Category Archives: Susan Piver

Something Good

Lory State Park, image by Eric

Lory State Park, image by Eric

So great to be partnering with Wanderlust to share this list with a larger audience.

1. Adele’s latest album, 25. I’ve been listening to it nonstop since it was released. And this prank she pulled on a group of Adele impersonators is so sweet.

2. Wisdom from Susan Piver, “Love is the least safe thing there is. It’s fierce. You can’t domesticate it. It’s wild. When you find it you should rejoice. When you lose it you should grieve.”

3. 31 Days of Gifts You So Deserve from Be More With Less, “is like an advent calendar in your inbox designed to deliver the gifts you so deserve. The gifts are meaningful, some are magical, and all of them remind you to fully embrace the simplicity and meaning of the holidays with purpose and intention.” Added bonus? Pay what you want! This would make a great gift, for yourself or someone else.

4. NIH to retire all research chimpanzees. Fifty animals held in “reserve” by the US government will be sent to sanctuaries. This makes me so happy. Here’s one reason why, Chimp With Darkest Past Takes Comfort In Tiny Troll Doll.

5. Outlaw Willie Nelson Opens Up In Two Classic ‘Fresh Air’ Interviews. Confession: I adore Willie Nelson.

6. In ‘Just Eat It,’ Filmmakers Feast For 6 Months On Discarded Food.

7. Roasted leek and white bean galettes, a recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Yum. And this Honey Maple Roasted Carrots recipe from the Cafe Sucre Farine. (I get a little obsessed with roasted veggies this time of year.)

8. Florida Teacher Starts Each Day Complimenting Students One by One.

9. Finding Your Way Back to the Practices that Serve Your Soul, Willo O’Brien on Medium. This, in particular, is brilliant, “Fully allowing and feeling the emotions. Letting them be and letting them come through. Listening to what they have to say, giving them love, compassion, and space. This is the ultimate practice at the heart of it all.”

10. The incurable creative virus from Paul Jarvis. Have I told you lately how much I adore him? (P.S. Here’s a call for stories that will be published in the book this piece will also be in).

11. 365 Collage Journal Flip Through from Jamie Ridler. This looks like a fun project.

12. “You can always just listen” from Judy Clement Wall.

13. One letter can change your life–or someone else’s, “a free digital booklet all about the art of letter writing” from Alexandra Franzen. With the holidays coming up, this is a great practice to start cultivating.

14. Good stuff from Chookooloonks’s this was a good week list: let us attempt to spill light, and Still learning lessons, and Karen’s advent of light journaling course.

15. The *new* Black Friday hosted by the amazing Sherry Richert Belul. “This Black Friday, go with the new black: Spend at least part of the day making a Love List as a holiday gift for someone you love.”

16. Good stuff from Susannah’s Something for the Weekend list: Visible Mending as an art form, and Shinning the Light on Sensitivity, and Elizabeth Gilbert on dealing with criticism.

17. A Funny Thing Happened When I Was Typing My Suicide Note…

18. Health at Every Size Lies from Dances with Fat.

19. READY ♥ SET ♥ REFLECT an online retreat being offered by the amazing Susie Stonefield Miller. This is for “anyone who is yearning to take some time to reflect on the past year, to let it inform this next year, to choose a word for the year and to make a gorgeous deck of inspiration cards,” and will include “short guided meditations with art journaling prompts, video tutorials, thoughtful worksheets, and community connection.” Good stuff.

20. Planning Day: Design Your 2016 from Jamie Ridler, a webinar to help you design the year you want.

21. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “…each minute we spend lending ourselves, our time or talents or energy or thoughts to something that we really want little or nothing to do with is time is stolen from the things that really do matter to us. Each minute spent with the parts of our life that we want to be free from is a minute that we are not at peace….a minute that is spent feeling miserable instead of joyful.”

