1. Faith Ringgold, quilt and visual artist, dies at 93. “Ringgold also created paintings, sculptures, performance art and children’s books. Her work focused on Black life, feminine life and the crossroads between the two.”

2. James Patterson will be donating more than $300,000 to the American Bookseller Association and American Library Association members.

3. The Beautiful World of ZOOM, the Short-Lived PBS Show That Once Had More Viewers Than Sesame Street.

4. Couple goes viral by sharing heartwarming pregnancy updates with neighbor.

5. Netflix Sets Frank Marshall-Directed Documentary ‘Rather,’ About the Career of TV News Icon Dan Rather, for April 24th Premier.

6. Regrets of the Dying.

7. How Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” Ruined His Career.

8. Steve Almond Tells Us About How Mercy Pushes Us Deeper Into Truth on Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar, “the occasional series I do, in which I invite an author to tell us five things—not only about their most recent book, but about their life too.”

9. Recipes I want to try: Thai Peanut Chicken Noodles, Thai Chicken Meatballs in Peanut Sauce, and Easy Mile High Biscuits.

10. David Sedaris launches new tour, new kids’ book and lots of new gripes.

11. Tide In, Tide Out: Anne Lamott on Growing Old and Making Peace with Death.

12. Love is a father and daughter dance. (Facebook reel)

13. Timelapse powered by people. (Facebook reel) This is such a cool idea. And here’s another one. (Facebook reel)

14. Wow.

15. “Everything Is an Invitation” with David Whyte on the Sounds True One podcast. “In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with David about his writing career, his creative approach to leadership, and the conversation with life to which we are all constantly invited. Tami and David discuss the willingness to have courageous conversations; the generativity of ‘a well-felt sadness’; reframing regret; the seven steps of invitational leadership; “robust vulnerability” and choosing the path we really care about; anguish, anxiety, and being OK with the unknown; letting go; ‘apprenticing ourselves to our own disappearance’; and more.”

16. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name.

17. Home: An Illustrated Celebration of the Genius and Wonder of Animal Dwellings.

18. What Breaks & Remakes Us: Salman Rushdie on calamity and consequence on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.

19. Retired science teacher Patrick Moriarty reunited with more than 100 students from his decades of teaching for an eclipse watch party on April 8, 2024. In related news, Vintage Eclipse Viewing Glasses and The solar eclipse is over—here are 3 things to do with your used glasses.

20. A German art gallery employee snuck in his own art in hopes of a breakthrough. Now the police are involved. This reminds me of this story, which had a very different outcome: An 8-year-old boy snuck a book he wrote onto a library shelf. More than 100 people are waiting to check it out.

21. Which States Have the Highest Minimum Wage in America?

22. Palestinians and the world must not lose hope.

23. Who decides what violence is? “We’re told from birth that violence is only present in the last act, in the final domino that falls. When we learn about crime we’re told to focus on the robbery, but never on why someone might turn to theft. It’s always the actions of an individual that we’re told to judge, and never their circumstances, or the system they live under, or the policies that have shaped their life. And we need to break that cycle, that approach, urgently. Because the truth is that the biggest offenders are wearing suits; they’re often in boardrooms or state houses. The companies that pushed Oxycodone on America have hurt more people and made more money than any drug dealer. Police forces have killed more people in the United States than any gang. Policies around evictions and climate and health care have hurt infinitely more people than any criminal mastermind could ever conceive of.” Which reminds me of this quote from Desmond Tutu:

24. Life lessons: Isabella Tree on what life so far has taught her. “Writer and farmer Isabella Tree helped kickstart the rewilding revolution in Britain. She talks about man’s hubris, her most revitalising habit and what makes her feel optimistic.”

25. The Only Way Forward from Frederick Joseph. “Reflecting on our efforts to support migrant mothers and families.”

26. Giving Yourself Permission to Create from Nikita Gill. “How to give yourself to the blank page.” More creative wisdom from Nikita:

27. Maria Bamford and Her Intrusive Thoughts Are Making a Web Series.

28. The Dumbphone Boom Is Real on The New Yorker. “The growing dumbphone fervor may be motivated, in part, by the discourse around child safety online. Parents are increasingly confronted with evidence that sites like Instagram and TikTok intentionally try to hook their children. Using those sites can increase teens’ anxiety and lower their self-esteem, according to some studies, and smartphones make it so that kids are logged on constantly. Why should this situation be any healthier for adults? After almost two decades with iPhones, the public seems to be experiencing a collective ennui with digital life. So many hours of each day are lived through our portable, glowing screens, but the Internet isn’t even fun anymore. We lack the self-control to wean ourselves off, so we crave devices that actively prevent us from getting sucked into them. That means opting out of the prevailing technology and into what Cal Newport, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, has called a more considered ‘digital minimalism.'”

29. How to Stop Spiraling If Health Anxiety Is Taking Over Your Brain.

30. 22 Small Things That People Say Made Them Drastically Happier.

31. 4 Types of Burnout. “Are you frenetic, under-challenged, worn out or misaligned?” With my last job, it was a combination of all four.

32. Why I Swear by ‘My Year of No.’

33. Is that ad following you around the internet creepy or kind of cool?

34. No Time For Friends? Try the ‘Friendship Snack.’

35. A Room Alive! Making Comics Together, “a short documentary exploring and showcasing UW-Madison’s Comics Room and the community it has inspired–featuring interviews with Lynda Barry, Jeff Butler, and Julia Tanenbaum.”

36. Things Engineers Spotted During Structural Inspections. Yikes!

37. Working With Your Hands Is Good for Your Brain on The New York Times. (gift link) “Activities like writing, gardening and knitting can improve your cognition and mood. Tapping, typing and scrolling? Less so.”

