Tag Archives: Margaret Atwood

Something Good

Arthur's Rock, image by Eric

Arthur’s Rock, image by Eric (the zoom on my new camera is crazy good)

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

And P.S., I didn’t realize it until it was already published, but last week’s was the 200th Something Good list!

1. Watch Twilight Zone Creator Rod Serling Discuss Writing and Storytelling.

2. The root of the “food prison” from Isabel Foxen Duke.

3. Overcoming the 10 Biggest Obstacles to Creating on Zen Habits.

4. It’s been 19 months, a beautiful, horrible piece about the aftermath of a sister’s suicide.

5. Entitlement vs. worthiness from Seth Godin, in which he makes a really important distinction.

6. Good stuff on Positively Presents Picks list: 13 Ways Reading Will Improve Your Life and 30-day gratitude photo challenge: 2015 edition.

7. Trust by Maya Stein, one of her 10-line Tuesday poems. You can sign up to have one in your inbox every Tuesday. You should sign up. She’s an amazing poet. The way she lands a last line cracks the whole poem wide open, e v e r y time.

8. Why You Should Do NaNoWriMo…And Why You Shouldn’t on Terrible Minds. It started officially yesterday. Are you? Here’s a pep talk from Chuck if you need it, NaNoWriMo Pep Talk: The Perfect Machine Versus The Art Monster.

9. Take a Walk Around the Lake on Be More With Less.

10. 2nd Annual Awake in the World event. Starting on November 4th, you can get access to over 30 dialogues, presentations, and guided meditations in this FREE offering. “Over the course of 5 days you can explore teachings and practices with the potential to transform your personal sense of well-being, your relationships, your work life, and our society. Topics range from learning how to meditate, to applying mindfulness in everyday life, living with more purpose, getting involved in societal transformation and so much more.” Did I mention this is all FREE?! What are you waiting for? Go sign up!

11. 50 Questions to Help You Foster Gratitude and Feel Good About Life, an excellent set of contemplations from Tiny Buddha that would make great journal prompts or conversation starters.

12. So you want to have kids…A one-sided story of what to be prepared for in parenthood. “You will get poop on you.”

13. What I Wish I’d Known About Miscarriage. There are a lot of really good pieces on Medium about this topic.

14. Margaret Atwood On How Tech Influences Creativity.

15. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club,

Dreamers are not always treated with kindness and understanding. Visionaries are rarely taken seriously. People who seek for what is good and true are often scoffed, laughed at or shut down.

It’s brave to keep dreaming big dreams, to keep posing big questions, to decide not to settle for the status quo. It’s brave to seek for more beauty, goodness, joy and light in a world when it’s often so hard to find. It’s so courageous to keep your heart and mind on the good stuff and to ignore the fears that try so hard to keep us from all that our hearts are begging to have and experience.

16. Good stuff from Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter: A reminder: If you want fans, you have to be a fan first and The Steal Like An Artist Journal Talk.

17. Simple But Not Easy: The Right Effort of Beginning Again by Sharon Salzberg on On Being.

18. ‘Wild’ author Cheryl Strayed says you need to be ‘be brave enough to break your own heart,’ an interview from The Los Angeles Times.

19. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck from Mark Manson.

20. Good stuff from Bored Panda: Wiener Dog Totally Photobombs Couple’s Engagement Photos, and Never Leave Your Bed Again With This Awesome Japanese Invention, and Colorful Murals Appear On Roads Only When It’s Raining.

21. Something is going to kill you. Life is about what happens before that. “Maybe bacon causes cancer. So does sunshine. Everything that might possibly sustain us and bring joy to our lives only hastens our inevitable deaths.” This doesn’t mean we don’t take care of ourselves, but it certainly means maybe we shouldn’t get so hysterical about every little thing that we miss the good stuff. It’s about discernment, silly humans. Besides, Research links cancer to fruit and vegetables. In related news, Forget the Bacon: Living in Poverty Means You Have An Advanced Risk of Getting Cancer.

22. You can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides” by Wil Wheaton. Or you could look at it this way: What This ‘Star Trek’ Actor Gets Wrong about Working for Free.

23. A Room Of My Own, on the importance of making a space for yourself.

24. I lead, they teach from Laurie Wagner. This is about writing, but it’s also about the importance of community, and how even virtual community can be real. I take one of Laurie’s Wild Writing classes, and she’s totally right — it’s fucking magic.

25. “You Are Fat.”

26. 10/10 Would Be Fat Again from Meghan Tonjes. She did a really great cover of the new Adele song too.

27. A video by Jess Blank with a special thanks to Roz The Diva. Defying body-norm-expectations with her inspiring athleticism and determination, she’s reclaiming an activity many consider objectifying.

28. I have finally isolated the problem, wisdom from Anne Lamott on Facebook.

29. A Week in the Life of Maira Kalman. “The illustrator reads the obits, wanders New York City and embraces an attitude of gratitude.” This is so simple, so beautiful.

30. I’ve been wanting to tell you… from Tiffany Han. Just trust me, you need to go read this. Go ahead. Go now. I’ll wait.

