*What would I have to do repeatedly?* Sabbath Poems* Feeling Overwhelmed in '16

 

*What would I have to do repeatedly?*

... for this goal to be achieved? ErinMStudy link (or here) talks about avoiding goals that are general "read more" and set 3-5 goals that can have a date attached to them. (Her example is speak Mandarin fluently).   After you name that goal, you ask "what would I have to do repeatedly to have this happen?"  She calls some goals "lead goals".... every night i'm going to speak mandarin

This is different from James Clear who focuses on identify goals... if I were a runner, what would my daily activities look like?

Wendell Berry's Sabbath Poems*

The video above is a charming read (by a Hobbit?) of two of his Sabbath poems. 

Wikipedia: 

From 1979, Berry wrote what he called "Sabbath poems". They were first collected in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.  All Sabbath poems until 2012 are published in This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 – 2012.

The poems are motivated by Berry's longtime habit of walking out onto the land on Sunday mornings. As he puts it, "I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration."

The Sabbath poems have been described as "written from a particular place and on particular Sabbaths, and so should be read as part of a spiritual practice and as poems, in some sense, devoted to dwelling, to living thoughtfully in one place."[88] Oehlschlaeger links Berry's project to a key observation by Henry David Thoreau,

As Thoreau continues in "Life Without Principle," he notes the constant busyness of Americans, so engaged in "infinite bustle" that "there is no sabbath." And he notes later that "there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business." The logic is clear: destruction of the Sabbath is contrary to "life itself." That, I suggest, is the context in which we should read the Sabbath poems that Berry has been writing for nearly the last thirty years

Feeling Overwhelmed*

from my journal Sept 27, 2016Growing fear/anxiety of: 

• Sisphysian mountain of crap - plan, grade, observe, meetings, 
• email (toxic, spreading oil stain), 
• paperwork drudgery, 
• missing deadlines... 
• 
  
• all a joyless forced march interuppted with eunexpected crisis and conflict