Friday Fun Flier XXXI
Our first donation, the update, and an amazing book about the power of dogs
When I first opened up exclusive content on The Well-Lived Life, I pledged that I’d donate 10% of whatever my take-home from The Well-Lived Life was to charity. Yesterday, I made the first donation!
I was so blown away by the documentary Resurface (which highlights the work that Operation Surf is doing) that I decided to send our first donation of $87 their way.
It’s a small start, but as we grow, we’ll be able to raise more and more!
If you’d like to contribute and read along with The Unfamiliar Movement Project, you can join here for 40% off ($3 per month or $24 per year):
Quote of the week
"To me, the sea is a continual miracle; the fishes that swim, the rocks, the motion of the waves, the ships with men in them. What stranger miracles are there?"
-Walt Whitman
The update
I’m currently headed across Costa Rica from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and I’m about to enter my yoga teacher training in Puerto Viejo! After it’s over, there will be loads of new content to read about my experience learning and growing through it. Stay tuned!
A nail-biting true story I read last week:
The Cruelest Miles by Gay Salisbury
“An attorney named Robert Fink, who years later would defend Al Capone, would tip his hat whenever he passed a husky he particularly respected, and he once managed to persuade a jury that his sled-dog peg was acting in self-defense when he slaughtered twenty-eight sheep owned by the Pacific Cod Storage Company.
‘Is Alaska a dog country or a sheep country?” he asked the jury.’”
If you’ve ever seen the movie Balto and you’re wondering about the true story, this is the book for you! It’s been a long time since I’ve read a non-fiction book as packed with suspense as this one.
Have you heard of Nome, Alaska? You can sum it up this way: it’s located in the middle of the most inconvenient place to build a city. Nome is located on the southern tip of the Seward Peninsula, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. It was put up in the late 1800s when gold was discovered nearby.
In 1925, the worst-case scenario happened. Nome was struck by a Diptheria epidemic. Because I’d only seen the animated film prior to reading this book, I didn’t understand what a horrific and terrifying disease Diphtheria is. It causes scabbing on the inside of the throat that eventually suffocates the afflicted person to death. And it’s horribly contagious.
It’s also curable, but in 1925, someone forgot to include the necessary serum in Nome’s freight ship for the year. Then the epidemic broke out, in the worst winter on record. The nearest serum was hundreds of miles away. Things looked dire for Nome.
Who saved the day? Dogs, of course. Twenty dog-sled drivers and their canines ran the necessary serum 674 miles in 5 1/2 days in the dead of the Alaskan winter. It’s a nailbiter, folks!
My favorite thing about this book was hearing about the brutality of the Alaskan winter. There are stories in here about people losing their minds, fighting frostbite, and dogs displaying day-saving genius. There are also loads of crazy people (a tradition that I’ve heard continues in Alaska to this day).
This book is worth your time, I promise.
That’s all for this week, folks! Thanks for tuning in. I hope your week ahead is filled with love and light!