Links Less Ordinary 2

After the success of last week’s edition of Links Less Ordinary, I’ve brought it back for another run. This week has been a fabulous week for blog writing. Why don’t you spend some of your weekend following up some of these links? I promise you, it’ll be time well spent!

• Daz Cox is a wonderful artist and a really thoughtful blogger who often makes me think about my own views on art and its place in my life.  This week’s post was no different:

What is essential, especially to bloggers is to have your own opinion on what is art. What kind of “as art” have you made?

• One of my favourite singers at the moment is Donna Maciocia who sings with the band Amplifico.  She has a relatively new blog of her own where she is very generously sharing her new songs.  She put a new one up just this week which makes me smile every time I hear it!  Here’s the lyrics from the chorus:

Just want you to feel beautiful
I wanna fill you up with feeling good about yourself
And to be unstoppable!
If you can’t love yourself
Then how can you love me at all?
Just want you to feel beautiful
I wanna fill you up with feeling good about yourself
And to be unstoppable!

• The Writing Journey is a great blog that I really recommend you check out and subscribe to.  Bob has such a way with words which he demonstrated beautifully with his post, When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough:

Life has its ups and its downs. As human beings, we feel love and hatred and we even feel apathy at times. Pain and suffering and pleasure and ecstasy are all a part of it. Shakespeare was only half right; it is better to have loved and lost, but it is best to have loved, lost, and then loved again. It’s only more intense when it happens again.

• I love Wendi Kelly’s blog. She had a great post up this week called My Attitude, My Choice, which I think you’ll really like, all about how our attitude affects our experience of life.

What I realized as I went from one trial and tribulation to the next in the exciting adventure that became the LIFE OF WENDI is that no matter how hard things got to be, I was -in fact- in charge of how I felt about it and what I was going to do about it. I learned that I had choices. I could choose how I wanted to react and that the choices I made directly affected the outcome and other people’s reactions.

• Ellen Wilson’s post, The Butterfly Effect, really struck a chord with me this week.  It’s all about interconnections and how our words have the potential to effect change in the lives of countless unknown others.

You are the butterfly that makes the change of all our interconnections.  Spread your wings and see where they take you.

• Cynthia from Original Impulse has started a new blog to chart the progress of her next big adventure as she begins her travels through Italy.  It’s called Journey Juju, where this week she has a great post urging  us to follow her example and to live The Wacky Life:

By wacky I mean adventurous, creative, right-brained. Not being bogged down by details or reined in by fears. Willing to do new things in new ways.

• Over in Hawaii, Rosa Say has written about Calvin’s Mamaki Tree: a tree which she received at a ceremony to celebrate the life of a friend and work colleague who has recently passed on.  As always, her post is thoughtful and inspiring.

It would be a legacy that Calvin would have wanted, to simply have trees that will continue to grow with his belief that they are good for us. I was awestruck in that moment.

• One of my new friends this week (well-met through Twitter) is Brett who blogs over at 6Weeks.  He wrote such a moving tribute to his wife, who sounds like such a special lady, that moved me to tears.

The wedding bands, I designed myself, the stone, the most beautiful my eye had ever seen.  Perfect in every way, like my bride-to-be.  I paid cash, of course… and Saturday morning proposed to my lover, as she lounged in her pyjamas.  Her answer was not yes, but a shriek of joy!

• Last week I included in Links Less Ordinary a post by Diane Cordell.  This week I’d like to share a post written by her daughter who wrote a guest post for Journeys.  It’s all about bike riding, except it’s not: it’s about community, it’s about freedom, it’s about embracing life:

Most everyone I know had a bicycle at some point in their childhood. Your bike summed up freedom and adventure. Once you had learned to ride it- an accomplishment in and of itself- it was you and you alone who made it move, and you who chose where to go.

If you do nothing else this weekend (other than visit this great selection of posts, that is!) get out and explore the world outside your door.  As Audrey sang in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there’s such a lot of world to see.

What were your best reads this week?