Escape into a world of adventure and fun. Having fun, managing stress and finding peace and joy are fundamentals that every person wants and needs in living their best life. How can we do that when we have people and events every day that are stressful?
Happy Tales, How to Manage Stress and Find Peace and Joy, (with Adventures in Nature Featuring King, Sabre, and Wildlife Along the Way) gives us entertainment and answers. It is a story of adventure and joy in life. After moving to Seattle with her husband, author Diane de Mere was searching for ways to manage stress and find peace and joy. What she finds are herself and her own strength. This story is set against a background of changing careers and relationships with elderly parents, with wonderful animal stories along the way.
It is a story about her, and her husband, living in nature in the Pacific Northwest with bald eagles (Abby and Abe), loons, otters, deer, and orcas. You’ll read about the high jinks of their two rescued malamutes, King and Sabre, and their trip to Seattle from Los Angeles via RV with their rescued dog (at the time), Annie, and rescued cats. This is a story about endurance, patience, persistence and finding one’s way through nature and the belief in a Higher Being. It is a story about life, something that we all share.
This book is a compilation of thoughts, daydreams, poems, and notes in a journal spanning ten years since Diane’s 2004 move to the Pacific Northwest with her husband. It is a description of the immense beauty she saw every day among those forests, waters, and wildlife. That beauty became the force that helped her transition from being a successful but stressed-out corporate trainer for ten years in Los angles to the person she wanted and needed to be: someone who was able to handle the stress of frustrations, demands, disappointments, and personalities. It is an open monologue of what she did and how she did it.
The journal began as a backdrop, written in quiet moments between nights of praying for God’s help; nights and days shattered by emergency phone calls about aging parents and her husband’s all-consuming career; nights filled with mental dialogue recounting the previous day’s jolting events and her mind’s what-ifs and what-nexts––an unending phonograph of thoughts. But the astounding beauty and surprising little events in nature and the companionship and antics of her Malamutes became her respite and now her rejoicing song of life.
Slowly, the transitions took place from being fast-paced to slower paced; stressed out and yelling at her husband to being calmer; nervous to at ease; sleepless to more rested; and racing, shallow heartbeats to slower, deeper breathing. She was able to make herself schedule less in a day instead of filling every minute of every hour with activity, not allowing for any downtime in between. Along the way, she found writing, landscape design, and photography as new passions in her life.
For you, Diane’s journal is meant as an example of how to find peace, serenity, laughter, and beauty in your day. A shining path, a lighted journey has been given to her and she gives it to you. It is a path we can choose to follow that lifts us upward and onward with hope, faith, love, and peace.
At the end of the book, Diane offers chapters on Summary and Lessons Learned, Tips for Handling Stress, Recommended Reading, and a list of some of her favorite Nonprofit Organizations.
Happy Tales is available now through her website and at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and through her publisher, WestBow Press.
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