This is my 33rd Father’s Day without my father. For him, this poem. This perfect father’s day poem. A poem that reminds me not only of Daddy–swimming as far as was needed until he couldn’t anymore, and then, too–but also of my stepfather, Boyce, and of Mr Brilliant, a brilliant father with a heart as big as the ocean, a man who swims the storm for these two girls, always.

With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach

We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.

Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.

Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.

“How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?”
“As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

-William Stafford

MIND

Because Tess is so enamored of tiny things, tiny things catch my eye.

Because Emma is a woman and a gamer, among other things, these stories catch my eye and sadden and infuriate me. Emma has long taught me about sexism in gaming. What a pathetic example of it. Such anger, and ignorance, and meanness.

BODY

Easy, peasy, simple, cold goodness.

What a lovely, easy way to help the earth.

There are a lot of apples in my house. I think this is the answer. To veganize, replace butter with Earth Balance. Can be easily made gluten-free as well.

Great info on stocking your fridge for healthy meals.

Always a big fear for me when crossing bridges. Even reading this gave me a teeny tiny panic attack. But better to know than not know.

I’m going to make my way through these books for the environment.

SOUL

Entering the lonely quiet: “The school bus came. The school bus went. What do you want to do? Mark asked, and in that moment, the answer to both of them was clear. ‘What can we do?’ Jackie said. ‘Nothing,’ Mark said, and he sank down next to her on the couch.”

Are we friends on Goodreads? I’d love to know what you’re reading.

WORD

Worry is an addiction
That interferes with compassion.
~Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao: Daily Meditations

(photo of my fiddle with rosin bits, Instagram)

Together, we have the opportunity to learn, laugh, love, and give.

Together, we can be a true community. One that acknowledges our shared poverty as a true source of new life.

Love,

MIND

Actress Jean Stapleton died. She was truly a ditz with depth.

Read this.

BODY

If you love coffee, you’re gonna LOVE this.

On death as transformation. “Human death is becoming more and more divorced from nature. We pump our dead with polluting chemicals like formaldehyde, put them into airtight boxes and then plant them in precious real estate that could be used for agriculture. We think we’re denying death that way.”

I am a sucker for Thai peanut sauce.

Seriously, seriously good vegan buttercream icing.

SOUL

Yes. This. Six words you should say today.

What does it show about society when we commodify a pretty female celebrity’s meltdown? “Women are especially punished for appearing to go off the deep end. Men who behave like raging narcissists and actually get violent, on the other hand, are routinely enabled and placated. Take Charlie Sheen as the most obvious example: he attacked a couple of women and went on TV ranting about tiger blood, all while maintaining his role on a popular (if astoundingly bad) television show. His behavior, though violent and abusive, was laughed off as ‘antics.’”

What does this do to children? “We are testing children so often that the assessments threaten to take the place of instruction, and the stakes are high. Now they are tested on how quickly they can hide and flee from killers who could enter the school any time without warning. Everyone has to be ready. You need to know the best hiding places.”

WORD

 “What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.” -Terry Tempest Williams

MIND

How to get a job. “They (employers) just want to know one thing: Can you add value?” Sounds to me like college is becoming increasingly irrelevant unless some changes are made either to the job market or the educational system.

These are extraordinary visions by a 14-year-old. Or by an any-year-old.

I started watching this TED talk about why MoMA acquired Pac-Man because I thought it would be of interest to my design student and gamer daughter, Emma. And then I got hooked. There is so much here: high and low art, the intersectionality of art and culture, and a fantastic delivery of many, many ideas.

What is the cure for a distracted mind? “‘What I like so much about this assignment is that it goes right to the heart of the belief that you’ll feel bored if you pay attention to one thing for so long,’ said Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. ‘A lot of time when we turn away from things, we’re missing stuff that will give us a richer understanding of the world.’”

BODY

ROCK ON, I dream of Jeannie (at 78)! ROCK ON!

How to pick a superstar watermelon! Yes!

A plethora of vegetarian and vegan grilled cheese sandwiches for the win!

In the U.S., we just celebrated Memorial Day. I’m not sure many of us know its origin.

SOUL

I think it’s time for me to do The Work again on a situation I haven’t really ever fully resolved. Here’s one good example of using it.

WORD

“Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love.”  -Criss Jami

(Photo: A Bradford Pear tree that greets me daily. Hi, tree.)

In celebration of the real meaning of Memorial Day in the U.S., an 1876 flag with 38 stars that we hang on our porch for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July and other days when the happy spirit of patriotism strikes.

It is easy in our hip, intellectual, urbane world–the one in which we read Proust and bake spelt madeleines and drink raw almond milk and eat Dagoba Xocolatl bars and listen to poets on the radio–to be embarrassed by expressions of national loyalty and pride, to be conflicted by the connection some make between patriotism and fighting, to understand how to oppose a war and still support those fighting it and on this day, to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives.

So many of us have never fought for the freedoms we enjoy; in fact, we don’t even recognize that they are freedoms, but feel they are just how life is, should be. We won’t fully understand that they are not ours just for the breathing, not until they are gone, will we?

