1. Today is my birthday. I am 47 years old, and it’s wonderful to be alive, awake, still here. I feel simultaneously older and yet so much younger than that number. I am not at all where I expected I would be, and my life hasn’t gone the way I imagined it would, and yet where I find myself is so right, so much better than I thought, while also so much more difficult. More than anything, I promised myself I would spend today being exactly who I am, loving and celebrating myself. It’s still morning here, and I think what I’ve given myself today might just need to be the way I live all the time.
2. Susan Piver is brilliant.Her latest video for the Open Heart Project suggests a simple question that she labels “a life changing question.” I finally watched it this morning and it was so perfectly timed, such a great way to start my day. Spoiler alert: the question is “who would I be if I took myself seriously?” It reminds me of what Rachael Maddox said recently, how “maybe the magic that was missing all along was the will to be all the way true to the call of your brilliant heart.”
3. I’m still grieving the loss of my Dexter. It’s been almost a year and a half, and I’m only just now able to touch the center of that sadness, which is very much alive, fierce and tender and raw.
One wish: That we take ourselves seriously, and that we celebrate and love and grieve fully, each in exactly our own way.
3. Grace of Beginning, lines from a John O’Donohue poem shared by Erica Staab.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awake your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
15. “Every year, 750,000 Chinese die prematurely from pollution.”This post includes disturbing images and facts. Maybe just skip this one. It’s not so much “something good” as shocking and heartbreaking, but it was also weirdly helpful to me, inspired me to do better, make better choices.
32. Wisdom from Terry Tempest Williams, shared in Hannah Marcotti‘s weekly love letter,
For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . .
When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.
Sanity around food is not something that we achieve once and then never have to think about ever again…sanity around food is a meditation — a thought pattern — that we practice coming back to again and again, watching that thought pattern feel more natural overtime.
Little by little, our sane thinking patterns become easier to come back to,
Until at some point, practicing our new way of thinking creates grooves in our mind and we don’t have to actively remember anymore, it’s just happening — a new natural way of being takes over.
35. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön, on why to meditate,
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness… [We] work with cultivating gentleness, innate precision, and the ability to let go of small-mindedness, learning how to open to our thoughts and emotions, to all the people we meet in our world, how to open our minds and hearts.
