1. Merry everything and happy always! Yesterday we put on Christmas music and I wrapped the last of Eric’s presents and watched a few Christmas movies (rewatched Single All The Way and then Love Hard, both really good) and then we went to lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant. When we came home, I took a nap while Eric made an apple pie and walked Ringo, and after dinner we watched The Great British Baking Show holiday special. Today it was early morning presents, texts with people I love, talking to my mom on the phone, and not doing much of anything else. I hope that you too, kind and gentle reader, are making space for rest and ease, and that joy and love are finding their way to you.
2. Sunrise. This time of year, it’s extra.
3. Puppies and babies. Two of my favorite things.
She is the same size as Ringo, but Charlotte is only a baby (Great Dane).
4. Ringo Blue, all his quirks. I’ve mentioned before that Ringo loves to find things on his walks, pick them up, and carry them — sometimes all the way home. This week he’s found two single gloves and one pair of black knit gloves that he’s absolutely in love with. In fact, I spent a whole day washing and mending his toys, and when they were ready to come out of the dryer, he was clearly asking to play, brought me his beloved gloves. I took him to the dryer, opened it, and told him to “get a toy.” He set down his gloves and stuck his head in the dryer, had a look around, and picked the gloves back up! That was his choice. It’s like a kid who spends more time playing with the box a new toy comes in than the toy.
5. My tiny family, my tiny home, my tiny life. It doesn’t seem possible that it is already Christmas, it seemed to come so fast this year, feels like Thanksgiving was only two weeks ago, especially when today was 50 and sunny. There’s no one I’d rather spend the holidays with, or any of the regular days, even the awful ones — home is where they are.
Bonus joy: Eric being on a three week break, all the candy he made, new books and empty journals, a warm shower, clean laundry, clean sheets, down blankets and pillows, raspberries, apple pie oatmeal, naps, nuts and seeds, Eric and Ringo napping together on the couch, slowing down, knowing that slowing down is a necessary part of the process, getting in the pool, sitting in the sauna, the hydromassage chair, Christmas music, Christmas movies, all the lights, vaccines, listening to podcasts, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.
6. Wisdom from Esmé Weijun Wang: “Horrible things happen. Art cannot be a band-aid for all of them. But it can be a balm. If you can find something—a song, a painting, a poem—and use it to keep yourself afloat, you will be joining a long lineage of suffering people who take art and stuff their broken hearts with it.”
7. A Single Map is Enough. “To search closer to my front door than ever before for the things that matter to me: adventure, nature, weather, wildness, exercise, surprises, silence, new people, wanderlust, and curiosity.” LOVE this.
8. Abandoned Southeast. “In 2016, my obsession with the forgotten and abandoned inspired me to create this blog. My goal is to showcase the obscure, sometimes historic, forgotten places I have visited across the Southeast. I hope to preserve the past through documentation and photographs since many of these amazing places are often lost to neglect, demolition, or renovation.”
9. Self-care: Why play hard? on The Hedgehog Review which “offers critical reflections on contemporary culture: how we shape it, and how it shapes us.”
10. The Practice of Emptiness, a dharma podcast. “Roshi Joan Halifax unpacks the three doors of liberation, Vimalakirti’s gift to us: emptiness, signless, and aimlessness. She reminds us that ‘liberation isn’t just about freeing your body or mind from suffering, liberation is actually about being free from all preferences, [it’s about] being radically open to what is.’ She calls us to practice beyond duality, and engage with the teaching of ‘Not one, Not two.’ It is from this place of non preferential mind and emptiness that we can answer Vimalakirti’s ‘imperative for the bodhisattva to engage the everyday world for true awakening to be manifested.'”
11. The Trouble with White Women, “A Counterhistory of Feminism with Kyla Schuller”, author of the book with the same title.
13. Finding Refuge, “a book designed to guide you through exploring what is breaking your heart, where grief resides, and how it affects you.” Yes, please.
16. People Share What Surprised Them the Most About the Pandemic. I felt this one: “How much it divided us. I always sort of thought that if we, as a species, ever faced some sort of external existential threat, like aliens coming to wipe us out or some horrible natural catastrophe, we’d band together to help each other. Turns out; nope, we’ll try to make money off each other, use the situation for political gain, and refuse to take basic precautions to protect each other basically just out of spite.”
29. On Being with Krista Tippett / Jane Hirshfield: The Fullness of Things. “The esteemed writer Jane Hirshfield has been a Zen monk and a visiting artist among neuroscientists. She has said this: ‘It’s my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this … It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow … The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being is why good art thrills … Acknowledging the fullness of things,’ she insists, ‘is our human task.’ And that’s the ground Krista meanders with Jane Hirshfield in this conversation: the fullness of things — through the interplay of Zen and science, poetry and ecology — in her life and writing.”
30. ‘Worry Burnout’ Is Real on The New York Times. “Even in a pandemic, our capacity for catastrophe has a limit. Here’s how to spot the signs.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 