Something Good

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atriumfall

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

1. Good stuff from Seth Godin, The two-review technique and Are you interesting? Both of these are helping me to reframe the way I think about and approach my work.

2. Screw Finding Your Passion from Mark Manson. This post is really great, and yet I can’t offer it to you without also giving you another perspective, equally great (or maybe even slightly better), from Laura Simms: Why You Don’t Need to Find Your Passion to Do What You Love and Instead of Finding Your Passion, Find *THIS*

3. Mom, I’m Not A Girl: Raising a Transgender Child. I’m so glad there are parents willing to move beyond their own fear and confusion to parent with love.

4. Just F*cking Journal Class, an awesome four week course. The next session starts TODAY.

5. Big Magic: Resources Week 1 on Allowing Myself. Are you reading with us?

6. The Power of Maybe…A Story About Accepting What Is from Meg Casey, a powerful post about how we might shift our perspective. “If we are able to drop the story of ‘good or bad’ and just greet our life exactly as it is without judgement we create the maximum conditions for healing in our life. We also by the way, free up resources to help us through whatever life is throwing at us.”

7. Humorous Street Signs and Other Contextual Street Art Interventions by Michael Pederson, an artist in Sydney, Australia, who clearly has a partner in crime in Jeff Wysaski, a comedy writer in Los Angeles, because There’s a Man Scattering Very Funny Fake Books, Signs and Pamphlets Around L.A. It makes me stupid happy that there are people who are willing to make this sort of effort just to make other people smile.

8. 50+ Of The Cutest Baby Animals Of All Time on Bored Panda. As I put this post together, there are 149 submissions so far to this list. I’ve tried to figure out which is my favorite, but how is a person supposed to choose?! And if you were able to survive that, check this out, 15+ Animals Enjoying Autumn Magic (as I post this, the list is at 49). Baby lion playing in a pile of leaves?!

9. The Essence of Hayao Miyazaki Films: A Short Documentary About the Humanity at the Heart of His Animation. “His aim was to make films that would help us all further understand the human condition.” If you haven’t seen any of his films, I highly recommend them…all of them.

10. What I Wished I’d Known Before Setting Out to Become a Writer a guest post from Nicole Baute on Sarah Selecky’s blog.

11. My Lonely Robots Experiencing The Quiet Wonder Of The World, a collection from artist Matt Dixon on Bored Panda. These little guys are so sweet.

12. Did you hear that Oprah bought 10% of Weight Watchers? Here’s some good stuff that got written about it that says what I feel better than I could articulate it: Dear Oprah from Julie Dillon, and Oprah and Weight Watchers, a Match Made In… on Dances with Fat, and Dear Virgie: Oprah Buying 10% of Weight Watchers–WTF? I especially love what Virgie says, “you cannot be actively investing in the diet industry and actively investing in the improvement of women’s lives.” Word.

13. A Soulful Exploration of Inner Wisdom with Susan Piver, an episode of The Unmistakable Creative podcast. I could listen to Susan tell her story all day. What she says right at the beginning is friggin’ brilliant.

14. 17 Beautiful Rooms For The Book-Loving Soul. And yes, I want to go to there, BuzzFeed.

15. Wisdom from Virginia Woolf, “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

16. Why I Focus on Simplicity (and How You Can Simplify Your Life in 2016) from Blonde on a Budget.

17. Qwerkywriter. I don’t know how comfortable this would be to type on, but I love the way it looks.

18. This Is How The Pro-Gun Crowd Sounds To … Well, Normal People. *gigglesnort*

19. Beyond Happy by Omid Safi on On Being, in which he suggests, “What if we strive for something beyond happiness? What if we aim for a life that is about being whole?” I love the poem at the end of this so much.

Here is to a life, everyday and spiritual,
Both individual and communal,
Meditative and ritual,
Embracing all the emotions that make us human,
Leading us to happiness,
And beyond happiness

To being
and becoming
whole.

20. 10 Fast Ways to Become a Better Writer from Sarah Kathleen Peck.

21. Good stuff from Zen Habits, The Underrated, Essential Art of Coping and Why You Should Write Daily.

22. Finding Your Creative Flow: 17 Writer’s Tricks to Get Un-stuck and Start Creating.

23. Beautiful Peace Mantra sung by Tina Turner.

24. Today I Rise: This Beautiful Short Film Is Like a Love Poem For Your Heart and Soul.

25. Truthbomb from Danielle LaPorte, “Love is your calling.”

26. Purification. Pain. Passion. And marrying your soul. Or…How to tap your deep creativity. from Danielle LaPorte.

27. 8 Amazing Things Will Happen To Your Brain When You Keep Writing Every Day.

28. 5 Mantras for When You Hate Your Job from Laura Simms.

29. “How I dearly wish I was not here,” a beautiful, heartbreaking story of what it’s like to lose your dog, to let them go. I read it a few days ago and I still can’t even read the title without crying. I don’t want to do this again, e v e r, and yet I keep getting more dogs knowing that this is exactly what will happen with every one of them — it’s a particular flavor of crazy.

30. Just Between You & Me, an unedited and unreviewed weekly conversation between Jen Lee and author/illustrator Tim Manley.

