Category Archives: Poetry

Something Good

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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.

Day of Rest

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While at 27 Powers this past week, I was lucky enough to get to sit in on one of Laurie’s Wild Writing classes. How the class works is Laurie gives a prompt, reads a poem and then gives a line or two to spark the writing, which is 15 minutes of never letting your pen leave the page, seeing where it might take you, and she offers three rounds of the practice per class session. On this day of rest, I’d like to share a bit of what I wrote.

At the start of the second session Laurie read us Maya Stein’s poem, this is how you do it, and gave us the lines “this is how you do it” and “you were trying to save the world, that’s all.” I wrote,

This is how you do it, tender imperfection and fierce compassion and the dirty dishes and the bills and the way he looks at you and the burs and slivers and stickers that need to be carefully removed, the broken bits to be swept up and tossed or glued together depending on how precious the piece or how much it feels on this particular day like you need it, even if it is only a shadow of whole.

This is how you do it, you get on the plane, rent the car, show up in space, come in from Colorado or Monday or a dream, you show up, you are present, and when it’s over, you go back home. You kiss the boy, then the other boy, you leave the bag packed in the corner, eat dinner, go to bed, get back to work the next morning, digging in the bag for what you need right now, but still not unpacking.

This is how you do it, you get back to practice — you pull a card, write the words, sit and follow your breath, walk the dog, move your body into the poses. You show up, return, let go and come back, again and again.

This is how you do it, you write the content, edit the pieces, code and publish, answer the questions, troubleshoot the issues, get paid.

This is how you do it, even though you know the deal, impermanence, death is real, you’ve lived with it, been there, let it in, let it go, even thought it’s like stripping naked and handing them the sharpest knife, this is how you do it, allow it all in, to touch you, beautiful and brutal, tender and terrible, the mess, the dirt, the stink, the blood, the light, the laughter, you let it warm you, burn you, destroy you.

This is how you do it, bird by bird, every day, every moment, showing up for when it’s brilliant, for when it’s sharp, for when it’s the same old shit again, you show up, you stay with it, even when it makes you want to poke your eye out with a pencil, to run away screaming, to smash something, anything, to be anywhere but here, you show up, you stay, you keep coming back, letting go. You are trying to save the world, that’s all, and this is how you do it.

27powerslightIn the last round, Laurie read Maya Stein’s poem trash mandala, and the prompts were, “let your pain become a trash mandala” and “what’s torn away can steer you.” This round, we were running short on time, so we only wrote for 10 minutes. I wrote,

Let your pain become a trash mandala. So, unlike some who build a shrine, a dwelling, or worse yet a home or a fortress from what’s been lost, what hurts, who move in and live there, nail “no trespassing” signs to a fence made from bones and knives and broken liquor bottles — not like that, not that way, but rather pick up the pieces, what’s torn, the bits of what is lost, what is left, what you’ve found, and arrange it, shape it into something that heals, the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been possible without the broken bits, the left behind, the lost. Make what only you are able to see, looking in the cracked mirror of your grief.

Let your grieving meet the shoreline, walk into the water and let the waves knock you down, then get back up. If you keep practicing, it will get easier, you’ll get stronger. Pick the pieces the waves offer you, what calls to you, sparkles when the light touches it, pick them up and put them in your pocket, keep walking, keep collecting.

What’s torn away can steer you. Your life, all the struggles, what you see as obstacles, this is the path, this is the stuff to work with, this is your material, this is the trash, the treasure.

Let your pain become a trash mandala. Maya will make a bike, you could string together a trash ukelele, someone else might grind it all up and make paint, or medicine. See what you see, offer it and let it go — don’t move in and live there.

I hope you go to Maya Stein’s website and read more of her poetry, kind and gentle reader. She’s amazing.