Thoughts Happen

The World Is Not Falling Apart, from Jake LaCaze

I like meeting people on Twitter. It gets me out of my normal social circles where I interact with people. Jake LaCaze is one of the tweeters I've met online, and considering that he's young enough to be my, er ... considerably younger brother, he's not someone I would likely run into dropping off kids at the junior high dance.

But we seem to share a similar worldview, and I liked his recent post, The World Is Not Falling Apart, which starts like this: 

I hate watching the news. As a result, I often have no idea what the hell is going on in the world. I’m not sure if ignorance is bliss, but ignoring the sensationalized news certainly is bliss. When I pay attention to the news, I’m exposed to the same theme over and over: the world is a shithole, and it’s falling apart.

via jakelacaze.com

I hate watching the news too, and am irked by people with a hell-in-a-handbasket mentality. This is the world we've got, and we can either wallow in pessimism or notice the small, unreported acts of kindness and decency that are still all around us and adapt to changes as they come up. 

Read the rest of the post for a few everyday observations that will never make the news. 

In every Saturday Morning Surf I highlight a link that I think is worth sharing. I hope you find them intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

And yes, I know it isn't Saturday, but I haven't thought of a new, non-day-specific name for these updates. What about "Bloggishness," or "Interweb Intrigue"? Suggestions? Anyone? Anyone?

Brevity: The Palm Reader and the Poet

This happened a couple decades ago, and here is how I remember it:  I meet a girl, a young woman, maybe eighteen, at a poetry reading.  She says she can read my palm.  My lifeline is broken—she noticed as she sat behind me and I rubbed my hand through my hair—so maybe she'd better see, meaning see what’s in store for me.

Today's Saturday Morning Surf comes from Issue 34 of the online journal Brevity, which publishes well-known and emerging writers working in the "extremely brief" essay form (750 words or fewer). 

Short pieces appeal to me. I like to think it's not because I am a lazy reader or a lazy writer, but because I enjoy an experience distilled down to its essence, and appreciate the challenge of creativity within strict boundaries.

I loved this piece by Greg Bottoms because of the way he paints so much detail with so few words. I can taste the awkwardness of the poetry reading crowd "studiously not buying the author's book," and smell the acrid sweat from the palm reader, "a decade of pain that smells like cigarettes."

The beauty of well-written short essays such as this are that, iceberg-like, what is said only hints at what is beneath. For a writer to successfully craft a complete story in so few words it takes dedication, perseverance and a willingness to trust what you leave in to convey what you leave out.

Yet they read deceptively easily. I enjoy that challenge, which is probably why I've taken to the blog format, and aspire to write essays as good as The Palm Reader and the Poet of my own. 

While you're at Brevity, check out a few more of these brief pieces by clicking the Next Essay link at the bottom of each page. After all, they're like potato chips — you can't stop at just one. 

via www.creativenonfiction.org

In every Saturday Morning Surf I highlight a link that I think is worth sharing. I hope you find them intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

Writing Memoir: Peering Into Memories and Mary Karr’s Life

Today's Saturday Morning Surf takes us to  New Orleans, home of writer Darrelyn Saloom, who I met recently at the Creative Nonfiction Writers conference in Oxford, Mississippi (and shared with her and two companions the best Mexican street tacos I thought I would ever find east of the Rockies - I'll explain later).  

She writes in this guest post to the There Are No Rules writing blog of a discussion by memoirist Mary Karr (Liar's Club, Cherry, Lit) about how she creates connection with readers and the vulnerability that comes with that as a writer.

 ... memoirists are writing about how you continue to love people who have broken your *** heart, how you maneuver in the world and show the inside, the complicated psychological insides of human relationships. 

It's worth reading the full post for more quotes from Karr and Saloom's perspective as a reader and writer of memoir. 

And about those tacos — you can read about that in her Part 1 overview of our incredible experience in Oxford. 

via blog.writersdigest.com

In every Saturday Morning Surf I highlight a link that I think is worth sharing. I hope you find them intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

All book links are to independent bookstore Square Books' online store. Not an affiliate.

Give a Gift in Honor of Someone - Alternative Gifts International

How wonderful it is that nobody has to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." — Anne Frank

My family enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend with some close friends, and while we did bring a laptop, I didn't use it. I admit to checking email on my phone, but it seemed more important to enjoy our friends than to spend time updating the blog, so there was no post last Wednesday, and Saturday Morning Surf was postponed to Sunday.

But I didn't want another week to go by without letting you know about Alternative Gifts International, seeing as the gift-giving season is upon us. 

A gift you select from AGI is given in honor of your recipient to a carefully screened charity that address one of a myriad of social and environmental issues around the world. Gift levels range from $3 to provide groceries for one person for one day to feed hungry and homeless people in the U.S. and Canada to $240 for a year's worth of participation for one Haitian family in the Model Communities project which protects children in extreme poverty so they aren't sent away to slavery. 

