Three Truths and One Wish

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1. Truth: “my little world shattered / but the big world did not / not only did it have to carry on / it needed me to keep up with it / I was still supposed to care about / the little things that didn’t matter / wrinkled clothing and eye exams / the day of the week and unpaid bills.” Even though people like Oprah glory in the decade of 50 for women, marketing it as a time of freedom and fearlessness, for me it has been one of the most difficult eras of my life. Sure, it was a time when I took lessons and learned to swim, completed my 500 hour yoga teacher training and started teaching regularly, and retired from 20 years at CSU with the hopes of finally fully living as a writer and contemplative practice guide. And yet, it was also a time when I was clinically burnt out, in the thick of menopause, COVID happened and in those first few months one of my dogs and my sister-in-law died, I was hospitalized and had two surgeries, my dad was put on home hospice care and during that process my mom had a stroke and I was one of their primary caretakers during that time, my mother-in-law was hospitalized and died, and my mom’s health (mental and physical) continued to decline until she needed fulltime care and was placed in hospice but she “took too long to die” so recently we had to find another place for her to live while we were in the process of getting her house cleared out and ready to sell. Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been dealing with attempts to steal our credit, I got off my anti-anxiety meds (terrible timing), tried CPAP therapy only to fail and trigger a season of panic attacks and sleep issues, and after a biopsy and ultrasound I started having daily migraines that led to an MRI (“unremarkable”), and Ringo has had his own series of health issues that have required my close attention and effort. It’s been a lot, and not at all what I expected.

2. Truth: “but what about the tender things that did / the hungry bellies and global warming / violent war and finding cures for disease / rescued animals and community gardens / I wanted to carry more but my arms were broken / I wanted to keep helping but my heart was too.” That list above are the issues of “my little world” but there’s also the ways loved ones and those dear to me have struggled, and I don’t have to tell you, kind and gentle reader, of all the suffering and chaos happening in the rest of the world. At times, I am barely standing, can’t sleep or manage to take a shower or feed myself properly, but the desire to ease suffering in others and the world never leaves me. My therapist plays this trick on me where she asks, “if one of your students or a friend were struggling in this same way, what would you say to them?” I respond with such wisdom and compassion, AND I find it so hard to embody the same, to apply and experience what I know in my own life.

3. Truth: “I am now learning to be both / the lighthouse and the sinking ship / the beacon and the wreckage.” It doesn’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to be ready. Just start, just show up, and be honest about the difficulty because maybe that is exactly what someone needs to hear — not just the answer or the fix but also how hard it is, how messy and complicated. It’s hard for me to face it right now, hard for me to take care of myself, AND I’m not giving up. I hope you won’t either.

One wish: Maybe that’s my one wish, that even with our broken hearts and bones, we don’t give up. I was reading a Mark Nepo book this morning, a part where he says, “The instant a bone breaks, the two ends begin to reach for each other” and “The same mysterious force of life animates our hearts. When near the suffering of others, our inborn care will reach for others immediately if we don’t hesitate or block the love” (The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life, page 146). There’s nothing wrong with being broken and it is in our nature to move towards healing, to connect. Stay tender, keep your heart open, don’t give up. We need each other. Keep reaching out, don’t hesitate or block the love, learn to be the lighthouse and the sinking ship, the beacon and the wreckage. 

Something Good

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Special Personal Request: Kind and gentle reader, my dear friend Chloe’s sister, Aimee Brookens, DO, is raising funds to help pay six months of rent and cover the renovation costs of opening a medical clinic. “Unity Health Center will prioritize caring for the uninsured, underinsured, and those utilizing Medicaid while emphasizing equitable and responsible care for minority groups and all historically underserved populations including BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, Hispanic or Latinx. By creating a welcoming environment and building a trusting relationship between the medical team and patient, Unity Health Center will create a medical home that fosters healing and growth in the Greater Lansing [Michigan] community.” ANY amount you can give to help would be greatly appreciated, tax deductible, and donations can be made online at Unity Health Center. Thank you!

1. Poetry: Learning the Soft Way by James Crews, and in related James Crews news Episode 163 of Emerging Form podcast: James Crews on the Radical Act of Rest, On My History of Kissing Everyone At Parties by Isabelle Correa on The Slowdown with Maggie Smith, Twenty Seven Haikulings from Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Maximum Strength and When I Feel I Do Not Belong and Waking to Twenty-Two Degrees on April 24 and I left the ocean and Letter to an Unnamed Star by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Wage Love by Moudi Sbeity on Heart Poems, Cynthia Wanders My Neighborhood by Thomas Centolella and In the not-not-woods by Malia Maxwell and Love Poem to Taco Bell by Rebecca Bornstein on Poets.org, Bravery Is Your Companion by Julie Barton, Become Unusable by Frederick Joseph, The Kraken by Dante Di Stefano and My Father’s Painting by Bryan Walpert and Sleepless City of Rising Light by Matt Joseph on Rattle, A question that’s guided me for 30 years by Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, What the Doctor Said by Raymond Carver shared by Patti Digh, Poet Ada Limón Has a Trick for Public Speaking (“Plus, her entertaining strategy, favorite lip gloss, and a beautiful way to think about death”), Initiate yourself into the world of magical things, “Do not wait to be invited {3 poems from Hermit Season}” on Earth & Verse, and this from Kristin Noelle‘s recent newsletter:

“This is a blessing for the ones who feel sad

For the ones whose limbs feel heavy
and hearts feel weighed down.