31. Wisdom from L.R. Knost,

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful, And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful and relax an exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soulhealing, amazing, awful ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

32. 15+ Brutally Honest Illustrations Perfectly Sum Up Adulthood, which led me to my new favorite Instagram account.

33. Wisdom from Liza Palmer, “Angry is just sad’s bodyguard.”

34. Cracking the Codes: Joy DeGruy “A Trip to the Grocery Store.” So important.

35. No, it’s not you: why ‘wellness’ isn’t the answer to overwork. “No amount of multivitamins, yoga, meditation, sweaty exercise, superfoods or extreme time management, as brilliant as all these things can be, is going to save us from the effects of too much work.” Amen. Oh, and while we are at it, there’s no such thing as work/life balance — it’s all your life, silly humans.

36. Video: Taylor Phinney discovers his love for painting. “Phinney broke his leg in a crash at the 2014 U.S. nationals last May and has been on the mend since. He discovered his hidden talent of painting four months after the incident.”

37. ‘Ridiculous Fun’ Helps A Blogger See Through Depression’s Darkness.

38. Of naphopomo and the advent of light, two really great offerings from Karen Walrond of Chookooloonks.

39. Flow to the Music With This Trance-Inducing Playlist. I’m loving it, might even put Spotify on my phone so I can play it at my class tomorrow morning.

40. Feel-Good Yoga: 10 Poses to Feed Our Souls on Elephant Journal.

41. This Site Will Make a Stuffed Animal Clone of Your Pet. I’ve also seen felted mini clones, which I like even better. I need some.

42. A Healing Technique to Release Old Wounds on Elephant Journal.

43. Fiery Sweet Potatoes recipe. I need to try these. I read the list of ingredients and all I could think was “get in my mouth.”

44. A blessing from Elizabeth Gilbert and Rumi on Facebook.

45. HAES is Not Spooky, but Bad Research Methods Are on Dances with Fat.

Something Good

1. Feast, “an intensive 3-month program for women who want to come home to themselves, make peace with food, and feast on their lives.” I submitted my application about 20 minutes after Rachel opened, that’s how ready I am for this. She’s taking applications now, but just for this week and there are only 30 spots in this session. Other good stuff from Rachel: Go closer and Doing your best.

2. ZenPen ecourse, “Body-Based Writing for Healing, Transformation, and Personal Growth.” It starts today, so there’s still time to sign up for the latest session.

3. The lists I look at every week for inspiration:

4. Story Swap at the Lyric Cinema Cafe. Looks fun.

5. Wisdom from Clarissa Pinkola Estes,

[W}e all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.

6. Wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”

7. This is a little different, something I’m offering to you because I don’t agree with it, but I find it and my disagreement very interesting, worth contemplating: This is why you shouldn’t take people’s Facebook lives seriously.

8. One Model Tried On 10 Different Pairs Of Size 16 Jeans And This Is What They Looked Like on BuzzFeed.

9. Realistic New Year’s Resolutions on The Awl.

10. 10 Ways to Turn Off Your Worries on Psychology Today.

11. The Word from Susannah Conway. We both chose “nourish” as our word this year.

12. Future self, wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook.

13. Responding to Violence and Insanity (one Buddhist’s perspective) from Susan Piver.

14. Wisdom from Andre Gide, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

15. 27 Reasons Why I Can Never Be a Writer on McSweeney’s.

16. On Expectations (and the promise of 2015) from Sandi Amorim.

17. Why dreaming big almost cost me my self from Jennifer Louden, who has a gorgeous new website design.

18. My wish for your 2015, a poem from Cynthia Morris, who also has a gorgeous new website design.

19. A Note from the Universe, “I know this may come as somewhat of a shock, Jill, but of your innumerable and extraordinary gifts, one day you’ll consider your present day challenges as the greatest of them all. Trust me.”

20. Margaret Atwood’s charming Reddit AMA.

21. Wisdom from Mara Glatzel.

22. the thrive portraits from Chookooloonks.

23. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “life is much too short to ever stick around a person who makes you feel like you are difficult to love.” (Unless of course the person is you, and then you’ve got to figure that shit out).

24. Stop Waiting To Love Yourself Because Of Your Weight on Rebelle Society.

25. Watch Jimmy Fallon learn he totally missed Nicole Kidman’s decade-old come-on.

26. Five things the diet industry doesn’t want you to know in 2015.

27. Overcoming Objections to Body Acceptance from Isabel Foxen Duke.

28. My Indecorous Word of the Year from Laura Simms.

29. belonging to the body from lists & letters.

30. From Addicted Teen to Acclaimed Therapist: The Inside Story on the Good Life Project.

31. A Boy Said She Was Too Ugly To Touch. She Believed It For 10 Years. Here’s What She Has To Say Now. on Upworthy, from Soul Pancake.

32. Why “I am enough” isn’t enough on Life with Lucia.

33. Kill Inner Clutter Before it Kills You on Be More with Less.

34. Commuters push train off man whose leg became trapped between carriage and platform. This is who we are.

35. America, please stop raising assholes on Renegade Mothering.

36. To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This on The New York Times. And a related article that includes the 36 questions the author references, No. 37: Big Wedding or Small?

37. Self-Refinement Through the Wisdom of the Ages: 15 Resolutions for 2015 from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds on Brain Pickings.