1. So much poetry. Picture Day, First Grade and Again With the Ancestors and Nocturnal and Not Quite Lost on the Big Trees Trail and Sundays and Her Grand Nap Affair and Ode to a Good Friend and Fireproof Box by Julie Barton, Practice in Being Present and How and In the Fields of Grief by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and May the Brutal Never Erase the Beauty from Julia Fehrenbacher, and Any Common Desolation and How to Apologize from Ellen Bass, and The Owl Who Comes by Mary Oliver, and A House Called Tomorrow by Alberto Ríos shared by Patti Digh. And in related news, Thirteen ways of looking at form from Pádraig Ó Tuama.

2. Overwhelmed by Life? 15 Reminders to Help You Feel Better from Courtney Carver on Be More With Less.

3. Good stuff from The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: Hey MAGAs, Aren’t Christians Supposed to Give A Damn About Other People? and No, It’s Not Going to Be Okay and Before You Die, Remember to Live and Dear God, WTH? and We on the Left Didn’t Want to Be Right and It Doesn’t Matter How Bad Things Are Here and The Cure for America’s Cruelty Sickness.

4. Keep Stress From Overpopulating on Trackless Wild with Janisse Ray. “Let me warn you here that this is going to be a difficult post. Consider this sentence a trigger warning. I’m going to look closely at stress and the zeitgeist of 2025, and for a minute it won’t be easy. Then I’ll talk about ways to defuse, deactivate, and neutralize stress. These are strategies you already know. Don’t take them as suggestions. Take them as mandates.”

5. Staying informed and hopeful, a list of resources compiled by Patti Digh. “It’s clear that major news outlets are not providing the real news of what is going on in Washington, DC, primarily because they are owned by oligarchs like Jeff Bezos who are restricting the news. But we deserve to know what is happening.”

6. 6 Simple Habits That Will Keep Your Long-Distance Friendship Strong.

7. Addicted To Being Busy? How To Overcome Chronic Overwhelm.

8. The Value of Doing Nothing in a Hyperproductive World.

9. The Art of Doing Nothing: How to Create Your Own Personal Retreat Day.

10. 3 Hygge Hacks I Learned from Visiting Sweden in the Winter.

11. ‘Reading is part of my identity’: the woman taking on Goodreads owner Amazon. “Software engineer and developer Nadia Odunayo created the social media readers’ platform StoryGraph and its popularity has rocketed.”

12. The News and Your Attention: Engaging Without Being Consumed.

13. Recipes I want to try: Fish Taco Bowl, and Potsticker Salad, and Artisan Apple Bread, and Nigel Slater’s recipes for onion tart, and sweet potato, with miso and maple syrup dressing.

14. Worst possible from Seth Godin. An important, timely reminder.

15. 192 Nonfiction Books to Read This Women’s History Month.

16. Let Your Cardboard Show by Laurie Wagner.

17. Self-Taught Artist Masterfully Spray Paints Large-Scale Hyperrealistic Portraits.

18. A List of Things I Love from Andrea Gibson, “The poetry of everyday.”

19. Making Peace With Grief on A Grace Full Life.

20. Good grief, “A pep talk of sorts for those of us who are fresh out of pep” from Rita on Rootsie.

21. There are two political movements in America right now. “An invitation to join the one that’s smaller (but that won’t be for long).”

22. The End Files, “a weekly newsletter featuring stories about death. Inside each issue, you’ll find news stories, a weekly roundup of notable obituaries, a listing of famous deaths in history, interesting quotes and lots of cemetery- and death-related art.”

23. In Praise of the Fake Bathroom Break from Elizabeth Kleinfeld: Here for All of It. “The fake bathroom break is how we’ve cripped inhospitable situations for generations. It’s how the neurodivergent, the anxious, the traumatized, the exhausted, the grieving, and the overstimulated have survived spaces and situations that weren’t designed for our nervous systems or emotional needs. It’s the socially sanctioned disappearing act that no one can really question. ‘I need to use the restroom’ is the magic phrase that grants temporary reprieve from unbearable sensations, conversations, or environments. It’s the universal pass to solitude when the world becomes too much.”

24. “do I have to show other people my work before publishing it?”: For the love of God: No.

25. Art, Ambition, Creativity: How To Steal Like An Artist’s Austin Kleon on Daily Stoic. (YouTube video/Podcast)

26. Bodies hold our stories…the shame, the desire, the healing.

27. Keita Morimoto Lingers in the Artificial Light of Urban Nights.

28. Being There: The Hospice Story on The Dying Matters Podcast. “Since the founding of the first modern hospice in 1967, their work has grown to encompass rehabilitative therapies, emotional counselling, and even bereavement support for families, alongside excellent clinical care. The mission of a hospice is to improve quality of life and wellbeing, so that every patient can enjoy whatever time they have left to the full. This modern incarnation of hospice and palliative care was the vision of one woman: Cicely Saunders. In the 1940s, Cicely was a nurse who believed that medicine was failing to provide adequate and compassionate care to people who were dying, and it was this belief that led her to pioneer new methods of palliative care that totally redefined how we care for the dying.” 

