Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

With today's edition of Saturday Sharing, you can learn about the practice of forgiveness, and why forgiveness is good for your health; delight in reading Lewis Carroll's original Alice's Adventures Under Ground; learn how to have A Word A Day dropped in your in-box; attend a spectacular Northern Lights show; troll through the Museum of Bad Art (one of my favorite finds); and read the moving stories and poems of survivors whose collage portraits are the work of Jane Smith Bernhardt for the Hibakusha Peace Project.

✭ People who like words and the magic they can bring into life will like A.Word.A.Day, or AWAD, created 16 years ago by Anu Garg. Join this community of more than 900,000 linguaphiles in 200 countries and share your enjoyment of words, wordplay, language, and literature. This electronic publication provides daily a vocabulary word, the word's definition and pronunciation, information with audio clip, etymology, usage example, quotation, and more. The New York Times has described AWAD as "the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace." A premium, ad-free e-mail subscription is $45; a free edition, with sponsor ads, also is available. Go here to sign up.

✭ The practice of forgiveness is good for your health, according to this Mayo Clinic article. When you embrace forgiveness, the article indicates, "you embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy", which, in turn, improve spiritual and psychological well-being, reduce stress, and lower blood pressure and risk for alcohol and substance abuse. The site Forgive for Good lists nine steps you can take to make forgiveness a way of being.

✭ Now here's a museum that's proud of its collection: The Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, which bills its holdings as "Art Too Bad To Be Ignored". Begun in the basement of a private home in Boston, MoBA is a community-based institution "dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art." The collection ranges over portraiture, landscapes, "unseen forces", "noodity", "blue people", "poor traits" of the human or canine condition, the obscure, and the accidental. Believe me, I've seen worse. MoBA on FaceBook will keep you connected.

✭ Recently, I learned (and now you know, too) that the British Library provides one of its literary treasures online: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the electronically displayed illuminated manuscript includes both text and audio. It's a delight to "page" through the e-book, enlarge the 37 images, and remark upon the story's hold on our imaginations.

✭ August's Northern Lights show truly was spectacular. Go here and be amazed.

✭ The 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima was commemorated August 6. Seven years ago, artist  Jane Smith Bernhardt went to Hiroshima to interview survivors and sketch their likenesses on paper. Her multimedia Hibakusha Peace Project, which she describes as "an opportunity to reflect on the memory of Hiroshima with the hope of transformation" through art, is her deeply moving tribute: a series of collage portraits, accompanied by survivors' stories and poems. (Large files may be downloaded from the site.)

Jane Bernhardt, Hiromu Morishita

Related resources: Hibakusha Stories; Jane Bernhardt's "The Great Awakening" (Good Morning America, August 4, 2010) and "65th Anniversary of Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Spiritual Reflection", On Faith at The Washington Post; and Kenji Tamaki's "Hibakusha: The Story of Akira Nagagsaka" (August 9, 2010)

Jane Smith Bernhardt's We Are Here: Love Never Dies (Burnham Press, January 2010)