Killer YouTube Music Playlist
Sure. We all think we have the best musical taste, eh? All I can say is this is a group of songs from a whole host of sources that move me either lyrically or through the music alone. Thanks to Erica Swanson for a few. Keep an eye on her blog for great writing, great music and great design!
Most of these are pretty low key and lovely:
kd lang’s version of Hallelujah
Michelle Featherstone “I’m There Too”
Melody Gardot “Worrisome Heart”
Grace Potter & Nocturnals White Rabbit
Roison Murphy “If We’re in Love” (and anything by her live)
Cinematic Orchestra “To Build a Home” (stunning)
Dinah Washington & Max Richter “This Earth”
St. Vincent “Paris is Burning”
Related:
Lady Gaga, Oprah and My Own “Ah Ha!”
On Parenting, Possibility and Patti Smith
From Colleen Wainwright
How I missed her in the current issue of fear.less is beyond me (must be my tendency towards ADD which is why my eat-at-work healthy breakfast is still sitting in a bag, going bad, in my foyer at home). She is one of my major online idols. LOVE YOU COLLEEN. Check out the whole interview but here’s a snippet that resonated:
If I am honest with myself, connecting with other people, pushing myself and continuing to learn, is what makes me happy – not external success. -Colleen Wainwright
Related:
Loving and Respecting Your Tribe
Exile Lifestyle: Colin Wright
I love people living alternative lifestyles. It is part of what fuels this blog. Colin Wright of Exile Lifestyle is living a Timothy Ferriss-esque nomadic lifestyle and has pared his belongings down to 50 (though, Colin, I don’t see toiletries here!):
Exile Lifestyle
He’s got some great stuff on his blog for those of you who want to understand location-independent work/life via a real world example.
Open call: Colin, I’d LOVE to interview you!
Related:
An ARO Conversation with Jeannette Maw
Epiphany
Relationships are hard on me. But, I finally think it is fair to say, they’ve been harder still on my ex-partners. When you continue to hear the same things from people you’ve loved and lost, you gotta wake up some time. Unfortunately, waking up isn’t always clear and easy.
Folks. I woke up this week. I’m flooded by what I’ve discovered and it has freed me in a way that isn’t easy to express because I suspect that I’m in a small, lucky, sometimes cursed group of people.
I credit this book, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness, for what may be one of the most pivotal changes in my life. It is the section on “restlessness” as a type of loneliness where I recognized me. I can’t copy it all here so I’ll do my best to summarize an eloquent writer’s words:
Many or most of us suffer from a type of soulful loneliness, even when we are deeply loved, because we have felt a fully evolved, higher level of love via spirit. We’ve been “kissed by God” and in most of us there is a memory of this that causes all other love to pale in comparison. (Page 54 of the hard cover).
My sister and I have what we call the “love dream”. Unlike a sex dream, the love dream (with a stranger or a friend or a celebrity-the object is not important) leaves you bereft upon awakening. I’ve been blessed/troubled with these my whole life (because this is a serious post I will wait til another time to amuse you with the objects of my affection). I’ve laid in bed and cried because I could not reach that ethereal partner. As in-love as I’ve been, except in a few fleeting moments of physical intimacy, I’ve never experienced said “love dream” in reality.
So. You are my earthbound love interest. Poor you.
You simply cannot compare. Sorry. I’ll beg, cajole, nag, cry, grovel, yell, scream, pout, woo, rationalize, educate you to DEATH trying to get you to conform in some way to this level of love I’ve experienced.
And you just can’t. And you get exhausted and defeated because
It is never enough.
If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it 1000 times in variations.You can never do enough to please me.
When I read Father Rolheiser’s words, I wept copious tears. When I read them aloud to one of my objects, I wept again. I can barely keep from weeping now, frankly.
THIS is why I feel let down. THIS is why I suffer chronic loneliness. THIS is why I’m constantly seeking the romantic love of a lifetime…and why I can never really find it except in a spiritual capacity within myself.
I think some of us have a stronger memory of our love relationship with God/spirit/Universe. We can still feel it on a deeper level than others. This is me. I’ve been labeled a sensualist and an empath and once wrote Diane Ackerman about this sense of loneliness which she graciously responded to with a “yes”, she feels it too.
I feel free. I feel blessed. I feel a sense of understanding and acceptance I’ve never felt before. I’ve released the fantasy while retaining hope of a strong, healthy, committed human relationship and recommitted to focusing on my self and my spiritual life. Have you been “kissed by God”?
Related:
Authenticity and the Struggle of Relationship
This Photo Hurts Me
From Design Sponge. Where else?
Danille LaPorte: More Wise Words
If you create a personal brand that isn’t deeply personal, you’ve already sold out.
You can read it all here.
Time for Breathing…
It was. I get so caught up in being online, I forget how to be me. Don’t you? When I say this, I mean, for me, time to step away from the computer (really 40+ hours per week spent staring at this screen?) and most screens of any kind and to just “be”.
I am addicted, truly, to the online world. I don’t think it is too unhealthy, but it has its moments.
I must step away. And I did. This weekend. To a tiny lake up north with a group of people I really didn’t know in a tiny trailer with a newer friend. Fireworks across the lake, a sky crammed with stars, perfect weather and one Great heron skimming the water. I touched “spirit” and it touched my right back.
