December | 2019 | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

From our walk

1. Building a Mindful New Year, a FREE online program with “6 Transcendent Themes / 6 Buddhist Teachers / 6 Meditations to Guide You into 2020.”

2. Eat to Love e-course. “A six-week online program based on the bestselling book Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life. Led by nutrition therapist, meditation instructor, and certified Intuitive Eating counselor, Jenna Hollenstein, the Eat to Love e-course is a supportive and enriching environment to change your relationship with food and your body in a lasting way.”

3. Go, Dog, Go from Jena Schwartz. Because this, “The world will not crumble if you pause. The world will not crumble if I pause. The world will not crumble if the thing you are working on takes much, much longer than you ever could have imagined. But the world might crumble if you ignore what your soul is telling you, if you deny what your body needs, and if you override the deep knowing that never, ever leaves.”

4. Jillian Michaels Is Still Trying to Glamorize Bullying from Dances with Fat. “Fat people being allowed to exist, be happy, do stuff, live our lives, achieve things, be in the spotlight etc. aren’t ‘glamorizing fatness’ we’re just being happy, doing stuff, living our lives, achieving things, and being in the spotlight…There is no way to go ‘too far’ in the direction of people being treated with respect and equality regardless of size.” Also from Ragen, Fat People and Your Tax Dollars.

5. Manifest 2020 with Andrea Scher. “The New Year has always been such a rich time of reflection – a time to acknowledge how you grew this year, how you were brave, what was hard…and declare your year complete. This creates a beautiful space to vision what is to come. What if you could name your dreams and desires for 2020 and create a plan to make them reality?”

6. Read the Articles of Impeachment Against President Trump on The New York Times.

7. Merriam-Webster dictionary just announced the personal pronoun ‘they’ as 2019’s word of the year.

8. You’re Not Going Crazy: 15 Signs You’re a Victim of Gaslighting.

9. The Practice of Using December for Retreat, Reflection & Letting Go.

10. Good things from Susannah Conway: The Unraveled Heart, “a soulful monthly subscription to support you in building a deeper and more nourishing relationship with your self,” Find Your Word, “a FREE 5-day email course to help you figure out your word for the coming year,” and Unravel Your Year, a FREE workbook that helps you reflect and look ahead.

11. How the director of ‘Waves’ constructed one of the year’s most poignant soundtracks.

12. More reading lists! The Ultimate Best Books of 2019 List, and A 2020 reading challenge: 52 books by women of color in 52 weeks, and We read these 29 books in 2019. You should too, and The Best Reviewed Books of 2019: Memoir and Biography, and The Best Poetry Books of 2019.

13. Hey Yoga Teacher, Stop Touching People For No Reason.

14. Greta Asks Media to Focus on Other Young Climate Activists.

15. Fossil fuel companies responsible for more than half of ocean acidification, study says. “It certainly can’t hurt for individuals to try to limit their consumption of fossil fuels and other products that are the result of oil — things like single-use plastics, for instance. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that even with all of the consumption of these products that we are responsible for, the majority of the burden still lies with the companies that have chosen to continue extract, refine and peddle fossil fuels despite being armed with knowledge well in advance that doing so would damage the planet. No harm will come from reducing your own reliance on fossil fuels and related products — but more good will come from holding the real culprits responsible for their actions.”

16. Have you swept your rhino today? (video)

17. Weinstein and His Accusers Reach Tentative $25 Million Deal on The New York Times.

18. This is what an antiracist America would look like. How do we get there? “Opposing racism is not the same as building an antiracist society. Our new series, Antiracism and America, looks at the structures that sustain a racist society – and how we dismantle them.”

19. This app matches marginalized communities to therapists who share their background. “Teletherapy app Ayana matches users to licensed professionals based on their culture, race, and experiences. Can it help close the mental healthcare gap?”

20. We need to learn how to relax, without guilt. “Being busy all the time is part of the way we live. But, whether gardening, reading or spacing out on the sofa, taking time to rest is just as important.”

21. These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum. “The teen authors of Tell Me Who You Are want to change how American students are taught about race.”

