Tag Archives: Love

Something Good

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pdxfloor1. Wisdom from Mahatma Gandhi, “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

2. 23 Pictures That Will Warm Your Cold, Dead Heart on Buzzfeed.

3. Feel Her from Julie Daley on Unabashedly Female.

4. Your dog isn’t being friendly. He’s an asshole. And so are you. from The Dog Snobs. Amen.

5. 10 Questions for Grace and Whit on A Design So Vast. This had me cracking up and crying. I hope Grace gets her dog.

6. Things to do after your dog has died from The Other End of The Leash. *sob*

7. Allison Mae Photography, Ansel & Tilda: July, in which Allison shares photos of her own dogs. She’s just so g o o d.

8. Here we are today {Just One Paragraph 8/30} from Christina Rosalie.

9. From Brave Girls Club,

Dear Beautiful Girl,

You are enough.

You have enough. You do enough. You think enough. You serve enough. You know enough.

So enough is enough, girlfriend. Pat yourself on the back, go take a hot bath, and let yourself chill for a while.

Sounds like you could use a little break from being so much of enough.

Just BE.

You are so wonderful, just the way you are. You are loved. xoxo


10. Wisdom from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.”

11. Say I Love You Often, on Elephant Journal.

12. Wisdom from Seth Godin, in his post The opposite of anxiety,

I define non-clinical anxiety as, “experiencing failure in advance.” If you’re busy enacting a future that hasn’t happened yet, and amplifying the worst possible outcomes, it’s no wonder it’s difficult to ship that work.

13. 7 Simple Lessons From the Mat and My Life is too Complicated to Simplify from Be More With Less.

14. An Open Apology to All of My Weight Loss Clients from Iris Higgins.

15. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

It’s painful when you see how in spite of everything you continue in your neurosis; sometimes it has to wear itself out like an old shoe. However, refraining is very helpful as long as you don’t impose too authoritarian a voice on yourself. Refraining is not a New Year’s resolution, not a setup where you plan your next failure by saying, “I see what I do and I will never do it again,” and then you feel pretty bad when you do it again within the half hour.

Refraining comes about spontaneously when you see how your neurotic action works. You may say to yourself, “It would still feel good; it still looks like it would be fun,” but you refrain because you already know the chain reaction of misery that it sets off.

16. 6 Ways to Thwart an Off-Leash Dog Rushing You and Your Dog from Dogster.

17. More wisdom from Seth Godin, in his post Q&A: What works for websites today?

The only reason to build a website is to change someone. If you can’t tell me the change and you can’t tell me the someone, then you’re wasting your time.


18. More wisdom from Brave Girls Club,

Dear Beautiful Girl,

What are you willing to let go of today? Life is so much about knowing what to hold on to, and what to let go of…and having faith that it will all work out in the end.

Your heart and your gut know exactly what you need to let go of, even if your brain is giving you all sorts of reasons to clamp your fingers around it. There are seasons and times to have different things, relationships and situations in your life…and then the seasons change and it’s time to let go of many of those things. Change is hard….but change is absolutely necessary.

We’ve all got to let go of old habits, old situations, old behaviors and sometimes even old relationships to make room for what is meant for the next part of our lives. If we just get quiet, get brave, and listen very closely….our hearts will tell us what to let go of. This doesn’t mean it will be easy…it just means that it is what is meant for now.

You can do this. Listen to your heart. Be brave. You are loved. xoxo

19. An Inconvenient Hunger from Rachel Cole. (P.S. Registration for Rachel’s next session of Ease Hunting opens today!)

ease.button120. From Rowdy Kitten’s Happy Links list, Adventures of Traveling Cars by Kim Leuenberger.

21. From Positively Present Picks list: Sayings 2.0 and put this shirt on.

22. George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates. This is good advice for all of us.

23. From Susannah Conway’s Something for the Weekend list: Your Guide to Interacting with an Introvert, Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences, Food Typography, and this video of Robert Downey Jr. singing Driven to Tears with Sting.

24. 5 Ways To Bring Mindfulness Into Everyday Life on Daily Good.

25. Jimmy Fallon, Robin Thicke & The Roots Sing “Blurred Lines” (w/ Classroom Instruments) on Elephant Journal.

26. New York photographer turns strangers into friends.

27. 8 Life Lessons From My Dog on Elephant Journal.

28. In the Midst of My Joy, I Wept from Thoughts Askance.


29. The Trauma of Being Alive by Mark Epstein.

Day of Rest

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In my studies of Buddhism, I am constantly reminded that everything is the path. Good, bad, and indifferent, spiritual or secular, there is an opportunity to learn, to practice. No matter what comes, no matter what is, the instruction is to open to it, surrender to the moment, connect with the reality of experience.

Of course, when things are bad, this is harder to do. When someone you love is dying, and then when they are finally gone, it’s hard to stay present, open to the pain, to face the reality that they are gone. The amazing Amy McCracken said it best, when she talked about sweet Alyssa Doane’s memorial service,

Alyssa was buried this morning.
Despite all of the pretty flowers
and hundreds of messages
of love and support and the promise
that she was no longer suffering
and already dancing in heaven,
seeing Floppy in her casket and her mom at the grave site
made me want to go home and sleep for the rest of my life.

I cry every time I read that, for Amy, for Alyssa, for Alyssa’s mom, for everyone who loved Alyssa, for me and for everyone who’s ever lost someone they love, for the fact that so many of us can read what Amy wrote and even if we don’t know her or Alyssa, we know just what that feels like.

I’ve been reading Pema Chödrön’s book Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, trying to understand how to do just that, live with uncertainty and change, with the promise of impermanence and mortality. Pema shares a quote from Steve Jobs that is helpful,

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No reason not to keep your heart open, let it all in. We all bought tickets for a airplane ride where the guaranteed ending is not a wonderful vacation but rather a fiery crash in which we are all going to die, we are taking a ride on a boat guaranteed to sink — this is the deal. I know this intellectually, and yet my heart keeps getting broken by it, I still want to “go home and sleep for the rest of my life.” I try to be curious, open, gentle, but I fail.

Pema says,

We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen, so today I’m trying to make a little room, create some space, allow breath to be breath, love to be love, grief to be grief — allowing it all to just be.