1. Poetry: My Body Knows Its Limits by Page Hill Starzinger and At Last the New Arriving by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (I love the ending lines of this one: “What a prize / you are. What a lucky sack of stars”) and Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic? by Andrew Grace on The Slow Down with Maggie Smith, Drought and I Want Beauty by Julie Barton, Your callings will keep calling: Listening to what returns, Letter Four {Falling Gently} from Alix Klingenberg on Earth & Verse, You, the Light by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Saying Yes by James Crews shared on Heart Poems, Helper by James Crews, Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda shared by Patti Digh, How to See the Milky Way by Sarah Williams shared on The Marginalian, and blessings, like by Maya Stein. In related news, The Most Romantic Poem on Cup of Jo, (don’t miss the comments section), and Joy Harjo Answers the Orion Questionnaire, “In which we get to know our favorite writers better by exploring the sacred and mundane.”

2. We Are Asking the Wrong Questions About Belonging from Mindy Tsonas Choi. “How do we be and belong with one another in all of our differences? This, is the question of our time.” Amen.

3. 27 Things That Feel Better Than Scrolling Social Media by Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

4. Good stuff from Patti Digh: What the heart makes in the dark — The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography and What are your hinges? The snow that saved my life. She also shared these links to some other cool stuff: An Existential Guide to Making Friends, and Where writers write — 12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots, and Kazuaki Koseki’s Dreamy Photos Capture Japan’s Forests Shimmering with Fireflies.

5. Wisdom from Danny Gregory: “The quest for the perfect studio, the perfect atmosphere, the perfect sketchbook — those are just forms of procrastination. They can get in the way of making things, not making them easier.”

6.  Good stuff from Jamie Attenberg on Craft Talk: What if I Told You Perfection Was Impossible, and Coffee and Water and Bigger Truths, and Strike While the Iron is Hot, which includes this lovely pep talk:

“You must type while you can type, you must handwrite while you can handwrite. If you are waking up in the morning thinking about something specific related to your writing, then you must honor it. Honor your creativity, spirit, inspiration, artistic self. Always make the time to write. Make the time to make your shit. Do not get in your own way, make room for yourself instead. It’s not just your head you’re tending to here. It’s your heart, it’s your belief system, it’s your whole self when you write.”

7. Good stuff on The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: Our Town’s PRIDE Festival Was a Beautiful, Joyful Celebration of Community. Then, The “Christians” Showed Up, and Yeah, It’s Hell Here, But Heaven is Still Within Reach, and We’re all ANTIFA, Donald.

8. Conscious Change Collective. “A project of the Garrison Institute’s Spirituality and Social Change Program and Circles for Conscious Change, the Collective is a collaborative field of actors applying inner work and spirituality towards social change. We aim to support a more conscious and cohesive field of action by bringing together organizations and communities to share wisdom, practices, and strategies — strengthening connection, visibility, and momentum for transformative impact.”

9. Let’s Talk About AI Art on The Oatmeal.

10. Nature Gets a One-Star Yelp: The Funniest National Park Complaints.

11. What’s Really Going on With Those Elaborate (Parent-Decorated) College Dorm Rooms? by Anne Helen Petersen on Culture Study.

12. Four Places to Rest. “How our Buddhist refuges can work for non-Buddhists too” by Satya Robyn.

13. Poet Kim Stafford on Instagram.

14. Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth on Smithsonian Magazine. “The famously reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books ranging in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the naked mole-rat.”

15. 50 (Short) Rules For Life From The Stoics.

16. A Day in the Life of a 102-Year-Old French Yogi. (video) “For decades, Charlotte Chopin has been teaching yoga in Léré, a village in France. At 102 years old, she maintains a simple approach to aging well.” AND, she didn’t even start doing yoga until she was 50 years old.

17. Wisdom from Kari on A Grace Full Life, in response to the question “what is the most important lesson life has taught to you?”:

to stop waiting for life to get easier and instead find meaning right in the middle of the hard parts.

Amen.

18. Monarch butterfly gets a life-saving wing transplant on Long Island: “It was so intricate.”

19. Notes from The Middle of Nowhere by Laurie Wagner. For 12 years, we wrote together almost every week. I joined her Wild Writing Family after she stopped teaching regular classes but have to confess I haven’t taken an active part yet, because every time I see a video of her reading a poem or hear her voice, I want to cry. I miss her. The same thing happened with Susan Piver, when her community grew beyond the capacity for personal relationships and she stopped leading retreats at what is now Drala Mountain Center. Then the same thing happened with my mom, her still there but also not, at least not as she was before.  

20. Our Brains Evolved to Socialize—but Max Out at About 150 Friends.

21. The Permission Workbook: The Perfection Problem. “Overcome it, or you’ll get stuck in creative quicksand forever” by Elissa Altman.

22. Why everyone is lifting weights – and how to get started (whatever your size). “Are reps or weights more important? Is it good if it hurts? How should I structure my workouts? Everything you need to know about resistance training, from the experts.”

