Friday, February 21, 2014

a teen who predicts the future

 Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' and I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet!”


---Gus, The Fault is in our Stars 

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Submittable

"My partner, Bruce Tribbensee, and I worked a day job together. During lunch we would go out and complain about our boss....


We went out to lunch and made a list of things that sucked. One of the things that I thought sucked, as a writer, was sending out stories to magazines.


Our initial idea was to create a social network, where everybody was either a writer or a publisher. Writers could find organizations that were looking for particular pieces.


The plan was to move into art, then music. We would just be this creator,  publisher social network. We called it SubmishMash.


We named the company after something we thought sucked. That is like naming shoes after the sound they make stepping into dog crap."


---Michael Fitzgerald, in a great interview where he waxes on the benefits of living in Montana and the uncomfortable importance of keeping your butt in the chair.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Agnes, who danced in the dark.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.  The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.  The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.


---Agnes de Mille



Monday, January 27, 2014

quote from Donna


"Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not accept money."  
 
--author unknown

Monday, January 20, 2014

Quote Collection

Beautiful quotes from my current stack of books:


Story


"Telling our stories is holy work."
---Reverend Nancy Lane, Ph.D.


"Owning our story can be hard, but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it....only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light."
---Brene Brown


Repetition


"Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself---in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."
---Elizabeth Bowen


"Repetition is not failure. 
  Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.
  There is no expected pace for inner learning.  What we need to learn comes when we need it, no matter how old or young, no matter how many times we have to start over, no matter how many times we have to learn the same lesson.   No one really likes this, of course, but we deal with our dislikes in the same way, again and again, until we learn what we need to know about the humility of acceptance."
---Mark Nepo


Compassion


"I don't believe compassion is our default response.  I think our first response to pain---ours or someone else's---is to self-protect.  We protect ourselves by looking for someone or something to blame.  Or sometimes we shield ourselves by turning to judgment or by immediately going into fix-it mode."
---Brene Brown


"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain.  Compassion practice is daring.  It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us." 
---Pema Chodron

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Forward

I receive a lot of forwarded emails from my mom.  She will correct me to say, "A few."  And she will quantify exactly how many are in a few, how many are in several, and whether my grammar is correct.  It usually ain't.  (Hi, Mom.)
So fun so fun so fun. 


Some of these emails are political, some are religious, but the best ones are titled I THOUGHT SHE WOULD LIKE THIS and include a video of puppies interacting with lions in a seemingly natural way.  These are for me to show to my daughter.


Today's email was titled WE WERE ALL HOME SCHOOLED and at the bottom, was a quote unrelated to the actual email.  Sort of like getting a video of a lion and a puppy playing, and at the bottom it might say, "God Bless America."


Anyway, I liked the quote.  It went:


"Faith is not about everything  turning out ok.  It's about being ok, no matter how things turn out."

Shaz-am.  God Bless America.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Discovery

Unanimous conclusion at the dinner table tonight:
Goat's milk is not as delicious as goat's cheese.