jillsalahub

1. Morning walks. I’m excited for next week because I was looking on Google maps the other day and found two alternative routes at one of our favorite trails that I want to try, see where they go. It’s cooler and darker in the mornings now and I’m okay with that — for one, it means fewer people but more animals are out. And, while I may have to start the walk with a headlamp, we get to see the sun come up.

2. Practice. The past three Thursday mornings, people’s schedules were wonky, so I’ve been doing unplanned private yoga sessions at Red Sage, just one person each week but also a different person each week, and it’s been kind of fun. I adore teaching and practicing there. Zoom was being wonky, so sadly my writing sangha and I didn’t get to practice together Friday morning. Hopefully we get that figured out by next week because that practice session with those women is one of my favorite things. I’ve been meditating at random times this week. Rather than first thing in the morning each time, I’ve been sitting when the need hits me — and it has been on the regular because some sad anniversaries are coming up and a few friends are losing their dogs and the ability to sit with those big feelings is such a gift. Yoga, writing, and meditation keep me sane.

3. Fall. Yes, there are sad anniversaries, but other than that, this is my favorite season in Colorado. The way nature invites us to slow down and let go, how things start to turn towards quiet and stillness, how everything turns golden.

4. Mom. She for certain is slowing down some, becoming quieter, but she’s still here and still remembers us. I’m so grateful for the continued care and company she is getting. I posted this on my social media last week:

A phone call with my mom this weekend: She has late stage vascular dementia, so I wait until my brother is there visiting, call his phone, which he hands to Mom as he explains to her how to hold it and listen and who it is on the other end. She tried once, but her first question for me was a struggle to find the words, “Are you…are you…are you taking…a break?” which I know to mean “Are you at work?” which is something she always asks me even though I’m now mostly retired because it’s what she can remember of previous conversations with me. Frustrated by not being able to find the words, we said goodbye and I love you and she handed the phone back to my brother. Then in a few minutes, she asked to have the phone back.

On her second try, she began with “It’s hard to talk to you right now because I’m trying to eat,” but as my brother pointed out, she didn’t have anything in front of her to eat, there was no dinner plate or even a small bag of chips. After she said that, it started to pour down rain at my house, so I told her, and she said, “You can keep it!” which is what she’s always said to me about our weather, whether it’s hot or snowing or storming. Then she said, “I’m going to hand this back to Dad,” which meant my brother, and with another goodbye and I love you, I was talking to him and not my dad, who has been gone for two years now.

We got off his phone a few minutes later and in another few minutes, my brother texted, “I know this might make you sad, but she just picked up the TV remote and said to it, ‘Hey, can you hear me?'” ❤️💔

5. My tiny family, small house, little life. My favorite, my favorite, my favorite.

Bonus joy: peaches and corn and watermelon and tomatoes — the last of the season, texting with Chris and Chloe’, stickers, clean sheets, a warm shower, grapefruit Bubly, when King Soopers sends customized coupons based on things I regularly buy (I know the “Big Brother” aspect of that is creepy, but also thanks for the discounts on stuff I was probably gonna buy anyway!), ordering pizza, all the laundry done and put away, tarot, sitting with Eric and Ringo in the backyard, how green our yard is right now, the opportunity to start over as many times as necessary, other people’s dogs and kids and gardens, good TV, listening to podcasts, getting books from the library for my Kindle, the glitter I keep finding everywhere, comedy, true crime, documentaries, good music, naps, fry sauce, reading in bed at night while Eric and Ringo sleep.

1. Poetry: In the Dark of the Cinema and Case Study in Insanity and Sitting on the Porch at Night and The Hope Engine and Opening and Enter Here and Self-Compassion from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Summer Morning on The Weekly Pause with Jeff Crews, Words rise to the surface and the stories that surround from Pádraig Ó Tuama, On Not Hiding and When Everything Changes and Solo from Julie Barton, The Forgotten Corners by Jeff Foster shared by Heart Poems, Want by Carrie Fountain (one of my favorite poems), From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee, and To Begin With, the Sweetgrass from Mary Oliver.

2. A conversation with a death doula. (video) “‘It’s one of the most magical times of life. It’s one of the biggest things that happens to us,’ says death doula Molly Nelson of the end of life.”

3. Detect Fakes. “How do you spot a deepfake? How can you tell if an image is AI-generated? How well can people distinguish between AI-generated media and images, audio, and video recorded by a traditional camera or microphone? Detect Fakes is research project hosted at Northwestern University by researchers at the Kellogg School of Management to examine how people distinguish truth from fiction in online media, especially as synthetic media becomes more and more realistic…The goal of this research program is to reveal what synthetic media looks like, benchmark how well people can distinguish synthetic media from ‘real’ media across a variety of contexts, and generate insights for how to help people distinguish between the two.”