29. Making art in times of turmoil from Patti Digh.

30. Hope in Dark Times by Satya Robyn on Going Gently.

31. Why Animals Love Introverts (and the Feeling Is Mutual).

32. Are you homesick too? “Perhaps for a place, a time, or a person? It all counts” from Sas Petherick.

33. Against Self-Improvement: Adam Phillips on the Danger of Treating Ourselves as Pathological Patients in Need of a Cure.

34. After Loss, Comes Life.

35. Trump’s backpedaling shows he’s not invincible. “To compel Trump to reverse course, our job is to highlight political missteps, heighten public outrage and raise the political cost of implementing his radical agenda.”

36. The Page is Always Waiting, “And your words are always there for you” from Jami Attenberg on Craft Talk.

37. On Writing More of the Story from Jena Schwartz. “A little story about PR and keeping it real.”

38. Your Art is a Tool and Beauty is an Emergency. “Maggie Smith on creating during upheaval, how not to kill pleasure, and the emergency of a sunrise.”

39. Musk’s Economic Jihad, “Trump will soon learn that his support isn’t infinite. His base might be rabid, but even the most die-hard MAGA voter has a breaking point.”

40. How To Stop Food Noise Naturally: 5 Habits To Start Now, According To Doctors.

41. How Not to Have a Breakdown While America Does. “Why Your Self-Care is a Revolutionary Act.”

42. ‘The nice version of her was manufactured for YouTube’: my mum, the family vlogger who became a child abuser. “Ruby Franke was a social media star who made viral videos about her six children and perfect-seeming life – until she was jailed for child abuse. Now her eldest daughter Shari is telling her side of the story.”

43. Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams review – a former disciple unfriends Facebook. “This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant organisation describes a ‘diabolical cult’ able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world’s vulnerable.”

44. ‘It’s part of who I am’: Heston Blumenthal on the bipolar diagnosis that saved his life, his journey of self-discovery – and how he finally emerged from his family’s shadow. “In a searingly honest interview, the star chef talks about the pressure of success, dealing with grief and how being sectioned changed everything.”

45. Stargazing, poetry and meditation: What connects NPR readers to their spirituality on NPR. “In February, we asked our audience: What does your spiritual practice look like?…More than 80 readers from different belief systems sent in their poignant responses.”

46. Vasilisa Romanenko’s Lush Portraits Wrap Common Birds in Decadent Patterns.

47. Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Why She Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

48. Yotam Ottolenghi: I tried intermittent fasting, and hated it. This is why we need to ditch the diets and go back to basics. “The chef says we need to forget fads and focus on the joy of good food cooked with love.”

49. In a world that glorifies hustle, deep rest is a revolution from Rev. angel Kyodo williams. (Facebook reel)

50. Charles Yang performing “Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. (Facebook reel)

51. And finally, a bunch of random things I saved to my phone recently.

1. Poetry: Rage Letting and These Powerful Men Need Bird Lessons and The Artist at Work and Lift from Julie Barton, Trying to Understand from Julia Fehrenbacher, What we notice from Pádraig Ó Tuama, and Self-Talk from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and I Wrote A New Poem. It Opened A Door from Andrea Gibson.

2. Good advice from Jenny Lawson: Just don’t be a dick.

3. The Wisdom of Pulling Back from the News from Krista Tippett. “I can’t count the number of people I’ve encountered across the last weeks who have reported that they are deleting apps, limiting their consumption of news, boycotting or disrupting the barrage of information overwhelm. I’m beginning to see this as a spiritual discipline for being alive in this time. It is not to be confused with disengagement or passivity. It may be an essential tool for sanity, and a key to discerning and sustaining a sense of agency for the time ahead.”

4. What Would Your Simple Contented Life Look Like? from Satya Robyn on Going Gently.

5. Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations.

6. This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World: The Twilight of the American Passion Job from Culture Study.

7. Good stuff on writing as practice from Lion’s Roar: Nothing Is Wasted, (“If you use your difficulties to create art, says Ruth Ozeki, it will give them meaning”), and Zen Mind, Writer’s Mind, (“Author Natalie Goldberg discusses Zen and the writer’s practice”), and 5 Tips for Mindful Journaling — which mentions my beloved friend Laurie Wagner, (“James C. Hopkins on how—through writing—you can find the flow of awareness, free of judgment”).

8. KNOW WORRIES #13 – “For All the Dogs I’ve Loved, and There Have Been Many” on Jonathan Edward Durham’s Substack. Because, this:

“I still consider dogs to be the mankind’s greatest achievement. Sure, you could make an argument for science or philosophy or coffee, I guess. But when’s the last time any of those loved you unconditionally besides coffee? And I want to be very clear that I’m not throwing any shade at cats by leaving them out of this conversation. I just don’t really consider them an ‘achievement,’ necessarily, because I’m pretty sure we had nothing to do with the whole cat ‘situation.'”

AND

“…many years ago, one of us saw a wolf and was like, ‘omg I would love a cute scruffy little version of that,’ and then we, as a species, got together and knocked that wish clean out of the fucking park.

