What is it like to grow up beneath that prairie sky? To make a home in Edmonton or Calgary, with the mountains close enough to hike in? To live in the north, where the distances are great and there are signs to tell you to make sure you have enough gas because the next gas station to 200 km away! I still think Alberta feels vast. Now I’m curious about why—and about the people who have made lives in all those different landscapes.

What is it about sincere gratitude that touches us and brings us closer together? For me, gratitude reaches beyond courtesy and appreciation. In its deepest form, it doesn’t even need to be for something. It is an energy, an attitude, a direction in which we turn ourselves. I can feel grateful before I have made a list of reasons, much as I can feel love without stopping to explain why.

Most of us do not think very much about the mechanics of walking across a room. We decide to go somewhere, and our body follows. We stand up, turn, walk around the dog, step over something left on the floor, reach into a cupboard and carry what we need back to the table, all while thinking about something entirely different. When movement is working well, it feels almost automatic, which may be one of the reasons we give it so little attention until something changes.

Have you ever listened to yourself describe an ordinary day? It might be interesting to try, because most of us probably don't realize how much commentary is running through our day. We wake up and notice that it is raining. We get into the car and notice the traffic. We stop at the grocery store and notice how crowded it is. Something costs more than it did the last time we bought it, someone says something irritating, the house needs cleaning, and by the time we sit down at

Let’s Talk about Life... Finding Answers, One Question at a Time A Weekly Conversation about Your Everyday Concerns Don't Forget this is our last Saturday at Alderney Gate. Next week, October 4, we go to Bedford Place Mall Food Court on Sundays from 12-2pm for all of those people who want to pick up their orders and have a chat with Allana & Bette This Week’s Conversation: What Changes have I seen, and what do I want to take forward? This week, with the equinox behind

There is something valuable about looking three months ahead because it gives us enough distance to imagine a meaningful difference without pushing the future so far away that it becomes vague. Ninety days is long enough for strength to improve, routines to settle, meals to become easier, a project to move forward, or one neglected part of life to receive the attention it has been waiting for, yet it is still close enough that we can picture ourselves standing there and looki

In the cycle I think of as the Fire Cycle, the time between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, we gather in the results of our choices. We see what our attention helped to grow, what we neglected, and what took root without our noticing. It is a good time to ask: What will I carry forward?

Quebec is difficult to describe in a few neat paragraphs because there isn't just one Quebec. Travel across the province, and the personality changes with the landscape. Go far enough north, and you enter a vast world of boreal forest, rivers, hydroelectric projects and eventually tundra — lands that have been home to Cree, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Communities are separated by distances that make our idea of “just down the road” rather amusi

Most homes are already filled with scent long before anyone opens a bottle of essential oil. Shampoo, laundry products, hand soap, candles, cleaning products, plug-ins, perfume, fabric softener, room sprays, and personal-care products all contribute something to the aromatic environment we live in every day, yet because scent has become so closely associated with making a house smell pleasant, it is easy to forget that aromatherapy offers us something quite different.

There are movements we once did without giving them any thought at all. We bent down to tie our shoes, stepped over something in our path, climbed stairs, reached behind our backs to fasten clothing, crouched down to retrieve something from the floor, carried groceries from the car, stood up from a chair without leaning heavily through our arms, and sat down on the ground without first wondering how we were going to get back up again.

There is something about this time of year that changes the way we think about food. Through the summer, we can walk outside and pick something from the garden, stop at a roadside stand, bring home a basket of berries, or find local vegetables piled high at the market, but by the end of September the question begins to change from “What is ready to eat?” to “What are we going to do with all of this before we lose it?”

When we hear the words climate change, we may picture melting ice, fierce storms, or forests burning somewhere far away. But climate change is also reaching into fields, orchards, and forests where aromatic plants grow. It may even affect the essential oils we use every day.

Twice a year, the earth appears to pause and balance itself. Day and night meet at the autumn equinox, each taking roughly half of the twenty-four hours, before darkness begins claiming a little more of the day. It sounds wonderfully orderly—as though summer has finished its shift, autumn has arrived precisely on time, and the celestial accounts have all been neatly balanced. Life, of course, is rarely that well organized.

British Columbia can be difficult to summarize because it is too large, too varied and too strongly shaped by geography to fit neatly into one description. The coast, the Interior and the North each have their own character, yet throughout the province there is a recurring relationship with land, distance, weather and adaptation. That may be why Allana’s story feels like such an appropriate introduction to British Columbia. She did not arrive as a tourist looking at the moun

Some changes are so slow that we barely notice them. Others can happen in a moment. But whether a cycle lasts a few seconds, a season, several years, or a lifetime, change does not simply appear out of nowhere. It moves through a process.

The season is changing. Your movement can change with it without disappearing.

There are almost an endless number of essential oil combinations that can be created, but creating a beneficial and well-balanced blend is not choosing three oils that sound appealing and putting them together. We consider the purpose of the blend, the aroma, the strength, the method of use, the people who will be using it, and ingredients that may need to be avoided or adjusted. Sometimes we make a small change to a recipe, and others the person and situation become the star

It is also especially useful if you live somewhere else in Canada and are wondering whether we can still help you. You do not have to live close to Nova Scotia to have a conversation with us. We work with people remotely, ship across Canada, and can discuss products, custom formulations, and appropriate service options no matter where you are located. Sometimes ten minutes is all it takes to answer the question that was keeping you from reaching out in the first place.

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.