Day 1

Today is Day 1 of the 30-Day Journaling challenge. There are hundreds of us doing this together. After years of living with a rare form of cancer, I am used to being in isolation. What sustains me is keeping a journal. Journaling untangles my knots. It wakes me up to beauty. It’s an antidote to fear. But journaling together, with you—now that’s a rare treat!

Pick one of your objects, animals, or plants and describe the place where you are living now from its perspective. Be detailed and specific. Don’t clean up your mess! The goal is to get down on paper where you are right now and how nutty your behavior might seem to another being. Use all the senses! What does your cat/plant/fridge see, hear, smell, feel and wonder?

Write for 1-11 minutes beginning with the prompt. Or not. No rules! Just keep your hand moving. 

Day 3

These times remind me of the paradox of being human. On any given day, I feel joy for beautiful moments. I also feel pain for what we have lost and what we are losing each day.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams, writes about the human capacity to hold opposing feelings at once in her book, An Unspoken Hunger. 

“How are you feeling?” (Terry asks her uncle Alan at the age of 9.)

“I am very happy, and I am very sad,” says Alan.

“How can you be both at the same time?”

“Because both require each other’s company. They live in the same house. Didn’t you know?”

They live in the same house! The concept that they live in the same house has stayed with me for over twenty years because it gave me language for my mixed emotions.

Your prompt: Write about what causes you pain and what gives you joy now and how these two feelings can live in the same house.

Day 5

My friend Alden Smith at The Mountain School in VT taught me to learn poems by heart to calm me down. When I used to wake in the night full of worries about my health and my children’s wellbeing, I’d recite “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry over and over until I fell back asleep. It worked better than melatonin or magic.

Today’s prompt is not about memorizing poetry (though let me know if you want to and I’ll give you tips to make the process easy). It’s about how when we spend time in Nature, we can find grace.

Your prompt: Go to a place outside that brings you peace (if you can’t, try locking yourself in the bathroom and open a window to outside—it works for me). Sit quietly in silence.

Close your eyes. Do nothing. You don’t need to be productive. This moment is for you to feel the bigger context of Nature.

When you open your eyes, write down what you hear. Look at the sky above you and remember that the earth is still spinning. Write down what you see.

Write down the ways in which Nature doesn’t seem to be affected by current events. Relax into the grace of the world.

When you wake in the night in the coming weeks, return to this moment, the words you wrote, and the peace of wild things.

The Peace of Wild Things

–Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Day 7

Today you have a choice of prompts. I’ve been thinking about how particular colors like pink or blue make me feel. I’ve also been wondering about the moon and how a full moon can make me curious about the tides that live inside me.

Your prompt: Pick one.

1. Write about your relationship to the color pink. No need to write complete sentences. Begin with “Pink is…” and let the pen roll its way through positive and negative associations.
2. The moon can shine a spotlight on certain relationships. Let the moon inspire a journal entry on the pull and push of independence and compromise. How well are you balancing what you give to others and what you do for yourself? Where do you need to hold on and where can you let go of the nature of things? How much are you willing to accept the dark with the light? 

Day 9

Today’s prompt comes from one of my favorite books about writing: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

In my twenties, I lived on a farm in New Hampshire with a beautiful Jewish couple and their children. They taught me how to plant strawberries, harvest potatoes, and care for goats, but they also included me in all of their holiday celebrations.

Each year, I would look forward to the Passover Seder because it was a feast of food and stories. I loved the way children were encouraged to ask questions and the way that together, we remembered. The whole days seemed to be a poem that began with the words “I remember…” 

Your prompt: Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write “I remember…” at the top of your journal page. Journal about the first memory that comes to mind or do a stream of consciousness and write down every memory that comes to you in ten minutes.

Leap through time and make the past come alive.

Day 11

Today your prompt is about your voice. I’ve been thinking about my own voice, and how easily I lose it when other voices around me are louder or more authoritative. In isolation with my husband and kids, I sometimes feel like I was adopted into this family. The problem is that I am starving to express myself more freely, the way I do with my girlfriends. I want to swear more, to get angry, to be inappropriate, to have space to dance or chant or cry. 

