1. Taking Mindfulness to the Mat on Lion’s Roar. “Applying the Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness to hatha yoga asanas, says Frank Jude Boccio, can enrich practitioners’ experiences and cultivate awareness of the unity of body and mind.”

2. Reasons to be Cheerful, “a non-profit editorial project that is tonic for tumultuous times.” I’ve shared this before, but it’s worth a revisit.

3. October issue of The Sun online, “We’ve lifted our paywall. In this time of isolation, we want to share stories about what connects us, the challenges we face, and the moments when we rise to meet them.”

4. Mindful by Design, “an audio course all about mindfulness, meditation, evidence of how it all works and some guidance to make it work for you. Over five episodes and accompanying meditations, Rev angel Kyodo williams introduces core principles of the mindfulness practice through both science and lived experience.”

5. Poetry Unbound. “Your new ritual: Immerse yourself in a single poem, guided by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Short and unhurried; contemplative and energizing. Anchor your week by listening to the everyday poetry of your life, with new episodes on Monday and Friday during the season.”

6. Tending Joy and Practicing Delight, Ross Gay on On Being. “To be with Gay is to train your gaze to see the wonderful alongside the terrible; to attend to and meditate on what you love, even in the midst of difficult realities and as part of working for justice.”

7. Hearing Your Voice, a new podcast from Melissa Toler. “I’m having conversations about all of these things with Black health and wellness professionals and fat activists who have taken a weight-inclusive approach to their work. My goal is to uncover the lies and myths that get sold to us, but more importantly I want us to explore how we can filter out the cultural noise and begin to hear our own voice.”

8. Wild Writing Teacher Training with Laurie Wagner, “a 5-month-long class for men and women who want to learn how to lead this life-changing writing process that invites people to show up on the page in a deeply powerful and authentic way. The teacher training will take trainees into the depth of their own writing, guide them into leadership, and show them how to create, market, and run their own Wild Writing workshops.”

9. 10 things you need to know to stop a coup.

10. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. In related news, Collapse Takes A Lifetime. America Is Just Getting Started.

11. Wisdom from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Truth cannot be borrowed. It can only be experienced directly. The fruit of exploration, suffering, and the direct encounter between one’s own spirit and reality — the reality of the present moment and the reality of ten thousand lifetimes.” A few weeks ago, his sangha announced that Hanh had stopped eating, was getting closer to death. May he have ease in this time.

12. Maggie Smith and the poem that captured the mood of a tumultuous year. From four years ago, even more true than it was then.

13. Recipes I want to try: Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Spicy Vegan Nuggets (video), and The Best Ever Vegan Mac N Cheese. P.S. did you know you don’t have to be a vegan to cook and eat yummy vegan food?

14. Wisdom from Audre Lorde: “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

15. For a Good Time, Call. “On the party line, Maria and I can be anything, or anyone. But always, we’re adults.”

16. Hula Hoop Master. (video) This kid is me, with all of life, all the ways, all the things.

17. The Courage, a print by Lora Zombie.

17. The Case for Writing a Memoir in Essays. “Beth Kephart on the Power of Fragmentation in Books By Sonja Livingston, Megan Stielstra, and More.”

1. Morning walks. Enjoy this set of pictures, kind and gentle reader, as they may be some of the last. On our walk yesterday, we were turning towards the final mile, heading towards home when the sky was finally light enough for me to turn off my headlamp, which means I won’t be able to take many pictures from now on, as we enter the dark season. We saw a heron earlier in the week and were able to get a picture, but on the next walk it was so dark that even though I got really close to it, you can’t even see it in the picture I took, and an owl flew over my head and sat it a tree close enough to look but too dark for a picture. I enjoy the quiet and cool of this season and the one that follows, but it certainly cramps my style as a photographer.

(P.S. WordPress updated their editor, so now the options are to either add a single picture, one at a time, rather than as a group like you used to be able to, OR to create a gallery — learning a new editor isn’t exactly what I wanted to do this morning, and I’m not sure how I feel about this gallery option, but everything changes, and this is just another reminder of that).

2. Writing practice. I’ve started my own personal challenge: every day for the next 61 days, I’m reading a chapter from a writing book (I started with Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir) and then writing at least 1667 words. I still write my morning pages, and do Wild Writing practice twice a week, but this is a focused intention and effort to work on the book I’m writing. The other part of this challenge is to get up every morning at 5 am (I’d been sleeping in on the days Eric walked Ringo), which includes getting more and better sleep and spending less time on my phone.

3. Fall garden. The season is officially over, as water restrictions are in place here and starting on the first of October, we are no longer allowed to water. Eric has been slowly cleaning things out and up, and yesterday he harvested pumpkins.

4. Being retired. So much privilege, I absolutely am aware of it and so grateful. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for me to already be burnt out and trying to work through this moment in time, attempting to cope and take care of myself in this context with the job that I had.

5. My tiny family. Ringo can be such a pain sometimes, but even when he’s being a jerk, he makes me laugh — how he has to dig up the couch and bark and flip over and run around before settling down every night when we sit down to watch some TV, his indignation at any animal that refuses to move when he demands it (in particular, heron and cats), how when Eric takes off his neck gaiter after the morning walk Ringo insists on wearing it and asks for it back if you take it off even though he hates wearing a dog collar, how he’s claimed Sam’s couch as one of his napping spots, how he has to bark at our neighbor dog Rizzo every night before he goes to bed as if he’s telling her good night. Eric has almost worn out the full set of markers he asked for last Christmas leaving me love notes on the kitchen counter.

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Bonus joy: the yellow leaves covering our backyard, the bloom on my spider plant, writing and hanging out with Mikalina, tea with Chloe’, getting in the pool, sitting in the sauna with Eric, hot cocoa in my coffee, pay day, having the money to pay all our bills on time and in full, the smell of gingerbread, crunchy peanut butter Clif bars, texting with my mom and brother, good podcasts, reading in bed at night while Ringo and Eric sleep.