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…

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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…

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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?

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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,

He…

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I’m going to be honest. This last few weeks around here have been filled with 2nd guessing myself, Olympic-level overthinking, bad sleep decisions, and general disagreeableness.

It has reminded me of when I spent a semester in a Bangladeshi village at 19. Mostly on my own for 4 months dropped in a village 3 days on an ox cart past the last urban anything. We were in rainy season, and the roads looked like that image above.

Oozing mud reached my ankle or higher. Context note: I have one leg and use crutches to walk.

Every few steps the suction power of that viscous goo I was slogging through would consume a crutch tip. Pull it right off. SLURP. Gone. I quickly gathered an entourage of village kiddos spelunking through mud to dig me out every 10 feet or so.

For the girl 🙋🏻‍♀️ who hated to ask for help, wow, was that a lesson. Even almost 30 years later.

That’s what the last month-ish has felt like around here.

This last week has come with some deep reflection and realization… We are in such a different place now in the world than we were when I started this Substack in 2023-2024 with our first 100 Days of Wonder. I am in a much different place too.

I love creative challenges. But I am realizing there are times when they can overwhelm and shut down the very creativity you are hoping to wake up. The trick is to know yourself well enough to know when they are helping to stretch you. And when they are suffocating the joy right out of what you’re doing.

Seth Godin talks about elements of this in his little book, The Dip. The “dip” is the hard part where pushing through brings real value on the other side. But there are other times it’s a cliff or a culdesac where more push-through isn’t helpful at all.

• If I push through the hard part, does this meaningfully improve and offer value?

• Or am I just staying because I started?

So I want to do something I’ve never done in the many creative challenges I’ve hosted here and on social media—remind you that you have permission to quit anything that isn’t serving you. With ZERO shame.

If this (or any) creative challenge is not building your creative JOY or growth, I’m going to suggest redirecting that precious energy into a direction that will.

The last thing I want is for this space to be “homework” in your inbox. God, no.

So I’m rearranging a few things to better serve the wonder we all need more of. Myself included.

Starting next week, I’m sending you a weekly Saturday essay. The prompts to finish this 100-Day Project will still be sent, but they will arrive linked in that essay. You can click through or not.

Why? I’m writing a book and I need to get back to writing the kind of words that are pulled from the depths of the stretch marks in my soul not a prompt jar. Back to the joy of language and expression and telling you about forages wild evening primrose and infusing it into jojoba oil.

I need to prioritize more joy in the absurd times we are dancing through. And maybe you do too. Sleep better, care for my body and not get strapped into the doom loop roller coaster white-knuckled in survival mode.

I want you to hear from me, brew some tea and enjoy a letter from a friend. Not file this as another set of things to do.

And if you are loving our 100-Days of Wonder prompts… they still will be coming, just linked as an option instead of the main event.

Thank you for being here and letting me change and grow with you.

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The Daily Prompts: April 12-18

From Penelope the Prompt Jar… holy heck, I wrote the letter above before I pulled these prompts!

• DAY 50 | April 12: What does consistency feel like today?

• DAY 51 | April 13: What does growth feel like from the inside?

• DAY 52 | April 14: How does movement impact your creativity?

• DAY 53 | April 15: What does possibility look like right now?

• DAY 54 | April 16: What does creative joy feel like?

• DAY 55 | April 17: Write about the last time you discovered something surprising.

• DAY 56 | April 18: What practice helps you return to yourself?

As always, I am so grateful you are here.

All my love,

My favorite definition of noise is that which disrupts, obscures or interferes with a message. It’s anything that makes it harder to hear what matters.

Noise isn’t always about volume. Except when it’…

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Thank you for all the love for Charlie. We are still figuring things out, but he is hanging in there. I had some medical testing this week so it was my turn to be slightly slower than usual. But I’m getting back in the swing of things and I can’t wait to be back writing more in the coming week.

What has been the biggest thing that has stood out to you now that we are almost halfway through? I’d love to hear your favorite aha moment you’ve had so far.

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The Daily Prompts: April 05-11

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 43 | April 05: Where do you want to invite more wonder into?

• DAY 44 | April 06: What does it mean to you to take up creative space?

• DAY 45 | April 07: What story does your creative work want to share with others?

• DAY 46 | April 08: What lessons are you learning about connection through your art?

• DAY 47 | April 09: What do you need to focus?

• DAY 48 | April 10: What has your art revealed that you didn’t expect?

• DAY 49 | April 11: What does your art want to try next?

In case you missed it…

It was a quiet week and you’re all caught up!

As always, I am so grateful you are here.

All my love,

Consistency. Everyone’s favorite word! Admittedly, I chose it because it is something I am really working on.

Building creative practices, like writing every day, that can hold us. Places to which we…

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My poodle Charlie just turned 12 and is having a flare-up of some health conditions that have kept me taking care of him this weekend. Thoughts & prayers are so appreciated. He’s my baby. 💕

The Daily Prompts: March 29-April 04

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 36 | March 29: What season of creativity are you in right now?

