I am so excited to spend this summer with you!

Read more

Read more

I always love a “Give Jesus a chance. He died for the opportunity” license plate frame on a large SUV as it barrels down, practically pushing my car out of its way so it can take my place. Congratulations, you gained 3 whole feet.

As I sat there, NPR replayed Terry Gross’s 2016 interview with Stephen Colbert. (I already miss his opening monologues.) They were talking about his first years in the Ed Sullivan Theater. Stephen explained that, at first, he thought he needed Broadway energy to fill the space: high kicks and all. It was, after all, a literal Broadway stage.

But then, as he settled into the role, he began to realize that he didn’t need main-character high-kick energy to fill a gigantic space. Authentic presence was just as powerful, maybe more.

I turned the radio off, sat in traffic, and cried. Perhaps I’ve just been trying too hard here. Dandelions fill fields just by being themselves and letting the wind carry their seeds.

I’ve been quieter because things have been rearranging beneath the surface. In some ways, I think I’ve been trying to figure out the right high-kick routine to keep this space growing, when everything in me simply wants to write you letters and stories. Hot takes and hopeful rants about living with wonder in an age of algorithms. Messy confessions from the middle of my gloriously imperfect humanity. Big observations after leaving decades of leadership inside high-control religious ecosystems and living with chronic pain. Musings on creativity while currently in a creative rut.

I know some of you came initially for creative prompts and challenges. They have always been a part of the vision for this space, and they were the part that took off—in stunning ways. I am so grateful for that.

But this writer has ink in her marrow. And deep determination in her soul to use her words and time on this earth to create a space where wonder is a path back to ourselves and one another in a distracted, divided, and disconnected world.

We’ve never needed wonder more—not as a glowing aesthetic, but as a way of remaining human inside systems designed to fracture our attention and optimize our worth.

We need voices that name our griefs and guide us back to the joy that lives alongside them.

We need friends who offer strength when we cannot fathom taking even one more step. I hope I can be that here for you.

As for the proverbial elephant in the room… I hear from many places, “Now don’t be political. You’ll lose people.” Here’s the deal. You will probably never see me with a decision board breaking down election odds unless I was drawing on it. Not my lane. I’m going to leave government and political analysis to the pros like , , and .

But wonder is political. Creativity is political. Living in a disabled, female body in the state of Florida in 2026 is very political. Medical access is political.

You might occasionally see my spicy side because I am all in for team human decency, and I’m done tiptoeing. I firmly believe Christian nationalism undermines both the love of Christ and democratic freedom. I don’t say that as an outsider. I say that as someone who spent almost 20 years of her professional life inside those systems before leaving in 2013.

The gold SUV with a platitude plate frame sped between lanes ahead of me. I let out the deep breath-breath-sigh that settles your nervous system.

And I kept thinking: Wonder and whimsy change things, because they change us.

We may be living through a time of profound uncertainty. But that doesn’t mean we have to navigate it alone.

I’m exhausted by internet gurus and living in a culture where visibility is mistaken for expertise. Maybe you are too.

I’m not entirely sure what the road ahead will look like. But I know I want it to be curious, alive, and filled with honest stories and audacious hope, belly laughs, and, yes, creative community. Things that celebrate what is good and kind, without looking away from the things that are not.

And I believe down to my mitochondria that love will outlast all of this.

We will find our way forward together.

I am so glad you’re here.

All my love,

Here are some of the things I’m pondering about the word consistency.

You might call these my notes before I write a longer essay…

Read more

This week felt like it blew in creative fits and squalls. I was either living inside my thoughts or chasing them like a Texas tumbleweed in a spring storm.

I’ve been thinking a lot about consistency this week. Maybe it’s because we are nearing the end of our 100-Day Project. Perhaps it’s because I’m working on a longform writing project that is both feeding my soul and demanding I feed my soul more so I have what I need to write.

I can’t give what I do not have. The words that hold weight are the words that become real in me.

I am constantly fighting my way through the noise of this season. It is a difficult thing to maintain focus when the very system you escaped is now shaping public life around you in profound ways that keep every last nerve cell you have on perpetual high alert.

So I’ve been thinking of consistency. A lot. Primarily my lack of it.

