A good heart will find you, just be ready then

The first time I heard Lisa Hannigan sing, was the first time I took Birgitta to a concert. She was so young. I was so young. Berlin was new to both of us, we were all new to eachother. Damien Rice was playing, but it’s Lisa Hannigan I remember, she was shining, she still is. We still are.

Then there’s Glen Hansard. I’ve never seen him live. But it feels like I have. It feels like I know him better than most of my friends, and, better yet, it feels like he knows me.

And what do you know, the two of them playing together, in my number one reason for going to Paris: Shakespeare and Company. Beautiful music, surrounded by books and people. Life at its best. It is good. And it is true.

Life in Death

The greatest thing with winter is to look at all that is dead, lifeless, naked, and to know, and to feel your body connecting deeply, instinctively, with hidden life, with the massive forces of pure and raw and real life power waiting underneath and inside, waiting patiently, because it knows and feels that all things come just as much as all things go.

100 Days of Love

Day 144.

After some weeks of nervously biting my nails, I feel proud and humble and ravishingly excited - - my book is here! With the most fantastic photos from my friend, the photographer Camilla Jensen, 100 Days of Love is my very first book, a real book, a beauty printed on awesome and forest friendly paper. What started an early morning in May, as shivering movements over my Mac’s keyboard, as informal efforts of spilling of my heart out on this blog, can now be read in bed and on the toilet, it can be scribbled in and even get dog ears. It is frightening and marvelous. I love it. 

I think it’s too early to say much about what it means. There’s two things I’d like to mention though, two things I tried to speak about on the amazing launch party we had last Thursday. Here they are:

1. Following my heart and doing what I love is the most kick-ass ground-shaking feeling there is!

2. We’re out of excuses. A vast landscape of different platforms, free and open, ready to use. New ways of funding, distributing, marketing and producing are emerging, sometimes free, often open, always available for good content. And most importantly— People! People are great and endlessly supportive! From friends and family to community and people you’ve never met - they’re all there waiting to help and support and cheer, once you stick your neck and your heart out. I feel endlessly grateful after these last weeks—grateful, and eager to kick more ass and shake more ground. 

What I know it means is this:
Following our hearts and doing what we love is possible. 

-

The book is available for sale here: www.asmundseip.com/book
and you can have a sneak peak at some pages here.

Doing beautiful

Day 135.

How often don’t we think we need to be faster and better and stronger, while everything life asks from us is beauty? Do what you do, but feel it.

In the deeply experienced doing hides the beautiful being.

Feel it, my friend, feel the misunderstandings and the expectations, feel the average Monday morning, the rain. Feel the coffee and the inspiration, feel your heart beating, the dance of your eyelids, the start of a new week!

Drive.

Day 134.

Yes, I know, political correctness and such, but I just love to drive my car. Oh, what a delight to turn the key around! Not that it even gets close to a macho growl, we’re talking Japanese plastic fantastic, but it doesn’t matter. It has four wheels and an engine and I can drive it anytime I want!

Alone, screaming as loud as I can. With both kids in the back, the girl of my life in the front, filled coffee mugs and a long day of driving. A roadtrip, yes, a roadtrip with someone interesting, stopping for lunch, conversations growing deeper as the distance from everything else is growing larger. And alone, again, with electronic music or Tom Waits or maybe opera or simply in silence. Think, or not think, but drive and drive. 

Ah, what a relief that we have cars. I want green cars, sustainable cars, cars you can eat when you’re done with them. A friend of mine allegedly owns a Fisker Karma, I hope he reads this and invites me for a drive. I won’t even try to eat it!

So many cars, so less time. So many possibilities, even for this post. I’m thinking I need a moralistic ending, but, pardon my french, screw that. I just love to drive. That’s all.

100 Days of Love

Day 128.

On a scale from one to ten, I’m feeling so incredibly excited right now! 100 Days of Love — my first book — just came online on Amazon, it’s a book, it’s there, you can buy it and download it and read it on your Kindle or iPad or on whatever makes you happy! 100 Days of Love, my first 100 days of blogging and sharing what I love and dream of and fear, 100 days of passion and purpose and taking leaps out of any comfort zone I’ve ever known. And you know what? I love it!

What do you love? Our bright minds sure love to complicate things, and although it may seem that way, life doesn’t have to be a misty maze of difficult matter. I may be naive at times, I admit it and promise never to change it — because in my experience, doing what you love is not only possible, it is also feasible, reasonable, profitable, attainable, practicable and the greatest source of joy there is! 

I love writing and I love sharing and now I’m so happy to share this book with you! As happy as I am that the ebook is online, it feels extra great to also be working with a print edition, for which I’m so lucky to be working with the fantastic photographer Camilla Jensen. If we’re really lucky, we’ll have the printed version of 100 Days of Love ready before December!

