The Jayhawks have a new album out, Mockingbird Time, and it’s probably great. But to me, it can’t get any better than 1995′s Tomorrow the Green Grass.
23Nov, 2011
Today’s guest post is courtesy of Jesse Rice. Jesse is a speaker, musician, and author of The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community. He and his wife, Katie, live in Seattle-ish, WA, and he blogs at www.churchoffacebook.com. Dear Fear-Of-What-Others-Think, I am sick of you and it’s time we broke up. I know we’ve broken up and gotten back together about a bazillion times, but seriously, Fear-Of-What-Others-Think (or FOWOT, for short), this is it. We’re breaking up. Because I’m tired of over-thinking my status updates on Facebook, trying to sound more clever, funny, important. And I’m tired of wondering which Tweets might drive the most traffic to my blog, as though my value as a human being were truly numerical. I’m tired of wondering which picture to post online so that my in-danger-of-over-expanding gut doesn’t hang out too much and cause others to think I’m a normal late 30-something male, God forbid. Or that I vacation not in Hawaii or Paris or rural Vietnam, but in central Oregon, if I can afford to go on vacation at all. I’m sick of feeling anxious about what I say or do in public, especially around people I don’t know that [...]
21Nov, 2011
You would think some of the writers of the Bible would have gone to a Christian writers’ seminar to learn the magical formulas about how to dangle a carrot in front of a rabbit, but they didn’t. Instead, the writers of the Bible tell a lot of stories and account for a lot of history and write down a lot of poems and recite a great many boring numbers and then conclude with various creepy hallucinations that, in some mysterious way, explain the future, in which, apparently, we all slip into Dungeons and Dragons outfits and fight the giant frog people. I forget how it goes exactly, and I mean no disrespect. But because it is so scatterbrained, and has virtually no charts and graphs, I am actually quite surprised the Bible sells. Perhaps it’s those lovely and colorful maps, which puzzles me because they aren’t even current. But I like the Bible. Now that I no longer see it as a self-help book, it has infinitely more merit. It has soul, I guess you could say. As far as the writers in the Bible go, there are a few I like more than others. I like Paul the best [...]
20Nov, 2011
Technically, I guess it’s more Sunday Afternoon Music. This week, Zach Condon’s eclectic, Santa Fe-based band, Beirut. Enjoy!
16Nov, 2011
Today’s guest post is from Sarah Raymond Cunningham, the author of multiple books. Sarah quit her job so she could write what she’s passionate about and keep building a community called STORY. She also contributes to projects she believes in at People of the Second Chance. You can follow her newest endeavors, like onethousandpremieres.com, at her blog, www.sarahcunningham.org. I hope I‘m not the only person whose life circles back to different versions of the same question: Should I sink my energy into tackling new ambitious projects? Into chasing some noble goal? Or … should my ambition be to relax off the hero button for a while; to settle into a more natural, less-stressful life rhythm? Could the simple acts of living and loving somehow be just as noble? To top it all off, I face this question without the infamously Christian “life verse”. (I have a life Bible, does that count?) I don’t even have a life mission statement tacked to my mirror or refrigerator or car dashboard. What I do have is a little visual that’s all my own. It doesn’t feel commercial or gimmicky or demanded of me by some charismatic leadership figure. The visual is inspired by [...]