Our Week 13-15 Prompts ⬇️

Because May is so busy leading into summer, I went ahead and added the rest of the 100 Days of Wonder prompts so you have them when you are ready.

This is what has caught my imagination ⬇️

What if the consistency of repetition matters far less than the consistency of the kind of substance that makes up the soul and story of our creative work?

When I hear the word consistency, I immediately think of streaks. How many days did you read? How many times a week did you walk? Did you show up every day? And I’m not saying there is no value there.

We absolutely need to show up for ourselves and our creative dreams.

But what if it is less about flawless repetition and more about focused composition, less about activity and more about authenticity?

What might happen if we shifted the way we defined consistency in our creative practice from the quantity of our execution to the quality of what winds up being executed?

You don’t need to optimize everything. Your creativity isn’t a machine. It’s a work of heart.

I think there is something powerful waiting to be explored here. Keep an eye out because I plan to do just that.

Love from the bottom of my heart,

The Daily Prompts: May 17-June 01

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 85 | May 17: What role does rest play in your creative process?

• DAY 86 | May 18: What does consistency mean to you?

• DAY 87 | May 19: What do you give to others through your creativity?

• DAY 88 | May 20: How do you know when it is time to begin again?

• DAY 89 | May 21: Write about your relationship with blank pages.

• DAY 90 | May 22: What routine is most nourishing to you?

• DAY 91 | May 23: What is one small act of creative rebellion you can embrace today?

• DAY 92 | May 24: When did you last follow a spark into the unknown?

• DAY 93 | May 25: What does sustainable creativity look like to you?

• DAY 94 | May 26: What helps you stay open to the unknown?

• DAY 95 | May 27: What truth does your work keep returning to?

• DAY 96 | May 28: Write about someone who believed in your work.

• DAY 97 | May 29: What are 3 ways you can support yourself creatively?

• DAY 98 | May 30: What clears the way for beginnings?

• DAY 99 | May 31: Write about the power of repetition in your work.

• DAY 100 | June 01: When does your work feel like collaboration with something bigger than you?

All my love,

Welcome to our first video studio storytime chat.

I wish we could hang out in real life. So I’m hopping on camera to make it feel closer to that. Here’s the first of our studio storytimes!

Read more

Thank you for being here. I am so incredibly grateful.

Read more

This week has been a time of revisiting things. Revisiting loss. The kind that claws at the inside of your breast breast bone and kicks against your rib cage longing to break free. Revisiting love. The kind that seeps into your DNA and rearranges it so you can never be the same.

When things get hard, I lean harder on whimsy and wonder. I sometimes imagine them as Anne Shirley and Luna Lovegood wandering arm-in-arm in an enchanted forest where the trees tell stories and grow stars in their branches.

Whimsy isn’t abstract. It all but demands to be embodied in the real world. I think that’s why I love Anne Shirley so much. I was a 9 when Megan Follows made her debut in the beloved Anne of Green Gables. My mom almost didn’t let me watch it because she was afraid it would give me even more ideas than I already had.

Yes, I was the child who read under her blanket and got scolded for bringing Nancy Drew to the dinner table. The lake of shining waters and the depths of despair became permanent parts of my vocabulary. And I began to recite poetry out loud because I loved how the words felt when I said them. To be fair, my mama was pretty dang whimsical herself.

Our Week 12 Prompts ⬇️

If you are new, here are the links for the rest of the 100-day prompts so far: https://wonder.dmicheleperry.com/t/100-days-of-wonder-2026

More recently, I’ve thought of the powerful agency whimsy gives us as having 4 domains—like the 4 leaves of the clover. 🍀

• TEND: Embracing tiny ways to add care in my everyday, very ordinary life.

• ROOT: Connecting to what grounds, anchors, and nurtures me

• PLAY: Making and exploring all the corners of my creative practice without pressure.

• GROW: Developing my inner world. Leaning into writing, learning, and reflection.

Here are 4 images that share some main ways I whimsify my real-life world. I find it so helpful to have a starting place.

And every so often I still tilt my head to one side and think… what would Anne Shirley do in a situation like this?

I’m so incredibly grateful for you being here. For your comments and support and restacks… and all the ways you are pivotal in building this community together.

