You cannot make an informed choice about something you’ve stopped noticing. Something can become part of your normal environment long before you ever stop to ask whether you actually want it there.

There are times when we want a room to smell lovely, and then there are times when we walk into a kitchen after a strong meal, open a room that has been closed up for a few days, or notice that damp, stale feeling that can settle into the house and think, this room needs more than perfume. That is exactly where "Clear The Air" earns its place, because it was created as a strong, purposeful household spray rather than a light background fragrance.

Long before European settlement, the Mi’kmaq were living from the land and waters of Mi’kma’ki, drawing food from the ocean, rivers, forests and changing seasons. Fish and shellfish, eel, game, berries, roots and edible plants all formed part of traditional foodways, while smoking, drying, roasting & boiling allowed foods to be prepared and preserved according to what was available at different times of year. That knowledge of the land and sea forms the beginning of the food

Not all movement gives us the same experience, even when our bodies are doing the work.

Air is one of those things we rarely think about until something changes. We notice it when wildfire smoke rolls in, when a room feels stuffy, when traffic fumes are heavy, or when we step outside and suddenly realize how fresh the air feels. And yet air is with us every moment.

Meal planning is so much more than creating a grocery list. Long before your first bite. Behind each meal comes awareness, intention, and planning — or lack of them. When does your supper actually begin? Most of us would probably say that it begins when we sit down with the plate in front of us, or possibly when we take the first bite, but by then a remarkable number of decisions have already been made. Someone has decided what the meal will be, the ingredients have been chos

There are times when we know something in our lives needs attention, but we cannot necessarily put our finger on one single thing that needs to change. We may recognize patterns that keep repeating, feel disconnected from parts of ourselves that once felt very familiar, notice that certain areas of life seem to take far more energy than they should, or we reach a point where we know it would be worthwhile to stop and look at ourselves more closely.

We use the word energy all the time. We say we have none left, that someone changed the energy in a room, that certain foods give us energy, or that getting outside and moving can somehow make us feel more alive. Most of us recognize these experiences immediately, but we rarely stop to ask what is actually happening, why our energy can change so quickly, or how much of what we feel each day may be influenced by what we eat, how we move, and the people around us,

Everything has its own way of being in the world, and we recognize that far more readily than we may realize. A rose does not present itself in the same way as a pine tree, just as wild orange has a completely different character from patchouli, and frankincense creates a very different experience from eucalyptus. We notice these differences through scent, colour, shape, chemistry, and our own response to them, but there is often something more difficult to describe as well.

For most of us in Canada, water has always seemed abundant. We turn on the tap and expect it to be there. And most of the time it is! But increasingly erratic weather is changing the way we need to think about water. Long dry stretches can be followed by sudden heavy rain — sometimes so much, so quickly, that instead of soaking into the ground, it rushes away.

We have become very accustomed to deciding whether a food is good for us by turning the package around and reading the numbers. We look at calories, protein, fibre, sugar, and perhaps a few vitamins and minerals, and if the numbers seem respectable, it is easy to assume that the body will experience that food in much the same way as another food containing similar nutrients.

It isn't simply a place where vegetables grow. It is a small living system — soil, roots, insects, rain, sun, compost, weeds, vegetables, and people all interacting with one another. As our weather becomes hotter and less predictable, perhaps those of us who grow even some of our own food can learn a few things from the idea of climate-resilient farming. We don't need hundreds of acres to use the principles.

How do you let your child become their own person without losing the relationship that helped them become one?

When we send a child back to school in September, most of our attention naturally goes toward the things we can see and prepare for. We make sure the shoes still fit, find the backpack, buy the supplies, figure out who the teacher will be, wonder whether any familiar friends will be in the classroom, organize lunches and transportation, and, particularly with younger children, spend at least a little time wondering how that first morning is going to go.

In The Cost of Never Stopping, we spent a lot of time talking about how busy we have become, but one of the most important things we discovered was that being busy doesn't necessarily mean being physically active. We can have an exhausting day mentally and emotionally while our bodies have barely changed position, or we can have a day in which our bodies have been working almost constantly while our minds are dealing with their own demands at the same time.

What Happened Before You Finally Ate? When we talk about nutrition, we almost always begin with the food. What did you eat? Was there enough protein? Were there vegetables on the plate? How much sugar did you have? Were the carbohydrates good ones? All of those questions can be useful, but after everything we have been talking about in this Wellness Letter, I think there may be another question we need to ask first: what happened during the hours before you finally sat down

How many times have you heard someone say, “Where does the time go?” or “I can't believe it's August already”? We talk about time as though something has happened to it, as though the years are moving faster, the weeks have somehow become shorter, and there simply aren't as many hours in a day as there used to be. Of course, there are. We have exactly the same twenty-four hours that we had in 1986, 1996, or 2006, and yet for many of us those hours feel very different. Maybe w

One of the ideas behind Movement Matters was that we don't always need to find another large block of time in an already busy day before we can move more. There are little pockets of waiting time already built into our routines — the kettle is boiling, supper is cooking, the microwave is running, or we're standing at the counter waiting for the next thing.

Are you getting any of these incredible vegetables? How Many Real Plants Did You Eat Today? When we talk about eating more fruits and vegetables, it is easy to picture a salad at lunch, broccoli with supper, and an apple somewhere in between and think we've done fairly well. But this week's Casaroma challenge is asking you to look at your food a little differently — not just at how much plant food you're eating, but how much variety is actually showing up throughout your day.

When most people think about exercise, they think about stronger muscles, a healthier heart, or perhaps losing a little weight. Very few people think about their skin, yet one of the most fascinating things about the human body is that movement influences nearly every system that keeps our skin healthy.