Lincolnites find bliss, meaning in life
People are searching. … Searching for that something that makes them happy. Fulfilled. Gives their life meaning and purpose.
Some, like the late Joseph Campbell, professor and author of such works as “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” “The Masks of God” and “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor,” call it “bliss.”
One would think it should not be hard to figure out what makes you happy and then just do it.
But many search and search. Some never find their bliss.
Go online and Google “finding bliss” and 1,190,000 references pop up. Google “finding life’s purpose” and you’ll get 84 million more hits.
The world is full of people offering guidance and inspiration for discovering and pursuing our very own bliss.
Bookstores are filled with self-help self-discovery books. Many are best sellers like Sarah Susanka’s “The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters,” Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” and Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret.”
From Oprah to Dr. Phil, the airwaves are filled with advice and tips. Everyone promises: We can discover our passion. Bliss is out there. It can happen. Here are four Lincolnites who prove it:
Gardening brought healing and life’s passion
Every Sunday morning, Bertine Loop drives her overloaded Volvo station wagon to a prime parking spot at the Old Cheney Farmers Market. She hoists up the tailgate and secures it before she begins to take out books, baskets filled with file folders, plants and folding tables — all neccessary for her to do her “job” that day.
Loop, wearing black overalls, grabs a red wagon, fills it up and pulls it over to the spot under the big shade tree reserved for the Master Gardeners information table.
Coordinating and running this table is part of her volunteer hours as a Master Gardener, but she has tallied up far more than the required number of hours.
Gardening, and everything that goes along with it, is Loop’s passion, not a requirement.
Twenty years ago, after a car accident that left her with time to think, she discovered that gardening was a part of her healing process. “It is a reflection of life,” she said. “Nurturing, new growth. It is about caretaking and challenges.”
If she could, Loop would garden from sunrise to sunset. As it is, she tries to adjust her work schedule so she is at least outside to enjoy those two special times of day.
As a therapist, she can incorporate her gardening into her work and has completed the coursework for horticulture therapy. Clients may find themselves in her backyard, where she explains the similarities of gardening and life.
Her office always has some green plant material in it. “It gives off oxygen,” she said, another reference to gardening’s life-sustaining properties.
Over the years, she has prioritized her love of gardening — half-time therapist, half-time gardener. “I work at both, 100 percent of the time,” she said.
Which is not to say Loop is exclusively out pulling weeds. Her roots may be in the garden, but she has branched out the last 10 years to co-host the KZUM radio show on gardening, “How’s It Growing,” continues as a Lancaster County Master Gardener and helped organize the recent VegFest at the Sunday Farmers Market.
“I’m excited about the ‘green community,’” she said. “It’s a great way to bring people together.”
In the winter, Loop takes a break from outside gardening and works inside instead. Like all plant people, she’ll scan the catalogs for next year’s bounty.
And next year’s VegFest, she said, will be bigger and better, with melons and squash featured.
She’s already planning it.
-- Kathryn Cates Moore
Finding the right ingredients for bliss
Around midnight on most nights, you’ll find Cate Flotree making soup in the kitchen at Grateful Bread.
She sleeps from about 5 to 10:30 p.m. so she can get up in time to start making six or seven huge pots of vegetarian soup to serve to the lunchtime crowd.
Flotree loves slicing potatoes, carrots, onions and other veggies and watching them boil and simmer into a perfect soup stock. She gets the same pleasure from working in the kitchen as a painter might get at an easel or a weaver at a loom.
“For years I had this intense passion for making bread,” she said. “Then it evolved into this intense passion for making really good soup.”
A few decades ago, Flotree and her husband, Mark, would have been labeled hippies. Both have a passion for a simple life that contributes to the well-being of others and to the planet.
They opened Grateful Bread on Earth Day in 1998 as a bakery specializing in ethnic breads from around the world. A former bakery manager at Open Harvest natural foods market, Flotree had been baking bread at home and selling it at the Haymarket Farmer’s Market.
“I was baking so much at home, it just got out of hand,” she said. She wanted a place where she could devote her full attention to creating the best-tasting bread possible to share with her growing clientele of faithful customers.
After about five years, however, the Atkins Diet craze hit and the same people who had craved her bread began eliminating carbs.
“I had read about a restaurant in New York City that all they did was soup,” she said. Not knowing whether Lincoln could support a soup-only restaurant, the couple changed their menu — much to the disappointment of some people who had counted on buying early morning loaves of English oatmeal or Zen potato bread.
But the vegetarian soups won them over. People fill the small shop at 1625 S. 17th St. for lunch and line up to buy soup to go.
