1. Rewilding A Forest | Artist and Poet Maria “Vildhjärta” Westerberg. “Maria was a romantic, animal-loving, dreamy child who, growing up, had a hard time conforming to the demands associated with the trajectory towards ‘a normal life’. As a young adult she became depressed, and was encouraged by her therapist to go for walks in the forest. The myriad of funny-looking twigs and sticks she found along the way immediately put her on a path to recovery. Now, 25 years later, she’s a celebrated ‘twig poet’ whose art is shown in galleries throughout Sweden. When a climate related crisis strikes the forest where she lives and works, she’s forced into a new type of creativity in order to save the place that once upon a time saved her.” This film is part of a series called “Something Beautiful for the World”, which is a collaboration between Reflections of Life, Campfire Stories and Happen Films.”
2. Are You a ‘Floor Person’? Why Lying on the Ground Feels So Good on The New York Times. (gift link) “For some, just a few minutes can quiet the mind.”
3. how to connect with your intuition from A Soul Called Joel. (video) “In this episode, I’ll guide you through a mindfulness practice and meditation to help you detach from your thoughts and access your inner wisdom. Key Points: Our intuition is always speaking to us, but we often miss its messages because we are not present or available. We can cultivate our intuition by being mindful and aware of our thoughts and feelings. A helpful practice is to ask yourself the question, ‘What do I need to know today?'”
4. My Anxiety: Is what’s wrong with me what’s wrong with everyone else? on The New Yorker.
5. 5 Daily Habits That Are Causing 90% Of Your Pain from Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.
6. What Happened Here? “It was just ice cream” on Short Reads.
7. What I Don’t Want To Write, on Behind the Book by Ijeoma Oluo.
8. The Shortest Path to Creativity from Jami Attenberg.
9. Welcome To Your Colonoscopy…..AGAIN.
10. Good stuff from Seth Godin: In search of incompetence and Willfully uninformed and Later or now?
11. Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar. “In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America’s most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. For the first time, digital scans of both Adams’s original negatives and his photographic prints appear side by side allowing viewers to see Adams’s darkroom technique, in particular, how he cropped his prints. Adams’s Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style landscape photography. Although a majority of the more than 200 photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities (see Collection Highlights). When offering the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams said in a letter, ‘The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment….All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.'”
12. Craft Tip from Maggie Smith: Finding the Sequence.
13. Keep making art.
14. Chip’s Wrirting lessons: Interview | Four Questions with Tom Romano.
15. My self-retrieval operation has become a self-becoming operation from Patti Digh, “And becoming never ends.”
16. Give up on happiness. Go hard at wonder. “Pathologically busy people clamoring for happiness. Founder of HATCH Monica Parker explains how we can do so much better than that.”
17. The surprising benefits of ‘awe walks’ for your health and well-being.
18. Year-Round Produce: Wyoming Gardener Outsmarts Winter With Underground Greenhouse.
19. ‘American Fiction’ And The Wet Eyes Of The Sentimentalist.
20. The 2024 Election is About the Rich Stealing From the Public.
21. Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers.
22. Wild Failure, Wild Writing, and Wild Business with Laurie Wagner on the For The People podcast on Spotify. “I have the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Wagner who’s an incredible author and writer who influences so many people in the United States to tap into their intuition and subconscious through wild writing. In this Episode we explore the journey of creative business development and success.”
23. “Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda” Brings Brilliant Trans Comics to the Famously Transphobic Netflix.
24. Joe Camp, Filmmaker Behind ‘Benji’ Franchise, Dies at 84 on The New York Times.
25. The Free Soloist Who Fell to Earth. “Austin Howell soloed harder and more often than almost anyone else in the country, documenting his exploits on Instagram and a podcast. But behind the scenes his mental health was faltering.”
26. A Maui chef’s lifeline: his restaurant as the island recovers from Lahaina wildfires.
27. One of the Best Things We Can Do for Ourselves as We Age. “This will help feed your soul and boost your overall health.”
28. My 15-Year-Old Daughter Died. I Recently Found A Box Of Hers — And What Was Inside Left Me Shaken.
29. Why People in Sweden Do Nature Right. “During a monthlong stay in Sweden, I realized that my Americanized relationship with the outdoors was off track. Here’s what I learned.”
30. Animals have overtaken our lives, and we’re having a wonderful time.
32. 64 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Grief.
33. How one dog and her new owner brought kindness into the lives of many.
34. Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler speak out about battle with MS. (video)
35. Ava DuVernay: ‘I’ve got real big-sister energy’. “The film maker, 51, on her early love of film, why she’s not on social media and the importance of silence.”
36. Recipe I want to try/eat: Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.
37. Sculpt The World short film, (Instagram reel). “It features many works from over the years in various environments, including never before seen work.”
39. Oprah Is Harming Black Women by Pushing Weight Loss Drugs and Diet Culture.
40. a remembering: who were we before social media? from Karen Walrond.
41. Wind, Blue Sky, a new poem from Susan Aizenberg.
42. The Unfolding is What is Beautiful from Gretchen Schmelzer. “Unfolding is a tender-hearted process. But the final blossom, while an impressive end goal, is not what holds the radiance. The true wonder –which is hard to stop watching when you watch the film of the sunflower—is in the process of becoming. It isn’t the flower, but the unfolding, that is beautiful.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 
I love the Maria Westerberg short film.
When I first started practicing yoga, the thing I loved most was just lying on the floor. There is something healing about being on the floor.
I was just thinking about that author’s colonoscopy article, and here is her second one on the day of my colonoscopy prep! I’d read her first one and it was so encouraging. I love when things like this happen. 💕
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