Go Mighty Life List Inspiration

I sometimes get frustrated at having to ask for help when I’m not physically strong enough to do something on my own. Pictured above is Jen Bruntlett’s husband portaging a canoe. She wants to do it herself, and I’m all for it. Let us know when the weight training commences, and then send us a duplicate of the above photo, except with your girly legs poking out, Miss Jen. And in the meantime, consider a coracle.

Stacey Ferguson is still at work learning American Sign Language thanks to a goal grant from Olay. Recently, she was able to understand the gyst of  a signed two-hour conversation. Stacey’s sister is deaf, so this goal and all the effort and love going into it puts a lump in my throat.


Bonnie Chan checked off a goal to benefit Cycles of Change, and it’s been on my Life List for years, Go on a multi-day bike trip.

Molly is taking our Skillshare class, and aiming to collect ten tickets to shows this year. She settled on the goal after we did a class exercise about working backward from feelings you want to experience. Molly wants to be amazed. Good one.

On Monday, we’re launching the #mightyup challenge, which is about doing a little something fun every day. Meet me back here and I’ll tell you all about it. In the meantime, take some time this weekend to revisit your Life List on Go Mighty. The site is still in beta, but we’re processing invitations within about 24 hours now, so please go request one if you haven’t. We’d love to have you.

Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a favorite author, but this is my first read of her poetry. My favorite poem from Morning in the Burned House:

CRESSIDA TO TROILUS: A GIFT

You forced me to give you poisonous gifts.
I can put this no other way.
Everything I gave was to get rid of you
as one gives to a beggar: There. Go away.
The first time, the first sentence even
was in answer to your silent clamour
and not for love, and therefore not
a gift, but to get you out of my hair
or whatever part of me you had slid into
by stealth, by creeping up the stairs,

so that whenever I turned, watering
the narcissus, brushing my teeth,
there you were, just barely, in the corner
of my eye. Peripheral. A floater. No one
ever told you greed and hunger
are not the same.

How did all of this start?
With Pity, that flimsy angel,
with her wet pink eyes and slippery wings
of mucous membrane.
She causes so much trouble.

But nothing I ever gave was good for you;
it was like white bread to goldfish.
They cram and cram, and it kills them,
and they drift in the pool, belly-up,
making stunned faces
and playing on our guilt
as if their own toxic gluttony
was not their fault.

There you are still, outside the window,
still with your hands out, still
pallid and fishy-eyed, still acting
stupidly innocent and starved.

Well, take this then. Have some more body.
Drink and eat.
You’ll just make yourself sick. Sicker.
You won’t be cured.

More lines and stanzas of note:

left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery
sighs on the cigarettes of men
I hardly knew and didn’t want to.

crisp as heated metal

The speech here is all warty gutterals,
obvious as a slab of ham

Wall me up alive
in my own body.

the lost syllable for “I” that did not mean separate

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

Vocabulary

capon – castrated roosterc
sauve qui peut – every man for himself
arpeggios – a musical technique where notes in a chord are played or sung in sequence, one after the other, rather than ringing out simultaneously.
abbatoir – slaughterhouse
carapace – a protective, decorative, or disguising shell
sic transit – thus passes
plangent – Loud, reverberating, and often melancholy
sibilants – Of, characterized by, or producing a hissing sound like that of (s) or (sh)
portage – carrying water craft or cargo over land, either around an obstacle in a river, or between two bodies of water