1. 5 Gentle Rules To Help You Feel Good from Be More With Less. Maybe your rules (those things that are fundamental to your wellbeing, the ones you can’t skip or do halfway) are different, but knowing what they are and honoring them is essential. What makes you feel good?

2. A state of flow from Austin Kleon. Just a few days ago I was thinking about the states of drift and flow, writing about it, and it turns out that was only a few days after Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his work related to the concept of “flow”, died.

3. Come Home to Yourself on Lion’s Roar. “Your true home is this body. This mind. This moment. There, says Kaira Jewel Lingo, you’ll find peace and freedom. From her new book We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption.”

4. Art with intent from Seth Godin.

5. Maezumi’s Three Teachings on Lion’s Roar. “Wisdom teachings are fascinating things. They may not appear to be special. They are never complicated. They can sound so ordinary that we don’t even hear them or grant them consideration. But like seeds, they burrow into us and one day surface in full bloom. Only then are we ready to appreciate them.”

6. The Truelove: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About What We Deserve. Because this, “if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love.”

7. Recipes I want to try: The Best Apple Crisp and Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onion Galette. I tried this recipe for Broccoli Parmesan Fritters and it was delicious.

8. Eating Disorders and Social Media Prove Difficult to Untangle on The New York Times. “Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram try to monitor for content related to the problem, but it is not always clear what to do about it.”

9. Worker Exploitation, Capitalism, and The “Normal” We Can’t Return To. In related news, The Pursuit of Rest Under Capitalism.

10. Why Pay Full Price, If You Already Know How it Ends? by Megan Falley. “Another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress [perhaps even the first chapter?] was just published in Midway Journal, about the first time I saw the movie Titanic. What I don’t say in the story is that the woman seated behind me suggested my mother remove me from the theatre because of how hard I was crying, and how I shouted, ‘No!'”

11. Ross Gay Demands Our Attention (in a Pandemic or Otherwise).

12. 4 Grief Blogs We Love. “We have no real criteria other than we just like them and consider them to be informative, contemporary, open minded, thoughtful, and social.”

13. Alan Cumming | Making Peace & Claiming Joy on The Good Life podcast. “What sounds like a near-magical life on stages, television and the big screen, though, has also seen its share of profound pain, loss, grief, existential struggle, and eventually a series of reckonings, and awakenings to who and what matters, and a certain reclamation of joy and life. Now in his 50s, he reflects on these moments along this journey in his new book, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, and we dive into all of it, along with his take on current culture, in today’s conversation.”

14. 50 years ago, The Electric Company used comedy to boost kids’ reading skills.

15. Artist Hides Clever And Funny Signs Around His City For People To Find.

1. How to Practice Paying Attention. “5 ways to steer it in support of your values.”

2. What’s That Feeling? Oh, It’s Fall Regression. “Is this the part of the pandemic when we’re happy? When we’re angry? When we’re hanging out or pulling back, when we’re hopeful or dismayed, when we’re making plans or canceling them? The calendar moves forward but we’re stuck. In old patterns, in old understandings of how work and our families and the world should be. That’s the feeling of regression, I think.”

3. Remarkable Trees Throughout The World. I agree, but they forgot this one: 1,400-Year-Old Chinese Ginkgo Tree Drops Leaves That Drown Buddhist Temple In A Yellow Ocean.

4. I am a compost heap from Austin Kleon.

5. Why Highly Sensitive People Can’t Watch the News That Often.

6. As Jane Goodall grieves climate change, she finds hope in young people’s advocacy.

7. Adam J. Kurtz | Art, Life & Backhanded Optimism on The Good Life Project Podcast.

8. I Forgive You, For Everything by Laurie Wagner.

9. Netflix’s CEO Is Wrong. Transphobic Media Causes Real Harm. In related news At Netflix, a star and employees pressure a top executive over Dave Chappelle’s special on The New York Times.

10. Plant-Based Food Companies Face Critics: Environmental Advocates on The New York Times. “Some analysts say they cannot determine if plant-based foods are more sustainable than meat because the companies are not transparent about their emissions.”

11. The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies. “Extreme right-wing views and the wellness community are not an obvious pairing, but ‘conspirituality’ is increasingly pervasive. How did it all become so toxic?”

12. The ‘Black Sherpa’ summits every Colorado 14er in a push for more diversity in outdoor recreation.

13. Chinese Boy Accidentally Finds 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs. Whoa!

14. The Act of Vanishing Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2021 First Prize, Nonfiction by Megan Falley.

15. Texas Superintendent Apologizes After Official’s Holocaust Remarks on The New York Times. “State lawmakers and the Anti-Defamation League condemned a school official’s advice to ‘make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.'”

16. Loss and the Beauty of Hope with Jessica Patterson on the Inner Peace Yoga Therapy Podcast. “In this episode I interviewed Jessica Patterson. Jessica is a friend, fellow yoga teacher and the owner/director of Root Center for Yoga and Sacred Studies in CO Springs. She describes herself as a writer, teacher, and puller of threads. In this podcast, we pulled a few threads together. Specifically we spoke about the volume of loss we have experienced as a global society over the past 20 months and the quiet tolls these losses are taking on people. We also spoke about some specific losses she has experienced, and what has helped her navigate those times. Finally, we talked a bit about hope and where we go from here.”

17. Susan Orlean: “Is It Possible to Be Truly Wild?”

18. After 2 Years, a Tire Is Removed From an Elk’s Neck in Colorado on The New York Times.

19. The Dieter’s Diet. “Noom, the popular weight loss app, promises to teach you how to eat better, not less. (Except also, eat less.)”

20. “People vs. Fossil Fuels”: Over 530 Arrested in Historic Indigenous-Led Climate Protests in D.C. There are no words for how disappointing this is.

21. Words Mean Things: Understanding Colonialism.

22. How Getting a Dog Has Helped Me as an Introvert.

23. Guy Finds Lost Egg in Pet Store and Brings It to Life.