These Things: A Library in a Tree, That Time Picasso Stole the Mona Lisa, and Ski Maps
Moon and Planet in a Morning Sky. Jan. 31, 2019.
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
- e.e. cummings
Of course another way to say it would be to say that trees are made of books which can be literal or figurative like making a free library out of a tree rather than to cut down the stump which of course I understand is not figurative but like in Michael Pollan’s new book, we simply have to commit to learning, “How to Change Your Mind” and this can be as simple as having “40 Questions to Ask Yourself Each Year” as a way of evaluating where you’ve been and where you are right now and why was it that Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were accused of stealing the Mona Lisa even though, to the best of my knowledge and amateaur research, neither of them were ever that one guy who hand paints maps of ski areas because, as it turns out, photographs simply don’t work as well as the abstraction that the human imagination brings to articulating a particular thing.
Recently on The Morning Ride Pedal Powered Podcast
This podcast is a personal journal I record this podcast on my bicycle ride into the office every Monday and Thursday on topics of personal productivity, creativity, cinema, literature, music, and bicycle commuting.
3.13 The World Isn’t Really Against You. Most Likely. - How do you get back to your ride, your thing-that-you-love-to-do, even when it’s not working or you fall off your bike? Oh! I’ve got two great winter bicycling tips to keep you warm and come home to a clean house.
3.12 Getting Unstuck and Out of My Ruts - How do you get unstuck and out of ruts? Here are a few things I’ve read about recently that seem to be helping me get unstuck creatively and personally.
3.11 It’s Time to Start and Your Hair Down There (for bicycle commuters) - I was so wrong last week so here’s an update on when to start your ride. And yeah, we gotta talk about your hair down there (tips for bicycle commuting).
3.10 You Do Not Have to Be Good. But Pay Attention. - Poet, writer, environmentalist, and teacher Mary Oliver died last week but left us with some inspirational poems and instructions for life. I'm also thankful today that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed on his ride and didn't quit pedaling.
3.9 It’s Worth Working on If It’s Working On - What’s worth working on for you? Does hard work always produce the expected result? How do you feel about your work when you don’t get the result you want? Are you in it for the work or the result?