Category Archives: Loss

Something Good

1. READ THIS when you can’t remember who you are, what you do, why you do it — or how to talk about it from Alexandra Franzen.

2. Intimate Portraits of Cosplayers at Home from Twisted Sifter.

3. Simplify Your Life by Writing It Down and The Greatest Secret to Productivity That No One is Talking About from Be More With Less.

4. From Chookooloonks: what are we looking for? which led to what we hope to find.

5. Wisdom from Danielle LaPorte, “With envy out of the way, you’ll have more room for your own greatness.”

6. Wisdom from the Dalai Lama,

When the teachings say we need to reduce our fascination with the things of this life, it does not mean that we should abandon them completely. It means avoiding the natural tendency to go from elation to depression in reaction to life’s ups and downs, jumping for joy when you have some success, or wanting to jump out the window if you do not get what you want. Being less concerned about the affairs of this life means assuming its ups and downs with a broad and stable mind.

7. Good stuff from MindBodyGreen: 10 Ways To Stop Stressing & Start Living Peacefully, and Is It Time To Stop Worrying About Sugar? (You Don’t Have To Quit It), and The Ultimate Bliss Salad With Ginger Miso Dressing.

8. My 10 favorite “Before I die” responses: Candy Chang celebrates the release of her book on the TED Blog.

9. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

We use our emotions. We use them. In their essence, they are simply part of the goodness of being alive, but instead of letting them be, we take them and use them to regain our ground. We use them to try to deny that in fact no one has ever known or will ever know what’s happening. We use them to try to make everything secure and predictable and real again, to fool ourselves about what’s really true. We could just sit with the emotional energy and let it pass. There’s no particular need to spread blame and self-justification. Instead, we throw kerosene on the emotion so it will feel more real.

10. No One is Coming from the Positivity Blog. Oh how I wish the right person would read this, really hear it. *sigh*

11. Hello 35!, a list of lessons Tammy from Rowdy Kittens has learned over the last thirty-five years. She’s one smart cookie.

12. Wisdom from Ronna Detrick, “It is one thing to admit, maybe only to ourselves, what we most want, need, and deeply desire. It is another thing entirely to trust that we might be worthy of such, to give that internal voice any semblance of credibility.”

13. Danielle LaPorte Truthbomb, “So much is a cry for love.”

14. Distraction or desiring? What you are choosing? from Jennifer Louden.

15. Good stuff from Elephant Journal: Can Yoga Save Us? and How I came to love my body–just the way it is.

16. 15 Reasons why Fort Collins is the Greatest City in America. I love where I live, but do not understand why Lee Martinez Park is not on this list. Wait, scratch that — let’s continue to keep it our little secret.

17. The Simple Guide to a Clutter-Free Home from Becoming Minimalist.

18. DIY: Hem Jeans Fast & Easy.

19. your daily rock : amazing grace and your daily rock : let someone help you

20. You don’t need to dance before your double mastectomy to be awesome from Lisa Bonchek Adams.

21. From Susannah Conways’s Something for the Weekend list, The Plant Whisperer.

22. Shared (first stanza) by Kelly Rae Roberts in her newsletter:

What in your life is calling you?
When all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms by itself
in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?

In the silence between your heartbeats
hides a summons.
Do you hear it?
Name it, if you must,
or leave it forever nameless,
but why pretend it is not there?
~Terma Collective

23. A 4-Year-Old Girl Asked A Lesbian If She’s A Boy. She Responded The Awesomest Way Possible, a really great talk Ash Beckham gave at the TEDx Boulder, shared here by Upworthy. I especially loved, “Hard is not relative, hard is hard,” and “When you do not have hard conversations, when you do not tell the truth about who you really are, you essentially are holding a hand grenade.”

24. Shared by Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens on her Happy Links: Everything You Need to Know to Start Your Microbusiness and There are no rules.

