1. Poetry: The Long Run by Linda Gregerson and At the Entrance of a Love Poem, I Hesitate by Maya C. Popa on The Slowdown with Maggie Smith, A Witnessing by Ted Kooser on Rattle, After Watching the Difficult Film and When Feeling Stuck by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, What time is it? (it’s pantoum time) from Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, The Paradox by Sarah Kay, A Way of Staying Soft by Sam Aureli on Heart Poems, Listen by Barbara Crooker shared by Patti Digh, I Don’t Know Much, But by Julie Barton, Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon, and Empathy by James Crews.
2. Good stuff from Maria Popova on The Marginalian: The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair and How Not to Dwell on the Past.
3. Against Indifference by Frederick Joseph. “On mutual aid, exhaustion, and fighting to keep one another here.”
4. Saying goodbye is a lifelong practice by Patti Digh. “The dead leave us with an impossible assignment: to remain here without them. And slowly, awkwardly, painfully, and sometimes angrily, we learn to do it. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But by continuing. By loving other people well. By remembering. By saying their names aloud. By telling stories. By allowing ourselves to be changed.”
5. ‘I laughed out loud dozens of times’: authors choose books to make you fall back in love with reading. “From a darkly comic new novel to a gripping 1950s memoir – Katherine Rundell, Malala Yousafzai, Matt Haig and others appearing at Hay festival pick titles to tempt you”. In related news, The New York Times’s Summer Reading Bucket List. (gift link) “Read along with the Book Review this summer: Can you check off five items before fall arrives?”
6. ‘I thought I was the saviour of the planet’: how Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray found a wellness cult – and lost her mind on The Guardian. “She landed a role in hit TV show Skins at 17 and went on to star in the fantasy epic. Then she was drawn towards a mysterious spiritual community. How did she end up being sectioned?”
7. Endangered Butterflies Are Thriving Behind Bars. “In the tender, methodical work of rescuing an imperiled butterfly species, incarcerated women are finding a sense of purpose.”
8. The radical act of slowing down. “A meditation on how our obsession with speed and productivity undermines our health, relationships, and chances for lasting success.”
9. How To Balance Being Online With Mindfully Logging Off.
10. Can’t Stick To Journaling? Try These 4 Simple Hacks.
11. Feeling Down? 12 Science-Backed Ways to Get Out of A Funk in Just One Day.
12. Chance of rain by Jasmine on The Tiny Joy Project. “What happens when you stop predicting every storm.” *sigh*
13. How to Survive a People-Centric Job as an Introvert.
14. More of the same: how creative rituals can help you break free from the idea echo chamber. “Why inspiration feels harder to come by and how three types of creative ritual could be our strongest defence against the slow erosion of taste, attention, and intention.”
15. Things I’m still learning about writing on The Imperfectionist.
16. What It Means To Love Someone by Sara Kuburic. “Six quiet truths about the hardest, most human thing we do.”
17. Emerging Form Episode 165: Ramona Ausubel Will Get You Unstuck. “Drawing from her newest book, Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page, Ramona shares with us why certain strategies work only at certain stages of creative projects. We talk about finding patterns, ways to develop characters and create scenes, different ways to approach different drafts, the half-draft approach, finding opposition and so much more.”
18. The real AI by Seth Godin.
19. 8 Kind and Regret-Free Ways to Declutter Things by Tammy Strobel on Be More With Less.
20. The last Pap smear by Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie. “There’s a last time for everything. Whoa.”
21. what lurks at the bottom of boxes and bags by Elissa Altman on Poor Man’s Feast. “Piecing together our truth from ancient papers and photos.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 