Three Candles for Soul Shelter’s Cake!

— For it’s a jolly good blog-oh … —

This month we ring in Year Number Three for Soul Shelter! Hard to believe we’ve been around so long already — we’ll soon be grayhairs by the standards of the Web.

We’ve grown Soul Shelter slowly and gently these last two years. Every step of the way we’ve sought to make it unfailingly inspirational, helpful, fun, and informative. Now we’d like to ask you, Dear Reader, to help us celebrate our third year.

If you:

• appreciate Soul Shelter’s perspectives
• find yourself awaiting your weekly Soul Shelter epistles
• have ever caught yourself reflecting — offline — on something you read at Soul Shelter

and/or …

• believe we’ve delivered on the Soul Shelter pledge “to provide a stabilizing, reliably worthy alternative” to the breathless chatter of the blogosphere,

then snap on a bright party hat on our behalf and help us make some celebratory noise: Share us with your friends, Tweet us, Stumble us, Digg us, Forward us, Facebook us, link to us, add us to your blogroll, make us your homepage, and otherwise spread the good Soul Shelter news. We’d love to widen our fold, and what better route to new but long-destined readers than through our faithful current ones?

And allow us to thank You, our loyal visitors and subscribers. We’re in your debt. Without your valued readership and comments, we’d have shriveled long ago.

Today, to further mark our anniversary, we offer the following Soul Shelter round-up. Here’s a Best-Of from our first two years — nine posts of which we’re particularly proud. Maybe you missed them the first time around, maybe they’re a good place to start for any new  readers you’d care to point our way.

And maybe you’d like to add your own favorite Soul Shelter post to the list?

Enjoy, and here’s to the good year ahead.

A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money

Too often, pay doesn’t parallel passion. Fortune falls behind fulfillment. Money and meaning are mismatched. What’s a seeker of reasonable balance to do?

You Don’t Have to Be An Insider

I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires. If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

Losing a Job, Reclaiming a Life

That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.

Are You An Amateur? Why Not?

Here’s a wonderful but much too uncelebrated means of personal fulfillment and life enrichment: the learning and doing of a thing purely for the love of it — otherwise known as amateurism.

The Rainbow Vanishes

I wanted my kids to understand that someday, all too soon, it would be their father lying before them, cold and lifeless. But they didn’t understand. How could they, when I was just beginning to understand?

The Risk of Happiness

There comes a time when one must recognize that the pursuit of happiness, in its multifarious forms, will always involve a feeling of risk, of embracing a financial or emotional unknown (or sometimes both at once).

Coffee Breakthrough

Dave proudly displayed his brand new, Swiss-made, fully automatic espresso machine, for which he’d slapped down a cool $945. It must be nice to be able to afford a high-end, fully automatic espresso maker, I mused aloud. Dave’s response snapped me to attention. ‘Actually, I can’t afford not to own one.’

The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto

Travel means engaging a larger world, not merely retreating from the one we know. Travel means joining in the human experience.

Time to Give In, Time to Give Up

Suddenly, all bets were off. … Everything was canceled. It was the beginning of Portland’s biggest snowfall in 40 years.