Grief is the price of love, and it is expensive. ~Hugh Hollowell
1. Inside Outside: A Contemplative Nature Writing Weekend. “Revitalize your connection to the wilderness and your writing through this immersive weekend of nature writing and contemplative practices in the gorgeous landscape of McCarthy, Alaska. Together we’ll deepen our writing practice as we turn our attention to the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of wild nature and human nature. We’ll be nourished by the unique forests, rivers, and mountains of Wrangell-St Elias National Park for inspiration, humility, and connection with ourselves and the more-than-human world. Facilitator, Michelle Latvala, will guide us in writing practices, nature practices, and embodied contemplative practices in order to write more deeply from the landscape and from ourselves.”
2. Support Sabrina Ward Harrison’s Battle with Parkinson’s. “Over the past two decades, Sabrina’s books, creativity courses, in-person workshops, and speaking engagements have inspired individuals around the world to embrace their creativity & bravely share their own unique stories. Now Sabrina is faced with a life-altering diagnosis. Sabrina is battling Early-Onset Parkinson’s Disease, a rare form of the disease that strikes young people and worsens significantly over time.”
3. Sea Otter Reintroduction Could Mend Ecological and Colonial Scars.
4. A Simple Guide to Not Being an A**hole from Johh Pavlovitz. “The Subversive Activism of Human Kindness.”
5. Good stuff from Seth Godin: Success is not an option, and “I don’t learn that way”, and Assume goodwill, and What does the world owe us?, and An overlooked and powerful editing tool, and The seduction of false promises. I think my favorite thing about Seth’s posts is he always gets right to the point.
6. Good stuff from Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie: Counting them all (“A little essay for you that’s a love story, too”), and The way of desire (“A poem, some process thoughts, and some link love”), and Of work, healing, and play (“Or: Rewiring and reframing is hard!”).
7. Poems from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Still Learning to Pray, and Make a Wish, and The Tender Gap, and All the Excuses, and Self-Compassion, and Two Days Before Mother’s Day I Visit Your Grave, and Toward Peace, and Grief Is Not Like the Squirrel in My Garden, and Coming Home the First Time after Our Son Died.
8. Maria Popova Answers the Orion Questionnaire, “In which we get to know our favorite writers better by exploring the sacred and mundane.” There are some other great authors featured in this series, which you can find here.
9. An Interview with Tommy Orange. “The Pulitzer-Prize nominated author on writing, personal history, and looking ahead.” This book is on my summer reading list.
10. Letting Go of Sentimental Items. (video) “In this video I talk about our relationship with things – specifically the things that we have a deep emotional connection with. How can we let go of our sentimental items?”
11. Increase Your Agency By Responding, Instead of Reacting. “Ever wonder why your emails tend to be better when you wait a little before replying? Choosing to take a pause before we act may sound simple, but it yields powerful results. Longtime mindfulness teacher and author Andrew Safer shares a few ways we can practice pausing, both at our job and everywhere in our life.”
12. 6 Reasons You Might Be Messy That Have Nothing To Do With Laziness.
13. 6 Simple Dutch Habits for Happiness, Health and Self Care. (video) “Have you ever heard of niksen? How about gezellig? Let’s talk about some simple Dutch habits for happiness, health and self care. I love sharing a bit more of my culture with you today, and talk about some things that are quite normal for us Dutchies, but might not be so normal everywhere.”
14. What is chaos gardening and should we all be trying it? “This gardening trend is one for the rulebreakers – and anyone wanting to help the environment.”
15. 7 Accessible Ways To Build Resilience In the Storm.
16. 101 Additional Advices, from Kevin Kelly. “Six years ago I celebrated my 68th birthday by gifting my children 68 bits of advice I wished I had gotten when I was their age. Every birthday after that I added more bits of advice for them until I had a whole book of bits. That book was published a year ago as Excellent Advice for Living, which many people tell me they read very slowly, just one bit per day. In a few days I will turn 73, so again on my birthday, I offer an additional set of 101 bits of advice I wished I had known earlier. None of these appear in the book; they are all new.”
17. Time lapse video of cactus blooming. (Instagram reel)
18. Louisiana Channel on Instagram. “1000+ artists, architects & writers interviews. Produced by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.”
19. Joyful persistence: my talk for the UBC School of Creative Writing graduation from Sarah Leavitt. Graduation speeches can be so inspiring, and are usually pretty short so don’t take long to read, watch, or listen to, and at any given time most of us are “graduating” from one thing to another and could use the advice.
