1. Poetry: The Transformation by Red Hawk and After the Mundane by Vaishnavi Pusapati and Fourth Time by Genaro Aguilar Saucillo on Rattle, What the Living Do by Marie Howe and Prayer by Nancy Cunard and All Week, I Listened by Sasha Debevec-McKenney on poets.org, The Nearest Inch and The Simple Truth by James Crews, Checkout by Caroline Bird and Notes on Beachgrass by Yong-Yu Huang and Wind, Blue Sky by Susan Aizenberg on The Slowdown with Maggie Smith, The Real Work and The Mother by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, This Time of Year by Barbara Crooker on Heart Poems, To Be of Use (The poem under the poem…) by Maya Stein, Marked Safe at the Dinner Party: A Wounded Introvert’s Manifesto by Julie Barton, Gathering Nectar by Julie Fehrenbacher, and Catalog of Misplaced Things by J. Mae Barizo shared by Patti Digh. In related news, on the Native America Calling Podcast: Joy Harjo on the healing power of poetry, and on the Poetry Magazine podcast from Poetry Foundation: Wake, Butterfly: What Else Is True? with Marie Howe.
2. Living in the Doorway by Sara Kuburic on Notes From My Phone. “What I wish more people talked about is how much holding on can feel like love. It can feel like loyalty, or like proof that what we had really mattered. There’s often a quiet fear underneath it, something like: if I let go, maybe it didn’t mean as much as I thought it did, and maybe I didn’t mean as much either. I understand that fear, but I want to gently say that staying in the doorway isn’t the same thing as honoring a relationship. Very often, it just becomes a way of abandoning ourselves.”
3. A Kansas City nonprofit turned vacant lots into free fruit orchards. “A simple concept from Kansas City is sweeping the country. Planting fruit trees on vacant lots and making the produce free to anyone has cascading positive effects for the community. Now, more than a million people live within walking distance of a Giving Grove orchard.”
4. A little love letter to making things (and the people we make them with) by Brad Montague on The Enthusiast.
5. For the Man at the Paint Counter by Krista Lee Hanson on Short Reads. “A happy haunting.”
6. A new painting by Britchida. I love when she shares the story behind a painting.
7. 5 Bad Habits to Declutter By The End of The Year by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.
8. A Time to Move Forward, “On Becoming Acquainted with Myself” by Elissa Altman on Poor Man’s Feast.
9. The Tenderheart and the Roughneck by Tony Plohetski on Esquire. “There was always an unclosable distance between my father and me. Instead of cutting him off, like so many of my peers have done with their parents, I spent the last year of his life drawing closer to him than ever before.” This is a longer read, but totally worth it (even though I don’t agree with everything the author has to say about how people chose to engage in difficult relationships with parents, as he does that thing where he assumes because something turned out to be true for him, it’s The Truth).
10. Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died on The New York Times. (gift link) “Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.” He was one of the good ones.
11. Being the candle flame, “on staying close to light within the cave” by Lisa Olivera on Human Stuff.
12. Taking a hike, literally from Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie. “The months since June have been good ones. Quiet, but good. Rather than touching on all the good bits, I’d like to dive deep on one: walking.” One of my favorite topics.
13. Good stuff on Discursive Thoughts: The 10,000 Heartbreaks, “Finding Resilience Through Everyday Pain” by Lodro Rinzler and Why I Meditate #001 : Purgatory Canyon by Adreanna Limbach, “The Ambiguity of Being Human / Not Knowing / Vintage 70’s Suits.”
14. What It Takes to Be Free by Maria Popova on The Marginalian. “We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance deals the vast majority of the cards — the family and epoch we are born into, the body and biochemistry we live in, the people we cross paths with, the accidents of chemistry and happenstance we call love. The great double-edged question is how to keep power from becoming a prison and how much freedom we can find between the narrow parameters of our givens. But somewhere deep down, in the marrow of our language, we seem to know: The word power shares its Middle Latin root with possibility — its only measure is that which liberates the possible in us; our only power is our freedom.”
15. 13 Tiny Rituals for Late Autumn from Alix on Earth & Verse. “Simple, low-energy ways to celebrate the darkening world.”
16. Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition Winners Photogallery.
17. What Am I Getting Out of My Writing? by Jami Attenberg on Craft Talk. “We’re showing up for ourselves on the page, but do we know why?”
18. Printed in Place by Caleb Dean on Orion Magazine. “The love, loss, and locality of an independent newspaper.”
19. I love what Courtney Carver had to say in the opening of her Weekend Favorites list this week: “I’m writing this in a jam-packed coffee shop on a chilly morning. In between words, I’m sipping my drink (cortado with a splash of vanilla and a dash of cinnamon), watching the trees bursting with color, leaves falling to the ground and thinking about my post-work walk in the sunshine.
I’ve been slowing my life down for many years for this. Now I get to enjoy moments like this, the soft, slow, gentle ones. I don’t need to escape my work, drown my sorrows (even though they still show up), or go overboard to prove my worth or explain my choices. I want to be sure to notice that it’s happening. If you work towards something and forget to notice and celebrate, you’ll just keep on striving for something else. I’m going to stay here for a while.”
20. How daylight saving time changes affect you and what you can do about it.
21. What an eight-hour power cut taught me about food stockpiling on The Guardian. “Blue cheese and sardines can only get you so far. What you need in an emergency is a deep pantry.”
22. Should we tip on takeout? We weighed all angles and the answer is… on The Guardian. “Adding gratuity doesn’t always make sense, but the obligation to has been entrenched as a societal norm.”
23. The joy of veg-maxxing: how to eat many, many more plants – without really trying on The Guardian.
24. How to be happy: Tips from the pioneers of well‑being research. “The group identified many central themes to happiness: having basic needs met, relationships, meaningful work and living in ways that align with one’s values and circumstances. Looking ahead, they were concerned about inequalities and declining youth well-being. The single most recurring theme in the discussion, however, was the importance and joy that comes from social relationships.”
25. And finally, a few random things I saved to my phone this week.
