Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn't a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for YOU <3  Have a beautiful, beautiful holiday surrounded by nothin' but love, love, love



...back to cooking/baking!




xoxOM

The Ear is an Organ Made for Love
by E. Ethelbert Miller

(for Me-K)

It was the language that left us first.
The Great Migration of words. When people
spoke they punched each other in the mouth.
There was no vocabulary for love. Women
became masculine and could no longer give
birth to warmth or a simple caress with their
lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity
and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities
like fog smothering everything in sight. My
ears begged for camouflage and the chance
to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of
how we sound. Someone said it reminded
them of the time Sonny Rollins disappeared.
People spread stories of how the air would
never be the same or forgive. It was the end
of civilization and nowhere could one hear
the first notes of A Love Supreme. It was as
if John Coltrane had never been born.

After we saw what there was to see

This. Is. Beautiful.


“Unmakeable”

Book printers said Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmakeable” Book “could not be made.” Belgian publishing house Die Keure proved them wrong. Jonathan Safran Foer’s book is an interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.

You can see more pictures of the Tree of Codes on Visual Editions’s Flickr stream.  Pretty amazing.

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Heard this poem recited the other day and it warmed my heart and totally brought me back to experiences such as this one on NYC subway rides.  There is beauty and kindness everywhere...even in the grungiest, darkest, smelliest places...






New York Subway

by Hilda Morley

The beauty of people in the subway
that evening, Saturday, holding the door for whoever
was slower or
left behind
(even with
all that Saturday-night
excitement)
the high-school boys from Queens, boasting,
joking together
proudly in their expectations
 power, young frolicsome
bulls,
the three office-girls
each strangely beautiful, the Indian
with dark skin
the girl with her haircut
very short and fringed, like Joan
at the stake, the corners
of her mouth laughing
the black girl delicate
as a doe, dark-brown in pale-brown clothes
 the tall woman in a long caftan, the other day,
serene
serious
the Puerto Rican
holding the door for more than 3 minutes for
the feeble, crippled, hunched little man who
could not raise his head,
whose hand I held, to
help him into the subway-car—
so we were
joined in helping him & someone,
seeing us, gives up his seat,
learning
from us what we had learned from each other.

************

I don't play backgammon, but this pretty board is making me reconsider my resistance to learn the game...

Check out all the different variations of backgammon boards by Ara Peterson and his father Jack. (Warning: You might have a color seizure if you click on the link above)

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An iPhone is something I do not have in my possession but I like the sounds of the new Fooducate App


Fooducate’s iPhone App lets shoppers make better, healthier choices at the supermarket. It empowers you with all the tips and tricks Fooducate’s been writing about on their blog. The nifty app let’s you scan the barcode of a food product and then tells you the good and the bad. And it suggests healthier alternatives.

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This is inspiring me to actually print out some of my photos.

This photo album by Debra Folz stands on its own corner due to a reinforced front and back cover, which gives it a magic sort of ‘objet d’art’ feel. Lovely.

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Thanksgiving is in just a few days.  It's been quite a big year for me, in many ways, and while it's important to be thankful everyday for the joys in our lives (and even, at times, the challenges), this time of year reminds us to be more conscious about gratitude.  While the true history of Thanksgiving is not something that makes me particularly proud as an American, I do appreciate that the holiday has somewhat morphed into a day that calls upon us to actively reflect and give thanks for people, things, and situations in our lives.

This year I am especially grateful for and humbled by the guide within.  I'm thankful for the wisdom and light of my inner guide and the courage I have been granted to take action in my life and make decisions/moves that are beneficial to my higher good and, eventually, to the higher good of the Universe.

And of course, I am always thankful for my beautiful family (and the exciting new changes!) and the friends who have been by my side and in my heart through it all.  

What are you grateful for?

A Peacock in Spring
by Joyelle McSweeney

Makes derangéd love
To the muddy hill. Shoots of green knocked sideways
On a factory floor. Next to the stopflood
Retaining wall, sprung rhythm. Just as
A center for Islamic banking
Furls green writing like a blooming branch across the screen, visible
Pop-up ad of the market or
green fuse. In a wiry flash,
A living goddess with a threefoot eye
Bends o'er her spreadflat copybook, contemplating a career at maths.
I've always been good at maths,
And how they multiply, and how they multiply, and how they
Lock in a pop-fly, snag the interface, shatter the salary cap,
Thwack. Into the tanned glove, a second piece
Of hide. It's spring, tumors and mushroom caps pop-up, the avatar
Salary man can't muster himself to grope the
Pixilated schoolgirl. Sad subways.
Before the Senate panel, the discredited chairman holds
You gotta keep on dancing
Keep on dancing
Keep on dancing til the music stops. Amen, says the peacock,
Shifting his attentions now to the wall. He shrugs obscenely green,
Obscenely jewel-toned, obscenely neck-like,
An obscene grandeur and an obscene decadency,
A screen, a mask, a dance,
A thousand green-groping eyes. Lapse and bless
With your largesse, you antique
commode, you gossiping
fairground—
(And now a common bird launches itself at my window
A defunct grenade from Spring's blackmarket shouldermount
Because I do not know its name
And do not wish to watch it stagger from air to glass
I hear it re-enunciate
& grow increasingly garbled & go
On outside the
poem that would be increasingly
inside, let me in.
Where my sleek unbidden brow breaks blood upon the panel, breaks
beads amid the streaks of let me
in and let me in)