For the ones who can’t quite name the cause,
or there’s too many causes to name.

If you’d like, you could start here:

One long, slow breath.
One long, slow exhale.
One hand on your heavy heart.

‘Dear heart,’ you could say.
‘Dear heavy heart.’

And after a few more breaths,
you might move that hand to cup your cheek
and with a grandmother’s tender love,
you might hold your hand there.

‘Precious one,’ your hand could say.
And, ‘Yes, love,’
Which is to say Yes,
you are feeling all of this.
You are holding all of this.
This is all so heavy now.

Maybe there’s nothing else to do just now.

Maybe there’s no where else to be.

Maybe sadness can be here,
and like the green that emerges silently
from barren branches in spring—
green that at first is not green,
but scraggly nubs of no-green—
like that green, maybe not-sadness will arrive in time
and offer you new gifts
beyond the ones that sadness brings.

There is so much life pulsing beneath the surface of you.
Swirling in the spaces around you and between you
and all that is.
The impulse to shift
to grow
to mutate
to break apart
to come together
to fall down
and rise up
to change seasons
to push out blossoms that look and smell sweet.
Sadness can’t stop any of this.

So maybe it’s okay that it’s here.

‘Precious one,’ I say to you with your sadness.
And: ‘Yes, love.'”

Also, in related poetry news, a new podcast, The Poetry Hotline. “The plan will be to have a biweekly podcast where I invite my poet friends to read a poem aloud, to talk briefly about their piece and maybe answer a couple of questions. Then, I will give a little pep talk at the end.” Or, the short version: “A biweekly poetry newsletter, pep talk and podcast. Poetry as a life preserver.”

2. This actually is my first rodeo (“Why being new at life is not the same as failing at it”) by Jasmine on The Tiny Joy Project. 

3. What to Do When the Signs Stop. (“How I learned to talk to Andrea again”) by Megan Falley.

4. Accidental art therapy by Jenny Lawson.

5. Life is a Potluck, (“sometimes all you have to offer are scanned notebook scribbles”) by Brad Montague on The Enthusiast.

6. Good stuff from The Awkward Yeti: Courage Building and Mondays.

7. Good stuff from Open Secrets: So It Goes (“Could getting rid of my estranged family’s gifts heal me?”) and I’m Italian? (“How a DNA test, not mine, changed my life”).

8. A Missed Goodbye, or Perhaps Not by Swasti Bhattacharyya. “Life continues. There is no need for goodbyes.”

9. Good stuff from Jamie Attenberg on Craft Talk: About a Tree (“I see it every day”) and When Changing Tense Makes You Tense (“The right but annoying move”).

10. Rehabilitating the Active Imagination: Samantha Harvey on How to Be a Reader in the Age of Fractured Attention on The Marginalian.

11. Reclaiming Our Hijacked Attention from Kaira Jewel’s April 2026 Newsletter.

12. I Missed the Fox, “And I think it means something” on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

13. No Crumb. “A list post including dreams, food, books, the garden, and more” by Erin Geesaman Rabke.

14. For Americans Who Feel Lost in America on The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz.

15. The Case for “Strategic Laziness,” According to Artists and Athletes. “Rest and creativity go hand in hand. As these pros explain, downtime improves performance, focus and long-term success.”

16. This Is a Gardening Show review – Zach Galifianakis’ charming new series feels like perfect TV on The Guardian. “Part lesson, part lark, these 15-minute episodes are a total joy. They have such a deliriously light touch they will make you want to run outside and plunge your hands into the soil.”

17. The Best Literary Fiction of April.

18. Nobody talks about why most of the people who actually change their lives didn’t follow a system, didn’t read a book, and didn’t set goals, they just finally admitted something to themselves and everything downstream of it slowly reorganized. “The warehouse shift that shattered my color-coded self-help journals taught me what thousands of productivity gurus couldn’t: real transformation happens when you’re too exhausted to maintain the lie anymore.”

19. Repetition, Repair, and Restoring the Broken Chain, “A prompt from my daughter” by Jena Schwartz.

20. Imagining Her Back to Herself, “She was more than the way she was found” by Patti Digh.

21. Live Simply: 10 Lessons for a Lighter Life by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

22. Of Teachers and Cheaters, Rules and Tools. “Great artists steal, right?” by Danny Gregory.

23. Tick-Tock, Mister Wick from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds on his 50th birthday.

24. In times of destruction, create something: things to make by Isabel Abbott.

25. My family tried to eat fewer ultra-processed foods for five years. Here’s what we learned on The Guardian. “Cutting UPFs from our grocery list was expensive, laborious and time-consuming.”

26. 4 Things That Are Not Your Responsibility — Even If Your Anxiety Says They Are. “Consider this your permission slip to let go of the pressure.”

27. What to Do If You Hate Your Job—but Can’t ‘Just Quit’.

28. Why rest alone doesn’t restore energy.

29. And finally, I love this idea from Austin Kleon.