Love from the bottom of my heart,

Coming to our Prompt & Ponder members this week:

• Our first studio storytime video and coffee chat where I dive into more of my story and why I find whimsy so powerful.

• The audio version of me reading On grief, gardening, & what it means to come alive.

• A few hand selected visual reference images for creative inspiration.

• Our subscriber chat where we share what we’re working on!

Subscribe now

The Daily Prompts: May 10-May 16

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 78 | May 10: What small habit could shift everything?

• DAY 79 | May 11: What do you need to look at with fresh eyes?

• DAY 80 | May 12: How is curiosity guiding you today?

• DAY 81 | May 13: Write about a moment that feels a little like a miracle.

• DAY 82 | May 14: What role does community play in your creative growth?

• DAY 83 | May 15: List 2-3 things your curiosity wants from you right now.

• DAY 84 | May 16: When does your creative practice feel like home?

All my love,

My backyard went feral this last year. A little like my soul, filled with the dried remains of what once thrived, after over a year of sickness kept me weak and in bed. I’m digging us both out this spring. We will find our roots again together.

It does not escape me that the week I finally begin ripping out the remains of my garden is also a week forever intertwined with pain, grief, and loss. And maybe, just maybe, this is the year I can sit with them as friends and teachers instead of enemies.

Six years ago my mom was beginning the final few days of her life. Cancer was finally finishing what it started. And I was caught in the gales of a grief so elemental I thought my heart would be shredded by its fury.

When someone died in Sudan, the village gathered to wail and pound their pain into drumbeats that lasted all night long… sometimes going on for days. It was raw, wild, and primal. I didn’t get it then because I still existed in a system that gave grief tidy edges and banished it to greeting cards.

We used to have rituals that gave us sacred containers for our loss and pain. Some places still have them. But I find myself now in a land that tends to reduce grief to a social media post. And the few places that hold the literal weight of my loss, I have not been able to bring myself to visit.

This Friday I will be seeing my parents graves for the first time since my mom passed six years ago. Another family member is being laid to rest there, and while everything in me wants to run, I know I need to be there. For my cousins, but also for me.

Grief isn’t the enemy. It’s not a cosmic boogeyman. It is the thing that lets you know how deep your love runs.

This post landed on my Instagram feed today. I hope it offers you the same strength it did me.

When we aren’t allowed to fully, deeply grieve, something deep in us begins to die. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong in our world. We are carrying years of unprocessed loss and calling it strength. I’m learning that when I don’t pour myself out on a page, that loss gets lodged in my bones and metastasizes in my cells.

What if the very pain we are avoiding means we are also avoiding what it means to live fully alive? And all the pious, frantic bypassing with our platitudes and social niceties just leads us farther away from ourselves—and one another.

When we shut down our grief, we shut down a core part of what makes us magnificently human.

For those of you familiar with the story, when Lazarus (Jesus’s friend) died, Jesus wept. There was no, “Oh, he’s in a better place. Don’t be sad. That sickness was so hard.” Jesus freaking wept.

In the evangelical world I came out of, sorrow was often side-eyed as weakness and empathy has been rebranded as sin. When the whole system is built on a core belief that the human heart is intrinsically deceptive and wicked, emotional growth tends to get stunted in profound ways. This comes with a tragic lack of language and resources for navigating complex feelings. Like grief. Stuff-and-buff (as in stuff your feelings and buff your facade) is not a healthy coping mechanism or path to wholeness.

In the early days after my mom died, I wondered if I would survive the loss. It felt like my world was being dismantled on the molecular level.

But grief left stretchmarks my soul because it was a womb, not a tomb. Its darkness was not the darkness of death, but the darkness that comes before the dawn. Grief was an umbilical cord tethering me to the goodness that remained. Its pain still helps me embrace new depths of being in the world that are fused with wonder.

So if Mother’s Day is complicated for you, or just straight up hard, please hear me… your pain is valid. Your loss deserves to be witnessed with deep compassion. You deserve to be seen and heard, loved and held, not fixed or placated.

I hope that this space can be one where we find the wonder that lives in our scars and stretchmarks, and where we can bravely be more beautifully, deeply human even in the middle of all the hard.

All my love,

For the last few years I’ve kept an inspiration archive.

It has been one of the best practices I have ever developed. And it is so, so simple. Not to mention rewarding.

