“Your output depends on your input.”
{Austin Kleon}
While consuming my “daily bread” yesterday, those daily emails from writer’s whose perspectives I admire, I realized that I had not been as comprehensive as I had intended to be. I rectify that today by adding to the mix a couple of “weekly bread” resources who inspire me as well as some authors and poets whom I could not recommend more highly.
But first, a bit of context:
As I shared on New Year’s Day, I have been experiencing, struggling with and enjoying the fruits of a profound shift in my thinking and feeling about my work and my own very human experience. All of the resources I am sharing with you have been essential to the process of simplifying my understanding of who I am, what I care most about and what I am here to do, while also keeping me engaged in the very real work of living a life in the here and now.
On a weekly basis there are two deeply meaningful and very different resources that come my way. On Friday’s, the author and creative force Austin Kleon publishes a list of “10 things I thought were worth sharing this week.” There is always something of value, something which opens up my own creativity and pushes my thinking in a new direction.
On Sunday mornings I receive Brain Pickings which the author, Maria Popova calls, “an inventory of the meaningful life.” These are deeply researched pieces, drawn from across the spectrum of human disciplines, on living with more intellectual, spiritual and creative intention and vitality.
I am biased in favor of the physical experience of reading a book. This past couple of years I have been encouraged and enlightened by the work of Terry Tempest Williams, Richard Powers, Cara Wall, and Frederick Buechner.
I have also been reading a lot more poetry, specifically the work of Seamus Heaney and Kay Ryan, not to mention my ongoing appreciation for the work of David Whyte whose writing first opened my eyes to the expansive frontier of my vocation.
These “inputs” have had everything to do with my “outputs,” whatever shape they have taken. I trust they will be of value to you. Happy reading.
Photo by Mariana Kurnyk on Pexels.com
