25 Random Things About Me

After being tagged by a few of my few of my Facebook friends (Janet, Dave and Katelyn), I'm game to play, too.

1. Some of my ideas about how to spend a Saturday were formed by a late 1970s McDonald's commercial I saw as a kid with a bunch of girls going to the mall. (I think it was titled, "Saturday Shopping Spree.")

2. I love books as much as I love people. My idea of great fun browsing the library or a bookstore. (In fact I spent Friday evening at the library, and it was awesome.)

3. I've always thought it would be cool to own a bookstore.

4. Or a cool cafe that serves breakfast and lunch and allows creative types to hang out.

5. Some things on my life list:  travel to India, write a song, build something with my own two hands, have a second home on water and learn to read auras.

6. Yeah, and about that aura part. I'm fascinated by things like past lives, Akashic records, quantum psychics, parallel universes, tarot and pretty much anything that falls into the category of "New Age Spirituality." 

7. I have not eaten wheat, sugar, cheese or anything fermented (including beer and wine) for more than four months as part of a candida cleanse eating plan. Surprisingly, this actually hasn't been hard at all.

8. My Kolbe A Index profile is "quick start, fact finder," entrepreneur type. My Meyers-Briggs is ENFP.

9. Learning, exploring and researching are big passions of mine. 

10. I intend to write a book of poems, a book of short stories or a novel in the next five years.

11. I have a tendency to quit things. (See Kolbe Index profile in #8).

12. I'm a little OCD about whether an object on a table or on the wall is in proper alignment. It will bug me something fierce if it's off-kilter.

13. When looking at photographs of kitchens with a shelf of cookbooks, I will sometimes look to see if they have a copy of the book I wrote about ice cream. (Lame and vain, I know.)

14. Someday I'd like to live in New England, the Carolinas, California or Oregon. 

15. I sometimes wonder how I managed in the days before Google, iTunes or email. 

16. I want to have a small farm with chickens, goats, geese and alpacas. But I want someone else to take care of the animals. I just want to enjoy them.

17. I also want to have a loft in the city. 

18. Yeah, I play that City Mouse, Country Mouse thing pretty much down the middle.

19.  I'm big fan of the Oscars and love the red carpet show as much as the actual awards portion.

20. Needless to say, I have been on a major movie-going kick of late. In the last six weeks, I've seen: The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt, Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Gran Torino and, um, Twilight. (Three times I've seen two movies in one night — bliss!) Tonight, we're going to see The Reader and Frost Nixon.

21. About Twilight, I starting reading the book during our holiday vacation and read it and Eclipse in two days. Book 3, however, I'm still on. 

22. I got pretty lucky in the husband department.

23. I got very lucky in the child department, too.

24. My most direct experience of God comes when I am in nature.

25. I love the act of making lists, more than following them.

Tell me, what are 25 random things about you??

Flowering Fridays: Words to Grow On

(photo above, one my beautiful orchid friends)

Each week when I water my orchids, I talk to them. I'll say: "Aren't you beautiful?" Or "Oh, look at you, you're growing more buds." Or "I love your blooms." 

And sometimes, I'll just say, "I love you."

I provide my seven orchids with regular watering, good indirect sunlight and lots of loving words.

I do not use any fertilizer at all, and yet my orchids bloom year after year for me as if my words encourage them to keep growing and blooming. (It sometimes seems to me that they even lean in to listen when I talk.)

A few weeks ago in Rev. Martina Schmidt's transforming Spiritual Mastery program I am participating in we watched Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life DVD, which is all about the power of affirmations and how we feel about ourselves. (Trailer is embedded below; or link directly here.)

It got me to re-noticing how I talk to myself. And I see that much of the time it's usually a pretty mean conversation going on inside my head, full of criticism, judgment and put-downs about myself. 

I am committed to changing my self-talk to reflect how I talk to my orchids — with love, acceptance, gratitude and appreciation. 

I went out and bought a You Can Heal Your Life affirmation kit at Three Sisters' Spirit in downtown Waukesha, too. (It's a wonderful store full of classes and gift items honoring the sacred feminine.) In the kit, there is a wonderful CD in there with Louise Hay talking more about affirmations and providing sample affirmations. I have been playing with the affirmation — I love and accept myself — and with Hay's suggestion to say something nice to myself every time I notice myself in a mirror.

Tell me, what's something loving and encouraging you can say to yourself?

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.

"praise song for walking forward in that light"

Praise Song for the Day

by Elizabeth Alexander

A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other's

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of someone and then others, who said,

I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce,

built brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out-at kitchen tables.

Some live by Love thy neighbor as thy self.

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota

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I love that President Obama chose to include poetry in the Inaugural Festivities. (Poets have only been included four times in our history.) As Minneapolis poet Tim Nolan says in this Star Tribune article, "A poem is one soul speaking to another soul, and that's very moving in a public setting….It provides something that nothing else can really accomplish with the same efficiency and directness."

(Be sure to read entire three pages of this thoughtful article on the importance and nature of poetry. I love what poet Todd Boss says in this article: " 'We the people' commission poets all the time to speak for us, to illuminate the present, to give words to our accruing history…In a perfect world, there'd be a poem commissioned for every occasion, not just the most momentous. Think what a world we'd live in if poets were asked, for example, to respond to every report by the National Academy of Sciences, or every World Bank summit."

I also learned in that Star Tribune article that Barack Obama is a poet, too. As an undergrad at Occidental College he published two poems in the literary journal there. See this New York Times article for poems; while the New Yorker weighs in on their merit here.)

You can find more on Elizabeth Alexander and the writing of the inaugural poem here (The Guardian), here (Time Magazine) and here (NPR story).

Alexander's website includes several poems and audio selections, including Alexander in a Poetry Off the Shelf interview on Obamapoetics.

Praise song for the beginning of a new era in America. Praise song indeed. 

Update on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 4:49PM by Shannon Jackson Arnold

Also, check out this UK Times video link to Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott reading a poem he wrote for Barak Obama — "Forty Acres."

Update on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 7:34AM by Shannon Jackson Arnold

I updated the poem to reflect the actual line breaks. Makes such a difference to read a poem this way (i.e. not just hear it or read it but see it in form, too, with punctuation, line breaks, style). I got a whole new appreciation experiencing this poem in its "proper" form). Thanks to Alicia at Posie Gets Cozy for tipping me off to the link here.

Can't wait for Graywolf Press to publish the chapbook on February 6. For me, this poem capture what I want to remember about the inauguration.