Not only does it continue to gro…

Read more

There is a little patch of clover nestled along the short stretch of sidewalk from my cottage front door to the driveway. It has captured my imagination more than most things these days.

We are in one of the worst droughts in a century right now in North Florida. But this little patch is a bright audacious green in the midst of all the creeping brown.

I have a penchant for naming things. Possibly more like a compulsion to identify and whimsify the world around me. It’s a coping mechanism.

My car glints red sparkles in the sun and is named Ruby. My crutches are affectionately called Goodness and Mercy respectively, because they follow me all the days of my life and are strong enough to walk on.

Our Week 11 Prompts ⬇️

This week, after 10 years of living in her, I have finally named my Florida home and studio Cloverview Cottage. It took a decade of living inside this space to find its true name. Some things just take time to become what they are.

And that played a part in changing this to The Cloverview. It’s also a wee play on words Cloverview/Overview… 🤣. The name makes me giggle and in times like these, I need laughter about as much as I need air.

Have you ever had an outfit that is almost right? It’s just a tiny bit tight in one spot and the buckle isn’t that noticeable… But it isn’t comfortable enough to relax confidently in. Friend, you have permission to change the things that no longer work for you or your creativity.

Decades ago I lived in Calcutta, India for a time. I got passably proficient in turning 6 yards of fabric into a sari that mostly stayed put with the help of safety pins. But on the corner of my street was a tailor where I had my salwar kameezes custom-made to size. He’d barely measure me when I dropped off fabric and 3 days later, I had perfectly fitting clothes. It was like magic.

If something isn’t fitting right now, maybe it’s because you have grown. Not because something is wrong. Growth and change are signs of being alive. You have permission to expand without shame.

The air hung swollen, pregnant with rains ready to be delivered. The dry season was bowing out with fits and bluster begrudgingly making way for the wet to come.

I watched the winds blow the first real cloud cover we had seen in months onto our evening horizon. How so much in my world in Africa spoke to me of the wonder and beauty found in the simplest moments.

I sat with the children on our compound in the fading light huddled together with bursts of giggles taking silly shots on my camera.

All at once my crutches went walking away without me in the confident clutches of our then almost-four-year-olds.

Everyone dissolved into laughter. I told them if they took my crutches, they would have to carry me. I think they strongly considered those comments a challenge. But I can only hop so far on one leg.

I watched them joyfully turn the crutches I lean on into picture frames for the kind of laughter that makes you gasp between gales of guffaws.

Could the very things that carry the weight of my frailty become a frame for deep-down, belly-clutching joy?

I can say now, 15 grueling, devastatingly beautiful years later, with complete conviction and utter certainty… How we embrace and frame our frailties might be the most important key for unlocking the depths of this kind of transformative joy that carries us.

My friend has one of the most powerful memoirs I have ever read about surviving medical trauma and heart breaking loss. It is filled with THIS deep, stubborn, tenacious joy that doesn’t bypass pain; rather, it finds its place of thriving right in the middle of it. I’ll be sharing more on my personal experience reading this gift during her book launch week. But click this banner to read more on her website and preorder her book. It holds special relevance for those of us living with chronic illness and pain.

Get the Place Between Our Pains

Also, I got the delight to design her book launch website. It was such an honor. Preorders are critical in the book world. So if you are interested and able, consider getting a copy. Plus this is the link to her gorgeous Substack:

So my friend, what is one frailty you have encountered this week that might be holding an unexpected invitation to wonder and joy?

What is your ordinary resilient clover patch blooming at your feet?

(This isn’t about faking it until you make it or toxic hype, both of which I am allergic to. It’s about finding those micro moments of goodness right in the middle of the things that are hard.)

I am so incredibly grateful for you being here. For your comments and support and restacks… and all the ways you are pivotal in building this community together.

Love from the bottom of my heart,

The Daily Prompts: May 03-May 09

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 71 | May 03: Describe the tiniest creative action you could take right now.

• DAY 72 | May 04: What practice helps you trust your timing?

• DAY 73 | May 05: What is one way you might be gentler in your practice today?.

• DAY 74 | May 06: Write about a question you want to explore in your art.

• DAY 75 | May 07: What can looking again reveal?