When I first found out about Alternative Gifts, I loved the idea, but felt a little funny about giving them to my family — we were pretty used to doing things the traditional way. So instead I started by putting some alternative gifts on my own wish list, so people could get me something from AGI if they wanted. I always feel like Santa Claus when I open an AGI gift because not only am I getting a surprise, I know I am helping someone else, and that feels really cool. 

Since then my family has absorbed them into our tradition, and we do a combination of regular and alternative gifts. They are great for the hard-to-buy-for and people who don't really want more stuff. 

AGI also started a pre-paid gift card option this year, where you select the gift amount you want to give, but the recipient gets to decide which cause the money goes to. Each charity address one of the following eight categories: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger; Achieve  Universal Primary Education; Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women; Reduce Child Mortality; Improve Maternal Health; Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Other Diseases; Ensure Environmental Sustainability; and Global Partnership for Development.

Alternative Gifts International was inspired by the Anne Frank quote above. We really can start improving the world right now. 

via www.alternativegifts.org

In every Saturday Morning Surf I highlight a link that I think is worth sharing. I hope you find them intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

Robert Goolrick: The Imagined Beauty of a Life I Haven't Had, via Pen and Palette

Some moments catch you totally unprepared for their force. One such moment came a week ago when Robert Goolrick read from his novel, A Reliable Wife, and his memoir, The End of the World As We Know It, at Off Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

What could have been simply a pleasantly enjoyable book reading was instead a powerful opportunity for connection between a writer and his audience, human to human. The occasion was captured beautifully by Susan Cushman on her blog, Pen and Palette in her post, The Imagined Beauty of a Life I Haven't Had, the destination for today's Saturday Morning Surf.

The selection Goolrick chose to read from his memoir was the last chapter; afterwards he told us it was the first time he had read it in public. I felt honored to have been there in that space at that time. This humble, eloquent, dignified man brought the extraordinary into the ordinary in a way that sanctified that moment forever.

wwwpenandpalette-susancushman.blogspot.com

 

Saturday Morning Surf is a way to highlight pieces on other sites that I think are worth sharing. Each Saturday I’ll post a link to something I found during the previous week that I hope you will find intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

All book links are to independent bookstore Square Books' online store. Not an affiliate.

What Defines a Culture? | Kaleidoscopic Wandering

 

Today's Saturday Morning Surf  takes us to Jamaica, courtesy of JoAnna Haugen and her blog, Kaleidoscopic Wandering. I met JoAnna through LinkedIn a couple of years ago and have become a fan of her thougtful travel essays and articles. She's also a kitten foster parent - these are the kinds of things you only learn about your fellow writers through Twitter, which is one of the wonderful, unexplainable things about it. But getting back to Jamaica ... (which I would love to go to sometime, BTW, ... In this post JoAnna examines the idea of the real culture of a place and what that means when you look beyond the surface. I encourage you to read the comments also and add to them if you are so moved -- a lot of interesting dialog there. Here's an excerpt from the post.

"On a recent trip to Jamaica, I found myself annoyed when the group I was with stopped at the local Margaritaville to get a taste of the “real” Jamaica. The beach was packed with beach chairs and cluttered with tourists who shelled out bundles of cash for slushy alcoholic drinks in plastic cups and strings of beads being sold by local hawkers."

via kaleidoscopicwandering.com

The Buddha at Work - "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" | Interdependence Project

I’m starting something called Saturday Morning Surf here at Thoughts Happen as a way to highlight pieces on other sites that I find intriguing and worth sharing. Each Saturday I’ll post a link to something I found during the previous week that I think you will find interesting and, I hope, thought-provoking. Please leave your comments here at Thoughts Happen or the Thoughts Happen Facebook page to let me know what you think of them. 

This week I’m sending you to The Interdependence Project’s “The Buddha At Work” columnist Jon Rubinstein, who excerpts a Mary Oliver poem called “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?”

As a disclaimer, I am not usually a poetry person. I’m usually too left-brained for poetry, and a lot of it bores me, frankly. But I heard a lot of Mary Oliver poems quoted during my Shambhala Meditation training and found them penetrating and breathtaking.The first line Rubinstein quotes gets right to the point: 

 

“Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?”  

Whoa. 

Oliver’s honesty in getting to the core of what it means to be human breaks through barriers between individuals and I find myself nodding in recognition whenever I read her work. 

 

I won’t quote any more of the poem here, but instead send you to The Buddha at Work - "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" | Interdependence Project, which in turn points to the entire poem if you find yourself compelled, as I was, to read the rest. 

Hope you enjoyed the first Saturday Morning Surf session. See you next week!