38. Japan Gives Washington 250 Cherry Trees as Replacements on The New York Times. (gift link) “The trees will replace 140 that will be torn up as part of a restoration project. The capital’s first Japanese cherry trees were a gift from the mayor of Tokyo in 1912.” In related news, Stumpy, the Washington, D.C. Tidal Basin’s “celebri-tree.”

39. What I Do When I Face Boredom. “In times when I find myself confronted with feelings of boredom, I make a conscious choice to let it happen. Instead of seeking immediate distractions, I allow my mind to experience this emotion.”

40. Remarkable Tessellated Forms Emerge in Intricate Origami by Goran Konjevod.

41. Why Highly Sensitive People Get Overwhelmed Easily (And How to Fix It).

Spring is a reminder that winter doesn’t last, that it’s simply a season, and only one of four. It reminds us that after night comes day, that death is inevitable but there is new life and possibility all around us, all the time. In spring, the song of birds in the early light of morning returns, a shock after the quiet of winter. The grass starts turning green, trees begin to bud and the earliest of blooms open. Somewhere, there are eggs kept warm in nests and newborn kits in dens. We sit outside and turn our faces toward the sun, eyes closed as if in prayer. Easter is celebrated in spring, along with the Spring Equinox, both representing the renewal of life and a return to light.

It is the way it goes, this natural cycle of beginnings and endings. It feels like something you can trust. And yet, recently, things have gotten…weird. The reasons are clear but that doesn’t make it any less strange.

The week after Easter this year was filled with three days of earthquakes and “once in a lifetime” weather events, culminating with a total eclipse. It can be difficult to feel any certainty in the ongoing inevitability of life when the earth shakes, the winds are so strong, and the sky goes dark as night during the middle of the day. The next total solar eclipse will happen on August 23, 2044, 20 years from now. If I am here, alive and in Colorado, I still won’t be in the path of totality — immersed in total darkness in the middle of the day, the moon momentarily blocking the sun.

And yet, I feel swallowed by the whale like biblical Jonah or like I am experiencing the dark night of the soul in Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. The years leading up to this one have felt like that, except rather than looking forward to release, rescue, or rebirth, it’s hard to imagine any ending where anyone is any version of “saved.” It feels a bit more like maybe there will at least be music and dancing as the Titanic sinks. There certainly aren’t enough lifeboats, so our choices are to be the musician or the dancer for as long as we have left.

“For human beings, the process of living stains us repeatedly with the grit of being here, with heartache and disappointment and the pointedness of being human, which can sicken us if harbored or make us whole if released. Again and again, we, more than any other life form, have this majestic and burdensome power to harbor or release the impact of our experience.” ~Mark Nepo

 

The chronic tension in my shoulders is a reaction to stress and anxiety, my body’s response to a rise of cortisol in my system, an ancient strategy to protect the neck and heart from harm. My body shrugs the shoulders up towards my neck and hunches forward to block my heart, to defend them from the teeth or knife of a predator. I do it without even thinking, without intending to, and so far, it’s a habit I haven’t been able to shake.

At first, to try and lower my stress levels, I took a close look at my environment. I set out to determine the people, places, or projects that caused me stress, and considered ways to mitigate their impact or get rid of them altogether. I stopped hanging out with people who made me feel bad. I left a few groups and lost a few friends. I quit my job, thinking that was the primary source of stress. I examined my habits. I stopped drinking alcohol, drank more water, took lots of naps, went to bed earlier, did yoga, and started meditating.

After a purge of what wasn’t working and implementing better habits, I considered the remaining chronic tension in my shoulders a body problem. Through body centered efforts, I thought I could process and release what I was holding, learn new patterns of movement that enabled more ease. I tried a mix of therapy, body work, and movement practices.

And yet, here I sit, seven years later, my shoulders still tight and aching.

“Like fallen leaves our memories cover our path until they are remembered out of existence, setting us free…Experience covers us over, and the expressive journey lets us come clean to the table of light.” ~Mark Nepo

Rather than finally figuring this out, finding a solution or “fixing” it, I’m remembering something I’ve always known. And that is: The way forward, for me, is to write my story, to tell it in a way that I can fully understand it, process it, free myself from it, and maybe even turn it into something that might help someone else.

I’ve been so sure that along with my teaching this meant writing a book, or even multiple books. I’m not giving up on that, but I’m realizing it can’t be the point, the goal, my whole life. If the book becomes the thing, then what does that mean if I don’t finish it, what does that mean if no one ever reads it, what does that mean for me once it’s finished – am I “done,” is that success? Then what, and so what? That can’t be it.

“But aren’t you already working on a book, Jill? Didn’t you say that a few years ago? Isn’t that why you haven’t been blogging as much?” Yes, yes, and yes. To be honest, I’ve been saying for more than two decades that I’m working on a book, and while I have been trying and efforting, starting and stopping and then starting over, after multiple drafts and attempts, I still haven’t finished it. Sometimes I feel no closer to finished than I did when I started.

A friend asked me recently how my writing was going. I tried to explain that it was a struggle, that as I worked, I was simultaneously doing other, deeper work that made it all so much more complicated. There’s so much I don’t understand, so much I haven’t reconciled about just being alive and it can be hard to know what or how to write about that.

It’s like what someone said about the only way out being through. I can’t get to the other side of this unless I write my way through it. Resisting the writing, the story, feels worse than facing it, and every moment I stay stuck feels like a little death. The objective then is to liberate myself from my own self, my own story, my own suffering. The intent is to be free. I hope I can figure out how to do that and that I still have time.