25. Lessons in love – a tribute to Charlie on Life is Limitless. *sob*

26. This is an actual essay written by a college applicant to NYU.

27. Golden Retriever Puppy Cam. This is only going to get better.

28. Dogs vs. broccoli from Dog Heirs. I had no idea this was so popular.

29. 11 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My Business from .

30. Comfort Food: No one brings dinner when your daughter is an addict on Slate.

31. There is no gone, on Painted Path. Amen.

32. Wisdom from Tama J. Kieves,

You want to know “how” you will do your dreams. You want a guarantee. I’ll give you one. Commit to tasting the nectar of anything that brings you joy or peace. Get hooked on your own idiosyncratic ecstasy. You will have found your reason. You will have experienced an undeniable power. Then you will listen to yourself. And that is how you find your how.

33. Wisdom from Parker Palmer, shared by Curvy Yoga, “The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge can become more fully human.”

34. Creating the Life We Want from Annie Neugebauer, in which she says really good stuff, like,

It can be indescribably difficult sometimes, to follow through with our desires. For me, the main push-back comes from intangible socieital pressures. I don’t want to care what others think about me, but holy crap do I ever. I really care. I want people to like me. (Why is that made into such a despicable sentiment? Doesn’t everyone want to be liked?) More importantly, I want people to respect me – or at least accept my choices. The problem, then, arises when what I want isn’t what society wants me to want, and I must overcome that natural instinct and step beyond its draw.

35. 2013 Holiday Gift Guide – Part Two from Rachel Cole. Registration for Rachel’s Wisdom Notes for a Well-Fed Holiday is now open. Most people have holiday traditions, and I think this is becoming one of mine.

36. Stunning Portraits Of The World’s Remotest Tribes Before They Pass Away on Bored Panda. Makes me think two things are natural about, fundamental to humans, that honoring these things is essential to our survival: we are creative and we have a relationship with the earth and its creatures.

37. The first lie… from Seth Godin.

38. Free High-Resolution Photos from Paul Jarvis.

39. Wisdom from Mark Nepo, “To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.”

40. Day 1: ‘Hey, What’s The Neighbor Doing To His Lawn?’ Day 60: ‘OMG!!’ This is exactly what we are doing to our front yard, little by little.

41. From Positively Present Picks, Two people decided to surprise New York’s jaded subway conductors, and the results will make your day.

42. Photographer Takes Beautiful Portraits of Shelter Dogs to Find Them Homes, shared with me by Justine, who like me wants to rescue all the dogs.

43. New music on SoundCloud. I am obsessed with Furns, and Sales is good too. Furns “Power” might be my favorite new song.

44. Are You Happy And In Love? Here’s Why That Makes You So Sad. from Upworthy. The only thing I disagree with here is that he says the Buddhist practice of non-attachment means you don’t care, and that is just wrong, a misunderstanding of the basic concept.

45. The Control Myth, a brilliant blog post by Michael Baugh that combines dog training with the wisdom of Pema Chödrön and Brene’ Brown, and says “What do we want, control or connection?” Thanks for sharing it, Sarah (and thanks for about 100 other things too), my favorite dog trainer.

46. Two brilliant pieces on being self-employed from the brilliant Susan Piver, Self-Employment: Three Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me and The pain of pricing.

Something Good

1. Can We Gain Strength From Shame? Brene’ Brown on NPR.

2. What if forgiveness isn’t about forgiving? Thoughts on consciously relating to people who have hurt you. from Danielle LaPorte.

3. Danielle LaPorte Daily Truthbomb: “Forget about being impressive and commit to being real.”

4. Part of a community… from Seth Godin.

5. Shifting Tides by Dani Shapiro on Positively Positive.

6. A Letter From Fred by Green Shoe Studio, “A short documentary telling a poignant story of life, love and music.”

7. Wisdom from Elizabeth Berg on Facebook,

I just heard from a woman who was in my Chicago workshop. She greatly improved an essay she wrote by taking the risk to go deeper, then deeper still. She got to a truth she’d been hiding from, and it made all the difference. It was painful for her to write and to read aloud, but we all were stuck with the beauty of what she did, and even though we had not been through what she described, we resonated to her words. I think that’s because we’re all struggling with one thing or another here on planet Earth, and when we read about someone telling the truth about what they’re struggling with, it makes us all feel better. The Beatles were right when they said all you need is love. And I believe that part of love is telling the deepest truths about yourself, at least to yourself. It’s not easy. It’s something that for most of us is always a work in progress. But it’s worth it to try.