• DAY 37 | March 30: What do you tend to notice that others may overlook?

• DAY 38 | March 31: If your creative work could pose a question, what would you want it to be?

• DAY 39 | April 01: Describe what it feels like to be part of something bigger.

• DAY 40 | April 02: What creative door has recently opened for you?

• DAY 41 | April 03: Is there a creative question you are afraid to ask? What is it?

• DAY 42 | April 04: What new perspective has intrigued you lately?

Leave a comment

In case you missed it…

As always, I am so grateful you are here. It is an honor to serve you.

All my love,

Honestly, the flattening effect of short-form media crept up on me. I didn’t even realize it was happening until I tried to craft something longer than an Instagram caption. Suddenly structuring a thesis and stating my points felt more like high-altitude rock climbing than writing.

One of the ways I got my words back post-TBI was by studying copywriting. This discipline gave me tools to research and find the words that lived in my audience’s head—as well as my own. I will always be grateful for that.

But copywriting is often short, conversational, and crafted to be pithy, almost to a fault. It is designed to hook you, but it only dives deep enough to get you to take the next desired action. Scroll down the page. Click the button. You know what copywriting doesn’t do well at all? Write a spacious, engaging book with depth of soul. Literary writing is a completely different world.

Since embarking on this writing adventure, I have come face-to-face with my own verbal inadequacies. Writing has felt like an exercise in squeezing ink from a rock. For over a year I have stared at my screen willing words to come that have simply refused to enter the stage on cue. Rude. (But it’s not the word’s fault. Not really.)

I’ve been quieter here because I have been trying to find the way back to my literary voice. And I’ve had to deep dive into reclaiming my own attention just to write about the importance of… reclaiming our attention. 🤣

One of the most vital things I’ve done to get my attention back has been to return to what was once a daily anchor for me: reading physical books and writing by hand in a notebook. My life unfolded in page after page of handwritten journals, starting when I was 15 through my 30s in Africa.

But when I returned to the US in 2013, I stopped writing. It was a devastating move, and I no longer trusted my voice to have anything worth saying. Then came the brain injury that took my words. So for the last decade there have been only scant scribbles and spurts stretched across a very few notebooks.

Sue Monk Kidd writes, “Writing is more than creating language and story. It also involves the creation of self.”

It takes attention to create anything—especially your own becoming.

Personally, I would rather not live in a world of 30-second soundbites where my attention gets auctioned to the highest bidder. I’m going to venture maybe you don’t either.

I want to be crystal clear about the dynamics that are at play. We live in an economy that is built to extract our attention and keep us scrolling (and spending).

Reclaiming that attention may be simple, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. It is not one-and-done, a box we check off, or a level we attain. It is rather an ongoing practice and an intentional posture we maintain.

What Attention Is & Why It Is Vital, Especially in an Age of Algorithms

The English word attention is derived from the Latin root attentio, meaning to stretch towards, as in active mental effort or focused concentration. The word also came to mean care and consideration. Taking back my attention has been one of the most important and stretching things I have ever done—pun completely intended.

When our attention gets fragmented, we are literally being stretched thin. Attention has a finite capacity. It can be exhausted and fatigued. And, as such, it requires care to protect and replenish.

In addition to our feeds and algorithms, navigating this new landscape of AI-everything adds a level of complexity to things. Whether we recognize it or not, AI writing has become utterly pervasive and ubiquitous on the internet.1 It is woven into online advertising, emails, scripts for YouTube videos, social media accounts, and sadly, even some books. AI is dramatically scaling the amount of content we have to sift through online which adds even more strain to our attention resources.

In the days ahead, it will be increasingly vital to not only know how to steward our focus but also how to recognize AI content and manipulation. Our democracy, freedom, and sanity may very well depend on it.

How to Get Your Attention Back, Even If You Can’t Move to a Cottage in the Woods

If I am really honest, all of this makes a part of me want to hide in an almost off-grid cabin in the woods. It’s so tempting. But for the vast majority of us, myself included, that’s obviously not a sustainable reality. There are, however, things we can do to help move towards balance. These are some of the things I am currently finding most helpful.

📱 I deleted apps that either extracted my attention or exploited it for someone else’s profit. TikTok and Amazon were my first two to go. While I liked some content, the format of TikTok was horrible for my brain health and my nervous system. It just wasn’t worth it. Amazon got cut because it was too easy to spend money I didn’t need to be spending. I am not here to tell you to delete a specific app. I am here to suggest we need to recognize anything that is depleting and extracting our attention for someone else’s profit.

☕️ I have scroll-free mornings. I now read a physical book and write in a journal as I enjoy my coffee. I don’t check my phone until I have to use it to create for work. Also, I turn my phone screen to grayscale when I am not working. Have you ever tried doomscrolling social media in grayscale? It almost put me to sleep!

