Good words.

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” -- Joan Didion

Let it go let it go let it go

This just makes me so darn happy. You can't not love these guys.

Come on. He says, "Dance like your life depends on it and celebrate the fact that you are alive." He ends the performance/show with: "Isn't it great to be alive?!" Love it. Methinks these are good themes for the new year.

Related: Drummers are so awesome.




This whole performance is amazing, but watch freaking Michael Shrieve (20 years old!) on the drums. His solo starts at about 3:05. Amazing.

(Of note: Carlos Santana said that during this performance he was so high on mescaline that he thought he was wrestling a snake instead of playing guitar).

All their living.

"Take my picture," my four-year-old daughter Violet demands. It's almost bedtime and she's gotten herself ready. It's quite a sight: footie pajamas, a headband with a sparkly blue bow that she calls her "everyday crown," a purple necklace, a bracelet, a pink heart-shaped ring, and a pair of sunglasses decorated with butterflies. She leans against the wall in the dining room and brings her knees together, turning her foot in slightly. It is an uncanny representation of an awkward model pose. "Take my picture with your phone," she says again. I do, and then let her see it. She smiles. "Put it on Facebook," she says. "Will you put it on Facebook so everyone can see my beautiful face?"

I tell her I will, but I don't -- feeling torn as I watch her scurry down the hall into her bedroom. I'm proud of that kid, enormously proud. And I do think she has a beautiful face. I'm charmed by this new expression of her individuality, the way she carefully picks out her accessories, the way she insists on that "everyday crown" every. single. day. I'm even charmed by her confidence, impressed with it even, because it's something I never had. Not even when I was a kid her age with no reason to believe the world was anything but a wide, welcoming place. Not even now, when I look at everything I am and everything I have accomplished. Why is it that 32 years into this thing called life "believe in yourself" is still the hardest thing I have to do?

I follow my daughter into her bedroom and she leans against the bed, a studied lounge pose, and she asks me to take her picture again. Then she pulls her glasses down around her mouth and asks me to take her picture again. Another pose, another picture. Again and again.

What I'm thinking of as I snap these pictures is humility, and being humble, and how it marks in my mind a delicate line between believing in yourself and not. It's the difference between feeling like you could conquer the world and feeling like the world is conquering you. I don't want to foster arrogance, which my daughter has in spades and then some, no matter how innocent it is, but I also don't want to damage that budding sense of pride she feels in herself, the way she can make decisions about her appearance, things that look good to her, and wear them with absolute confidence that she looks amazing.

And yet. How much of that confidence is already directly tied into what others think of her? "Do you think I look beautiful?" she wants to know, adjusting her headband. "Do you think you look beautiful?" I ask her, and she takes a moment to look at herself in the mirror. "Yes!" She decides. "Well, then, you are," I tell her.

My five-year-old, Madeleine, is still in the bath and I leave Violet to her preening so I can give Mad the five minute warning. "Hey, cutie," I say as I peer around the doorway in the bathroom. "You've got five minutes, and then we pull the plug." Mad beams up at me. "Okay," she says. She's gotten much better at receiving compliments lately. There was a time, not so long ago, that if you told her she is beautiful, she would balk. "I'm not pretty," she'd insist. "Yes, you are," I would tell her, and she'd firmly deny it. "No. I'm. Not."

And this worries me, too. She shies away from the camera, from looking at herself in the mirror, from compliments about her appearance. She's confident in other ways: her athleticism, her ability to catch lizards and snakes, her knowledge of reptiles and bugs. I love this, and I encourage it as much as I can. And I want that to be enough, to make her strong enough to withstand a world that tends to knock little girls down sooner or later. But I'm afraid it isn't, that one day she'll realize that the whole world is judging her based not on how well she can spot and catch a lizard that's 20 feet away, but on how she looks, how she stacks up to some collective image of beauty that none of us can escape.

All of this is mucked up by my own experiences, of course. How, when I was in middle school, a classmate noticed the ribbon trim on my socks didn't match and she spent a good while mocking me for it. "What, are you poor? Does your mother shop at Goodwill?" Angela asked in front of the whole class after lunch as we waited for our teacher to enter the room. I stared down at the pages of my book, face burning red, tears streaming down my face. I refused to look up at her. The next year I was walking down the hall during lunch, between rows of lockers, and I crossed paths with two popular jock boys. "Did you see her?" One boy asked the other in exaggerated horror, fake-shuddering. "She was UGLY." And I felt it like a punch in my chest as I sucked in my tears and refused to let them see me cry.

I never told anyone those stories, too embarrassed to say the words out loud. Because if I did, maybe it would be true. Maybe my ugliness was a secret my loved ones were keeping from me, because they loved me. This is the sad, stupid truth: sometimes I still believe that's true.

Of course I want to save my daughters from feeling like this. But how can I teach them to be confident on their own terms when I have never been that way, not a single day in my life?