• DAY 76 | May 08: Describe the moment you know you are ready in terms of your five senses.

• DAY 77 | May 09: What helps you show up when your motivation is low?

All my love,

I had the opportunity to give a mini workshop this week for a community women’s meeting on the power of microdosing awe, and then we practiced with a watercolor winddown.

It went so well I wanted to s…

Read more

The light rays stretch low and long across my dining room table piled haphazardly with the books I’m reading and my tower of notebooks, all dog-eared and underlined with thoughts scribbled in the margins like secret conversations.

I’ve been writing mostly by hand these days. It helps my squirrel brain focus long enough to maybe catch thoughts long enough to record them.

I’ve been watching the ink seep and scratch lines across my paper. Copying phrases I love from what I’m reading. Notating the techniques used and how I might adapt them to my devices. Reading with pen and paper in hand helps me hold on to what captures my imagination. Otherwise my thoughts are more a game of catch and release.

Our Week 10 Prompts ⬇️

This week I’ve been thinking about longing. The kind that dares us to want more than we currently have words for. Sue Monk Kidd writes, “Longing is one of the most eloquent and insistent ways the soul speaks.”

Spending decades in certain corners of evangelicalism, longing was portrayed as dangerous, and so were souls, unless they were saved. It was drilled deep that our souls should not, must not be trusted or listened to. Soulish was sinful and 3 inches removed from evil.

I was trained to stifle and shush, shelve and shame the very way the deepest part of me communicated. Longing was only holy if it was to make myself less and shrink my becoming into something palatable to the system I was in.

So I often lived a life only partly alive and called it sacred. It was more a function of being scared than anything set apart. But there was a sacristy in my soul and it was filled with longings I didn’t even know were there. One of them was to live a life of creativity.

Please hear me. Your creativity is not a selfish pursuit.

Many of you here reading this are women. These things are often especially true for us. There is a culture that expects us to be perennial caretakers, frequently even to the point of shutdown.

Friend, you are allowed to be true to what’s in your heart and open the door to listen to the longings in your soul. They are there for a reason.

Too often creativity is framed as a frivolous “little” hobby that only gets validated when a certain measure of “success” is reached. There are moments I even frame it that way to myself.

You are worthy of taking up space on a page. You are worthy of being seen and heard. You do not need to shrink who you are. You are not too much, too loud, too emotional, too quiet, too opinionated, or too sensitive.

If you have to shave off parts of who you are to be “welcome” that isn’t actual belonging. Belonging is found in the places we are allowed to “be longing” and have those dreams celebrated and supported. People who are invested in controlling narratives simply are afraid of anyone who has the ability to change them.

So welcome to a life of leaning into longing as good and beautiful and holy. It holds keys to how we connect to our creativity and often shows up as curiosity that becomes the doorway into deeper wonder.

I’m going to leave last week’s quote here again because I simply have not moved on from it.

What are the things that bring you alive?

What is one thing you are curious to try? Who are the people in your world that see your longings and call them sacred? Where are the spaces you don’t have to be scared of getting it wrong?

Hopefully this space is one of them.

You are so very loved and I’m deeply grateful for you being here.

PS. I found this video unexpectedly really inspiring this week. It’s not my normal fare, but there are so many insights. Especially the segment with 82-year-old Dan from OK starting at 7:50 (I have his interview cued up in the link.)

The Daily Prompts: April 26-May 02

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 64 | April 26: How does curiosity help you get started?

• DAY 65 | April 27: What helps you return to a project after taking a break?

• DAY 66 | April 28: Write about a beginning that worked out differently than you expected.

  DAY 67 | April 29: What does collaboration invite you to explore?

• DAY 68 | April 30: When do you most feel like an artist?

• DAY 69 | May 01: When does your voice feel strongest?

• DAY 70 | May 02: What role does vulnerability play in your art?

All my love,

Maybe it’s just me, but the world feels like it is on fire any time I turn on the news. How then do we stay connected to wonder in the middle of the disorienting tumult that tumbles from our screens?

Read more

I rummaged through the pile of clothes blocking the door of my closet searching for a flowy skirt to spin in. My clothes slowly built into a mountain of fabric over the last few months. I’m mean they’re folded-ish.

