When We Open Ourselves This Way

When we open ourselves this way, we become malleable, liable to be shaped by the world we live in, implicated in it, embedded in it, stained in its mud and shot through with its illumination.

A willing participant in the world, open to its pain and also its joy.

Roger Housden in Ten Poems to Change Your Life.

On WordPress.com 15 Years Yet Now With More Tumblr

Fifteen years with the lance user on WordPress.com.

This milestone caught me by surprise. As early user on WordPress.com (username ID between 600 and 700) I blogged here a bit in early days but not too consistently. My tech-focused blog ran on self-hosted WordPress1 until 2011, and I didn’t pick up a regular personal blogging habit on this lance.blog iteration until late 2014.

Another interesting fact, the lance username is tied to my Automattic work account. This blog is powered by lancewillett (registered later).

That’s all the tech trivia I’ve got for today. However, I’d love to see what y’all are blogging these days. Share your existing blog links in a comment.

New to blogging? An invitation: Try out a WordPress.com blog and sign up for Tumblr; you can connect them to share across automatically on both platforms. Both have great mobile apps, too. Then, use ’em and send feedback and notes. What do you like best? What needs work?

Happy blogging!

[1] See this primer on self-hosted WordPress versus WordPress.com.

Life Beyond the Mind

There’s great freedom in not compulsively interpreting other people, situations, and so on, not imposing all these judgments. Imposing thinking continuously on the world, which is so alive and so fresh and new at every moment. 

Eckhardt Tolle speaking to Krista Tippett on the Becoming Wise audio program.

Audio link.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.