Excerpt
Kick off your shoes. Relax. Take it easy. But don't wait until you go on vacation. Get comfortable in your everyday home.
Open up. Feel the breeze blowing through your house. Feel the warm sun on your toes, the cool tiled floor, the polished wood planks on the back deck. Pad around your uncluttered house, slipping easily from room to room. Cook and eat and live in one big space. Sleep peacefully with doors thrown open to the garden.
Embrace the sun. Make your windows and doors really big, with lots of glass. Let sunlight pour in through clerestories, skylights, and transom windows. Curl up in a window seat, tiptoe through an open colonnade, catch the view from a sun-drenched veranda. Stretch your arms-and your house-up into the light.
Live outside as well as in. Open whole walls to the outdoors, extend the roof outward, let the floor slip seamlessly outside to become a deck. Cook and eat on the patio, build a fire in an outdoor fireplace, take a nap in a hanging bed on the porch. Plant a kitchen garden right beside your house. Run through the wet grass to get to your backyard studio.
Adopt a barefoot state of mind. Be glad you live in a warm climate, move to one, dream of moving to one, or act like you're in one even if you're not. Use every room in the house every day. Think informal thoughts. Simplify. Live outside when you can, bring the outside feeling inside when you can't. Never forget how good it feels to have sand between your toes.