Monthly Archives: October 2013

Something Good

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1. Good stuff from Marianne Elliott: Why I haven’t practiced yoga for five weeks. And why that makes me a better teacher and How I pack for 5 months: a packing ninja reveals her secrets and Telling the difference between a bad day, a run of bad days, and burnout.

2. Good stuff on Elephant Journal: Natural Remedies to Heal your Thyroid, and 7 Ways to Help Someone Who is Grieving, and We Are Not Here to Do Everything, We Are Here to Do Something, and 10 Things You Need to Stop Doing Today to be Happier, and Letters to Myself. P.S. Maybe you’ve noticed I share a lot of their stuff? I’m a paid subscriber — the content is totally worth it.

3. a room with a view on SF Girl by Bay. I’ve talked before about how much I love Amsterdam. Next time I go, I want to spend at least a month, maybe a whole summer, and stay in an apartment just like this one.

4. Good stuff from Jen Louden: How Being a Good Girl Gets in the Way of What Calls You and Finding Your People Right Where You Are.

5. Wisdom from Tama J. Kieves,

Do not be afraid to follow a thousand directions. You are only listening for one voice. You are following heat, light and truth. There is no right answer to find. An inspired life is all about developing a relationship with your own wholeness and love.

6. Good stuff from MindBodyGreen: Why Paleo Didn’t Work For Me, and 5-Step Cleanse To Maximize Thyroid, Adrenal, Immune & Digestive Health, and 5 Ways To Love The Present No Matter How Scared You Are, and 10 Fun Facts About Sweet Potatoes, and The 7 Chakras for Beginners, and Autumn Kale & Quinoa Salad, and 5 Things A Yoga Instructor Should Never Say.

7. Rise and shine: the daily routines of history’s most creative minds on The Guardian.

8. In case you feel like you need permission today… from Kat McNally.

9. Karma points, happy break-ups, true confessions, darkness + light: the BEST things I’ve ever written … that aren’t on this site from Alexandra Franzen.

10. Mudita from Rachel Cole.

11. The Body, Mind, and Space of Self-Care for Creatives – Part 3: The Space on Scoutie Girl.

12. My Pursuit of the Art of Living on Zen Habits.

13. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

At some point, if you’re fortunate, you’ll hit a wall of truth and wonder what you’ve been doing with your life. At that point you’ll feel highly motivated to find out what frees you and helps you to be kinder and more loving, less klesha [i.e. mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions] driven and confused. At that point you’ll actually want to be present—present as you go through a door, present as you take a step, present as you wash your hands or wash a dish, present to being triggered, present to simmering, present to the ebb and flow of your emotions and thoughts. Day in and day out, you’ll find that you notice sooner when you’re hooked, and it will be easier to refrain. If you continue to do this, a kind of shedding happens—a shedding of old habits, a shedding of being run around by pleasure and pain, a shedding of being held hostage by worldly concerns.

14. 3 habits for dissolving envy from Danielle LaPorte.

15. 25 things every woman needs to know from Hanna Brencher.

16. Be Cool and Don’t Be an Asshole, really good advice from Chris Grosso on Huffington Post.

17. Shared on last week’s Positively Present Picks: Need-To-Know: Practical Magic, and 21 Harsh But Eye-Opening Writing Tips From Great Authors, and The path is not straight, and Dog People Unite Temporary Tattoo, and Be Happy: 46 Proven Techniques to Increase Your Happiness and One Way to Get More Sex, and Convos With My 2-Year-Old – Season 2, Episode 1 – “Dinner Time,” (this whole series is one of the funniest things ever).

And on this week’s list, Socktober from Kid President and Soul Pancake, and How to Do What You Love.

18. feeding the feelings: my confession (please be gentle) from Liv Lane.

19. When did you get the call to service?, a beautiful confession from Andrea Scher on Superhero Life.

20. 10 Dog Training Tips for Rescue Dogs, (which seem like good tips for any dog owner really).

21. The Inconvenient Moments from The Scribbler’s Journal.

22. Tender from Simply Living with Ariana Pritchett.

23. Get Simple and Focus on What Matters Most on Be More With Less.

24. Missing Mahlon from Rowdy Kittens.

25. Hashtags: #MomTexts with Jimmy Fallon.

26. Pack Dog, a website I am afraid to join because of the potential for time suck and cuteness overload.

27. Where Bloggers Blog on Tumblr.

28. 6 Things Every Couple Should Stop Doing from Marc and Angel Hack Life.

29. Claire has a birthday message for her mommy, on Hello Giggles. Warning: Danger Baby alert, (“Danger Baby” is code for a kid so impossibly cute, it will make you want to make, adopt, or steal a tiny human, immediately). Even though this video is only a minute and a half long, you know that the adult who filmed and edited spend hours and hours working on it.

30. Wisdom from Chögyam Trungpa,

We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our “self-improvement.”

