your daily rock : become someone you respect
Eve Ensler has said, “I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.” Do you respect yourself? Are you okay with being different, with your own particular …
your daily rock : dance more!
Feel self conscious about dancing? Me, too. It didn’t used to be that way. Every Friday night in high school, I was on the dance floor with my friend Steve, doing elaborate disco moves (stop laughing). I haven’t danced like that–with abandon and joy and passion–in years. Decades. So I’m …
your daily rock : forget about the audience
Make a strong offer without trying to please the audience, or amuse them, or get them to like you, or influence their response to you. Detach from investing in what other people think–you can never control that anyway. Nothing you do can really control that. Instead, focus on what you …
your daily rock : listen to the message
We get so many messages. From our bodies, from our surroundings, from our intuition, from our places of deepest knowing. We know. And yet we spend so much time denying that we know, denying that we need to reconsider or flee or embrace–whatever the message is, we shut it down. …
your daily rock : turn around and look
You know those iconic photographs so many of us recognize? Those scenes from shared human history that are seared into our collective memories? The flag-raising at Iwo Jima, the young man in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square, the execution of Nguyen Van Lém by Nguyen Ngoc Loan during …
your daily rock : create spaciousness
We need to breathe. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard talked about spaciousness by invoking the poet Rilke: “Rilke wrote,” Bachelard recounts, “‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” Clear something out. …
your daily rock : ignore all critics
Are you creating things to make critics happy? Is that really the highest and best use of your life force, your creative spark, your soul, that big brain your body carries around? I think not. As Fritz Perls said, “If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, …
your daily rock : live deeper
Diane Ackerman has written, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” And the depth of it. What does it mean to live deeper? Some might …
journey to a little red free library.
A story in 13 parts. 1. I’ve wanted to put up a Little Free Library for a few years, but we just never got around to it. 2. I saw a little red schoolhouse for sale in Wisconsin that had been turned into a house. 3. I fell desperately in …
your daily rock : love your layers
It’s interesting to think about our lives as layers, strata of emotion and body and events, like the cut-open side of a mountain where we can see the different colors of earth, each building upon the one below, the one inside. While we might prefer to hate or get rid …