But now, ebook! If you feel inspired by this blog, or touched or moved or annoyed or any feeling as long as you feel, help me get it out to the world by sharing and liking and recommending and giving it wings to fly with!

#100love - Passion and purpose, one blog post at a time!

Take me to Amazon.com!

Do what you LOVE what you do!

Day 121.

A weekend break became a somewhat longer break, a loud and messy break, but also a silent and peaceful break. Two weeks ago, my writing started to feel forced and unnatural. If anywhere, forced and unnatural are really not islands I want to live on, so I took a break. It ended yesterday, with a long walk in the forrest. Alone. 

In my weary head, I often believe everything need to change. That whatever is needed for whatever to be OK is big and extensive and needs years. Some things do take time, and time can be a beautiful friend to those who wait. But other times, the only thing needed is a glimpse of silence. A minute, even only a second. Silence is after all not measured in time. 

Yesterday, in the forrest, I became silent. And out of that silence came a book. I decided to write a book, and with the help of my friend, the iPhone, I started writing it right there, amidst the trees and the birds and the wet moss.

I started writing what I hope will be the most inspiring book I know! It will be a book on changemakers and on making change happen — in my life, in your life and out there, in the world. Lots of action, and lots of silence, too.

Scary, but incredibly exciting, I can’t wait to share more of the book writing process here on asmundseip.com and on facebook.com/changeattention! As you might know, I’m also a big fan of crowdsourcing, and I’ll definitely be needing your help in finding awesome stories and people we can learn from. Inspiration is a powerful tool when shared! 

And then there’s this blog. The break felt good, and I’ll have more of them. But it also made me realize how much I love writing. I missed writing every day, and that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write every day. Unless I don’t. That’s when I have another break. It’s not so complicated, really.

And now: More life. More love. More do what you LOVE what you do!

(Thanks to the awesome @MariasMetode for the awesome wall-stickers waiting on my desk this morning!)

What Do You Love, rain edition.

Day 118.

Brainstorming a new idea by myself in the rain while walking and then on the phone and it’s still raining and I love having new ideas and I love pretending they are swimming pools I can dive right into and swim and play and sometimes I think I need to get myself together and stop having all these ideas but then I let the fuck go and swim some more because I love it. Because I love it. 

Life, Death, Love and the Sea

Day 88.

In the ocean I see the collision of life and death: the rising of each wave is life insisting on itself, and in the trough I see death. These high points and low points are all part of the larger dance. You really feel the lament of the ocean, and at the same moment there’s a generosity, because the waves keep coming. These forces are working back and forth endlessly.

You can read the touching and inspiring interview “Water, water everywhere — Ran Ortner’s love affair with the sea” by Ariane Conrad in its entirety over at The Sun Magazine.

(Photo: Flickr/CreativeCommons/rkramer62)

In Search of Amelia Earhart

Day 87. 

A short night and a long day later. Blueberries and chanterelles. A body perforated by acupuncture needles. Flowing heart chacras and heightened body awareness. Salmon with parsley and olive oil. Awake at night with a scared boy suffering from croup. Tom Waits, Roberta Flack and the joy when my father and I search Spotify for an album he last listened to 40 years ago, and find In Search of Amelia Earhart (Spotify link) by Ian Matthews’ band Plainsong. Fantastic! From 1967 to 1969, before Plainsong, Matthews was a member of Fairport Convention, another band I love, and suddenly I find myself in folk rock heaven! Joni Mitchell! George Harrison! Bob Dylan! I love you! I could go on forever, and I will, but the whole excitement made me think of a piece I discovered online, in which the Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit (check them out!) interviews Jack White for Time Out Chicago. In the end, White is asked how it feels like when soccer crowds chant the riff from one of his songs, “Seven Nation Army”. His answer struck me as especially beautiful. It surely is about folk rock, but it can be applied to so much more: 

The first thought that came to my mind when I first heard a crowd doing that was there’s this movie called Yankee Doodle Dandy with Jimmy Cagney in it and he’s playing the songwriter George M. Cohan. There’s a scene in the movie where they’re having a parade at the end of World War I and soldiers are marching down the street and everyone is singing his song. And he’s hearing it and he starts walking along with the soldiers and a soldier turns to him and says, “What’s the matter, old man, don’t you know this song?” And it’s a beautiful moment because he doesn’t tell the soldier, “Yeah, I wrote it.” It’s a beautiful moment to just be a part of the mob and absorb the idea that you don’t own music. Once it’s out in the ether, it becomes folk music. That’s your goal as a musician, to make folk music.