Erika Says

I’m often asked for social-good holiday gift recos – for friends, for corporates, for family. As the timeline for gift buying starts to scrunch, I thought I’d send out a few recommendations for the last minute crowd.

*Know of more? Add them in the comments, below.

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AdVenture Project
“Give a Stove” - $20 buys 1 stove for a family in need in Haiti. Helps stem the epidemic of respiratory diseases caused by dangerous, inefficient coal stoves.

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Conservation International
“Protect an Acre” - $15 protects 1 acre (and $45 protects 3!) of endangered rainforest.

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FIGS
“Threads for Threads” - $65 buys 1 tie & 1 uniform for  a child in need.

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Peace Bomb
“Buy Back” - $16 buys 1 bangle and clears 3 meters of bomb-littered land in Laos. The actual bangle is forged from the decommissioned bombs.

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Pencils of Promise
“Give the Gift of Education” - each pencil buys something different – from $25 to educate 1 child, to $25,000 to build 1 school.

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Women for Women International
“Gifts that Give Back” - a variety of gifts available, from animals, to education, to job skills training. Baby chicks are $15!

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World Wildlife Fund
“Adopt a Species” - $50 sponsors an animal from any species you choose!

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Other year round favorites include: Warby Parker, TOMS, and charity:water.

Enjoy & happy holidays!

I just rediscovered the poem that made me fall in love with words:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

-Billy Collins

thanks for the trip down nostalgia lane, @marcossalazar

On a family vacation to Rome, I had an experience that was the closest to spiritual I’ll probably ever get (or admit to getting). The sight of thousands of swooping starlings gliding over the skinny streets of the ancient city has stayed with me ever since.

Although video is a poor substitute for the real thing, this one comes pretty close:

via @thefoxisblack

UPDATE – I love this one more:

by @alexanderchen

…but I think this is how Imagine was always meant to be played: