Make a Little Magic--or a lot

"To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts."

-- Henry David Thoreau

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Have you read #Seth Godin’s blog?

He has reached his 7,000th blog post.

There are no ads, never have been. No guest posts. No one can buy a slot or a referral. All Amazon affiliate revenue is donated to BuildOn and to Acumen.

Seth writes every word.

The secret to writing a daily blog, he says, is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.

The blog contains more than 2,700,000 words, delivering the equivalent of more than thirty full-length books. The blog doesn't exist to get you to buy a book, Seth says. Sometimes, he thinks he writes books to get people to read this blog.

Seth hasn’t missed a blog post in many, many years--the discipline of sharing something daily is priceless. Sometimes there are typos, he says.  I hope that they're rare and I try to fix them.

“Over time, the blog adds up. People remember a blog post a year later. Or they begin a practice, take an action, make a connection, something that grows over time. The blog resonates with people in so many fields, it's thrilling to see how it can provoke positive action.”

From his Nov 10^th post :

Everyone else is irrational

Everyone else makes bad decisions, is shortsighted, prejudiced, subject to whims, temper tantrums, outbursts and short-term thinking.

Once you see it that way, it's easier to remember...

that we're everyone too.—Seth Godin

This made me think of my daughter’s comment this week. She has been commuting for over an hour to work for over a month, and began to listen to the radio. “I hadn’t listened for a long time,” she said. However with the long drive she turned it on.

You know how it is—you take a break from something—like soda or news, and it doesn’t taste good anymore. “It’s all fear based,” said my daughter. “You listen to conservative radio, it’s fear. You listen to liberal radio, and that’s fear based too. Has the world lost it’s common sense? Did it ever have any?”

“Look closer to home,” I said. “The people we know are wonderful.”

And then there are those who promote positive thought on #Instagram, #Twitter, and #Pinterest. They still believe in believing, and tell those reaching for their dreams to never give up. 

Any to the contrary? Ignore them.

From Caz makepeace--ytravelblog.com

“I've never quite understood it when people cry at concerts or at places like Disneyland. Well maybe at concerts, when I touched Lenny Kravitz's leg as he electrified the stage as a 17 year old, I nearly cried from joy! “But tears at Disneyland - I mean none of it's real.  “And then yesterday, I walked into Hogsmeade at Universal Orlando Resort and the tears began to prick. And then when I walked into Hogwart's and then as I walked into Diagon Alley. “What was wrong with me? “Simply,  I was overcome by the magic.” One young woman had the courage to sit down in a café, let her imagination run wild, and write it all down. You, too, can bring on the magic. Oh, here’s a great creative absurdity to dump into your head:  “There’s a #Twinkie in my Vodka.” A company in San Diego is making vodka out of old stale twinkies. Have no fear though, those the charcoal filtration takes out any flavor. Hee hee.

What's Next?

“To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts.”

-- Henry David Thoreau

How many of us are really living the life we dreamed when we were six years old, or even twelve, maybe twenty-one?

Aren’t we running too fast, over-scheduling ourselves, feeling that we have no time?

What’s next?

Nothing in society teaches us to live in the now—everything is “What’s next?”

When we enter grade school, we feel the pressure to do well so we can get into college. When we get to college we are asked, “What’s next? What is our major? What job will we have?

We look for the ideal mate to make our lives fulfilled and joyful. We wait for children. We wait for them to sleep through the night. We have an eye on their education, their college.

Remember when you were a kid and you laid on the grass and felt the cool dampness of it?

You were lying on a living pallet, and as you lie there with the sunshine a blanket of warm on your skin, you looked into the sky and watched a whiff of white gas gather itself into a cloud.

Can’t you smell the grass, feel the sun?

Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

 Recently I reread a book I had read about 20 years ago and loved the author all over again. It was Dorothy Gilman, and her book was A New Kind of Country.

She was a lady alone, her boys were in college, and for $10,500 she bought a house and ten acres in Nova Scotia. She went there to find a new kind of country, one in which she could “Front only the essentials.”

During a Christmas visit back to New York, at a dinner party, the host turns to her and says, “It’s high time you told us about your move to Nova Scotia. Which I certainly envy you doing.”

“Yes,” his wife says, “I’m so curious. Tell us, for instance, what you do every day.”

Dorothy was about t reply when the friend who accompanied her to the party, said, “Oh, I can tell you that. She gets up at dawn, chops wood, milks the cows, builds fires, does a little writing, eats fish, and goes to bed at sunset. Now tell me, she continues. “what you’ve heard about the Johnsons’ divorce.”

 

 

I, too, feel I must be working all day, to read a book during the day is somehow frivolous, so I squeeze in a little reading before I fall asleep at night.  I’m caught up with the need to be doing “important” stuff,  too.

 

In his book, Medicine Power, Brad Steiger quotes a one-hundred-year-old medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers. “I don’t know what you learned from books, but the most important thing I learned from my grandfathers was that there is a part of the mind that we don’t really know about and it is that part that is most important in whether we become sick or remain well.”

 

Oh, It’s Halloween—go scare yourself silly.

 

Comment:

So true! I remember well the oak tree up the 'D' hill by Grandma Willett's , climbing the hill, lying in the weeds to look up at the clouds to see what the might be......and look out over the area below extending to the river. There was a retired horse in that pasture named, Captain, whom I had asked the owner if I could climb on/sit and pretend as well as stand on while he grazed. Almost the same mentality as drinking out of a hose, 'eating' the mud pies, riding in the back of a pickup.......M.