It reminds me of my diagnosis. When I first found out about the tumor wrapped around my vocal cords, I worried, When will I lose my voice? But as I faced the idea of dying young, the real question became, When did I let my voice go?

We unapologetically express ourselves when we are really young. (Don’t you remember singing into your hairbrush?) As we grow and try to fit in, we start lying. We lie to hide our struggles or we lie to please others. We lie when we pretend to be someone we’re not. We lie when we curate our lives on social media. Gradually, by constantly lying, or at least not telling our inner truth, we lose touch with who we are. We stop using our own powerful voice. But we can reclaim it. We can find and use our own voice again. It begins with listening. 

Day 13

One Summer in my twenties, I became fascinated by metamorphosis. I studied the life cycles of insects obsessively. I found out that a caterpillar doesn’t just go into a cocoon, grow wings, and come out as a butterfly. It dissolves completely inside the chrysalis until it is nothing but green liquid. No wonder transformation is uncomfortable, I thought. In the process of becoming something new, we have to dissolve first.

That same summer, I kept a pet dragonfly nymph, waiting for it to hatch its wings. When it finally did, I couldn’t believe that it just crawled out of the water one day and flew off at a speed of over 30 mph. A dragonfly may begin its life in water, but it contains everything it needs to fly inside it when it’s born. The dragonfly taught me that transformation is not something I make happen. It’s something I allow to happen. 

Today’s prompt: Don’t say demolition, say transformation. How is your old self dissolving right now? What hurts in the process? How would you act if you believed that everything you need is with you right now to transform into something new? How can you imagine these days as a time of transformation for the world, too?

Day 15

Today marks the halfway point in our challenge! You’re doing GREAT. It’s hard to do anything consistently for two days, much less two weeks! To celebrate, I want to introduce you to a special guest, the incomparable Gideon Irving! He is currently on intermission from his Horse Tour, a 3,000 mile odyssey on horseback to perform “stovetop folk” music in rural homes across the American West. He’s been written up in The Atlantic, twice in The New York Times, and Rolling Stone named his song “Wake Up Looking” as one of the 25 Best Music Videos of 2019. But that’s the mundane stuff. What makes Gideon unique is that he gets a big, crazy, wonderful idea like riding horses across the west with his banjo, and then he does it. Never mind the obstacles, the naysayers (pun intended), and the fact that he grew up in NYC and had never ridden a horse. He says he is “passionately dedicated to being unreasonable in the spirit of connection and curiosity.” I can think of no better way to live. 

I met Gideon as a teenager. He walked into my 11th grade English Literature class looking for the bathroom. Not really. But he did seem a little lost. Then he blew us all away in that class with his endless stream of creativity. A few years later, I invited him to come live with us and be our kids’ “manny.” I came home one day and Gideon was playing the banjo while these happy toddlers were dancing at his feet, singing at the top of their lungs, “Whack fol the daddy o, there’s whiskey in the jar!” Since then, he’s produced 3 CDs, performed in over 600 homes on 4 continents (his choice to play in homes instead of other venues), and created a sold-out off-broadway theater production. And now, without further ado, I give you Gideon Irving…

Today’s prompt from Gideon Irving: In this moment where we are placed in our own company to an unprecedented extent sometimes I like to think I’m someone else. Someone who has less pain than me or more pain. Someone who is far away where the dirt looks different and the air smells different when it rains or someone within a mile that I’ve never seen or never met. It’s exhausting to be ones self and the only option we are ever given. Be somebody else. 

Write as someone remarkably different than who you are in this moment. let it be absurd and surreal or detailed and accurate, but do not be yourself. Do not write what you know. Write what you don’t know. Be who you aren’t and ruminate on that who isn’t you. Find some of their details some of their experiences in this moment or other moments. Start with a seed of them and expand holding the complexity that this person is both fictional and in the multiverse likely very very real.

Day 17

“I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.”–Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”

I’m fascinated by language and how it shapes our identity. Amy Tan grew up embarrassed by her mother’s “broken” English even though it was vivid and expressive. As a Chinese American, she spoke English one way at school, and another way at home. 