How cool is this?!

Check out this incredibly awesome NYT article on molecular animation...bringing the power of cinema to biology. 

Happy (belated) Birthday, Vonnegut

I was thinking of Kurt Vonnegut yesterday and meant to dedicate a bday post to him...buuuuuut, a day late will have to do.

I still remember the day he died and feeling a genuine sense of loss.  What a footprint he has left on the American literary canon.

Kurt Vonnegut once came up with a list of eight rules for writing a short story. Rule number one: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." Other rules include "Start as close to the end as possible" and "Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of."


He said: "Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity. ... If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."


And he said, "Make characters want something right away — even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. ... When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone's wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do."


And he also said, "It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all."



Some Background info. (via Writer's Almanac):




His family had been well-off but lost all its money in the Great Depression, and his mom thought she'd make a new fortune by writing pulp fiction. She enrolled in evening short-story seminars. Vonnegut said, "She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms."

He said that as the youngest child he was always desperate to get some attention at the supper table and so he worked hard to be funny. He'd listen studiously to comedians on the radio, and how they made jokes, and then at family dinner time he'd try to imitate them. He later said, "That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup — mosaics of jokes."

All his life he loved slapstick humor. In old age, he told an interviewer that one of the funniest things that can happen in a film is "to have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep." Also, he said that one of the things he loves best is "when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coat hangers and scarves." When he was on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he told his students that they were there learning to play practical jokes. And he said, "All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again."

His novel Cat's Cradle was based on his experiences as a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady. One of the characters, a scientist named Dr. Felix Hoenikker, was based on an absentminded G.E. researcher named Dr. Irving Langmuir, whose personal quirks Vonnegut transcribed right into his book. Vonnegut said: "He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in." Cat's Cradle, published in 1963, earned Kurt Vonnegut his master's thesis in anthropology from the University of Chicago; when he was a graduate student there years before, his original thesis had been rejected, and he'd dropped out of the program. The novel also earned a Hugo Book Award nomination and a cult following.

Kurt Vonnegut sat down to be interviewed by The Paris Review series four different times over the course of a decade. The interviews were pieced together to be published as one big long composite interview. But before it went to press, Vonnegut asked to edit the manuscript. He ended up rewriting not only some of his answers but the interviewers' questions as well, and so in the end they published an interview with Vonnegut in which he was both the interviewer and the interviewee. He's introduced like this: "... a veteran and a family man, large-boned, loose-jointed, at ease. He camps in an armchair in a shaggy tweed jacket, Cambridge gray flannels, a blue Brooks Brothers shirt, slouched down, his hands stuffed into his pockets."

We're told that "he shells the interview with explosive coughs and sneezes, windages of an autumn cold and a lifetime of heavy cigarette smoking. His voice is a resonant baritone, Midwestern, wry in its inflections. From time to time he issues the open, alert smile of a man who has seen and reserved within himself almost everything: depression, war, the possibility of violent death, the inanities of corporate public relations, six children, an irregular income, long-delayed recognition."

In the last of the four interviews, Vonnegut's self-edited description reads: "... he moves with the low-keyed amiability of an old family dog. In general, his appearance is tousled: the long curly hair, mustache, and sympathetic smile suggest a man at once amused and saddened by the world around him."

Health
by Rafael Campo

While jogging on the treadmill at the gym,
that exercise in getting nowhere fast,
I realized we need a health pandemic.
Obesity writ large no more, Alzheimer's
forgotten, we could live carefree again.
We'd chant the painted shaman's sweaty oaths,
We'd kiss the awful relics of the saints,
we'd sip the bitter tea from twisted roots,
we'd listen to our grandmothers' advice.
We'd understand the moonlight's whispering.
We'd exercise by making love outside,
and afterwards, while thinking only of
how much we'd lived in just one moment's time,
forgive ourselves for wanting something more:
to praise the memory of long-lost need,
or not to live forever in a world
made painless by our incurable joy.

