Tag Archives: Terrible Minds

Something Good

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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.

https://youtu.be/6_Po2lELD6A

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

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ladybugcan

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

1. Mabel Magazine #4: What’s Next? is available for preorder, (one of my pieces is featured). I love their tagline so much, “making a living, creating a life.”

2. Good stuff from Alexandra Franzen: What if your job didn’t exist? and Will anyone come to my party? What I like so much about Alexandra’s advice is that even though it’s really good for specific people, it’s also applicable to anyone who is human, anyone trying to figure out how to live their lives.

3. Go Big, Go Weird, Go You, And Fuck Fear Right In The Ear and Kubler-Ross Model of Grief Associated With Editing And Rewriting on Terrible Minds. He might use a lot of naughty words to do it, but Chuck tells the TRUTH.

4. The Case of the Stolen Basketball Hoop from Jena Schwartz, in which she says, “Isn’t that the reason I blog, to pull all of the disparate strands from a day into some kind of bow you’d recognize and want to pull open, to unwrap with the promise of something beautiful waiting inside?”

5. 3 Ways to NOT Fail at NaNoWriMo. And in related news, 12 Thoughts On NaNoWriMo: Why you should or should NOT participate in National Novel Writing Month.

6. Getting Over the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) from Kute Blackson. I don’t necessarily think that something more exciting is happening somewhere else, I worry that if I stop, slow down, take a break, I’m going to miss something good, something important — so I listen to Kute preach.

7. The power of fear and Simple questions for writers from Seth Godin.

8. Eighteen Attempts at Writing About a Miscarriage. Sad, beautiful.

9. 10 Slow and Steady Strategies for Practical Decluttering from Be More With Less – clear, useful, simple instructions from Courtney Carver.

10. How To Be An Artist (In An Internet Age), an interview with Austin Kleon.

11. What have you experienced? on Chookooloonks. Make sure to read the comments, leave one of your own.

12. One-Third Of This Company’s Workers Have Criminal Backgrounds. “Dave’s Killer Bread is urging other employers to hire ex-convicts, too.” This is the kind of bread we eat, because it’s good and because they are doing good.

13. 15 Habits That Will Totally Transform Your Productivity. #3 is my favorite.

14. ‘Broad City’ released a Columbus Day video, because they know what we need.

15. Making Magic: Thoughts on The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Big Magic on Flingo.

16. Artist Uses Nature To Color Animal Paper Silhouettes on Bored Panda. In related news, Self-Taught Polish Artist Uses Fallen Autumn Leaves As Canvases For Her Paintings and Maple Leaves Left In A Box For 15 Years Became Canvases For My Art. Which reminds me of Flor & Fawn, a creative collaboration between Katie Daisy & Karen Eland — they are going to start doing custom pet portraits and I really want some of my dogs!

17. The Key To Oprah Winfrey’s Success: Radical Focus, a fascinating look behind the scenes.

18. Rest on Allowing Myself.

19. UN to investigate plight of US Native Americans for first time. “The UN human rights inquiry will focus on the living conditions of the 2.7 million Native Americans living in the US.”

20. To Witness Victory of This New Bravery by Omid Safi at On Being. So good.

21. Rescue Kitten Adopted By 5 Ferrets Thinks It’s A Ferret Too. Stupid cute.

22. The Meaning of Hatha Yoga (and No, It’s Not “Sun & Moon”) from Michael Lloyd-Billington, one of my favorite local teachers. I teach Hatha Yoga and this was still an interesting read for me.

23. “A Love Affair with Change”: An Inkerview with Isabel Abbott on The Inky Path.

24. Karl Paulnack Welcome Address on The Boston Conservatory. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read about the importance of the arts, of artists, of humans. He concludes, among other things, that,

Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

25. Why October is Hard on Getting the Words Wrong. All I can say is Amen.

26. Truthbomb #907 from Danielle LaPorte, “No need to try so hard.”

27. The Water Takes You Just as You Are from Rachel Cole.

28. The Lonely Death of George Bell from The New York Times. “Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, some alone and unseen. Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of activity. Sometimes, along the way, a life’s secrets are revealed.” This piece was so interesting, so heartbreaking.

29. The Tiny Book Show. There’s still plenty of time to take part.

30. RISE, a morning yoga course with Adriene.

31. Read this when no one loves you. You know what, read it anyway. Read it now.

32. A Group Of People Tried Journaling Every Day For A Month And It Got A Little Too Introspective, a BuzzFeed video. “A group of us was asked to commit to writing in a journal 10 minutes every day for a month and this is how we did.”

33. 22 Habits That Will Make Your Life a Little More Peaceful Each Day. Certainly worth a try.

34. A Girl Gets Her Period And Is Banished To The Shed: #15Girls.

35. Your life is of the utmost importance, Susan Piver’s latest Open Heart Project video. In the email she sent to the OHP Sangha, she ended this way, “Thank you for being alive. Thank you for bringing your unique beauty to us all. Thank you for working to open your heart to the mystery.” Amen.

36. Wisdom from Dza Kilung Rinpoche,

You don’t need to be an “excellent meditator” to start with. All you need to do is have your heart and mind make the following agreement: “Let’s rest. There’s no reason right now to wander around following thoughts or worrying. Let’s be relaxed and open.” There’s not even any need to shut down your thoughts. Just be there with them, but not overly concerned or engaged. Let there be total openness, and just relax within that.

37. Anna Kendrick’s Surprising (and Brilliant) Shower Thoughts. The last one is the best, and I can’t stop thinking about it.