“I still bake bread, but now I give it away” in the form of baguettes and other small-sized breads to go with the soup, Flotree said. She also makes scones and muffins.
She and Mark, who are one side and the other of 50, run the shop along with their two sons, Cheyenne, 25, and Dylan, 20.
The business takes so much of their time that they closed down for nearly three months this summer to sell their products at the Old Cheney Farmer’s Market. It also gave them a chance to spend some time at their cabin on the Platte River, and for Mark to re-roof their house. “We also needed time just to sit on our porch,” Flotree said.
But now that the store is on its regular schedule, she’s back in her element — and loving it.
“We’ve always been bohemians — that’s our lifestyle,” her husband said. They’ve also always had an interest in Eastern philosophy and see running Grateful Bread as following the Buddhist path of “right livelihood.”
Asked about their goals for the future, Flotree said, “This is it. What else would we do? This is what we want to do.”
While she’s content to spend most of her days in the kitchen creating beautiful soups, she encourages others not to be afraid to pursue their dreams.
“I think it’s really important that people are not afraid to make changes in their lives,” she said. “If there’s something you really want to do, figure out a way to do it.”
-- Bob Reeves
Path to bliss a never-ending, always-changing road
Steve Marsh remembers it as clearly as if it happened yesterday — not 30-plus years ago.
Famed professor, author and inspirational thinker Joseph Campbell was on television.
“He said, ‘If you want to have a happy and successful life, you have to follow your bliss,’” Marsh recalled.
It wasn’t really earth-shattering news to Marsh. But it was re-affirming.
“I had been doing that since I was a kid,” the 53-year-old Lincoln man said. “ The books I read and the things I did and chose to do were the things I was most interested in and attracted to,” he said.
The son of theologians, Marsh and his brother were always encouraged to find their own way. Discover their passion. Pursue their purpose on earth.
In college, while his classmates were choosing majors that offered money, stability and a sturdy career ladder, Marsh followed his bliss into philosophy.
“I was interested in art and religion on one hand and psychology and science on the other,” he recalled.
As a student at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Marsh studied Western religions and philosophies. He spent two semesters at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., studying Eastern religions and healing arts like Tai Chi and Qi Gong under a Tibetan teacher. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan and his master’s degree from Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo.
Over the years he has held many jobs, all geared to helping others find their bliss, be it through religion, meditation, exercise or self actualization.
A voracious reader and consummate student, Marsh cites numerous authors and theologies, all of which have brought him to this place he is now.
“For me, it was realizing there was a greater power than me in control,” Marsh said.
It was identifying ego and letting it go. It was learning how to be humble and practice humility. It was living a life of “authenticity.”
“The most authentic sign of that is love,” Marsh said. “Sacred love. Holy love. Love of God.”
He sees all of us as interconnected — people are like islands in an ocean. Above the water’s surface they look separate and unrelated. But go down deep and you will discover they are all part of the same undersea mountain range growing from the same core, Marsh said.
He spends his days working as the religious programs director at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Nights and weekends he follows his “second career.” He teaches Eastern healing arts and meditation classes (Tai Chi and Qi Gong) at BryanLGH Medical Center’s LifePoint, Southeast Community College and beginning in early 2008 at Prairie Life Fitness Center.
He writes about his philosophies on his Web site (www.members.aol.com/stmarsh/new.htm) and in his book “Seeking Communion: Sacred Visions and Biblical Reflections.”
He counsels people seeking spiritual direction.
Marsh knows his philosophies are not new — rather, they are thousands of years old and transcend just about every culture that walked this earth:
Love others as you would oneself. Love ourselves as we love others.
We are all part of each other.
We are all children of God.
God gives us choices.
It is the choices we make that determine our path — whether it will detour us or lead us to our bliss.
It’s a never-ending, always-changing road. Even Marsh, who has lived his bliss for 46 years of his life, finds he must sometimes step back and question whether he is still on the path.
“I ask myself: What does God want me to do? What choice is most loving and healthful?”
And without fail, Marsh says, when he chooses that route, he always rediscovers his bliss.
-- Erin Andersen
Book changed life, pointed the way
When he was just out of high school, Adam Hintz read a book called “Ishmael” by Omaha-born author Daniel Quinn.
It’s a novel about a gorilla who has profound observations about evolution and the future of humanity.
Hintz says the book changed his life and was instrumental in his eventually opening Meadowlark Coffee, 1624 South St.
“It’s true — Meadowlark probably wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t read that book,” Hintz said.
The main idea of “Ishmael,” he said, is that “humanity is sustainable by design, but our civilization is fundamentally unsustainable.” In other words, humans are biologically designed to live in harmony with one another and the environment, but civilizations create an artificial situation in which humans exploit one another and the planet.
