The Baby Bear had me out of bed this morning at about 6, so we watched Selma while I edited pictures. Feeling ready to get my MLK speeches book out and get inspired. Ready to keep fighting fo the light and the people who completely disagree with me.

Oh, Kurt, how I love you.

Love this month because people tend to have creative ideas on their mind leading into Halloween. Also, with instagram and snapchat, we are all documenting and representing ourselves more than ever. How can we reinsert more creativity and making into our lives by cutting down our shopping?

I know I am not posting much! We have reached the end of my pre-posting, and I think I have a lot of weeks of uselessness ahead of me. Please be patient! I know you can barely survive without some straw-ranting!

I got to spend the weekend with my wonderful, badass, sweet angel of a mother. Hope you all had a great weekend as well!

Like so many of us, I have trouble not thinking about the election and how incredibly hateful and nasty political discourse has been this year. It is genuinely scary, especially to be bringing a baby into this kind of climate. I have been looking for things that remind me of the best of what we are instead of reading so much about the worst (time to put a "Trump" filter on my newsfeed?). Hope this inspires you like it does me- can you imagine how different the world could be if we all put our energy into helping instead of convincing ourselves that the other guy doesn't need help?

This quote is the heart of this blog and has been on my mind even more these last few weeks. Everything we do can either make the world a little bit better or a little bit worse for the people who come after us, many of which we love. I would just like to make the world a teensy, tiny bit better.

Hope you all have a positive week and that we all take the opportunities to do a little better, be a little kinder, and hopefully get to know a stranger.

We are getting ready to celebrate the 4th, and maybe you are too. Have been thinking a lot about what makes America great, and I love this quote. Hope everyone has a great week!

Feeling broken-hearted today, like I think most of us are. Dreading that there is always work to be done, but feeling encouraged by this:

I have been thinking a lot about the Bible passage lately where Jesus calls his followers to give away everything they own and follow him. As I have spent the past year so much more willing to give things away, it makes me realize that his command was not just meant as a sacrifice but also to free us. It's a gift. Stuff is a lot of work! It can really weigh you down. The more you have, the more you have to take care of, so I am grateful to be learning to be a channel, even if I have a long way to go.

Got up this morning and ate cookies for breakfast. Got on Twitter, and Patton Oswalt's twitter made me cry. If you don't know, the comedian's wife, who was a crime writer, died very unexpectedly this April. This was a quote from his daughter that he shared-

"When your mom dies you are the best memory of her. Everything you do is a memory of her." -Alice Oswalt, 7 years old.

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children" - Native American Proverb

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world" -Anne Frank

Gah, I love this. Everyone have a good week!

from LA Progressive

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." -

Eleanor Roosevelt

"The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark for the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." -JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I've been thinking a lot about grace today because our reading was the Prodigal Son, and I loved our priest's take on the elder son, how he also received grace after being prideful and thinking he deserved a special prize for "doing it all right." Anyway, I digress. Here is a lovely quote about grace:

"Remove grace and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved." Anselm of Canterbury

Chris Rock's monologue was hilarious and spot on, but I liked Shonda Rimes's circulating tweet the best:

"Know why I hate 'why is diversity so important' question? It implies the matter should be UP FOR DEBATE. As if LACK of diversity could be valid."

This doesn't absolve us from ignoring the question, but instead of seeing diverse casts as special and ask why, why not start asking all-white casted films why the hell is this movie so whitewashed?

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." -John Muir