It's inevitable that they'll turn outward, measure themselves up against the images of women they see elsewhere -- in school, in stores, in ads, on TV, on the Internet. This is the impossibility of raising daughters today, I'm afraid, because the beauty ideal is so mucked up a woman can never be just right how they are. And our girls are suffering for it. Example: I love the website Pinterest, which is kind of a dumb thing to say because pretty much everyone loves Pinterest. It's a place for people (and I would bet the large majority are women) to pin the things that interest them to inspiration boards. It's really a place to cultivate your ideal life, from making your home beautiful to being a better parent, to dressing better, to looking better, to getting your life organized. It is great inspiration, and yet lately it just feels icky and even dangerous because a lot of what you see there is body image focused, and none of it is consistent.

A picture of a woman's torso, hips thrust up, her hip bones jutting out. The comment: "Visible hipbones....one day." A picture of a woman's body with the tag: #thinspo and a thread of comments like "I wish I could have her body" and "I would give anything to look like that." A picture of a woman's body where a commenter chides the pinner: "Yuck, she's too skinny. That's not healthy; why would you want to look like that?" At worst: A 64-point list of "health" tips that promote anorexia. "Punch yourself in the stomach when you feel hungry." "Tell your parents you are eating dinner at a friend's house, then go for a walk instead of eating."

What is a mother to do?

As Madeleine gets out of the bath and gets dressed and Violet climbs into bed, everyday crown and all, I flip through the pictures on my phone. It's a snapshot of our life over the past year and I see everything: Violet somber, Violet silly, Violet posing, Violet doing her fake grimace-smile for the camera. Madeleine silly, Madeleine studiously avoiding the camera, Madeleine with reptiles she's found on our walks. Of course I think these girls are beautiful. They are the most beautiful things I have ever seen. But more than their beauty I see their life, and all their living, the moments that will stack up to form a sense of self that I hope gives them a clear eye toward what's really important in this world. That what you love is more important than how the world loves you -- that life is for living, for eating up, for savoring. And that this is the only beauty to worry about. Maybe it's not too late for me to figure that out, too.

It's not somebody who's seen the light.

The driveway is swept with orange and yellow and wet, the sky tiny ripples of gray clouds, thick and heavy. A mist of rain is everywhere. Walking outside I take a breath and fill my lungs with clean, cool air. The neighbor down the street has left his Christmas lights on and they are twinkling quietly in the still morning. I close the door against the warmth of the house, my husband making breakfast in the kitchen, my children filling up the house with the steps of their small feet, their PJ'd bodies curling into the comfort of the couch.

I'm waiting for a peppermint chocolate cake and a friend, and listening to Jeff Buckley sing "Remember when I moved in you/and the holy dove was moving too/and every breath we drew was hallelujah." A song so throbbing with sadness and beauty it's almost become a cliche, the way it demands you to feel something.

My heart's been heavy lately, something inside locked and stagnant. I recognize it, a murky, slow dark snarl of depression, and this time it's a little different. It feels untouchable and it grows and grows like some stupid cancer eating me from the inside out. There is a checklist of measures to take when it gets like this, things that let the light in, things that unsnarl the snarled, and I haven't even attempted them, and so it grows.

Why am I letting myself get stuck like that? I don't know. But today there are whispers of beautiful things, little reminders of the light you can pull within. It's a little pluck of pain and I can tug it free, I can. Starting now, with these words, with "And love is not a victory march/it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah," with the fall day folding around me, a perfect quiet blanket.

Assorted.

What I mean to say is that the search for meaning is the beautiful thing, because we cast our eyes inward and we cast them outward, and we find lovely things in both places, in the glowing heart and the lifted sky and everything. We get pummeled but our eyes keep moving. When we are very lucky our eyes settle on the best thing, and the beauty moves in and out of our vision, and we never have to look away, not once.

::

"undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn't born criminal. He's not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner... he's actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment. At the end of the day... isn't that what we all do?" -- The Roots

::

her mouth makes a wide O and thunder rumbles out, shakes even her teeth and pulls them up by their roots. she climbs the clouds and gathers molecules and hurls them into walls. you feel them tremble in your sleep but don't wake. instead you dream of coral snakes.

::

Just a freewrite.

We search for meaning, and in the searching meaning conflates with beauty, and so we're never sure what we're searching for. It could mean the same thing, but it doesn't, meaning and beauty. They are the same, the romantic part of you insists, but the small, hard part of you knows otherwise. Because we want beauty but we need meaning, and so for you meaning could be living your small existence from a chair in your living room, pulling strings and waiting for death. And for you it might be living a loud life from atop a cloud, collecting raindrops and scattering them into the wind. The first isn't beautiful, but who is to say that? Isn't there beauty in finding your comfortable place, in living there? Either way?

So you search for a way to feel good, and to feel beauty, as you look for meaning. And that means plucking your eyebrows and buying a new car and spoiling your kids and reading a new book, book after book, or finding the newest and best song that elevates you above the steady thrum of what it means to exist.

What's the point of any of it, the small, hard part of you wants to know. Why does your heart keep opening up and pulling in new things? Because it has to. It does, your heart reaching out and out, your nerves poised and electric, waiting to feel something more and better.