Kind and gentle reader, my Something Good list is going on vacation just like me, and that means most likely there won’t be a new list until the first part of July. As I always do when I take a break from posting these, I want to remind you that there’s a whole archive of lists, 720+ of them, so you either need a break as much as I do, or you could start working backwards and see what you may have missed. In the meantime, stay tender, keep your heart open, and don’t give up. 💛
1. Poetry: Quiet Together and I Am No Sensei and Even with Perseverance by Julie Barton, What Goes On and The Day Before Graduation by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Twenty-Year Workshop by Lynne Knight and Next Time by Stuart Watson on Rattle, City Chickens by Alison Luterman on The Sun magazine, Native Grasses by Lynnell Edwards and Missing by Mary Morris and The Burning Kite by Ouyang Jianghe translated by Austin Woerner shared on The Slowdown by Maggie Smith, Our Lady of the Garden by Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, Künstlerroman by Sarah Ghazal Ali and Every Person Is an Address, Every Person Is a Calendar by Megan Fernandes on Poets.org, Instead of AI and Mother Maple by James Crews, This Thing in You by Julie Fehrenbacher, Dig and fill and empty and burn by Amanda Sandlin, Advice from a Raindrop by Kim Stafford on Heart Poems, and Untitled by Matt Moberg shared by Patti Digh. In related news, How to Read Poetry by Patti Digh.
2. Recipe I want to try: High Protein Ham and Cheese Biscuits. Oh how I adore a good biscuit.
3. Stillness: A Mini Photo Zine by Alix Klingenberg. I love her “scrying the photograph” writing exercise.
4. Good stuff on The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: I’m Not Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence; I’m Afraid Of Natural Stupidity and An American Mourning.
5. 7 Permission Slips for Gentle Adulting by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.
6. Five True Things by Laurie Wagner.
7. What’s Left When the Well Runs Dry by Elizabeth Kleinfeld. “On caregiver burnout, Buddhist practice, and why self-care is a prerequisite—not a reward.”
8. Weeding by Kari on A Grace Full Life.
9. The Goal Is Not to Miss You Less by Megan Falley. “What if time does not heal all wounds?”
10. I lost my beloved husband after 35 years, then my sister and my father. Here’s how I rebuilt my old happy self on The Guardian. “I tried everything from gong baths to junk food and intermittent crying as I attempted to deal with my grief. Nothing helped – until I started tuning in to what my body was telling me.”
11. Five practical ways to feel better and make a difference. “Dr Mark Williamson, director of Action for Happiness, shares five small changes that really can make a difference to your life.”
12. Why Mental Health Matters So Much for Introverts.
13. The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI on The Atlantic. “So we end up with canned perfection—writing that can’t really be argued with, because it has no underlying deliberative reasoning process, no train of thought. As I wrote on X recently, AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”
14. Pendant, Gravid, Asking to Fall on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.
15. From the archives: writing the book that gave me back my life. “On Giving Myself Permission to Create” on Poor Man’s Feast by Elissa Altman.
16. Is it true that … we should all be taking creatine? from The Guardian. “The supplement is a proven sports performance enhancer, but research is ongoing and for most people it’s an optional extra, not an essential.”
17. ‘My body is fat, not wrong’: how body neutrality – not positivity – helped me shed a lifetime of shame on The Guardian. “If I’d been taught this way of thinking as a child, I can’t begin to imagine how much easier things could have been.”
18. Shelf Life: Maggie Smith. “The author of A Suit or a Suitcase takes ELLE’s literary survey…In this ongoing series, authors share an assortment of their most memorable reads: the books that have shaped their lives as writers and as human beings.”
19. And finally, these random things I saved to my phone this week.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 