As a teenager, Hintz used to hang out at the Coffee House in downtown Lincoln, and he even worked there for a while. “It was such a great environment for me,” he said. “I learned how to socialize with people and understand human behavior. There was such a variety of people there.”
For a while he toyed with running a guitar repair business, but then he and his friend Nathan Simpson decided to start their own coffeehouse. Meadowlark opened in 2005 and has become a popular hangout for people from all walks of life.
In a way, Hintz sees the shop as a microcosm of the sustainable society Quinn wrote about in “Ishmael” and his follow-up book “Beyond Civilization.”
When Hintz is mixing up a latte or cappuccino, he knows that the coffee is organic (grown without pesticides), Fair Trade (produced without exploiting farmers) and shade grown (without destroying the rain forest).
Baked goods sold in the store are locally produced — from Red Moon Bakery, co-owned by his wife, Anne. “The idea is to make sure the money is staying in Lincoln, as much as possible, instead of sending a check to Seattle or Arkansas every week,” he said.
Another key idea from “Ishmael” is egalitarianism — all people are equal and no one is better than anyone else. Hintz lives out that philosophy in the way he relates to fellow workers and customers.
“When I come to work, it’s like being at home,” he said. “I feel like I’m working with my brothers and sisters, with my friends.”
Meadowlark is “a crossroads of the community,” he said, where fundamentalist Christians and agnostics, socialists and those with right-wing views can sit and converse. “There’s a free flow of ideas (when) people get together over a cup of coffee.”
Meadowlark also brings people together through blues, jazz and folk concerts, art exhibits, slam poetry nights and free films on social issues, such as “Who Killed the Electric Car” and “Iraq For Sale.”
Many different groups meet there to meditate, read the Bible, discuss philosophy or politics.
“Adam is a very passionate person and a fun guy to be around,” his business partner Simpson said. “He has a lot of drive about the business and helping the community.”
Hintz recently helped start the South Street Summer Market, which will feature artisans and craftspeople selling locally produced products.
The principles of “Ishmael” apply not only to Adam and Anne Hintz’s working lives, but also in how they’re raising their two children, Iris, 5, and Sophia, 1½.
“We’re very busy people, but we’re living by example,” he said. “We hope to be an example to our children of how to live.”
-- Bob Reeves
Some, like the late Joseph Campbell, professor and author of such works as “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” “The Masks of God” and “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor,” call it “bliss.”
One would think it should not be hard to figure out what makes you happy and then just do it.
But many search and search. Some never find their bliss.
Go online and Google “finding bliss” and 1,190,000 references pop up. Google “finding life’s purpose” and you’ll get 84 million more hits.
The world is full of people offering guidance and inspiration for discovering and pursuing our very own bliss.
Bookstores are filled with self-help self-discovery books. Many are best sellers like Sarah Susanka’s “The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters,” Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” and Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret.”
From Oprah to Dr. Phil, the airwaves are filled with advice and tips. Everyone promises: We can discover our passion. Bliss is out there. It can happen. Here are four Lincolnites who prove it:
Gardening brought healing and life’s passion
Every Sunday morning, Bertine Loop drives her overloaded Volvo station wagon to a prime parking spot at the Old Cheney Farmers Market. She hoists up the tailgate and secures it before she begins to take out books, baskets filled with file folders, plants and folding tables — all neccessary for her to do her “job” that day.
Loop, wearing black overalls, grabs a red wagon, fills it up and pulls it over to the spot under the big shade tree reserved for the Master Gardeners information table.
Coordinating and running this table is part of her volunteer hours as a Master Gardener, but she has tallied up far more than the required number of hours.
Gardening, and everything that goes along with it, is Loop’s passion, not a requirement.
Twenty years ago, after a car accident that left her with time to think, she discovered that gardening was a part of her healing process. “It is a reflection of life,” she said. “Nurturing, new growth. It is about caretaking and challenges.”
If she could, Loop would garden from sunrise to sunset. As it is, she tries to adjust her work schedule so she is at least outside to enjoy those two special times of day.
As a therapist, she can incorporate her gardening into her work and has completed the coursework for horticulture therapy. Clients may find themselves in her backyard, where she explains the similarities of gardening and life.
Her office always has some green plant material in it. “It gives off oxygen,” she said, another reference to gardening’s life-sustaining properties.
Over the years, she has prioritized her love of gardening — half-time therapist, half-time gardener. “I work at both, 100 percent of the time,” she said.