31. Wisdom from Mark Nepo, “The reward for kindness is not goodness or being thought well of or even having kindness returned. No, the reward for kindness is joy.”

32. Don’t know if you heard, but I am currently obsessed with all things sweet potato. Here are a few recipes I’m going to try: Black Bean and Sweet Potato Quesadillas and Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas.

33. The truth about Columbus from The Oatmeal.

34. 3 Powerful Insights About Finding Yourself and Creating Change on Tiny Buddha.

35. What do you do when you DON’T KNOW what to do? from Kute Blackson. This guy has so much good energy, watching one of his videos is like watching someone dance.

36. 7 Ways To Find Your Inner (and Real) Happiness, Ed and Deb Shapiro on Intent Blog.

37. The Other Things We Do: Going to the Dogs, a beautiful post about grief, dogs, and words.

38. The Freedom of Less on Becoming Minimalist.
homecoming1639. Rescued Pit Bull saves foster family’s 4-year-old son on Dog Heirs. What I love about this story is that the mom had initially only planned to foster this dog, but after what TatorTot did for her son, “I am never going to let this dog go…I owe him for the rest of his life.”

40. Potty Talk! [Original] Need a good laugh!? You’ll have tears streaming… It really is the funniest video.

41. Wisdom from Randy Pausch, The key question to keep asking is, “Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.”

42. An interview with Susan Piver about the Open Heart Project, in which she shares this wisdom,

If I was to measure my life by how much money is in my bank account, you know, I would not be very happy right now…But if I had to measure my life by how myself can I be every day, and how much can I offer that makes me happy – I don’t mean to sound sappy about it – but it makes me overjoyed to offer this.

43. Wisdom from Laurie Foley, “To do lists used to be my tada lists, summits upon which to plant flags. Now they are merely trailheads where I start letting go.”

44. A piece about Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, from ABCNews.

45. Dutch TV interview with David Sedaris, (the interview portion is in English).

46. Julie+Nate // Portland Engagement Session, a beautiful set of pictures from Phil Chester. The ones with the light and the trees are brilliant, so beautiful they almost hurt to look at them.

47. Plant Your Feet, a poem from Ken Roberts on Museful Things.

Day of Rest

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At Opening The Creative Channel last weekend, the creativity workshop I went to taught by Andrea Scher and Laurie Wagner, Laurie led us in session of Wild Writing. She describes the process this way,

For 15 minutes we write as fast as we can, pen never leaving the page. By writing so quickly we are able to push past our inner critic and our ego and all the ways we stay trapped in looking good. This gives us a chance to move into a less self conscious, loose groove where, if we’re lucky, we may stumble into the fertile imagination that lingers within us, conjuring up stories and memories that are waiting to be written.

At the start of each wild writing session, Laurie provides a prompt. Of course it is understood the writing can go anywhere, that we let go and allow it to move, but the prompt is a place to start, to come back to if we get stuck — in the same way our breath can give a focus when we meditate. In one particular session, Laurie shared a poem by Robert Bly, Things to Think.

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

The specific lines Laurie offered as a place to start, to return to, were “Think in ways you’ve never thought before,” and “if you lie down no one will die.” I was surprised by what I wrote, and at the same time it made complete sense to me, I knew it was the truth — which is the magic of this practice.

This is it, isn’t it? At the heart of all the words and ripped paper and paint and roasted eggplant, there is this — if you lie down no one will die. Maybe sometimes what I’m really afraid of is that if I lie down, everyone will be okay, everyone will keep going, and when I die, no one will notice. I will lie down, I will die, and the world will keep on going. I’ll decompose there on the ground, with the sand and dead leaves, the bugs will devour what doesn’t rot away, I’ll turn to dust, and no one will see it, no one will remember.

So that’s it, isn’t it? The real worry, the true fear, the “creamy center” — I’m afraid of being lost, lying down and dying and having no witness, no one left weeping for me, nothing I ever did or said or made or felt remembered by a single person, the paper I wrote the words on shredded, torn and glue-sticked to someone else’s art, the painting I did with my bare hands handed off to someone else to cover in their own color. I will have lived, struggled and tried so hard and it won’t matter.

And yet, there is a part of me that doesn’t care, thinks maybe that is better, to not matter, to go without hurting anyone, to not leave anything behind that doesn’t get used up in someone else’s effort to make some kind of meaning out of something that can never make sense for any of us — 1000’s of us, years and years, painting in blood on cave walls, creating monuments that aren’t even understood by those who come after, speaking in languages no one will understand once we go quiet.

So it’s okay to let it all go then, the pursuit, the passion, because if you lie down, no one will die, and everyone will die.

Think in ways you’ve never thought before — if it doesn’t matter, you can lean in to the letting go, you can reach for the paint that makes you happy, no judgement, stone stupid, and it doesn’t matter. If a wave knocks you down, you ride it, get up and walk into the next. You notice what you are doing when you are happy and you lean in, and in two minutes, hand your painting to the person next to you, let go and go deeper.