1. Poetry: How Do You Know it’s Time? from Julia Fehrenbacher, Ode to a Boring Day and Half in the Sky and Muddy Water by Julie Barton, The Opening from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and what will you carry to the sun? and what is a poet? from Christopher Sexton.

2. We are All Los Angeles from The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz. In related news, If you need guns, tanks and propaganda to keep us from caring for our neighbors, you’ve already lost, “On love and fear” from Garrett Bucks on The White Pages, and Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance from David Kirp on The Guardian, “US institutions have been doing Trump’s bidding before he even comes after them. Here’s the counterstrategy.”

3. Write about the Small Things, “sometimes it’s the best way forward” from Laura Lentz on Writing at Red Lights.

4. To Keep or Not to Keep, “& Barbara Becker on simplifying” on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

5. Put Your Hands on the Future, with adrienne maree brown, Hope Portal, Session 2.

6. Getting by with a little help from my friends. “Life feels really weird right now, but also really normal, which is part of why it feels really weird” from Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie.

7. I have decided to be water, “It’s all I can do right now” from Patti Digh.

8. The Time I Didn’t Spend from Danny Gregory. “Start late, I tell myself. Start again. Start over. Just start.”

9. My Friends Have So Many Issues, “The healing power of being needed” from Andrea Gibson.

10. Tim Weed: Five Things I Learned Writing The Afterlife Project from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds.

11. A vignette in a minor key from Amy Marie Turner, who recently got her cabin in Alaska where she’d lived for nearly two decades ready to sell. 

12. Artifact on ShortReads.

13. Reconciling with family and friends, “may be important to the arc of your story” by Laura Lentz on Writing at Red Lights.

14. The Gift of Distance, “Why I don’t regret the twelve-year break I took from my father” from Elizabeth Kleinfeld.

15. Stay with the trouble, “Not solve it. Not fix it. Just stay” from Patti Digh.

16. Secrets of a Great Life (as learned by visiting schools across America this year), “a partial list” from Brad Montague.

17. Owl in Towels. “Wildlife rehabilitators often wrap owls in fabric so they can be weighed, treated, and fed. If not, the owls get in a flap. The result? Loads of pictures.”

18. Jaws at 50: Spielberg’s marine masterpiece transformed the movies – and us. 

19. When they chose to die together, my grandparents wrote the final chapter of a love story spanning 70 years. The longer I live, the more suffering and death I see, the more I understand why someone might choose this way to go.

20. Social media star “The Dogist” talks new book, online fame. (video) “The U.S. is dog-obsessed, and social media star The Dogist has tapped into that love, garnering millions of followers for his candid photos of pups around the world. Elias Weiss Friedman, the photographer behind the account, sat down with Dana Jacobson to talk about his new book and how he was catapulted to online fame.”

21. And finally, a collection of random things I saved to my phone this week.

1. Poetry: Boredom by Julie Barton, Going Quantum and Watching the Goslings and The Secret of Contentment from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

2. Making Peace With Failures from Connie Sun. “A comic about forgiveness and learning through failure.”

3. Good stuff from Courtney Carver on Be More With Less: 10 Simple Habits to Help You Feel Happier and Please Stop Cooking with These 3 Ingredients.

4. Writing Through Personal and Global Pain, “the world is burning. how can we possibly write?” from Esmé Weijun Wang.

5. The World Has Always Been On Fire, “What now?” by Anne Helen Petersen.

6. The most important emotion, “Pay attention to this potent messenger” by Meg Josephson.

7. Welcome to the Hope Portal, “Prepare Inwardly, with Krista — Session 1” from The On Being Project.

8. What is the home you carry with you? by Gretchen Schmelzer. 

9. Good stuff from The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz: The Cure for the Male Loneliness Epidemic in America and 56 Things I Think I Believe on My 56th Birthday and Living Your Best Life in a Dystopian Nightmare.

10. I am (now) anti-hustle, “I wasn’t always. But now I’m interested in enough” from Patti Digh.

11. 7 Smarter Questions to Help You Find Direction. (video) “What to ask yourself during changing times — or any time” from Daniel Pink.

12. Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real. “If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help.”

13. Want to cut through small talk? Try asking a ‘magical question.’

14. Recipe: the browniest cookies.

15. Ocean Vuong: “I’m The Writer I Am Because I’m Vietnamese.” “Talking to Ocean Vuong is stepping into a world where poetry, literature, and Buddhism meet—and at the center is his Vietnamese identity.”

16. With Remarkable Precision, Lito Cuts Playful Compositions from Single Leaves.

17. And finally, a few things I saved to my phone this week.