23. “It’s Okay But It’s Also Really Not.” When Dystopian Fiction is No Longer a Thought Experiment. “Yume Kitasei Explores the Different Forms Dystopias Can Take, On and Off the Page.”

24. The art of moving on when you don’t get closure: 7 truths you’ll learn the hard way.

25. Sorry, dad! Colin Hanks says John Candy was the ‘nicest guy in Hollywood’ on NPR Morning Edition.

26. And finally this collection of random things I saved to my phone this week.

1. Poetry: Saying Yes on The Weekly Pause by James Crews, Nostalgic for Five Minutes Ago and Going Lightly and Bird Trapped in the Amsterdam Airport by Julie Barton, On place and being in place from Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, poem in which a stinging thing appears by Maya Stein, Last Picnic by Charles Simic and shared by Patti Digh, The Poem I’d Give You by Daniel Skach-Mills on Heart Poems, and With the Stones of Our Stories and The Change by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

2. Writing in the clouds from Andrea Scher. When Andrea shares the message of a SoulCollage card she made for her mom who died early this year — “Now I can love you in the way I always wanted to love you” — it makes me think of how I “told” my dad after he passed, “Now is your chance to be the dad I needed you to be.” A strange aspect of loss is that you still have a relationship with the person who is gone, and sometimes you have the chance to heal parts of your relationship you couldn’t when they were still alive in a body.

3. When the Shadow Speaks, “lessons in resistance, strength, and creativity – letter 3 {Falling Gently}” from Alix Klingenberg on Earth and Verse.

4. On The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: Congratulations, Trump Supporters, You’ve Owned the Libs and Now That Fascism is Here.

5. How to Contemplate Death on Lion’s Roar. “Lisa Ernst on how to be mindful of death—and live with more wisdom, freedom, and gratitude.”

6. 37 Simple Pleasures That Deliver Joy Without Draining Your Bank Account by Tammy Strobel on Be More With Less.

7. Give yourself a break. “On the necessity of recharging the spirit in order to keep fighting” by Jennifer Sahn on High Country News.

8. 12 New(ish) Reading Recommendations. “Orion approved books to kick off your fall reading plans,” recommendations from Orion Staff.

9. Good stuff from Patti Digh: No circus stays in town forever, and some comets never come back, and The power of a shape, and The 7 Types of Rest.

10. Vernacular Architecture and Mossy Trees Fill Michael Davydov’s Tiny Worlds. “In the miniature world of Michael Davydov, tiny houses, moons, trees, and barns balance precariously in clusters and stacks. Observing the architecture and flora around his home in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, he taught himself how to draw and eventually began assembling small sculptures.”

11. What was going on when I was born? “Enter your birthdate to find out.”

12. Swiping less, living more. How to take control of your digital life. “In an always-on world, our phones have become lifelines – but at what cost? In Smartphone Nation, digital ‘nutritionist’ Kaitlyn Regehr explores our tangled relationship with screens and makes a case for reclaiming control through honesty, intention and digital literacy.”

13. The Guardian Documentaries. “Real people, untold stories” from The Guardian.

14. The Imperfectionist: Five short thoughts, “in the return of an occasional series, here are five ideas that helped things click for me in recent weeks. I hope some of them might do the same for you.”

15. Truth Hurts: Scrolling at Night Is Cooking My Brain. “In this, his first column, John DeVore confronts an ugly truth about bedtime.” P.S. “‘Truth Hurts’ is a monthly column about accepting who you are, where you are, and how you’re doing. It’s written by John DeVore, a writer who doesn’t always feel comfortable in his own skin.”

16. A Thought on Normalcy in Fascism. “Fascism does not break normal life, it feeds on it” by Frederick Joseph. “History has already shown us how this story unfolds. Fascism is not built only in the camps and cells. It is built in the shrug, the silence, the insistence that life can go on as if nothing has changed.”

17. A Glossary for the Unspoken by Isabel Abbott. “So much gets lost in translation between the lived knowing and the words to say it. is not the absence of vocabulary exactly, but the way language keeps running out just when life is most alive. We have words for weather, but not for the way dusk bruises the sky and makes the body ache like a memory. We have words for grief, but not for the hollow shape it carves in the air where someone used to breathe. We stumble through love with metaphors and approximations, while whole galaxies of feeling go unnamed, shimmering just beyond the reach of our tongues. I keep thinking there should be more, an alphabet wide enough to hold the weight and the wonder of what it means to be here.”

18. Why I’m Leaving Academia after a Decade of Contingent Labor. “Roughly 70 percent of faculty are contingent. This exploitative hustle is driving dedicated teachers out of academia.”

19. The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace. “More terminally ill Coloradans than ever are turning to Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic. We spent the summer witnessing the quiet decisions and final moments of those who chose when—and how—to say goodbye.”

20. Sharing Your Life With a Dog: 5 Benefits.

21. Omar Mendoza’s Natural Pigment Paintings Radiate the Power of Ancestral Knowledge.

22. Bryan Sansivero Documents Otherworldly, Forgotten Houses in ‘America the Abandoned.’

23. And finally, this small random collection of things I saved to my phone this week.