Image by Eric

1. What Can I Do About Burnout? on Lion’s Roar. “Burnout is the feeling of exhaustion that helpers sometimes experience when they have taken on more than they can handle. But, says Karen Kissel Wegela, there is much we can do to prevent it, and to work with it when it occurs.”

2. What You Can Do About Anti-Asian Violence. “A new surge of anti-Asian attacks comes nearly a year after Covid spawned increased vitriol toward people of Asian descent across the country.”

3. On praying, whether you believe or not from Austin Kleon. Because this: “When I pray, it’s because my world is so beautiful and I want to express my gratitude, or because there is a great disconnect between how my world is and how I’d like it to be. (Almost always both.) It’s for these exact same reasons that I make art. I see something so beautiful that I want to amplify it, or I see something so broken that I want to repair it.”

4. Good stuff from Jena Schwartz: How Are You?, and Paper Boats, and American Sentence: A Collective Poem.

5. Those We’ve Lost on The New York Times. “The coronavirus pandemic has taken an incalculable death toll. This series is designed to put names and faces to the numbers.” In related news, Death, Through a Nurse’s Eyes on The New York Times. “A short film offering a firsthand perspective of the brutality of the pandemic inside a Covid-19 I.C.U.” It’s a hard watch. Bless the nurses.

6. Wisdom from Tulku Thondup:

Generally, we go through life with little awareness of what we are doing, let alone the peaceful and joyful nature of our lives. We mostly think about the past and dream about the future while missing what is happening right now, in this moment. If we are not aware, we are not fully living. We are like sleepwalkers or zombies. To be alive and healthy, we need to wake up. In Sanskrit, the root of the word Buddha is “to be awake.” That is what true healing is, an awakening. As with a flower growing up from the ground and opening its petals in the sunlight, the process is generally quite gradual. Sometimes our spiritual growth seems slow and uneven. We can take a step backward or be filled with all sorts of doubts. We need to remind ourselves that the healing path is the right one to take.

7. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön:

Protecting ourselves from pain—our own and that of others—has never worked. Everybody wants to be free from their suffering, but the majority of us go about it in ways that only make things worse. Shielding ourselves from the vulnerability of all living beings—which includes our own vulnerability—cuts us off from the full experience of life. Our world shrinks. When our main goals are to gain comfort and avoid discomfort, we begin to feel disconnected from, and even threatened by, others. We enclose ourselves in a mesh of fear. And when many people and countries engage in this kind of approach, the result is a messy global situation with lots of pain and conflict.

8. Ijeoma Oluo on the Pervasive Impact of White Mediocrity.

9. Photographers Make Kids’ Wildest Dreams Come To Life.

10. How to Explain High Sensitivity to People Who Don’t ‘Get’ It. This is a few years old and I most likely already shared it, but it’s so good, it’s worth a repeat.

11. 20 Body-Positive Instagram Accounts to Follow Right Now. I share this piece and feel like the P.S. should be this one from Militant Baker: Why I’ve Chosen Body Liberation Over Body Love.

12. How Dad Lost His Voice — And Finally Learned to Listen. “We never realized how much dad’s booming bravado controlled our family dynamic, until it was gone.”

13. Coloradans ages 60 and up eligible for vaccine starting March 5. I am eligible in the group just after, which is supposed to begin the end of the month. Woo-hoo!!! In related news, How To Sign Up For A COVID-19 Vaccine In Your State, An Updated Guide to Face Masks on The New York Times, and Six Ways to Manage Coronavirus Depression.

14. Recipes I want to try: Best Chocolate Cake Recipe and Artisan Apple Bread.

15. What I wish I’d had in Texas. “When it comes to a disaster like Winter Storm Uri, what does it mean to be prepared?”

16. A Guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA, a TED Talk. “Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where ‘the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.'”

17. Clown Princes: Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall on ‘Coming 2 America’ on The New York Times. “The comic stars and longtime friends talk about their history together and their many, many roles in the original film and the new sequel.”

18. 11 Natural Lawn Alternatives.

19. How the Hosts of My Favorite Murder Built a True Crime Empire on Empathy. “As their blockbuster true-crime podcast celebrates its fifth anniversary, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark reflect on honoring victims’ experiences, their beloved fandom of ‘Murderinos,’ and prioritizing mental health.”