Yes, I compulsively checked my iPhone but the signal was iffy so it didn’t do me much good. Next time I go, I’ll take more books to curb the occasional twitch to be busy. But mostly I sat around campfires, and napped, and chatted, and swam and laughed. And ate really good food. It felt like a real vacation and not 2+ days.
I came back today, filled with juice, ready to write, connect and design while I listened to music. Revived. Amen.
Photo from here.
Dust Bunnies, Nia, AE and Teeny Diaries
Mini-diary available here. Found via Ali Edwards post here.
I love the idea of journaling. I’m terrible at doing it. I’ve had long spurts of a love affair with my gratitude journal and, at least once a week when I’m nowhere near it, I’ll think “I should start my gratitude journaling again”. It sits beside my bed. At bedtime I fall asleep in about 2 minutes. So.
I also have random thoughts, what are almost mini-stories sans plot that go on in my mind. Sometimes these end up as poems like musings about a bus ride. I have one stored in my head about a very old man I saw in the drive-thru at a Dairy Queen in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky, imagining that his wife died and that he was lonely and that the young girls and his evening’s twist cone at the DQ were all that kept him going.
I like the idea of storing snippets because so many of them are forgotten quickly. Barbara Kingsolver refers to this in one of her memoirs as “chasing dust bunnies”. Here and gone in a teensy little lightning flash moment.
Anyway, no real point of this blog post. Checking out Nia tonight if my energy gets me there. Not having energy and being aware that I want to do something akin to dance is the motivator. Plus this looks really really cool:
Is Perfectionism Killing Your Voice?
I’ll confess. I do a few things really well. One is sleep. At bedtime, I can be out in 2 minutes or less. I’m the envy of my insomniac friends and lover. I flip over to my side from my back and presto! My body knows it is sleep time.
The other thing I do really well is write. NOW WAIT! I’m not saying I’m a really good writer. What I’m saying I do really well is write…as in the words come forth and I don’t have to “toss and turn” over them. Honestly I think that some of this comes from writing poetry since age 7 with no intention of ever becoming published. For me, writing a poem has always been an attempt to capture a moment. It was, and still is, a form of journaling for me. And I rarely edit. If I have to over edit a poem, it becomes more self-conscious and generally not much better.
The same, for me, is true with blogging. I do not wrestle. I write when I feel compelled and the words generally spew forth. Yes, I hit the backspace button and will delete or add a line here or there, but for these posts, they are generally done in 10 minutes. Finding a great photo takes longer.
Why? Because I know it will NEVER be perfect. Nevah evah. The idea is to share a thought with a reader or two. Maybe more. Hopefully it will resonate. If not, that’s ok. Moment saved. For what? I know not. But, while I get excited by a large number of readers, I blog for the passion of it and am not defeated by a day of 5 versus 60. I know there are a lot of phenomenal writers competing for your attention because they are competing for mine.
Writing for clients is much more labor intensive because there are little or none of my own feelings in a post. Thoughts don’t flow from my brain to my fingertips.
Perfectionism kills authenticity. Let your words flow and fly, people! We want to know who you really are.
Loving and Respecting Your Tribe
There is a LOT of emotion flying (105 comments or so at last glance) on Charlie Gilkey’s Productive Flourishing blog about a post by Marissa Bracke called Launch Fatigue and How Not to be an Infomercial. The title says it all, but great folks, including myself, are coming forth with their feelings (or lack thereof) about the “inner marketing circle” (big names like Darren, Naomi, Brian, Danielle, Chris, Pam, etc.), being pitched to all the time, and being ignored when you are not a “big name”.
Kudos to Marissa and everyone else for bravely stating their points.
Here are my feelings about how to treat your tribe, no matter how whack they are:
1. Don’t disguise a pitch as a newsletter every 2-3 issues. I sign up for newsletters, not sales letters. It is ok if you tell me about your new product once or twice in the newsletter (in fact, I want you to!), but do NOT make the newsletter a pitch on a routine basis.
2. Ask your subscribers how often they want to hear from you and respect that. They can always find you if they want more. Colleen Wainwright is brilliant at being restrained with her newsletter. Jeannette is great at not hitting you over the head with products for sale, but letting you know just the same.And she is PROFOUNDLY generous. It has paid of with a huge, loyal tribe.
3. If you aren’t monitoring Twitter activity about you (ha ha ha ha), then you should be. And when you see someone really promoting you, especially if they have enlisted your services or purchased your product, DO follow them in return. I can’t believe I even have to say this.
4. If someone emails you, especially if they’ve asked if you’d consider accepting a guest post or if you’d look over something, it is totally ok NOT to do it. But you should acknowledge receipt of the attachment with a brief “thanks, but…”.
5. If you’ve offered your product to affiliates, respond to EVERYONE who asks to be an affiliate, even if you feel their pond is too tiny.
6. Pick a follower you believe in and promote the hell out of them in return for no reason except it is simply good karma. Do this frequently. Occasionally accept an interview request from someone with a small following and help them build it!
7. Ask non-affiliates to review your products and accept bad reviews graciously. If you are reviewing a product that you are an affiliate of, let us know (and it is the law-Randi says so).
I highly recommend that everyone read each and every one of the comments on Charlie’s blogs about Marissa’s post if you are considering a launch of everything. And, remember, you don’t have to just launch e-books and you don’t have to tweet the hell out of much of anything if you have cared for your tribe. Kelly Diels, who I adore and follow religiously, slipped in a new business opportunity at the bottom of a blog post. I never saw anything else. I will definitely buy from her, but not this week…
Share your thoughts..