📖 Reading physical books and now writing in an actual notebook every day for journaling. Writing even a few lines each day is one of the most grounding things I can do because I am honoring my own presence as worthy to take up space on a page.

✅ Monotask, micro-blast, and take a nap. Sorry I had to make that rhyme. I work on one thing at a time and when I feel exceedingly stuck, I blast a sheet of paper (usually in my planner) with everything I think I need to get done in the smallest minutia possible. Things that feel so small I can’t not do at least some of them. Also, I take naps now!

📝 I created a custom focus mode on my phone named Hobbit Hole Mode that turns off every notification—including the badges (the number that appears on an app icon saying how many notifications you have). This let’s me disappear from the world while I write.

💻 I started writing in a program called Obsidian. It is a super stripped-down, free program that just lets me write and organize my thoughts old school. It is analog-adjacent, which means it lives on my actual device with no cloud-based anything or subscription. Of course I have to manually back up everything, but that’s sweetly nostalgic. It returns me to the days of writing in Africa with a kerosene lantern and waning laptop battery.

Getting our attention back is about emotional regulation far more than it is external restriction. Restrictions may offer immediate structure, but they often don’t last for the long term. Whereas internal regulation is what happens when we go on a journey to learn what is healthy for us and our needs. Some things might need to go altogether. Others primarily require boundaries. And these decisions vary vastly between individuals and even between different life seasons.

One thing remains clear. If we want to experience more wonder in our world, reclaiming our attention is a crucial element in being able to find it.

The kind of wonder we talk about here isn’t ethereal aesthetics. It’s about showing up and practicing the art of noticing, training our attention to begin to see the small moments of goodness and beauty that unfold around us every single day. Not as a way to escape or bypass hard realities, but rather as a resilience strategy to make it through them.

So my friend, what is your attention stretching you towards today?

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I’m so grateful you’re here.

PS. If this has been helpful please share and restack this to help grow our community. And if you like weekly creative prompts (as well as our extensive archives) and access to upcoming audio versions of me reading (and chatting about) some of my written posts, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Attention. It feels like it is everywhere in my world these days. Stacks of the latest studies are stacked on my desktop. It is the crux of the book I am working on writing right now on finding wonde…

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I thought I might start sharing my responses to one or more of the previous week’s prompts. This question was the one that stood out the most to me personally.

When does practice feel most nourishing?

When I sit with my tea/coffee and my pen and journal in silence. Usually with 1-3 books I am meandering through. I used to love having instrumental music on when I wrote or created. Now it completely shuts me down and sends my brain into a panic. I still have fairly major sensory processing issues from my 2018 brain injury. It has redefined my creative practice, and my world in so many ways. I am forced to prioritize single-minded attention because I no longer have the brain bandwidth to try to convince myself I can multitask. (Which is a myth by the way. No one can multitask. We are all task switching, but that is a post for another day!)

But here’s what I am learning. There are things to push through to regain what was lost. And there are other things that are just different. Maybe one day I’ll slowly train my brain to handle music again. But right now I am ok in silence and the clicking of my keys as I type.

I DO, however, love my clickety lilac keyboard that would have driven me nuts 10 years ago. All that to say… we change. Our rhythms change for many reasons. The things that nourish us are invitations to let our practice hold us right where we are. And keep growing with us.

PS. I still groove to showtunes when I rebound. Currently The Greatest Showman is on repeat. Specifically the chorus of From Now On. If you want to smile, imagine me joy-bouncing on my rebounder on my one leg to that chorus on repeat. (My rebounder has a balance bar, don’t worry.)

The Daily Prompts: March 22-28

From Penelope the Prompt Jar…

• DAY 29 | March 22: What identity are you stepping into creatively?

• DAY 30 | March 23: What does celebration look like in your creative life?

• DAY 31 | March 24: How might a specific constraint might spark your creativity?

• DAY 32 | March 25: What playful practice might help you loosen up?

• DAY 33 | March 26: What unexpected materials or supplies feel like they are calling your name?

• DAY 34 | March 27: When does being seen feel supportive?

• DAY 35 | March 28: What unanswered question keeps you creating?

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In case you missed it — you are all caught up.

It’s been quiet here because I’ve been working on the parts of my book needed for finishing its proposal. It is deep, sacred, soulful work that takes a level of attention I have not broached in a very long time. I’ll be writing more about that journey here on some of our weekday posts because it is stretching me out in humbling ways I truly did not expect. I don’t want to just write a book, I want to construct a refuge you can inhabit with words to hold onto.

As always, I am so grateful you are here. It is an honor to serve you.

All my love,

I’ve been a busy bee behind the scenes these last few weeks reimagining how we can add more value to this Weekly Wonder Drop in ways that feel delightful and not like homework.

Over the coming weeks,…

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