Favorite poem i heard this year

Everything is waiting for you by David Whyte

Formative resources 2016

​ These are the things i enjoyed, made me think deeper about an issue, or helped me find myself again this year. Maybe it will help you do the same?

Podcasts

• Maya Angelou: “Letter To My Daughter” - i think i come back to listen to this once per year. It’s incredible. She was such a beautiful person!
• Robcast - John Phillip Newell - The Echo of the Soul
• On Being - Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Intelligence of All Kinds of Life
• You Made It Weird - Richard Rohr
• You Made It Weird - Peter Rollins

• Michael Puett And Christine Gross-Loh: “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About The Good Life” - The Diane Rehm Show

• On Being - David Whyte - THE CONVERSATIONAL NATURE OF REALITY (highlights mine):

  MR. WHYTE: Yes. Yes, that’s right. And there are many people in Syria now just trying to preserve their lives and the lives of their loved ones. So this has always been there and always been true. And who knows? Any of us could be precipitated into awful circumstances at any time. And many of us go through those dark years where you just feel as if it’s just the movement of your own — your own movement that’s just creating body heat to actually keep you alive.

  We go through those very, very narrow places. And John used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind, and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions, and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. And so the ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered.

  And you don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

  MS. TIPPETT: That’s what Rilke called “living the question.”

  MR. WHYTE: Exactly. Yeah. He’s always there before you. [laughs]

Article

​ Does that Matter? by Jason Fried

Wisdom from Victor Wooten

Victor Wooten is a master communicator, whether it’s music or english .

1. Music as language:

1. Play the chromatic scale to learn that notes that don’t fit are only transitions to notes that do fit, and therefore can be made beautiful:

Fun bee video

Last weekend i picked up another nuc (the first didn’t have a queen and i’m too inexperienced/not confident enough to introduce a queen right) and installed them into our hive. i wasn’t able to find the queen in there (after 2 passes through each frame!) but i did make this video:

Saying and doing

At work, i’ve been experiencing some hard drive issues in my main computer that i use for programming. So i spent a couple days trying to figure out what’s wrong and what i should do to fix it.

Turns out i’ve misunderstood the way my computer has been working. i thought that Windows was running on my “blazing fast” hard drive (my SSD) but instead it was running on my much slower, much older (7 years old at this point?) hard drive. Fortunately, this has only been the case since i switched to Windows 10 at work (September/October 2015?), at which point i made a lot of sweeping computer changes.

i’ve been running around the office for years telling my co-workers that they’re wasting their time running their operating system on slower hard drives and that once they switch to a solid-state drive, they’ll never go back, yet i have not been doing that!

This whole incident has been a reminder that even though what i have been saying has been correct, that doesn’t mean i’ve been doing it.