I get the image, sometimes, of all of humanity on a spaceship, in deepest darkness. But in the spaceship, the light is on, because of what we mean to and do for each other. And in that vast darkness, the light travels far.

8. Official video for Mary Lambert’s She Keeps Me Warm.

9. The perfectionism cure from Everyday Bright, “In this short video, I reveal the surprisingly simple method my daughter came up with to help us both overcome our perfectionism. I talk about how we eventually became comfortable with risk and, more importantly, with ourselves.”

10. 10 Times Calvin And Hobbes Broke Your Heart on BuzzFeed.

11. Ideaphoria: How to Enjoy The Wild Ride of Your Creativity on Scoutie Girl.

12. Got a big dream? Start with one room. from Alexandra Franzen.

13. How To Tell People What You Do — And Be Remembered on Forbes.

14. 6 Powerful Truths to Start Telling Yourself and 8 Things Unhappy People Refuse to Admit from Marc and Angel Hack Life.

15. The Five Languages of Body Love from Rachel Cole.

16. Chat & Chew with Kate Northrup – Money: A Love Story on KrisCarr TV.

17. Interview with Andrea Scher, by Carolan Deacon.

18. Unravel Yourself: Rachel W Cole on Inner Wisdom and Authenticity, an interview with Rachel on Achieve the Impossible.

19. Awesome free event from Omega: FIND YOUR OWN STRENGTH, Live Stream Event with Elizabeth Lesser in Conversation with Brené Brown and Joan Halifax Roshi, September 20, 2013, 8:00pm – 9:30pm.

20. Tig Notaro On Going ‘Live’ About Her Life on NPR, an older interview with one of my favorite comediennes. She’s coming to Boulder in December.

21. random thoughts: the need for analog on Chookooloonks.

22. Moments on Mystic Vixen, (it was her dog Henry I was talking about yesterday).

23. A Tiny Poem to the World from Kid President.

24. Rescued pit bull works as a therapy dog.

25. Read this, next time you want to give up on making a difference, from Marianne Elliott.

26. From Elephant Journal: The Cutest Damn Wedding Video, Ever, and “This is a young girl who wanted her picture taken with her makeshift hula hoop, playing at a dark & depressing charcoal factory in Manila. Hope is everywhere,” and Instructions for a Bad Day, and Eulogy for an Abandoned Black Dog.

27. The Last Séance by Deborah Thompson.

28. 20 Marriage Tips Everyone Needs to Know, written by a guy who just got divorced.

29. Why you shouldn’t be a writer by Rebecca Dickson.

30. 10 Ways to Create a Meaningful Ceremony from Pixie Campbell.

31. Wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook.

32. Ten Tough Truths About Cancer from the Atlantic.

33. From Happy Links on Rowdy Kittens, Where Bloggers Blog.

34. Bill Watterson’s Uplifting Advice To College Grads, Illustrated In ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ Style. on Huffington Post.

35. On Not Feeling Alone from Lisa Congdon.

36. Wisdom from Nancy D. Solomon, “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”

37. The Pursuit Of Bravery from Method & Scribe on Vimeo, (shared by Brave Love on Facebook).

38. From Susannah Conway’s Something for the Weekend list,

And,

40. Collaborating with a 4-year Old on the busy mockingbird.

41. “Downton Abbey” Season 4 Trailer Is Here! on BuzzFeed.

42. Into the Woods, a beautiful picture I saw on Reddit.