And it’s a good thing we did too, because have you seen things? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve watched or heard or read or seen or experienced or felt or thought about anything lately, but it’s rough out there. And I love cats (most of the time), but we’re just not gonna survive this on cats alone. We need more. So lucky for us, we adopted a machine that eats stress and shits love and thinks we’re some combination of god and spouse and best friend and soulmate. And by the way, it’s adorable. Oh, and also it will protect you with its life. Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but if you rub its ears, that’s how you get the serotonin out.” YES.

9. Becoming a High Agency Person, “A means of community worldbuilding” on Group Hug. I especially love these two links Elise shared: Fake Fliers and Requiem for a Tree.

10. Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting, a Google doc with a lot of great resources.

11. If the despots can engage in magical thinking, then so can we on The White Pages. “On telling ourselves a story (about our strength, about our capacity for love, about how we’re going to win) and then making that story come true.” Also on The White Pages, Soon, there will be a spark, because this: “The thing about gathering kindling is that you can only do so before long before a spark is lit and a flame starts burning. And because the current emergent movement is rooted in love and protection for all, the flame I anticipate will not be a destructive one. Trump and his allies have already been setting plenty of those. It will be a source of light, a bonfire that sends the signal to many more of us that there is safety and warmth, that we are not alone.”

12. How Do You Handle Your Books? from Jami Attenberg on Craft Talk.

13. I Have Slept in Many Places, “Writing as a side door” from Jena Schwartz.

14. I’m writing from Hugh Hollowell.

15. ‘Our community deserves beauty’: one man’s mission to green a UK tree desert. “In Grimsby, locals have created a society focused on the environmental and health benefits more trees provide, planting thousands in schools, parks and hedgerows.”

16. Lessons for the resistance 2.0 on how to fight back against Trump. “Defeatism and demoralisation are rampant in Trump’s second term. But we cannot give up.”

17. What can I do to fight this coup? from Choose Democracy. “We can’t put everything you could do in here — including ways to ground yourself in these times — but here are some starting points on how to orient and help fight the coup.”

18. The 16 Best Travel Movies for Inspiring Wanderlust. In related news, 50 Years of Travel Tips.

19. 14 Little Things We Stopped Worrying About. “Here are the little things successful authors, CEOs, astrologers, and others have stopped worrying about in 2025 and beyond” on Bustle.

20. The Hidden Cost of Your To-Do List (And How to Take Your Life Back) | Courtney Carver on The Good Life Project. (podcast)

21. Is America Great, Yet? I’ve Been Asking Around on The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz. Also from John, No, Christians, God is Not in Control, because this: “God works through the hands and words of the people who aspire to this love and goodness, and choose to exercise the individual power they have been entrusted with right where they’re standing. Jesus is not beamed down from Heaven, he is incarnated in the flesh and blood of those who believe that other people are worth sacrificing for, that mercy is the greatest gift, that love is revolutionary.”

22. Times 13 Women of The Year. “These extraordinary leaders are working toward a better, more equal world.”

23. Fleeing your past may be the beginning of your story… on Writing at Red Lights. “As we grow into the person we are meant to become, at one with the soul inside our body, we recognize the truth when it is spoken or written. Writing story is a way to set those truths free.”

24. America’s Last Best Thing: On Trump’s National Park Layoffs and the Erosion of America’s Public Land from Frederick Joseph. “I don’t know whether I have ever truly believed in America as a promise, but I have believed in its rivers and canyons, its mountains and forests—because the land, at least, keeps faith with those who keep faith with it.”

25. Keep Calling from Patti Digh. “I hope you are informed enough to be nauseous and cared for enough to be able to function in the face of all this.”

26. Showering with Spiders on Short Reads.

27. Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle. I was reminded of this essay this week, and it’s just too gorgeous not to share, again.

28. Finding “C” in a world of A vs. B from Patti Digh.

29. Make life possible on A Working Library, a blog about work, reading & technology by Mandy Brown. Because this: “It’s a long-held maxim in movement circles that the people who work for liberation and freedom will always be outgunned and out monied by those who fight for precarity, oppression, and exploitation. Our power is not measured in weapons or cash but in humans; our power is with and through each other. Making life possible in uncertainty is to make room for more life, your own and many others. It is, as ever, to practice solidarity and reciprocity, to show up and to be present. To recognize that what happens next is—not now, not ever—written in stone.”

30. Kate McKinnon: Embrace your ‘weirdness.’ (Facebook reel)

31. Bad wellness advice is all over social media. These creators are pushing back.

32. Tony Horwitz’s widow Geraldine Brooks writes a beautiful memoir of grief.

33. Andrew McMillan: ‘As an atheist, the poetry of Mary Oliver is the closest I come to prayer.’ “The poet on his early love of horror and the transformative power of Thom Gunn.”

34. How Introverts Can Stop Overthinking and Finally Find Closure.

35. Recipes I’d like to try: Ruffles Krispy Treats and 2 Ingredient Onion Ring Chips.

36. And finally, this collection of things I saved on my phone.