Gems #1 Reading notes

Some gems shining a little light this week:

Via the communicatrix, news of a new online magazine for women called Delish. Focusing on ‘what’s real, what’s useful and what’s beautiful’, it is gorgeous, smart, savvy and multi-faceted and clearly will appeal to an audience with these same qualities. Congrats to the team – it’s sensational.

I laughed out loud this week reading the quirky hyperbole and a half and a great post on sneaky hate spirals – all about days when all the little annoyances just build up.

And a true vintage gem I love – Marion Milner’s ‘A Life Of One’s Own’ , published in 1934 under the pseudonym Joanna Field. A pioneering exploration based on her own diaries, the book is the record of a seven years’ study of living and identifying what makes her happy. From this, she provides  perceptions and suggestions that can be practised to increase focus and happiness. It concludes with a discovery about psychic bisexuality – balancing the best of both worlds from what Marion sees as our male and female orientations: the objective and the intuitive respectively. Some words from this beautifully reflective book:

“My daydreams are nearly all of country cottages, of little gardens, of ‘settling down’ with flowers in vases and coloured curtains. I don’t think of backaches, dish washing.

I want to live amongst things that grow, not amongst machines. To live in a regular rhythm with sun and rain and wind and fresh air and the coming and going of the seasons. I want a few friends that I may learn to know and understand and talk to without embarrassment or doubt.

I want to write books, to see them printed and bound.

And to get clearer ideas on this great tangle of human behaviour.

To simplify my environment so that a vacillating will is kept in the ways that I love. Instead of pulled this way and that in response to the suggestion of the crowd and the line of least resistance.”

Image, Gems XII by fdecomite via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license