Which is not to say Loop is exclusively out pulling weeds. Her roots may be in the garden, but she has branched out the last 10 years to co-host the KZUM radio show on gardening, “How’s It Growing,” continues as a Lancaster County Master Gardener and helped organize the recent VegFest at the Sunday Farmers Market.
“I’m excited about the ‘green community,’” she said. “It’s a great way to bring people together.”
In the winter, Loop takes a break from outside gardening and works inside instead. Like all plant people, she’ll scan the catalogs for next year’s bounty.
And next year’s VegFest, she said, will be bigger and better, with melons and squash featured.
She’s already planning it.
-- Kathryn Cates Moore
Finding the right ingredients for bliss
Around midnight on most nights, you’ll find Cate Flotree making soup in the kitchen at Grateful Bread.
She sleeps from about 5 to 10:30 p.m. so she can get up in time to start making six or seven huge pots of vegetarian soup to serve to the lunchtime crowd.
Flotree loves slicing potatoes, carrots, onions and other veggies and watching them boil and simmer into a perfect soup stock. She gets the same pleasure from working in the kitchen as a painter might get at an easel or a weaver at a loom.
“For years I had this intense passion for making bread,” she said. “Then it evolved into this intense passion for making really good soup.”
A few decades ago, Flotree and her husband, Mark, would have been labeled hippies. Both have a passion for a simple life that contributes to the well-being of others and to the planet.
They opened Grateful Bread on Earth Day in 1998 as a bakery specializing in ethnic breads from around the world. A former bakery manager at Open Harvest natural foods market, Flotree had been baking bread at home and selling it at the Haymarket Farmer’s Market.
“I was baking so much at home, it just got out of hand,” she said. She wanted a place where she could devote her full attention to creating the best-tasting bread possible to share with her growing clientele of faithful customers.
After about five years, however, the Atkins Diet craze hit and the same people who had craved her bread began eliminating carbs.
“I had read about a restaurant in New York City that all they did was soup,” she said. Not knowing whether Lincoln could support a soup-only restaurant, the couple changed their menu — much to the disappointment of some people who had counted on buying early morning loaves of English oatmeal or Zen potato bread.
But the vegetarian soups won them over. People fill the small shop at 1625 S. 17th St. for lunch and line up to buy soup to go.
“I still bake bread, but now I give it away” in the form of baguettes and other small-sized breads to go with the soup, Flotree said. She also makes scones and muffins.
She and Mark, who are one side and the other of 50, run the shop along with their two sons, Cheyenne, 25, and Dylan, 20.
The business takes so much of their time that they closed down for nearly three months this summer to sell their products at the Old Cheney Farmer’s Market. It also gave them a chance to spend some time at their cabin on the Platte River, and for Mark to re-roof their house. “We also needed time just to sit on our porch,” Flotree said.
But now that the store is on its regular schedule, she’s back in her element — and loving it.
“We’ve always been bohemians — that’s our lifestyle,” her husband said. They’ve also always had an interest in Eastern philosophy and see running Grateful Bread as following the Buddhist path of “right livelihood.”
Asked about their goals for the future, Flotree said, “This is it. What else would we do? This is what we want to do.”
While she’s content to spend most of her days in the kitchen creating beautiful soups, she encourages others not to be afraid to pursue their dreams.
“I think it’s really important that people are not afraid to make changes in their lives,” she said. “If there’s something you really want to do, figure out a way to do it.”
-- Bob Reeves
Path to bliss a never-ending, always-changing road
Steve Marsh remembers it as clearly as if it happened yesterday — not 30-plus years ago.
Famed professor, author and inspirational thinker Joseph Campbell was on television.
“He said, ‘If you want to have a happy and successful life, you have to follow your bliss,’” Marsh recalled.
It wasn’t really earth-shattering news to Marsh. But it was re-affirming.
“I had been doing that since I was a kid,” the 53-year-old Lincoln man said. “ The books I read and the things I did and chose to do were the things I was most interested in and attracted to,” he said.
The son of theologians, Marsh and his brother were always encouraged to find their own way. Discover their passion. Pursue their purpose on earth.
In college, while his classmates were choosing majors that offered money, stability and a sturdy career ladder, Marsh followed his bliss into philosophy.
“I was interested in art and religion on one hand and psychology and science on the other,” he recalled.
As a student at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Marsh studied Western religions and philosophies. He spent two semesters at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., studying Eastern religions and healing arts like Tai Chi and Qi Gong under a Tibetan teacher. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan and his master’s degree from Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo.
Over the years he has held many jobs, all geared to helping others find their bliss, be it through religion, meditation, exercise or self actualization.
A voracious reader and consummate student, Marsh cites numerous authors and theologies, all of which have brought him to this place he is now.
