Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

More good books

Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, Eric Greitens

Forager's Harvest, Samuel Thayer

Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers, Mark Shepard

Stanford Rape Letters

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.bgdzlXxzE#.fv802xO0M

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2852614-Letter-from-Brock-Turner-s-Father.html

http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/06/06/to-brock-turners-father-from-another-father/

Mansplaining

Mansplaining video.

So funny and so spot on.

How do we as women interrupt the cycle?

good books

Before I forget to document them, I want to write down some good books I've been reading.

Fire Logic, Laurie Marks

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

Moghul Buffet, Cheryl Benard

10% Human: How Your Bodies Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness, Alanna Collen

Back in Control: A spine surgeon's roadmap out of chronic pain, David Hanscom, MD

Gandhi the Man:How one man changed himself to change the world, Eknath Easwaran

Songs of the Humpback Whale

I recently read a very thought-provoking book titled Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult.  It is a story about trauma told in the five voices of five different main characters including four who interweave to tell the story chronologically and one who starts at the conclusion and tells the story in reverse chronological order until she gets to the beginning of the timeline while everyone else's narrative is concluding.

I haven't really digested it all.  Hearing the story from five people's perspective, one in reverse, is fascinating as is the theme of unresolved trauma.  Perhaps all trauma remains at some level unresolved.  Perhaps that's what makes it traumatic- our very lack of ability to digest it completely or to fully understand each other or ourselves in it.  Listening to these five characters struggling to understand themselves and engage with each other exposed them- their vulnerabilities, their hopes, their griefs, their best attempts at living well.

This is a book which I will want to read again.

On Freedom

"Now that we're finally free,
I get why we fought so hard.
The real gift isn't freedom.
It's what we get to do with it.
I don't know about you,
but I never could just sit on a beach anyway."
-Nikita, S4:E6