21. Fredrik Backman on Creative Anxiety and Procrastination. (video) “At the Simon & Schuster centennial, author Fredrik Backman discusses the highs and lows of being an author, from attempting to get along with the voices in your brain, to the hidden joys of jet lag.” This is hilarious, and his last line is super sweet.
22. On having more interesting ideas. “A reader asked me how I go about finding interesting things to write about. I am not sure how good I am at being interesting, but I do spend a lot of time coming up with ideas—both for essays and for other contexts—and I am much better at it than I used to be. So…”
23. Good stuff from Lion’s Roar: Detox Your Mind: 5 Practices to Purify the 3 Poisons (“Five Buddhist teachers share practices to clear away the poisons that cause suffering and obscure your natural enlightenment”), and What to Say When Someone Dies (“Avoid pat expressions, says Valerie Brown. What a grieving person needs is loving presence”), and How to Make Friends with Your Aging Body (“If you have a negative body image, says Jenna Hollenstein, contemplating the five skandhas can help”).
24. Curating Your Online Life For Good, “Or how to self protect from the cray.”
25. The Bookshelf Embodied from Jena Schwartz. “A Father, a Daughter, and the Shared Language of Books.”
26. A Bold New Documentary Does Everything The Whale Tried And Failed To Do.
28. Good stuff from The Gurdeep Magazine: Caring for Our Global Family: The Key to Finding Joy in a Troubled World, and Finding balance in our race of constantly chasing after the elusive “next thing,” and Ensure you prioritize the health of your mind this summer.
29. Come by Chance podcast. “If you’ve ever been to Newfoundland, you know it’s a place where fog can envelop you so deeply, you don’t know where you’re going or where you came from. When two men, born in the same rural Newfoundland hospital on the same day, discover an unbelievable 52-year-old secret, it changes the way they see themselves forever. But this isn’t the end of the story. Because it turns out these men are not alone. A series of other close calls and near misses have begun to emerge, and not only at Come by Chance hospital. Come By Chance is a story about what it means to belong in a family — and how a twist of fate can upend the life you thought you knew.”
30. 13 People Who Operated on Themselves. “From the Founding Father who stuck whalebone where he shouldn’t have to the only known woman to have given herself a C-section.”
31. Gardens & The History of Gardening from Patti Digh.
32. Good stuff from Short Reads: Haunted (“How soon is too soon to panic?”), and Pantoum for 1979 (“Two steps forward, one step back”), and Banana-Strawberry Smoothie (“A first responder’s first loss”).
33. Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution on PBS. “From the basement bars of ‘70s New York to the peak of the global charts, this is the story of disco: its rise, its fall… and its legacy. Revelling in iconic tracks and remarkable footage, this is a powerful, revisionist history of the disco age.”
34. gardening as simple noticing. “What if you just want to watch plants be? What if gardening can be just care and attention, not control? For me, it’s more interesting when the plants don’t do what I’ve intended. I just like to watch them up close.”
35. 7 Things to Cut Out for a 50% Boost in Your Time and Energy from Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.
36. The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco.
37. An Invitation to Change the World from Gretchen Schmelzer.
38. Ten Years Out of Academia from Anne Helen Petersen. “Grad school theoretically expands your marketability and job prospects. What happens when it narrows them?”
39. Good stuff from The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad: Drawing in the Margins, and Choking Under Pressure, and Lost Dog, Lost Keys, Found Joy.
40. Good stuff from Positive.News: The most empowering changes you have made in your lives (“We asked readers: what have you done to empower yourself in these strange times? This is what you said”), and How to support your mental health during a crisis, according to you (“We asked Positive News readers what advice you have for coping during difficult times. This is what you said”), and Life lessons: Joseph Coelho on what life so far has taught him (“The poet and UK children’s laureate talks about avoiding clickbait, getting out on his bike and the joy of working with young people”), and Five ways to bring more awe into your life (“Experiencing more awe can alter our perception of time, research shows. Here are five ways to seek it out”), and Dutch digital detoxers unplug en masse. Will the world follow? (“Members of The Offline Club are swapping out their phones for board games, books and tranquillity. Now, the concept is poised to go global”).
41. Will Trump’s Conviction Matter? from Frederick Joseph. “Trump is the first former President convicted of a crime…now what?” Also from Frederick, A Great Deal Is Happening, “Catching up on some things, offering perspective, and inviting you to hang.”
42. Harlem World from Robert Jones, Jr.
43. an exhaustively researched compilation of the greatest black erotic thrillers ever made from Samantha Irby.
44. How To Break Up With Your Phone from Nikita Gill. “On hyper-connectivity doing a number on our brains.”
45. I love Jamie Attenberg’s Sunday Threads. Here are some recent ones: The Best Writing Advice You’ve Ever Gotten, and The Mistakes that Stuck, and Best Conversations.
