Kind and gentle reader, my Something Good list is going on vacation just like me, and that means most likely there won’t be a new list until the first part of July. As I always do when I take a break from posting these, I want to remind you that there’s a whole archive of lists, 720+ of them, so you either need a break as much as I do, or you could start working backwards and see what you may have missed. In the meantime, stay tender, keep your heart open, and don’t give up. 💛

1. Poetry: Quiet Together and I Am No Sensei and Even with Perseverance by Julie Barton, What Goes On and The Day Before Graduation by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Twenty-Year Workshop by Lynne Knight and Next Time by Stuart Watson on Rattle, City Chickens by Alison Luterman on The Sun magazine, Native Grasses by Lynnell Edwards and Missing by Mary Morris and The Burning Kite by Ouyang Jianghe translated by Austin Woerner shared on The Slowdown by Maggie Smith, Our Lady of the Garden by Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, Künstlerroman by Sarah Ghazal Ali and Every Person Is an Address, Every Person Is a Calendar by Megan Fernandes on Poets.org, Instead of AI and Mother Maple by James Crews, This Thing in You by Julie Fehrenbacher, Dig and fill and empty and burn by Amanda Sandlin, Advice from a Raindrop by Kim Stafford on Heart Poems, and Untitled by Matt Moberg shared by Patti Digh. In related news, How to Read Poetry by Patti Digh.

2. Recipe I want to try: High Protein Ham and Cheese Biscuits. Oh how I adore a good biscuit.

3. Stillness: A Mini Photo Zine by Alix Klingenberg. I love her “scrying the photograph” writing exercise.

4. Good stuff on The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: I’m Not Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence; I’m Afraid Of Natural Stupidity and An American Mourning.

5. 7 Permission Slips for Gentle Adulting by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

6. Five True Things by Laurie Wagner.

7. What’s Left When the Well Runs Dry by Elizabeth Kleinfeld. “On caregiver burnout, Buddhist practice, and why self-care is a prerequisite—not a reward.”

8. Weeding by Kari on A Grace Full Life.

9. The Goal Is Not to Miss You Less by Megan Falley. “What if time does not heal all wounds?”

10. I lost my beloved husband after 35 years, then my sister and my father. Here’s how I rebuilt my old happy self on The Guardian. “I tried everything from gong baths to junk food and intermittent crying as I attempted to deal with my grief. Nothing helped – until I started tuning in to what my body was telling me.”

11. Five practical ways to feel better and make a difference. “Dr Mark Williamson, director of Action for Happiness, shares five small changes that really can make a difference to your life.”

12. Why Mental Health Matters So Much for Introverts.

13. The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI on The Atlantic. “So we end up with canned perfection—writing that can’t really be argued with, because it has no underlying deliberative reasoning process, no train of thought. As I wrote on X recently, AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”

14. Pendant, Gravid, Asking to Fall on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

15. From the archives: writing the book that gave me back my life. “On Giving Myself Permission to Create” on Poor Man’s Feast by Elissa Altman.

16. Is it true that … we should all be taking creatine? from The Guardian. “The supplement is a proven sports performance enhancer, but research is ongoing and for most people it’s an optional extra, not an essential.”

17. ‘My body is fat, not wrong’: how body neutrality – not positivity – helped me shed a lifetime of shame on The Guardian. “If I’d been taught this way of thinking as a child, I can’t begin to imagine how much easier things could have been.”

18. Shelf Life: Maggie Smith. “The author of A Suit or a Suitcase takes ELLE’s literary survey…In this ongoing series, authors share an assortment of their most memorable reads: the books that have shaped their lives as writers and as human beings.”

19. And finally, these random things I saved to my phone this week.

1. Poetry: The Long Run by Linda Gregerson and At the Entrance of a Love Poem, I Hesitate by Maya C. Popa on The Slowdown with Maggie Smith, A Witnessing by Ted Kooser on Rattle, After Watching the Difficult Film and When Feeling Stuck by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, What time is it? (it’s pantoum time) from Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, The Paradox by Sarah Kay, A Way of Staying Soft by Sam Aureli on Heart Poems, Listen by Barbara Crooker shared by Patti Digh, I Don’t Know Much, But by Julie Barton, Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon, and Empathy by James Crews.

2. Good stuff from Maria Popova on The Marginalian: The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair and How Not to Dwell on the Past.

3. Against Indifference by Frederick Joseph. “On mutual aid, exhaustion, and fighting to keep one another here.”

4. Saying goodbye is a lifelong practice by Patti Digh. “The dead leave us with an impossible assignment: to remain here without them. And slowly, awkwardly, painfully, and sometimes angrily, we learn to do it. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But by continuing. By loving other people well. By remembering. By saying their names aloud. By telling stories. By allowing ourselves to be changed.”

5. ‘I laughed out loud dozens of times’: authors choose books to make you fall back in love with reading. “From a darkly comic new novel to a gripping 1950s memoir – Katherine Rundell, Malala Yousafzai, Matt Haig and others appearing at Hay festival pick titles to tempt you”. In related news, The New York Times’s Summer Reading Bucket List. (gift link) “Read along with the Book Review this summer: Can you check off five items before fall arrives?”

6. ‘I thought I was the saviour of the planet’: how Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray found a wellness cult – and lost her mind on The Guardian. “She landed a role in hit TV show Skins at 17 and went on to star in the fantasy epic. Then she was drawn towards a mysterious spiritual community. How did she end up being sectioned?”

7. Endangered Butterflies Are Thriving Behind Bars. “In the tender, methodical work of rescuing an imperiled butterfly species, incarcerated women are finding a sense of purpose.”

8. The radical act of slowing down. “A meditation on how our obsession with speed and productivity undermines our health, relationships, and chances for lasting success.”

9. How To Balance Being Online With Mindfully Logging Off.

10. Can’t Stick To Journaling? Try These 4 Simple Hacks.

11. Feeling Down? 12 Science-Backed Ways to Get Out of A Funk in Just One Day.

12. Chance of rain by Jasmine on The Tiny Joy Project. “What happens when you stop predicting every storm.” *sigh*

13. How to Survive a People-Centric Job as an Introvert.

14. More of the same: how creative rituals can help you break free from the idea echo chamber. “Why inspiration feels harder to come by and how three types of creative ritual could be our strongest defence against the slow erosion of taste, attention, and intention.”

15. Things I’m still learning about writing on The Imperfectionist.

16. What It Means To Love Someone by Sara Kuburic. “Six quiet truths about the hardest, most human thing we do.”

17. Emerging Form Episode 165: Ramona Ausubel Will Get You Unstuck. “Drawing from her newest book, Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page, Ramona shares with us why certain strategies work only at certain stages of creative projects. We talk about finding patterns, ways to develop characters and create scenes, different ways to approach different drafts, the half-draft approach, finding opposition and so much more.”

18. The real AI by Seth Godin.

19. 8 Kind and Regret-Free Ways to Declutter Things by Tammy Strobel on Be More With Less.

20. The last Pap smear by Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie. “There’s a last time for everything. Whoa.”

21. what lurks at the bottom of boxes and bags by Elissa Altman on Poor Man’s Feast. “Piecing together our truth from ancient papers and photos.”