22. Buddhism by the Numbers: The Four Noble Truths, a simple, clear description.

23. Ladybug take off – in slow motion. Nature is so fascinating, so amazing.

24. How our Feelings Weigh Down our Bodies on Elephant Journal.

25. 10 Things Black People Fear That White People Don’t (Or Don’t Nearly as Much).

26. 5 ways Christian fundamentalists completely misread the Bible.

27. The Gnomist: A Great Big Beautiful Act Of Kindness.

28. 20+ Cute And Funny Puns By Arseniic. Part of me feels like I’m too smart and too grown up to laugh at these, and the other part is laughing her thunderpants right off.

29. WATCH: A French Father Tries To Explain The Attacks To His Young Son. Sweet and heartbreaking. The way he smiles at his dad at the very end is worth the entire thing.

30. Three Reasons Frozen is Better.

31. Artwork is Work, Supporting the Arts Means Paying the Artists, a really great bumper sticker.

32. Nurse Writes This Heartbreaking Letter To The Parents Who Just Lost Their Daughter.

33. 48, written by Christine Mason Miller on our shared birthday, in which she says,

For now, while I’m able, I’m going to keep creating, feeling, living, crying, laughing, breathing deep breaths and being of service in whatever way I can. I will continue opening up my home to those I love. I will keep on trying to create the best I can create, whatever that means.

Today, I am turning 48 years old. Today, I am in awe of everything my first 47 years have given me. Today, I’m here to do one thing: LIVE.

34. Company is Coming. This is funny because it’s true. Anyone who is hosting Thanksgiving this year understands how it feels, the particular way you can lose your mind getting the house ready when you have people coming over.

35. Liz Kalloch’s redesigned website. LOVE it.

36. Watch Anthony Bourdain’s Mind Get Blown Eating At The Waffle House With Sean Brock. I always wonder where I’d take Anthony if he ever visited Fort Collins. Where would you take him where you live?

37. This quote from Arundhati Roy’s War Talk, which seems especially timely.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

38. Horse Head Squirrel Feeder. This is the best, a great gift idea.

39. Buddhist Extremist Cell Vows To Unleash Tranquility On West on The Onion, (just in case you thought it was for real).

40. Gluttony? It’s the holiday season; don’t judge yourself.

41. Funniest Parenting Tweets: What Moms And Dads Said On Twitter This Week. You don’t have to have your own kids to see the humor here.

Something Good

Horsetooth Reservoir, image by Eric

Horsetooth Reservoir, image by Eric

So great to be partnering with Wanderlust to share this list with a larger audience.

1. How Dare You (A lesson on defining your personal brand) from Paul Jarvis. I really think he has one of the most brilliant perspectives about marketing, branding, and blah, blah, blah. I think so because he says stuff like this, “As makers, we express who we are through what we make. That is, if we’re being honest about ourselves and what we stand for.”

2. Essena O’Neill – Why I REALLY am quitting social media. I share this with the disclaimer that I don’t believe (obviously) that social media is inherently bad. Just like every other technology or media, the way we use it manifests our own neurosis (and/or wisdom). We infuse it with who we are and what we believe. As such, every technology is also infused with our fundamental wisdom and compassion. It doesn’t exist on its own without us, isn’t inherently bad or good.

3. What if you didn’t give up? from Alexandra Franzen. Her superpower is a crazy fierce mix of motivation and inspiration, and this post is all the proof you need. In it, she says,”You can quit right now. Un-enroll. Hand in your notice. Shut down the website. Pack up your case and go home. Never play a note again. Fuck it. Or you can decide that following that persistent longing in your heart — the longing to create, to write, to make a difference in the unique way that you feel called to do it — is worth just a little more patience.”

4. Proud (Diet) Quitter from Dances with Fat.

5. Variations on stupid from Seth Godin, a great list of all the various ways we can be stupid.

6. Good stuff from Susannah’s Something for the Weekend list: A Writer’s Manifesto by Joanne Harris: The National Conversation, and The Life-Changing Magic of Intentional Ignorance, and Top 16 Ways I Connect with God-presence from Alanis Morissette, and Rae Morris – Skin [Official Video].

