March 31, 2012 by Giulietta Nardone
Magic has surfaced as a theme for the writers taking my latest Story Circle On-line writing adventure: Grab Life By The Writing Gusto.
I believe Magic exists, we just learn to filter it out on our slog to the “Real World,” which of course is anything but real. Truth continues to be stranger than fiction, so I’m not sure why we continue to train the young for the real world when that’s not in our best self-interest.
Someone said to me that the title for my class wasn’t possible, that you couldn’t grab life by the writing gusto.
Why not? That’s how ingrained folks are to sort everything into real and not real. (more…)
March 21, 2012 by Giulietta Nardone
I read Amanda Hocking’s latest blog this morning. She titled it, “The Lost Art Of Blogging.” She says that blogging has lost something for her. It wasn’t fun anymore. She thinks it might be because her blog had devolved into something less random and rambling and more cagey.
What I’ve noticed is the cadre of experts who’ve cropped up to tell you that you need to provide “useful” content and it needs to be in a certain format, etc. Guess one might call it the professionalization of blogging. I’m all for blogging from your heart and whoever needs to hear what your heart says, will find you. (more…)
March 9, 2012 by Giulietta Nardone
Hello wild things,
Real writing, the kind that comes from deep inside, will reveal what you want out of life, what’s missing, what’s in the way. We’ve been so molded from the outside in to conform with the consumer mindset, that we sometimes forget our truer selves live inside and they want something different, something unique.
For me, I had to find a way to get that side of me outside so it could free the rest of me. (more…)
March 2, 2012 by Giulietta Nardone
A friend sent me a short film clip that explains why it’s so hard to save things that matter to the heart, like nature. It highlights the book by Charles Eisenstein called, “Sacred Economics.” He traces the origins of money and talks about the need to return to the gift economy, where people actually need each other. In our present economy, nature becomes a commodity we destroy to make stuff, to fuel an economy that doesn’t celebrate our humanness.
It’s fascinating to me because I studied Anthropology in college. It married my love of people, culture, and geography. Some of the most interesting indigenous populations we studied lived along the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. That’s when I first heard the term “potlatch,” a type of feast. During these feasts, the host family gave away as much of their wealth as they could. People derived status not from how much they had, but from how much they gave away.
(more…)
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