31. Why I opt out of the holidays: A Simple & Meaningful Christmas from Paul Jarvis. This is really, really tempting…

32. It’s Not You, it’s the Clothes from Sally McGraw. It’s so important to remember this.

33. 3 Ways to Say Goodbye to Busyness on Be More With Less.

34. Meditation teacher, medical expert Jamie Zimmerman dies in drowning accident. Yet another reminder to not wait, to not give up, to love what/who you love now.

35. Good stuff from Chookooloonks this was a good week list: “National Geographic is currently accepting entries for its 2015 photo contest, and you can scroll through the best ones so far here“, and “my friend Justin had an adventure in Peru, and since he’s a gifted photographer, he shows us how gorgeous it was.”

36. Bill Murray Talks The ‘Kasbah’ — And The Merits Of A Life Lived Phoneless.

37. After 59 years, Mattel gets it right: the new Barbie ad is awesome.

38. Behind the Scenes With Dani Shapiro, “Memoirist and best-selling author Dani Shapiro shares what she’s learned about herself from her daily practice of writing and completing her books.”

39. Starting a podcast for people who don’t want their lives taken over by podcasting from Paul Jarvis. SUCH good advice.

40. Raise Your Hand Say Yes with Paul Jarvis. Tiffany has interviewed so many great people. You should check out her archive.

41. 7 things I did to reboot my life from Wil Wheaton. “I deserve to be happy. I deserve to feel good about myself. I can do the work that I need to do to accomplish these things.”

Day of Rest

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officeshrineI wrote something in my Wild Writing class with Laurie Wagner that I really like. As I shared it, it felt like something I could post here, and Laurie reinforced that by emailing me later to say it was “blog-able.” This particular writing process, wild writing, is completely magic. The way it works is Laurie reads a poem, and then suggests a few lines to use as prompts. We write for about 10-15 minutes — as fast as we can without stopping, no editing, no judgment. Instead of spending my time trying to make the writing perfect, precious, this practice takes me right to the messy truth — beautiful and brutal, tender and terrible. Sometimes stuff comes up that I don’t want to write about, that I’d otherwise avoid, but I write it anyway. Sometimes what I write is dumb or boring, nonsense. Other times I get to a place I never would have found without the permission given by the practice to be wild.

Wild writing is similar to what Natalie Goldberg writes about in Writing Down the Bones. She suggests in her chapter “First Thoughts” that “The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise.” Her recommendation for how to approach the practice is a set of six rules:

  1. Keep your hand moving.
  2. Don’t cross out.
  3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
  4. Lose control.
  5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
  6. Go for the jugular.

In her book, she includes a bit more commentary for the rules, but you get the gist. Laurie amped up the magic by adding the poem prompt, and asking that we share what we write, giving no commentary and receiving none. The combination of the three (timed and prompted and shared without commentary) propels my writing in a way that nothing else does. Wild writing lights a fire that burns right through all my crap, my ego, my resistance. And it doesn’t just work in the moment, but spills over into everything else I’m working on. It’s what I was able to recently teach in my Wild Writing, Crazy Wisdom workshop, and it’s why I hope to keep sharing it, keep doing it.

The prompt for this piece was “How to Pray” by Annelyse Gelman. I could have started with “let this be the year of the rough draft” or “it’s not enough that…” but I chose to start with “Bless the…”

Bless the rain, the wet and the mud. Bless the wind that tears through. Bless the sound of the furnace running, working, warming. Bless Ringo happily lying by the vent under the kitchen sink, hogging all the warm air for himself. Bless the last of the tomatoes and the watermelon we bought even though we knew it probably wouldn’t be any good. Bless the butternut squash and the olive oil and the garlic and the oven. Bless the muffins mysteriously so much better this time even though I’ve baked them hundreds of times. Bless the not knowing, the mystery. Bless the longing to know why even when there are never any answers. Bless the confusion tucked right in next to the knowing. Bless my bones. Bless the wind that keeps blowing even after all the leaves are stripped. Bless the plan for lunch. Bless the to-do list. Bless Adele, bless her voice, bless the words, even bless the sadness I feel knowing I can’t do that, can’t make that sound, can’t open up my throat like that. Bless the longing. Bless the disappointment. Bless the recipe we made a special trip to the store for, spent hours on, and that didn’t turn out. Bless its awful taste. Bless the writers who string the words together, make a mess, find a through line, somehow manage to put it all together. Bless the laundry. Bless the bills. Bless the windshield wipers propped by the door week after week waiting for someone to put them on the car. Bless the men who fixed our car. Bless the car. Bless the road. Bless the precious lives speeding along those roads. Bless the ones who don’t make it home. Bless the ones waiting, wondering where they are, whey they are late. Bless the work. Bless the brain and the energy. Bless the machines and the electricity. Bless the bread and the butter. Bless the toaster and the fire. Bless the mystery of the wind, the not knowing why or where it comes from. Bless the remaining two minutes. Bless the sound of a key in the door and the sound of their feet running down the hallway, the sound of a head banging into the door. Bless the wanting to be let in. Bless the closed door.

Bless this day of rest, and bless you, kind and gentle reader.