Never one to condone war with my Quakerly leanings, particularly wars that are unjust and unfounded, and cognizant of the fact that I avoid real images of war, those beyond the parade, opting for the sanitized ones instead, I can nevertheless put a heartfelt word of thanks out into the world to those men and women who protected me, who did what their country asked of them, for people they will never meet. Who lost their lives for me, for us.

It is Memorial Day in the U.S., a day to remember those men and women who have laid down their lives in the service of our country.

MIND

I have long been interested in disappearing languages, and language in general. This man’s work fascinates me: “‘The concept behind this project was to take those qualities—to take the inflections and use those as the basis of music,’ James says. ‘Rather than most music is based on physics-how many divisions of a second can you make, and how do you count that time. And it’s regular, that time is regular you beat out a beat, you keep that beat, you can make it a little faster, a little slower. But when we speak, the inflection is much more fluid. And the same is true of the melodic aspects of a lot of language, in terms of how much register they cover.’”

Language matters in other ways, too. How are we using language now? David Brooks explores that in “What Our Words Tell Us,” tracking the use of words and what those changes might mean: “People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.”

William Gaddis was a brilliant American novelist. Brilliant, I tell you. And I love this short piece about the recent publication of his letters.

BODY

Dudes and dudettes, we need to play more to reduce our anxiety. We need to stop rejecting any form of non-productivity: “The real problem had been my state of mind. I’d become increasingly adept at rejecting any form of “non-productivity.” I couldn’t allow any form of play if it didn’t contribute to earning money or doing something “meaningful.” Even when I was with friends or doing something that was supposed to be fun, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the time I was wasting. I wasn’t being productive; I was losing valuable time. I had to get back to work!”

Misandry and not: “Unfortunately, the reason that ‘fem’ is a part of the word ‘feminism’ is that the world is not, currently, an equal, safe, and just place for women (and other groups as well—in its idealized form, intersectional feminism seeks to correct all those imbalances). To remove the gendered implications of the term is to deny that those imbalances exist, and you can’t make problems disappear just by changing ‘feminism’ to ‘humanism’ and declaring the world healed. That won’t work.”

22 ways to get your vegan snack attack on. Oh yes.

Great question: Where are all the people with disabilities in the body positive campaigns that are proliferating?: “In the popular media, so-called ‘body positivity’ campaigns leave out disability to a remarkable extent. The body about which we are supposed to feel positive is nearly always the able body. That body might be fat or thin, white or black, Hispanic or Asian, tall or short, rich or poor, but it is almost always able.” Or, as my friends with disabilities like to call it, “temporarily able-bodied.”

10 more uncluttering things to do.

SOUL

These lost photographs of a segregated world are soul-stirring.

WORD

“It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” -Marlene Dietrich

(photo of peony taken with my iPhone in our back yard)

mind

One question that changes everything: “I wondered what it would be like to ask myself, ‘What could (potentially) be good about this?’ when facing challenging situations.”

And another question that changes everything: “One of the best questions you can ask when something negative happens is this: ‘What does this experience make possible?’”

body

Well, IS HE? “Food choices have become important political acts, with deep moral and environmental consequences. As self-righteous and irritating as this attitude can sometimes feel, it’s still speaking to a very real and scary truth. With rising obesity rates, a destructive system of factory farming, and terror-inducing 24/7 news stories about antibiotics in chicken and E. coli in spinach, many people have come to feel that their own food choices are among the most meaningful life decisions they can make.”

I am a design and typography nerd. Perhaps you are too. “The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor, the secret of its infiltration,’ said Duarte, is that ‘it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it’s still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.’”

I am very interested in learning more about this link between diabetes and Alzheimer’s Disease, and am thinking about the implications for my diet and exercise.

Likewise, this list of how to improve brain function is important to me. I’m doing well on numbers 2, 8, 9, 10, and the others need work.

This food right here is on my mind.

soul

Perhaps you will recognize your definition of joy in these.

Sit every day: “The findings are striking—if we practice something, it will rewire our brains, creating a new neural pathway.” This is a very helpful entry point for creating a meditation practice.

Just because I’m missing him.

word

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”  -Anaïs Nin

(photo of the first radish I ever grew, 5/16/13)

MIND

Here are 20 classic novels you’ve (probably) never heard of. For your reading list?

The science of self-deceit: “After three decades of pondering how self-deception might have given our predecessors an evolutionary advantage, Trivers has come up with a theory: We often deceive ourselves because it then becomes easier to deceive others.” And sometimes that self-deception has fatal consequences.

Talk about marginalia! A beautiful example of the architecture of thought, made more beautiful by Mr Brilliant’s appreciation of it.

BODY

Oh, lord, yes, I want this strawberry balsamic and olive oil cake to show up on my kitchen table tomorrow like magic. MAYBE SOMEONE IN MY FAMILY COULD MAKE A VEGAN VERSION OF IT FOR ME FOR MOTHER’S DAY.

Being swallowed by a hippo is not a perspective one has often. And it can have tragic consequences.

Did you know that sewage plants are especially vulnerable to climate change?

SOUL

This photograph of a final embrace will remain with you: “Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.” (Bangladesh, garment factory collapse)

This free mending library is, in some ways, a collaborative community project, spearheaded by one man with a sewing machine. “Viewed as ‘social artist’ by some and a curiosity by others, Swaine insists he is merely a ‘guy who sews.’”

WORD

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” -Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

(image from here)