4. Signs Your Social Battery Is Running Low on Introvert, Dear. “In social settings, the introvert brain is busy processing every word and detail, which explains why it can feel so exhausting.”

5. Telomeres: A Strange Fate, “Love, loss and the biology of endings.”

6. The Mystery of the Invisible Fish, “Why aren’t we already moving towards love?” from Satya Robyn.

7. The Purity Culture of Food? “The eerie similarities of wellness and religion” from Gina Luker.

8. A new way to look at the weekend, “and a different way to celebrate” on Hannah Ro Writes.

9. Good stuff from Jena Schwartz: Now Go Sweep the Porch (“Sometimes we all need a reset”) and Freewriting My Way Towards 5786 (“Let the spiritual preparation begin”).

10. A Pep Talk For The Grownups Who Show Up. “It’s part pep talk … part resource … part reminder… all let’s do good stuff together. A video packed with encouragement for anybody anywhere who cares about kids. It’s about tiny big changes, a few vocab words I picked up while visiting schools, and why you are the secret to making this a better world for kids. It’s the pep talk I would give to you if I could be right there with you. If you’re a teacher, parent, librarian, or just someone who cares about the next generation: please watch and share.” from Brad Montague.

11. The Holy Ordinary from Amy Marie Turner.

12. The Question of Missions, “A gesture, a feeling, a prayer” from Jami Attenberg on Craft Talk. Also on Craft Talk from Jamie, Two Pieces of Hate Mail, “On ‘politics’ and book reviews.”

13. The Night I Ended My Pregnancy by Julie Parker on Short Reads.

14. The secrets of lost luggage auctions: I bought four bags for £100. What would I find inside? “Unclaimed suitcases were once destined for landfill. Now people are ‘suitcase gambling’ – bidding for bags and their unknown contents, and diving deep into strangers’ lives.”

15. I would rather share in your earnest mistakes, “Than be pandered to by a slick talking savior” by Garrett Bucks on The White Pages.

16. Radical Pleasure: Why I Keep a Good Things Jar. “Athena Dixon on finding the right balance of what you want and what you need.”

17. 7 Daily Rituals to Release Stress and Worry from Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

18. ‘Crafting Sanctuaries’ Sheds Light on Black Experience in the South During the Great Depression. “In a collaboration between Art Bridges and Museum of Art + Light, a new exhibition titled Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Black Great
Depression South revolves around more than three dozen rarely seen images from the FSA archive that shed light on Black spaces during the Great Depression. Photos of homes, churches, schools, and barbershops demonstrate how ‘interior and public gathering spaces became canvases for self-determination and cultural preservation.'”

19. Why We Climb (2017). “Revisiting an old lesson about the value of our struggles” from Connie Sun.

20. Curiosity as an act of courage on Nonviolence Radio. “A conversation with journalist and bridge builder Mónica Guzmán on the power of curiosity in a polarized world.”

21. 5 Quieter Kinds of Success Worth Claiming as a Creative. “Defining success for yourself” from Alix Klingenberg on Earth & Verse.

22. Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on leaving her marriage for a dying friend: ‘She said, Let’s just live balls to the wall until I die!’ “One was a happily married and internationally famous writer, the other a cool, funny hairdresser and ex-drug addict. Then a shock diagnosis pitched them into an intense love affair.”

23. The Tension Between Rest and Living Fully. (video) “We all want to ‘make the most’ of our time. But what happens when that urge makes it hard to simply enjoy a slow, unplanned day?”

24. 100 things to support your mental health that aren’t go for a walk and drink more water, “with all due respect to going for a walk and drinking water” from Lauren McQuistin.

25. Unmade beds and overdue books: Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings.

26. A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In on The New York Times. (gift link) “More people are turning to general-purpose chatbots for emotional support. At first, Adam Raine, 16, used ChatGPT for schoolwork, but then he started discussing plans to end his life.”

27. Book burning, Latin prayers – and a lot of kids: inside the American ‘trad family’ movement. “The movement towards simple, Christian living can be a yearning for order in a chaotic age. It’s also alarmingly retrograde.”

28. Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety.’ “Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance.”

29. Photographer Ulric Collette Splices Portraits of Family Members into Uncanny Composites.

30. And finally, this random collection of things I saved to my phone last week.