The Marci Rating System

I started using the Delightful app a while ago. (Okay, I checked: December 18, 2021) At first I was doing the 'three things you're grateful for today' thing, because I've read a lot about how gratitude is good for you.

But I love checking things off my to-do list, which means I usually want to do the 'three good things' in the app early in the day -- waiting till the evening isn't great for me. So I switched to 'three things I'm looking forward to today,' which I love, and which feels much more action-oriented.

After a couple years, though, it's been feeling a little repetitive. I'm looking forward to seeing the sun, to taking a walk outdoors, to eating good food and drinking good coffee, to hugging my family and patting my cat. All those things are still true! But I was wondering about ways to mix it up a little.

Then I read this 2023 CNN article (Share the 17 syllables a day that changed your lives, by Tess Taylor), which turned out to be a reference to a 2022 article by the same author (How 17 syllables a day can change your life).

Did I miss the 2022 article entirely? Did I see the headline and skip it deliberately? Did I read it and then forget about it? I have no idea, but I read it this year and it spoke to me. So I'm trying it! Three lines, three things? A natural fit! Anyway, we'll see how it goes. But I feel invigorated for another year of looking forward to the same good things, this time in haiku form!

“If you have a creative practice,” he says, “you have this force within you, a way of meeting your life wherever it is.”
(-quote from Luke Rodehorst, in Tess Taylor's article 'How 17 syllables a day can change your life')

In the House With No Doors
by Sarah Kay

we have given up on knocking.
Incoming! we say, with our eyes lowered for modesty,
or, Hello! or sometimes, Sorry, sorry!
You have to pass through everyone’s bedroom
to get to the kitchen. We only have two bathrooms.
As a courtesy, nobody will poop while you are showering,
but they might have to do their makeup or shave
if they are in a rush, if we have somewhere to be,
so you can recognize every person by their whistle
through a wet shower curtain, you haven’t seen your own face
on an unfogged mirror in weeks. It doesn’t matter,
self-consciousness has no currency here.
If you were nosy, I suppose the little bathroom trashcans
would spill their secrets to you, but why bother,
privacy is a language we don’t speak.
Someone is always awake before you,
the smell of coffee easing you into a today
they have already entered,
a bridge you will never need to cross first,
and no matter how latenight your owl,
there is always someone still awake
to eat popcorn with, to whisper your daily report to,
to compare notes on what good news you each caught in your nets.
In bed, you say, Goodnight! in one direction
and someone says it back, then turns and passes it,
so you fall asleep to the echo of goodnights down the long hallway
’til it donuts its way back around to your pillow.
Someone is doing a load of laundry,
if anyone wants to add some extra socks?
Someone is clearing the dishes,
someone has started singing Gershwin in the backyard
and you can’t help but harmonize,
and for a moment what you always hoped was true
finally is: loneliness has forgotten your address,
french toast browning on the stovetop,
the sound of everyone you love
clear as the sun giggling through the window,
not even a doorknob between you.

I saw this poem on ye olde facebooke with no author attribution, but some (admittedly not difficult) internet sleuthing turned up Danielle Doby's book 'I Am Her Tribe' which appears to be the source.


Let your heart break daily.
In conversation. Over song lyrics.
During the pause right before the sun rises.
While you’re sipping coffee + looking into
the eyes of someone talking about something they love.
For it’s when we break a little – we come alive.
It’s in this space of healing,
we get to expand.
And it’s here, in our vulnerability and openness,
we step into our greatest selves.
-Danielle Doby

Time for the annual linking of ‘What You Can’ by Hanne Blank! (First posted December 31st, 2012, which makes it practically ancient in internet years. Still great after all this time!)

“You did it in the dark and you did it by your wits and you did it alone, because all of us ultimately do. You also did it in broad daylight and with the help and love and strong backs of others helping to make it possible, because all of us ultimately do that, too.”

-Hanne Blank, What You Can

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Things I've learned about my poetry habits today:

1. I've shared the same poem/quote three times in three separate years, each time as if it was the first.

2. I once wrote a weird haiku about Michelle Obama and the Queen hugging?! ("I have no memory of this place.")

3. There were a few other poems I missed this morning, and I found that one I was thinking of about women meeting in the bathroom.

*This Vote Is Legally Binding, by T.Kingfisher
Yes, of course, all women know each other,
the way you always suspected.

*Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, by Naomi Shihab Nye
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
this is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

*Sometimes it hurts when people scorn internet culture, by Shiv
It would mean a second by second update of
“I love you”
“I’m scared”
“Are you all right?”
“Stay close”
“Be brave”

*What You Can, by Hanne Blank
You did it while you dialed that phone number that time, and waited for “hello?”