“For me, it was realizing there was a greater power than me in control,” Marsh said.
It was identifying ego and letting it go. It was learning how to be humble and practice humility. It was living a life of “authenticity.”
“The most authentic sign of that is love,” Marsh said. “Sacred love. Holy love. Love of God.”
He sees all of us as interconnected — people are like islands in an ocean. Above the water’s surface they look separate and unrelated. But go down deep and you will discover they are all part of the same undersea mountain range growing from the same core, Marsh said.
He spends his days working as the religious programs director at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Nights and weekends he follows his “second career.” He teaches Eastern healing arts and meditation classes (Tai Chi and Qi Gong) at BryanLGH Medical Center’s LifePoint, Southeast Community College and beginning in early 2008 at Prairie Life Fitness Center.
He writes about his philosophies on his Web site (www.members.aol.com/stmarsh/new.htm) and in his book “Seeking Communion: Sacred Visions and Biblical Reflections.”
He counsels people seeking spiritual direction.
Marsh knows his philosophies are not new — rather, they are thousands of years old and transcend just about every culture that walked this earth:
Love others as you would oneself. Love ourselves as we love others.
We are all part of each other.
We are all children of God.
God gives us choices.
It is the choices we make that determine our path — whether it will detour us or lead us to our bliss.
It’s a never-ending, always-changing road. Even Marsh, who has lived his bliss for 46 years of his life, finds he must sometimes step back and question whether he is still on the path.
“I ask myself: What does God want me to do? What choice is most loving and healthful?”
And without fail, Marsh says, when he chooses that route, he always rediscovers his bliss.
-- Erin Andersen
Book changed life, pointed the way
When he was just out of high school, Adam Hintz read a book called “Ishmael” by Omaha-born author Daniel Quinn.
It’s a novel about a gorilla who has profound observations about evolution and the future of humanity.
Hintz says the book changed his life and was instrumental in his eventually opening Meadowlark Coffee, 1624 South St.
“It’s true — Meadowlark probably wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t read that book,” Hintz said.
The main idea of “Ishmael,” he said, is that “humanity is sustainable by design, but our civilization is fundamentally unsustainable.” In other words, humans are biologically designed to live in harmony with one another and the environment, but civilizations create an artificial situation in which humans exploit one another and the planet.
As a teenager, Hintz used to hang out at the Coffee House in downtown Lincoln, and he even worked there for a while. “It was such a great environment for me,” he said. “I learned how to socialize with people and understand human behavior. There was such a variety of people there.”
For a while he toyed with running a guitar repair business, but then he and his friend Nathan Simpson decided to start their own coffeehouse. Meadowlark opened in 2005 and has become a popular hangout for people from all walks of life.
In a way, Hintz sees the shop as a microcosm of the sustainable society Quinn wrote about in “Ishmael” and his follow-up book “Beyond Civilization.”
When Hintz is mixing up a latte or cappuccino, he knows that the coffee is organic (grown without pesticides), Fair Trade (produced without exploiting farmers) and shade grown (without destroying the rain forest).
Baked goods sold in the store are locally produced — from Red Moon Bakery, co-owned by his wife, Anne. “The idea is to make sure the money is staying in Lincoln, as much as possible, instead of sending a check to Seattle or Arkansas every week,” he said.
Another key idea from “Ishmael” is egalitarianism — all people are equal and no one is better than anyone else. Hintz lives out that philosophy in the way he relates to fellow workers and customers.
“When I come to work, it’s like being at home,” he said. “I feel like I’m working with my brothers and sisters, with my friends.”
Meadowlark is “a crossroads of the community,” he said, where fundamentalist Christians and agnostics, socialists and those with right-wing views can sit and converse. “There’s a free flow of ideas (when) people get together over a cup of coffee.”
Meadowlark also brings people together through blues, jazz and folk concerts, art exhibits, slam poetry nights and free films on social issues, such as “Who Killed the Electric Car” and “Iraq For Sale.”
Many different groups meet there to meditate, read the Bible, discuss philosophy or politics.
“Adam is a very passionate person and a fun guy to be around,” his business partner Simpson said. “He has a lot of drive about the business and helping the community.”
Hintz recently helped start the South Street Summer Market, which will feature artisans and craftspeople selling locally produced products.
The principles of “Ishmael” apply not only to Adam and Anne Hintz’s working lives, but also in how they’re raising their two children, Iris, 5, and Sophia, 1½.
“We’re very busy people, but we’re living by example,” he said. “We hope to be an example to our children of how to live.”
-- Bob Reeves
Copyright © 2002-2008 Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved.