Slipping in Honey Ebook Captures Lifetime and Love on a Greek Island

“If you realized you only had a year to live, how would you dwell it?”
– Jennifer Barclay, Falling in Honey Lifetime and Adore on a Greek Island

Have you at any time dreamed of packing up and relocating to a Greek Island? Writer Jennifer Barclay did just that and shared her working experience in her guide, Slipping in Honey, Life and Adore on a Greek Island. A delight to browse, Slipping in Honey charts Jennifer’s journey of adhering to her desire and relocating to the small Greek island of Tilos.

Now for me, I come across that whichever ebook I take place to be reading at any offered time will usually shape what I materialize to be experiencing in my own life – commonly by shifting my perspective in some way. So it was with Falling in Honey, which I was studying throughout my not-in any respect-dreamy Xmas vacation in my dwelling on not-so-tiny Vancouver Island a pair of years ago. My aged Mom experienced appear to take a look at and necessary a terrific offer of help – and then my elderly dog collapsed and necessary even additional enable.

So when the time came for me to collapse into bed (my sofa fairly) at night time and study a chapter or two of Slipping in Honey, I could temporarily put on the back again burner the simple fact that my gravely unwell dog was in unexpected emergency and my motionless, demanding and oddly ravenous mom was in my mattress. But escaping one’s reality can only go so much.

For though looking through about tzatziki and spanikopita, warm sandy seashores and refreshing swims in the sea soothed my soul through a incredibly frazzling time, it also obtained me wondering about… properly, about views – and just how significant a part they play in analyzing regardless of whether or not we are in a dream or a nightmare at any supplied time of our life.

If I have uncovered practically nothing else in this everyday living so much, I have learned this: pleasure is a preference – a condition of brain – vs . a guaranteed outcome that comes from creating a change in one’s exterior instances. And but so many folks, myself incorporated, are notorious for fantasizing about how a lot happier they would be if they lived somewhere else, with a person else, executing anything else.

And fair sufficient: maybe they would be.

But it truly is also truthful to say that no matter of where by we reside, the trials and tribulations of everyday living still occur. They do for me, here in my small bungalow by the sea… and they certainly did for Jennifer on her instead rocky highway to serenity. As these, I wouldn’t say Slipping in Honey is a reader’s escape from actuality. Fairly, I believe the e book retains a further and far more universally pertinent message: residence is where your heart is and if you can’t discover the real treasure you seek out in your very own backyard, you likely is not going to be in a position to locate it elsewhere.

What may perhaps require to adjust 1st is how you dwell your lifestyle vs . where you live it.

As it turned out, Jennifer’s coronary heart was on the island of Tilos – devoid of or without having a specific male in her daily life. And mainly because of this, Slipping in Honey succeeds in supplying beautiful illustrations of how to experience the joyful simplicities that the slower speed of island lifetime can supply: purchasing local foodstuff, preparing mouth watering foods, having lengthy walks, reading through in the sunshine, viewing the sunset… basically slowing down more than enough to savour the basic pleasures of every day everyday living versus speeding by the day at breakneck speed.

Without a doubt, the additional I browse of Falling in Honey, the much more I started to salivate – the two at the tantalizing descriptions of fresh new tomatoes, basil and feta cheese drizzled with olive oil or the heat pita bread dipped in handmade tzatziki and at the delightful feeling of serenity that Jennifer’s writing about island lifestyle evoked.

But then a single night, I place the ebook down, sat up and looked all over my dwelling area – and gave my head a shake. Now wait a minute right here, I assumed to myself: I reside on an island. A less complicated life at a slower speed experienced my purpose for going below in the initial location. I, too, had dreamed of being a writer by the sea – albeit the Pacific versus the Mediterranean.

But the sea is the sea and producing is producing… and since both are huge academics, I naturally wasn’t a very astute student. Externally, I had all the vital situations in position for inner peace. Internally, my pressure stage indicated I may perhaps as well be an financial investment banker in Manhattan.

For direction, I turned – still all over again – to a further creator and pulled out my dog-eared duplicate of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s typical, Gift from the Sea.

“Simplification of the outward existence is not more than enough,” Anne reminded me. “It is just the outside the house… a road to grace. The closing reply is constantly inside of.”

Ahhh… yes. Whilst my heart was in Sidney by the Sea, my brain was definitely however having difficulties to get with the slower-paced software. And which is alright: consciousness is an critical to start with move. Altering – or accepting – one’s self, I’m learning, doesn’t come about right away.

“Tolerance, persistence, patience is what the sea teaches.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

To me, the most stunning thing about Falling in Honey was how Jennifer made the alter in her existence that she knew she necessary to make – and by getting the braveness to do so, she fell in appreciate with existence all over again. And which is what I did, also, by moving to Sidney.

But slipping in really like with lifestyle is alternatively like falling in honey: sweet as it can be, from time to time you get so stuck in the aspects you get rid of sight of the even larger photo.

Studying Falling in Honey – and writing about it – served pull my standpoint absent from focusing solely on the present, relatively sticky, situation by reminding me to see it for it genuinely was: a little but nerve-racking bump on the for a longer time highway of the daily life that I have decided on to just take.

Maybe it would not occur as a shock that Jennifer and I have an appealing background collectively. She was my initially editor on my guide, A Widow’s Awakening. Jennifer patiently taught me how to write innovative non-fiction. Even though we never ever fulfilled in person in all the many years we worked together, she painstakingly aided me change my manuscript from the shattered ramblings of a heartbroken widow into a persuasive tale.

So I return now to Jennifer’s poignant query in the beginning quotation of this short article: If you understood you only had 1 yr to dwell, how would you reside it?

Very well, because I eventually figured out that how we expend our times is how we shell out our life, my solution is basic – but not straightforward: with incredible gratitude for all that I already have.