January | 2026 | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

I start the morning on the couch with the only light coming from the golden strings of twinkle on the Christmas tree, left up later than usual and also soon to come down, so I linger and savor the moment, still and quiet but lit up. It’s one of the things that gets me through this, the darkest season of the year — lights on the Christmas tree, battery-operated candles on the shelves and along the floor, a tall skinny LED light in the corner that can be set to multiple colors and patterns, the twinkle lights strung around the window, the light on my nightstand shaped like a tiny moon, our “alarm” clock set to slowly get brighter over time to mimic an actual sunrise hours before the real one appears, my light therapy lamp that imitates real sunlight, the candle on my meditation shrine.

I arrive at this day at the end of a week that held so many dark, sad things – Eric’s mom’s birthday, the first one without her here with us; the anniversary of January 6th, a day to mourn or to celebrate depending on your perspective; and on January 7th, a woman peacefully protesting at an ICE raid was murdered by one of their officers.

The good they murdered was a writer and a poet, a wife and a mom. She was 37, not so much my lucky number but the number that reminds me of impermanence, of love and loss, a call to keep going, to not give up, the age Kelly was when she died. Renee’s wife was there with her but not in the car. She’d gotten out and was standing next to the passenger side, recording and heckling the agents, challenging them to take off their masks and telling one to “get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Their dog, who looks exactly like my Sam, was riding with them that day and in the backseat when Renee was shot.

The last thing Renee said to an officer, before he reached in and tried to open the door demanding she “get the fuck out of the car,” before she cranked the wheel to leave was “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” It would be the last thing she’d ever say. An ICE officer stepped out from in front of the vehicle and around to directly in front of her and shot her point blank in the face and then two more times in the head. As the car rolled away with her dying at the wheel, her wife screaming and her big black dog in the backseat, one of the officers, maybe even the shooter, muttered “fucking bitch.”

Renee (right) and her wife, Rebecca (left)
Image credit: The Democrats on Instagram

Renee Good and her wife were there to disrupt, to protest, to be an obstacle to injustice — the very things U.S. citizens are called to do as a matter of pride, are promised by democracy itself we are free to do, seeing as we are united in the “land of the free, home of the brave.” Late U.S. Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis urged us to “make good trouble” in this way, encouraging us to take action and speak out against injustice, to challenge systems that are neither fair nor just. While John Lewis insisted this effort happen through nonviolent means, he himself was brutally beaten by state troopers as he lead the first march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. Renee and Rebecca Good were there in Minneapolis on January 7th as citizens, as neighbors, as good humans to “make good trouble” and one of them was murdered for it — a death sanctioned and supported by our government, clearly no longer a system “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Image credit: Stephanie Chinn Art on Instagram

In a statement released later, Rebecca Good described her wife’s belief in the essential truth that “we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” I cannot tell you at this moment exactly how the light comes, but it does, even here, even now. Maybe one way is to do what Rebecca Good suggests, to “honor her [Renee’s] memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”

Rest in peace, Renee. May your willingness to show up with an open heart, along with your heartbreaking loss, open the door a little wider to the light. May we open and open more and open still and sustain the light that guides those who are lost back home, back home safe to the people they love. Stay tender, kind and gentle reader. Keep your heart open. And please, don’t give up.

Kind and gentle reader: I will be in Oregon for the next two Mondays, so there won’t be another Something Good list until February 2nd. I’m guessing since this is the 708th one of these I’ve put together and published, it’s okay if I skip a few weeks? “See you” when I get back. Stay tender, keep your heart open, don’t give up. ❤

1. Poetry: From Destruction and On Not Reaching Despair and Waiting for the New Sun and At The Core and Sustenance by Julie Barton (so glad she’s back from her break), Once I Wanted Only Openness and Because and All This and One in the Collapse and What If We All Met on That Bridge? and After I Fell in the Canyon of Grief and Building the World We Believe In and Before I Read the News by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Good Guy by Blas Falconer and Going Home by Joan Kwon Glass shared by Maggie Smith on The Slowdown, What Ails Me by Sara Nicholson, The Names of Grasses by Jacob Shores-Argüello, A Poet Is Murdered by the State and I Am Sick by Annalise Parady, Imitating Brother by Andy Butter, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by by Renée Nicole Macklin [Good], The Actual World by James Crews, “how often and how well”: poetry of life and death on Poetry Unbound, Are you a Poet Seer?: Where magic and memory meet by Alix on Earth & Verse, How Can We Not? by Julia Fehrenbacher, Goodness Knows by Carrie Newcomer on Heart Poems, Poem Revised in a Twelfth-Floor Hotel Room After Seeing a Man in the Building Across the Street Holding What Appeared to be Binoculars by Camille Dungy shared by Patti Digh, Heart by Melinda Burns shared by James Crews, Winter Is a Big Empty House by Emily Wheeler, and Notes App Poems by Frederick Joseph.

2. Good stuff from Patti Digh: Leaving small lanterns behind (“flattening the hierarchy of what counts”) and Tend to the garden you can touch (“a refusal to confuse scale with significance”).

3. On The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: The January 6th Insurrection Didn’t Fail, it Just Took Five Years and All Americans Know January 6th Was An Insurrection. The Decent, Patriotic Ones Care and America, and Will We Stand With (Renee Nicole) Good or Evil?

4. Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules! by Elizabeth McCracken on The Guardian. “After 35 years of teaching fiction writing, the prize-winning author shares her wisdom. First tip? Don’t write what you know.”

5. The Practice of Enjoying Your Life from Satya Robyn.

6. Boomers who insist they “did everything right” often raised children who don’t know how to identify their own emotions.

7. I asked experts how to reduce screen time – here’s what they said by Lauren Gould on The Guardian. “If you want to doomscroll less this year, try these realistic tips from screen-time coaches.”

8. Why pleasure is the key to self-improvement by David Robson on The Guardian. “Forget puritanical self-discipline – the way to really make a new habit stick is to lace it with instant gratification.”

9. Why pleasure is the key to self-improvement by David Robson on The Guardian. “Forget puritanical self-discipline – the way to really make a new habit stick is to lace it with instant gratification.”

10. Words and Their Meaning. “On titles, relationships, misunderstandings, slurs” by Summer Brennan.

11. Cursed Days. “On letting complaints breathe” on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

12. The dog days of January “in which I sigh for 2,000 words” by Jonathan Edward Durham.

13. From Jamie Attenberg on Craft Talk: How to Keep an Open Heart (“When the results vary”) and What if I Had Never Fallen in Love With the City of New Orleans? (“A sliding doors prompt”).

14. we are in a space without a map, “Living in a State of Dislocation” by Elissa Altman. Also from Elissa, is cruelty addictive? “Humans, psychopathology, and the sadistic urge.”

15. Upright, “And glad to be here” from Jo on The House of First Light. “Joking aside, the small stuff is all I can do right now. You’ve probably been here, because you are also human, alive and aware. When you’re having All The Feelings All The Time but you don’t want to just crash out and escape, I think the only way is to keep the processing small and careful.”

16. Now what? “Thoughts on the space between endings and beginnings” from Jasmine on The Tiny Joy Project.

17. I’m So Booooooored. “And I kinda like it” by Danny Gregory.

18. Life Points Gained. “A break from social media” by Connie Sun. My break has lasted almost 2.5 months and I am loving it.

19. Let’s Make it Beautiful by Erin Geesaman Rabke. “Cheers to making room for it all: The heartbreak. The exhaustion. The hope. The joy. The beauty. The little things. The rising up (and laying down) in all the ways that feel right to your soul. Cheers to not forcing or expecting others to be how and where we are, but honoring their own journey. Cheers to the emerging, the changing, the skin shedding, and the (as my dear friend Alexandre says) moving as quickly as possible in the direction soul is calling us. May it be so.”

20. 8 Practical Ways to Declutter Your Life in 2026: A Retirement ‘Non-Resolution’ Checklist. “Here’s how to stop wasting your energy on things that don’t enhance your new chapter and focus on the things that do.” Reading this list, I’d say why wait until you retire?

21. What We Do in Winter. “How willows dream” by Rick Bass.

22. Don’t stress, do less: 52 ways to make your life easier in 2026 by Isabella Lee on The Guardian. “We asked experts in fields from homes to health to horticulture for advice on tasks we can simply stop doing and problems to take off our worry plates.”

23. Doomscrolling, people pleasing and low-fat foods? Life’s too short! Nine writers on what they won’t bother with this year on The Guardian. “Rutger Bregman, Josie Long, Michael Rosen, Meera Sodha and others on what they are no longer wasting their time on.”

24. The Pretender, “On forgetting myself in fatherhood” by Bud Hager on Open Secrets Magazine.

25. Make it so, 2026 – the Year of (Your) Story by Laura Lentz on Writing at Red Lights.

26. What Most People Get Wrong About Meditation. “You Don’t Need 30 Minutes or a Blank Mind” by Elizabeth Kleinfeld.

27. Here’s what the merchants of hate and fear will never understand. “Care, unlike terror, is a renewable resource” by Garrett Bucks on The White Pages.

28. The Underrated Joy of Letting Things Be Good Enough by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

29. Corporation for Public Broadcasting is officially shutting down months after GOP funding cuts. “The CPB’s board of directors voted to dissolve the private, nonprofit corporation after 58 years of service.” We’ve already lost so much and it just keeps coming.

30. The Nuclear Savings Rule: 10 Frugal Living Tips From the 1950s Era.

31. How Humor Can Be an Effective Tool For Social Change on LitHub. “Chris Duffy on Relieving the Horrors Through Laughter.”

32. Why “new year, new me” usually backfires (and what to try instead). “Do you really need to reinvent yourself every year? (Hint: no.) Learn why the ‘new year, new me’ mindset can be toxic and 6 tips for a calmer, more sustainable start to the year.”

33. 6 things people do around the world to slow down.

34. 5 things I refuse to make time for anymore: What’s on your not to-do list? by Courtney Carver on Little Saturday.

35. 12 Tiny Habits For The New Year That Won’t Wear You Out by Tammy Strobel on Be More With Less.

36. How to be less online in 2026. “How to stay sane and be in the world more — some thoughts.”

37. When we say this it’s soooo bad. (YouTube short) This made me laugh, the first time I watched it and the 42 times after that. In particular, the way he says, “shut up.” I’ve wanted to be this honest with people in public many times.