1. Morning walks. I am finally back to a “normal” schedule, walking Ringo four mornings a week. Eric does the weekend mornings and either Tuesday or Thursday morning, depending on which day I’m teaching yoga. It’s nice because I can sleep in a bit on the weekends, which somehow are still the days I do chores and get ready for the week ahead, even though I’m technically retired and could do those things any day of the week, and I like to devote the full day I teach to just that, focused on teaching and practicing yoga.
There’s magic on these walks, every single one. One moment of magic this week was walking a trail we don’t walk as regularly and running into a dear friend I hadn’t seen in a really long time. It was extra special because they had one of their dogs with them and Ringo liked her. I can’t usually predict which dog he’ll like and which he’ll see as a threat, so it’s nice when he meets a calm female who is smaller than him (these are his favorite qualities in a dog) and gets some good interaction, and extra bonus if it’s a friend’s dog who he might see again.
2. Community. Our time at the coast was an introvert’s dream vacation, but I’ve also enjoyed being back in community: at the gym, running into Chloe’ on the way back from the grocery store, talking with neighbors, practicing with my Friday morning writing sangha, having dinner with friends, and teaching yoga at Red Sage.
3. Peonies. Today is most likely the final day for the ones I cut and brought inside. I’m so glad they waited for me to come back from Oregon.
4. Practice. I don’t even like to think about where or how I might be without it — without the structure, the return, the invitation to start over as many times as necessary, the slowing down, the pause.
5. My tiny family, small house, little life. There are a lot of things in my life and the world that are hard, but these things are so easy, so right, so simple. Ringo is feeling so much better after seeing Dr. Foster and following her plan to heal his belly. Eric and I got tickets to see TWO Aimee Mann shows in the fall and later today we’ll pick our five shows to see this next year at The Lincoln Center, (Marc Maron and The Moth are for sure, we just need to decide on three more).
Bonus joy: good books, good TV, listening to podcasts, getting all the laundry done before it gets too hot outside, a/c, leftovers, trees, sprinklers, raspberries, plantain chips (my current obsession, with this dip), baked ziti (I can’t stop making it!), portable fans, how many more stars Ringo has in his fur now that he’s shed most of his undercoat, strawberry jam homemade by my aunt and uncle, daisies, hummingbird moths, texts from my brother that are just him saying “hi,” H. waking up at 4 am singing the ABC song, seeing him on Zoom, when Theresa saw Ringo and I walking and even though we were already a block away she came out and yelled “Good Morning!” and we waved madly at each other, seeing Sally in the pool, training with Shelby and the gang, being stronger than I expected, the hydromassage chair, the sauna, Rainier cherries, big salads, naps, new clean sheets, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.
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.”
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!”).
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”).
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.”
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 Revolutionon 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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
75. Tie-dye like you’ve never seen beforeon 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.”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 