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on How Schools Kill Creativity.

I light the fire under the pot

 ****************


What a sweet, simple poem:


The Emperor
by Matthew Rohrer

She sends me a text

she's coming home

the train emerges

from underground


I light the fire under

the pot, I pour her

a glass of wine

I fold a napkin under

a little fork


the wind blows the rain

into the windows

the emperor himself

is not this happy


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Been spending the past few days nursing my immune system back to health.  No more runny/stuffy nose!  No more fever!  No more headache!  Rwaaaaarrrrr!

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Off to interview Peter Garritano.  Pretty excited, should be interesting.  I'll post the article once it runs.

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I have much to share with you, but it'll have to wait until I have a a bigger period of free time (ha!).  Keywords: stories, workshop, oils, books, travel, and......more!


Happy Wednesday <3

I won't hesitate no more

Don't worry about a thing...

Lil' Cocoon

 

Don't you wish that you could curl up inside someone's sweatshirt and get all cozy when it's chilly out?  This is a photo of my 4 yr old niece and my dad.  Adorable little bundle of love.

Happy New Moon!

Happy New Moon, you beautiful people, you.



As most of you know, I have a little...eh...moon ritual.  On full moons I lay out a blank piece of paper to let it absorb the energy of the beaming moon.  Then, I fold it up and stick it in a special drawer.  On the new moon, I take it out and write down manifestations.  Sometimes they're general, sometimes they're really specific.  After finishing up the list, I fold it back up and stick it back in the drawer.  Been doing this for a few years now and I really dig it.  Give it a whirl, if you feel so inclined.  Feels pretty good to write down your manifestations.  Not only to see them in print, but to clarify them for yourself and for the Universe.

"Ayurveda is not of the east or the west, of ancient or modern time. It is one with all life, a knowledge that belongs to all living beings--not a system imposed upon them, but a resource to be drawn upon freely and to be adapted to the unique needs of the individual in his or her particular environment."

- Dr. David Frawley

from Canti
by Giacomo Leopardi
translated by Jonathan Galassi

XXXVII

ALCETA

Listen, Melisso: I want to tell you a dream
I had last night, which comes to mind,
seeing the moon again. I was standing
at the window that looks out on the meadow
staring up, when suddenly the moon
unhooked herself. And it seemed to me
that as she fell,
the nearer she got the bigger she looked, until
she hit the ground in the middle of the meadow,
big as a bucket, and vomited
a cloud of sparks that shrieked as loud
as when you dunk a live coal in the water
and drown it. So, as I said,
the moon died in the middle of the meadow,
little by little slowly darkening,
and the grass was smoking all around.
Then, looking up into the sky, I saw
something still there, a glimmer or a shadow,
or the niche that she'd been torn away from,
which made me cold with fear. And I'm still anxious.


MELISSO

You were right to be afraid, when the moon
fell so easily into your field.


ALCETA

Who knows? Don't we often see
stars fall in summer?


MELISSO

There are so many stars
that if one or another of them falls
it's no great loss, since there are thousands left.
But there's just this one moon up in the sky,
which no one saw fall ever—except in dreams.

Heart swirling with joy and love

Heard from him both in the whimsical spirit world and the tangible one!  Couldn't be happier for this soul I am fortunate enough to refer to as Brother.  Souls linked forever, I feel his healing.

Looks like many trips to Peru planned for the future for this girl.




"Papa Burgundy": You ARE love







<3

Enough
by Jeffrey Harrison

It's a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough for you to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off your boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you've never said circling inside you.

It's the rising wind that pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.

How to stay balanced during the beautiful yet harsh VT winter season

Sunday, Nov 7th in Bristol, VT....come join Christine Hoar at her beautiful studio in Bristol and gain an Ayurvedic perspective on how to stay balanced during the Vata-aggravating season of winter.  Christine rocks, Ayurveda rocks, the studio rocks....come join if you're in VT!

For more info., click here

Letter came in this morning all the way from Amsterdam....homemade envelope and all.  Smile on my face, warmth in my heart.  Snail mail is the way to go...it has a way of capturing the sender's true essence in a way that email never will.






<3



And now to share a quote that my friend included at the end of his beautiful letter:


"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now it was meant to destroy me.  Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.  I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity.  I belong to the earth!"

--Miller, '34

Sometimes you just have to raise your arms, open your heart, give thanks for everything...even the clouds.




Certain yoga poses have been evoking strong waves of emotion lately during class.  Just watching them pass and not spending too much brain power on trying to rationalize them.


Ok, must finish up my muscle tissue homework before class!



Look into your heart and you'll find

love

          love

                    love