After the last few weeks on the world stage, I have decided that for the rest of 2026 and beyond, the new level of audacity unlocked for me is whimsical AF.

I will be flouncing in flowy skirts and eating ice cream for lunch (occasionally). Burying myself in poetry books and writing classes and finally painting my kitchen backsplash. DIYing my very best life on a dime. And sharing the joy with you.

Our Week 9 Prompts ⬇️

Whimsy isn’t needless frivolity or childishness. It is a survival strategy when each news cycle seems to bring with it more uncertainty and hard things than the last.

Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and codirector of the Greater Good Science Center, studies the brain science behind awe, wonder, and positive psychology. (I’m actually auditing one of his university classes now for the book I’m writing.) He and researchers in this field have found small micro-moments of awe, where we are intentionally focused outside ourselves can reduce stress hormones, make our time feel more expansive, and improve our ability to connect to other people.1

Simply put, whimsy is a tool for a calmer nervous system.

When I say whimsy, I’m not talking about toxic positivity or hustle-harder hype. Rather, I’m referring to intentionally embracing playful, imaginative, or lighthearted actions with a side of quirky delight, artistic creativity, and childlike curiosity.

Researchers who study play have discovered tiny, whimsical acts signal safety to our brains. Whimsy is a resilience strategy. Cue dancing in your kitchen, reading to your plants, pouring your tea from a teapot, painting flowers on your lightswitches, picking dandelion flowers in your yard, and watching the clouds for animal shapes.

Y’all, I’m going all in on this. ALL IN. And I’m here to bring you with me.

Our New More Whimsical Format

Welcome to The Saturday Stroll: On Noticing What Matters, where we slow down long enough to live deeply again.

In 2024, I casually tossed out the idea of 100 Days of Wonder to friends on Instagram and invited the internet to join me. When thousands of you unexpectedly said yes, overnight I was building the plane while flying the plane. The plane? This Substack.

These last 2 years have seen so much change on every level. Deep, hard, messy growth. Kind words and so much encouragement, but also profound anxiety I didn’t expect.

Everytime the numbers here would wane and people drifted to other places (which I wholeheartedly support), I’ve had to wrestle with questions of… am I enough? Did I misstep on that last post? Am I offering enough value? Am I offering too much? Is this actually helpful given the current state of the world? Should I apply to be a barista?

A friend once said that running your own business is the weirdest psychological experiment you’ll ever run on yourself. I might add… especially if 80% of your income is subscription-based. People come and go, subscribe and unsubscribe. It’s the nature of this kind of model. I just completely underestimated the head game that flux can play.

I’d see our numbers climb and feel buoyed. The numbers would fall and I was searching for the shards of my confidence that shattered on the studio floor.

(And no, this is not a veiled ploy to get you to subscribe. A huge thank you to each one of you for being here in any capacity you are able.)

I spent much of last year trying to “not get it wrong” and figure out the right system. And that has led to less rather than more. I want, and need, this space to embody creativity again. Not just for you. For me too.

So here’s the working plan to get our whimsy back.

Each Saturday I’m going to show up here with an essay and a mix-and-match assortment of poetry snippets, thoughts from what I’m reading, pictures from art-making, quotes, inspiration images, recipes, and tangible delights all wrapped up with love and delivered right to your cyber doorstep.

I hope it feels like a special snail mail club landing in your inbox. Like an invitation to slow down, notice the beauty found in ordinary moments, and sip on a favorite beverage while reading words that pour courage on your week.

In a world where it feels like everything is accelerating, this is a place to regather around the art of noticing and finding wonder every day.

You are so very loved and I’m deeply grateful for you being here.

PS. Prompt & Ponder, we have some super fun changes coming too that will be sent out with this week’s Wonder Drop in just a few hours.

The Daily Prompts: April 19-25

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 57 | April 19: When is it easiest for you to use your imagination?

• DAY 58 | April 20: What imagery keeps showing up in your creative work?

• DAY 59 | April 21: How do you want to connect with others through what you create?

• DAY 60 | April 22: What idea feels delightfully unreasonable?

• DAY 61 | April 23: Write about what you are ready to start that scares you.

• DAY 62 | April 24: What part of your practice could be sillier?

• DAY 63 | April 25: What are you proud of in your creative growth?

All my love,