46. Anne Lamott: Thoughts on Love, Sobriety, and Second Chances on The Conversation podcast.
47. Lessons From My First Surf Lesson from Andrea Gibson.
48. Suzy Vitello Tells Us About Making Friends with Your Spidey Sense on Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar series, “in which I invite an author to tell us five things—not only about their most recent book, but about their life too.”
49. Don’t Pay Attention to This from Danny Gregory. “The way to think better turns out to be to think less.” Also from Danny, Why So Sensitive?
50. The Manicurist’s Daughter, “Excavating history as a member of the ‘1.5 generation’.”
51. Geoff Tice | Jokes with a G | Full Stand-Up Comedy Special. (video). This was filmed at our local comedy club.
52. How Introverts Can Increase Their Self-Esteem.
53. The Limits of Empathy from Ijeoma Oluo.
54. We Are All Made Of Stars. “We are all made of stardust. When we die, we return to that fundamental state. Gabriela’s experience looking at her father’s ashes suggests that maybe, on some deep level, nothing and no one is ever truly lost. We come from the cosmos and we return to it. Somewhere inside, we seem to intuitively know and long for that connection to something greater.”
55. 5 Questions With Leslie Jordan Garcia, MBA, MPH, CEDRS, PT, Body Liberation Coach.
56. Rachel Kramer Bussel on Why Her Mental Health Drastically Improved When She Stopped Posting on Social Media on the Open Secrets Podcast.
57. I went a week without ultra-processed foods. Here’s what I learned. In related “health & fitness” news, I walked for 90 minutes every day for two years — here’s what changed for me, and I’m a weight loss coach — these 5 fitness habits do more harm than good, and The Fad Diet to End All Fad Diets.
58. Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner and ‘master of the short story,’ dies at 92.
59. 9 Books to Spark Your Creativity.
60. The 30 Greatest Dystopian Books Of All Time.
61. U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón on ghosts, premonitions and forgiving yourself. In related news, Ada Limón On Finding Poetry In The Natural World.
62. Yum: Baked Ziti (I’ve made this four times in the past month and am obsessed) and Soy Lime Vinaigrette.
63. How a Self-Published Book Broke ‘All the Rules’ and Became a Best Seller on the New York Times. (gift link)
64. ‘How could my mother leave her baby and then kill herself?’: author Maria Grazia Calandrone’s quest for answers. “At eight months old she was left on a blanket in the Villa Borghese, Rome. More than 50 years later, prize-winning poet Maria Grazia Calandrone set out to discover the truth behind her abandonment.”
65. They Spent Their Life Savings on Life Coaching on the New York Times. (gift link) “Some people who wanted to improve their lives and careers through coaching found themselves trapped in what they described as a pyramid scheme.”
66. Trees for the Future. “We provide hands-on agroforestry training and resources to farming communities. By embracing sustainable land practices, farmers are reclaiming their agency, breaking the cycles of climate change and generational poverty, and rebuilding our food systems from the ground up…The Forest Garden Approach restores degraded land, captures carbon, improves biodiversity, and prevents future unsustainable land use practices.”
67. Grizzly with 5 cubs caught on camera in Yellowstone. In what feels like related news, Birth of rare white buffalo calf in Yellowstone park fulfills Lakota prophecy., “that portends better times, according to members of the American Indian tribe who cautioned that it’s also a signal that more must be done to protect the earth and its animals.”
68. How to Take the Perfect Nap. I’d say every nap is perfect. 🙂
69. Bonsai trees. (Facebook reel) I have a particular obsession with bonsai. Although my own efforts have been mostly failures, I have one small ficus that is over 20 years old.
70. On Memoir, Permission, and the Thorny Terrain of Writing About Family.
71. Brittney Griner reflects on ‘Coming Home’ after nearly 300 days in a Russian prison.
72. Fogo Island: Bringing new life to a remote Canadian fishing community on 60 Minutes.
73. 50 Of The Most Breathtaking Forgotten Places Shared On ‘Urban Exploration’.
74. In ‘Brats,’ ’80s stars grapple with a label that defined their early careers. As an 80s kid, I was obsessed with Demi Moore.
75. Tie-dye like you’ve never seen before on CBS Sunday Morning. “Tie-dyed fabrics have existed for thousands of years, with Americans really getting into the groove around the 1960s. Correspondent Nancy Giles talks with tie-dye artist Austin Mackereth and with designer and historian Shabd Simon-Alexander about the state of the art in tie-dye today.”
76. Ross Gay On the Insistence of Joy on On Being with Krista Tippett.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 