human contact.  There are two types of scabies.  One has the little buggers concentrated in between the fingers and sometimes the toes.  The other is more long term and leaves patches of gray crusty skin wherever the colonies concentrate.  But when I’ve gotten mites before, neither of those two descriptions matched my condition, nor did I get them from human contact.  I think I got them from birds.

Birds get mites really badly, so much so that certain swallows and finches have been know to line their nests with cigarette butts.  (For more on animals self-medicating, please see National Wildlife Federation, Winter 2025, Master Medicators.) This allows the nicotine, which was one of the first pesticides ever used in the United States, to reduce the mite infestations in their nests.  

In my research, I’ve come across horror stories of other people’s experience with mites that were similar to my own.  These mites often were not diagnosed as scabies and seemed to behave more like the mites that birds get infested with.  One man I read about was going on seven years of misery.  One woman wrote about her eighteen month old baby girl screaming in agony for weeks after her husband brought them home from work.  And it was she who posted the specific answer I was looking for, Hot Borax Baths.  

The first time I encountered these little buggers was when I was in my late teens and was helping a friend take care of her parent’s farm.  They had hundreds of chickens and ducks and had a coop with a low roof.  I went in there to clean it out and my bun, on top of my head, brushed the chicken wire, overhead, several times.  When I emerged from the pen, five or ten minutes later, I realized that I could feel the creepiest sensation of hundreds of invisible little beings moving down my neck and shoulders and onto my chest and back with little tiny nibbley bites.  

With a sense of panic, I alerted my friend and ran to the shower, grabbing a bottle of bleach on the way.  I stripped off my clothes in the shower and stuffed them into a plastic trash bag, to be thrown away.  Then I very carefully poured straight bleach over my head, hair and whole body.  I never would recommend that anyone do this.  But, that is what I did and it worked.  It happened so soon after infestation that they never got a chance to burrow deeply enough into my skin, and they all got fried.  It took about a half an hour of running water to rinse all of the bleach and dead mites off.

The second time I got infested with mites was decades later, out on our front lawn, under the trees.  I noticed a few little teeny tiny itchy spots, first on my legs, maybe three or four of them and didn’t think anything of it and went to bed.  The next day, there were a few more.  Soon after patches of twenty or fifty little bumps arose and I knew I was in some sort of trouble.  This time those buggers had already set up house-keeping under my skin.  

Over the weeks that followed, I started with aloe, progressed to herbal skin creams and essential oils, and wound up with prescription creams, all of which seemed to help for a day or two and then wound up much worse than before.  In the end, my husband and I move out of our house and into a hotel so we could run ozonators in all of the rooms of our home and kill every living thing in there.  We rented extra days and ozonated the hotel room after we were out, as well.  Wouldn’t want to pass this on to anyone else.

Meanwhile, I took a blow dryer to my skin and oh-so-painfully burnt the little buggers and their babies in the top layers of my skin.  This is another technique that worked, but again, like the bleach, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone.  Neither the hot blow dryer nor bleach are good for the skin and both can be seriously dangerous.

But this time after gathering some pine cones under a tree, by the next day, I knew what was cooking.  I started right away with the prescription cream and again some improvement progressed rapidly into becoming much worse.  I gave my chiropractor friend a call, saying I was considering a prednisone shot because I was in so much misery and expecting it to get only worse, when she reminded me that in our age group bone loss is a serious concern and cortisone poses a serious risk of osteoporosis and subsequent fractures and surgeries etc.  She said to try Borax Baths for getting rid of mites.   

In the midst of all of this, my digestion went off as well.  My appetite dropped and I felt nauseous.  So, I also called a Naturopath friend of mine.  She brought by a homeopathic remedy called psorinum.  I started on that and looked on-line for borax baths for mites.  

Previously my on-line research for what to do for mites was woefully unhelpful.  The natural remedies were fairly ineffectual and the medical ones weren’t ideal either.  But when I added Borax Baths into the search for mite cures, I blessedly found one site with bunches of success stories.  One week and 15 loads of laundry and four hot borax baths later, I was mite free.  We sprayed the house, car and all of our furniture down with three tablespoons of borax, diluted in three cups of hot water, with three tablespoons of three percent hydrogen peroxide.  We stripped our bedding and hot borax washed it with all of our clothes every day using one half cup of borax along with our usual laundry soap.  We also put the ozonator in the car for four hours.  And we put our shoes in the freezer overnight.  After taking our baths as hot as we could stand them for thirty minutes using three cups of borax, with two cups of three percent hydrogen peroxide and one cup of epsom salts, (3,2,1,) we air dried instead of towel drying to let a little of the solution remain on our skin.  And, blessedly, it all worked.

Should you, or any one you know, ever be so unlucky as to contract mites, may these Twenty Mule Team Borax rescue remedies help you as well as they have helped me.

Josephine Laing
© 2025

As a Clairvoyant Healer, Spiritual Counselor and Intuition Instructor, I share many tips for leading a healthy and fulfilling life.  Please be advised that I am not a doctor.  Nor am I licensed in any healing modality.  However, I have had years of experience in alternative and complementary health and healing.  All healing programs, including standard western medical protocols in addition to natural therapies, can cause harm rather than the benefit that you may be searching for.  After all some people can have a strong reaction to something as seemingly innocent as peanuts or strawberries.  Therefore, anything that I may recommend in these blogs and in my videos could be dangerous for you to try.  So, it is important that you Ask Your Doctor First before trying any natural healing protocol.  However, most medical doctors have little experience regarding natural healing programs and herbal medicine.  So please understand if your doctor is unfamiliar with these ideas.