What I'm up to this week:
Tim Ferriss sends out a 5-bullet Friday newsletter. I am adopting and adapting this into a six or seven string Saturday. Let's try it:
Isn't it time I posted poetry again?
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.______________________________Naomi Shihab Nye, found here
Parking this here so I can find it again later:
Shit, look at all the stuff that Ann Friedman did this year. What did I do? Not so much.
I tend to be disappointed when I fail to meet a challenge, with the emphasis on FAIL.
So instead, I like looking at challenges as options, with me free to complete as much or as little of them as I please. In this spirit, I am choosing two reading challenges for the coming year, and will just see where they take me:
So I finished about half of the Popsugar 2016 Reading Challenge. Fair enough.
I signed up the POPSUGAR 2016 Ultimate Reading Challenge. Also joined the relevant Goodreads Group. I'm going to add some ideas for what to read right here. And I am re-ordering the list based on what I've already read (obv. the ones in bold, with the checkmark and the date finished.)
Finished these:
Started, but did not finish:
Never got to these:
Heyyy, waittaminnit -
Didn't I say I would be Blo-Po-ing every day this month? Yeah well. Sorry, fell off the wagon there for a few days. But I think it would be rude for me to leave you with screaming Christian Bale for much longer, so ... what to write instead?
The journaling prompt says to write about a person, so I will leave this here as a stub, and pledge to add more meat later.