7. 10 Behaviors of Genuine People, a list, a way of being worth aspiring to — actual, real, sincere, honest.

8. Good stuff from Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter: “I’ve been working on this weird deck of cards (inspired by Oblique Strategies) to help me out when I get creatively stuck, so I thought I’d share a virtual version for y’all. More cards will be posted soon…”, and C.S. Lewis on how to be original, and “November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but I have no interest in writing novels, so I started National Novel Reading Month (NaNoReadMo).”

9. Why being weird is your best creative trait. What a relief…

10. Out of Control Salted Caramel Cinnamon Rolls, recipe and pictures that just might make your head explode.

11. And then that one time on twitter we all just became human and I laughed until I gave myself a headache from The Bloggess. If you are having a bad day, read these tweets and I guarantee you’ll feel better, and you’ll have a good laugh so it’s a win/win.

12. How to Decolonize your Yoga practice.

13. What Weight Gain Really Means. With the holidays comes a slew of content focused on how not to gain weight, how to lose weight, blah blah blah. Read this as the antidote.

14. Adele: Inside Her Private Life and Triumphant Return from Rolling Stone.

15. 20+ Cats Who Immediately Regretted Their Poor Life Choices on Bored Panda.

16. Songs that Crack my Heart right Open (in the Best possible Way) on Elephant Journal.

17. A Washington couple took a paternity test for their child. The man wasn’t the father. His unborn twin was. Science is weird.

18. Ruth Oosterman’s “Collaborations with my toddler.”. She takes her toddler daughter’s drawings and turns them into amazing pieces of art.

19. Elizabeth Duvivier is blogging every day for the month of November. Two of my favorite posts so far are this island of tranquility and season of bittersweet, in which she shares this quote from Daniell Koepke,

Despite what you may believe, you can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can make mistakes and still be capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love. Everyone has disappointed someone they care about. Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes. Not because we’re inadequate or fundamentally inept, but because we’re imperfect and fundamentally human. Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for failure.

20. Tig Notaro’s Amazon Pilot Is Wonderful. And, you can watch it right now on Amazon, for FREE.

21. We just found out that Winnie the Pooh is actually a girl. Awesome. Agreed — awesome.

22. In no particular order: Some things I have learned so far in my 9ish months as a nomad.

23. What you won’t read on social media about living the dream from Life is Limitless. Life is tender and terrible, beautiful and brutal — keep your heart open.

24. Writing Advice Is Bullshit from Terrible Minds.

25. Joyful and Exuberant, inspiration from Marc Johns. Trust me, go read it now.

26. Start with what you know on A Design So Vast. I appreciate Lindsey’s perspective so much, her willingness to look at herself and her life closely, directly, honestly.

27. Jamie Greenwood on Working For Yourself and Getting To The Heart of What’s True, a really great podcast.

28. Dieting is a Violent Act from Rachel Cole. Amen.

29. Two older posts from Susan Piver, which are just as relevant now as when she first published them, Self-Employment: Three Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me and The pain of pricing.

30. Two good pieces from Joanna Schroeder on Ravishly: Why I Stopped Weighing Myself and Why I Stopped Dieting And I Couldn’t Be Happier.

31. Thanksgiving Dinner Rolls With Surprise Gratitude Notes. I’d replace the notes with wishes, but yum!

32. Wisdom from Justine Musk, “Maybe you’re tired because you’re repressing so much of yourself.”

33. Mashed Potato Casserole recipe.

34. It’s Not The Dog, It’s You! A Simple Way to Stop Leash Reactivity.

35. Christians and Coffee Cups, which suggests, “And maybe this year we can stop yelling at others to ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ and instead focus on being Christlike ourselves.” A-fucking-men!

36. High school student absolutely kills a simple cover of Adele’s “Hello.”

37. The Self-Hatred Within Us by Sharon Salzberg.