22. Gifts For Writers 2019 from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds.

23. 21 Day Meditation Challenge Winter 2020. “A 21-Day Immersion in Wisdom, Compassion, and Community.”

24. Home: a 30 Day Yoga Journey with Yoga with Adriene.

25. How a denial of tenure at Harvard became a national controversy. “The decision is a blow to ethnic studies departments everywhere.”

26. Judiciary Committee Report Argues Trump ‘Betrayed the Nation’ on The New York Times. “The 658-page report asserts that President Trump should be impeached for abusing his office and obstructing the congressional inquiry into his actions.”

27. 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2019.

28. Hallmark Apologizes, Reverses Decision on Same-Sex Wedding Ad.

29. Most Women You Know Are Angry — and That’s All Right. This article is a few years old, but I feel like some people need reminding.

30. Experience: a burglar made me think I was losing my mind. “Things were going missing, but everybody told me it was probably nothing.” Something similar happened to me, although as far as I know nothing was taken. I’d come home and sometimes the inside of our house smelled like cigarettes, and someone kept tying all my shoes in my closet when I always put them away untied. One time I went home early from work because I was so sure someone had been in our house and I needed to go check. It made me feel crazy. After we moved out, we found out the maintenance man regularly went into people’s apartments when they weren’t there, without permission. He was a smoker.

31. Author Interview: ‘Imagine Pleasant Nonsense’ With ‘Strange Planet’ Creator Nathan Pyle.

32. ‘I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry.’ “Activist Rachel Cargle has built a brand — and a business — by calling out racial injustices within feminism.”

33. Joe Hammond’s final article: ‘I’ve been saying goodbye to my family for two years.’ “Last year the author wrote about parenting with motor neurone disease. Here, he reflects on the end of life, before his death two weeks ago.”

34. Melania Trump Thinks Greta Thunberg Had POTUS Attack Coming.

35. Cards to Help Fat Patients at the Doctor’s Office – English and French Versions from Dances with Fat.

36. Fresh Air on NPR: What Happens To The Stuff You Donate?

37. For the Holidays, the Gift of Self-Care on The New York Times. “A Buddhist teacher offers five simple steps to quiet your mind and soothe your stress any time of year.”

38. Adorable doggo sneaks into the house next door to join their kids’ bath every night.

Yesterday I did some wild writing with Mikalina. As my teacher Laurie Wagner describes it, wild writing is a timed writing practice where, “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.”

To start one round of writing yesterday, Mikalina read Maya Stein’s poem, weights and measure. A round of wild writing always starts with the reading of a poem and the suggestion of a few select lines or phrases to use as a starting point, then we write for about 10-12 minutes. When I shared my response, Mikalina told me I should post it to my blog, so here it is.

When I read Maya Stein, I somehow imagine that she writes each poem as quickly as we wild write, that what she writes comes out fast and fully formed. Clearly that’s not possible, not how it happens. Sometimes, I’m sure a line rises to the top like a bubble in the water, a fart in the bathtub, but it doesn’t always work like that.

Writing poetry is about space, about lingering, about circling back to the thought just before this one, or that thing that happened 20 years ago. It’s the smell that triggers a memory. It’s also getting somewhere and realizing you don’t remember the trip at all, you simply woke up and found yourself where you were going.

Poetry is like hunger, like forgetting to eat, like dreaming, like a long walk in the woods where you are surprised by a hummingbird or a bear, where you get lost or you find a particular rock that you just have to put in your pocket, take home and put on your writing shrine, always and forever able to remember where you found it, where it came from.

Poetry is that dream you can’t quite remember. Poetry is the map of an unknown territory that you study so much it’s like you’ve been there before, already. Poetry is like water, like air, like blood, like dirt, like roots, like waves. Poetry is grains of rice you can boil and eat even though before that they were hard and entirely inedible.

Poetry is the white noise that helps you sleep, the music playing in another room your ears strain to recognize. Poetry is citrus. Poetry is when Eric roasts peppers in our tiny kitchen in our tiny house and my eyes burn from the smell. Poetry makes you cry in the same way cutting an onion or a strong wind does. Poetry is your baby blanket, the satin edge of it frayed in one corner from all those nights you rubbed it against your cheek so you could fall asleep.