Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

It’s here! Today is the day. In fact honestly? I would skip BrocanteHome today, pop your shoes on and get thee to the bookshop or click here (aff) and get thy bottom over to Amazon to press please deliver to me RIGHT NOW (they have a button like that don’t they??), for twenty five years later, Sarah Ban Breathnach has swept through the pages of Simple Abundance and refined it for every women navigating a life in which her authenticity is challenged daily by the perpetual demands of the convenience of the internet and the esteem-bashing influence of social media.

For yes, I have had the lovely privilege of being among the first to read this beautiful new edition of Simple Abundance and I want you to know, if you are questioning how different it is from the well-thumbed copies I know we all have on our bedside tables, that it is both very, very different, and utterly, scrumptiously the same! As familiar as a meeting with the bestest of friends who simply has so very much more of her long valued wisdom to share. A friend possessed with an abundance of generosity and intellect she has used to create a book for our time inspired wholly by a book whose time has come again.

I am now on my third reading and my precious copy of the 25th anniversary edition of Simple Abundance is, I am not ashamed to admit, scrawled with my thoughts, with notes and highlighted passages. Each night I have sat with with a dedicated little notebook and created for my own joy, a journal full of simply abundant inspiration: links to follow and new-to-me writers to discover, words that speak to my heart and passages to treasure for always, and from this book I have awoken so very much of the spirit that had taken hibernation within me. For in Sarah, I remember who I am.

And oh how I needed that. How we all need Sarah Ban Breathnach’s gentle, occasionally fiesty and always inspirational wisdom right now! For isn’t it true that we have a lost a little of ourselves in the years since we first discovered Simple Abundance? Doesn’t life feel so much crazier: the demands on our time, emotions, finances and more so insidious that it is quite possible we wouldn’t recognise our most authentic selves if we found ourselves sitting next to her on the bus?

It’s time then for us all to remember who we are, and more than that, who Simple Abundance reminds us to be. It is time to face the challenges our lives now harass us with daily and to create for ourselves, with Sarah’s guidance, a life abundant with joy, pleasure, hope and music regardless.

You see I want to be her again. Who I was when I first discovered Simple Abundance all those years ago. A woman alive with hope and the sheer joy of possibility I found in the first book that had ever really spoken to my soul.

That the 25th anniversary of Simple Abundance should coincide with Brocantehome‘s 15th Birthday this week feels nothing short of serendipitous to me: for wasn’t a tiny post about the book that inspired BrocanteHome, only the second post I ever wrote here, exactly fifteen years ago? Though it doesn’t do to dwell on how fast (and occasionally how tortuously slow!) those fifteen years have gone, I now feel as though I am teetering on the brink of all the changes both the end of Finley’s school days and the transistion into menopause I am experiencing will bring, and that those things should coincide with an opportunity to examine my all grown up sense of authenticity, feels nothing short of a truly precious gift.

Sarah Ban Breathnach you see is in every word I write here. From the puttery treats her book inspired to the philosophies shaping each and every part of my own life that I share here, she is here. And I am so very, very grateful.

So here my loves, is an opportunity for us all to set about refining our lives, in the same way Sarah has so carefully refined each word in this new edition of Simple Abundance. A lovely invitation to dance with our authentic selves all over again. So batten down the hatches, treat yourself to a new journal, get cozy, (serve up nothing but microwave meals if necessary!) and wholly throw yourself into a book whose time has truly come again.

Get Simple Abundance here on Amazon US and here on Amazon UK… (aff)

P.S: Watch out for something truly, simply abundant coming very soon to Brocantehome won’t you? Im sooooooo excited!