I grew up in Canada where I went to school in French and spoke English at home. My thoughts, even my behavior, were different in one language than another. When I spoke French, for example, I possessed a certain sassy confidence and I swore like a sailor. In English, I was more of a rule-follower and always polite. 

Your prompt: Write about how language has shaped your identity. Do you speak a different English at home than you do at work, or with your parents? Write about the ways you change when you are around different people. If you speak more than one language, write about the ease and difficulty of switching between languages and whether you are different when you speak different languages.

Day 19

Comfort Yourself. Today’s prompt on stress and self-care comes from acclaimed sociologist and author, Christine Carter, PhD. She writes a super-useful advice column for Greater Good Magazine, where she draws on scientific research to help people lead less stressful, more meaningful lives. She is also the author of three books including The New Adolescence: Raising Happy and Resilient Teens in an Age of Anxiety and Distraction.

I met Christine when we were both young educators at The Thacher School in Ojai, California. What we lacked in experience, we made up in curiosity and appreciation of teenagers. She went on to get her PhD from UC Berkeley, studying happiness and how to cultivate resiliency. Now she is the mother of four teenagers, and has written a candid, practical, wise guide on how to raise amazing humans. She is also a phenomenal coach. Without Christine, I would never have finished my memoir, Fierce Joy, or had it published. And I definitely wouldn’t have laughed so much during the creative process. She is simultaneously a hero and the sister I never had.

Your prompt from Christine: When we are stressed, our brain tries to rescue us by activating our dopamine systems. A dopamine rush makes temptations more tempting. Think of this as your brain pushing you toward a comfort item . . . Like an extra glass of wine instead of a reasonable bedtime. Or the entire breadbasket. Or an extra little something in your Amazon cart.

This is the time to preemptively comfort ourselves in healthy ways. Schedule a quick call with a friend, reflect on what we are grateful for, or let ourselves take a little nap. Perhaps we need to seek out a hug or watch a funny YouTube video. These things may seem small — or even luxurious — but they enable us to be the people that we intend to be.

Your prompt: 

• What “reward” does your brain direct you towards when you are stressed? 

• What is a more constructive reward or treat that you can direct yourself towards? What are some healthy ways to comfort yourself? 

Carter’s prompt is an excerpt from her free eBook, How to Set a Resolution that Sticks: Establishing New Habits & Achieving Your Goals. 

Day 21

Write a letter to yourself from Joy. I believe that joy is our birthright and our most natural state of being. As we grow, we learn to push down our desires and our whims so we can stay “safe.” The consequence is that we forget who we are. One way to remember is to ignite the embers inside us and write down our dreams.

Your prompt: Begin with the words, “This is your true, joyful self speaking. I’m here to remind you of your dreams. You want to live by the ocean. You want to learn the names of constellations. You also want to…” Continue the letter with NO RULES, as if money were no object and coronavirus was far behind us in the past…

Day 23

How to Love this World. When a bear emerges from her den, all of her senses are on high alert. She investigates every leaf. She notices each new scent. A bird overhead deserves her full attention. One way to love this world is to pay attention to its smallest, natural delights. Today, spend your time paying attention as if you too just woke up from a deep hibernation.

Your prompt:

1. Open a window or get outside
2. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply, then open your eyes. Write down everything you smell, hear, see, feel, and taste
3. Next, read “Spring” by Mary Oliver. In it, she writes, “There is only one question; how to love this world.” Write a response to her question. (Oliver’s answer includes seeing darkness as a dazzling mysterious animal. It also includes paying attention to the smallest gifts of spring.)

Spring
by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.

All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her…

(Excerpted from House of Light. Read the full poem here.)

Day 25

Animals are re-wilding our cities. There are videos circulating of monkeys taking over public squares in Thailand, kangaroos bounding freely through Australia, and here in Colorado, mountain lions brazenly walking down the middle of the street. It gives me a thrill to see them because they are visions of renewal and possibility. Imagine how we could live more in balance with wildlife after all this isolation ends!

Stories of encounters with animals are popular at our dinner table. How many deer did you see today? Did anyone identify those tracks in our yard? Was that an owl I heard last night? Who wants to come see a fox den with me? Lately, after rescuing a mutt, everyone wants to talk about what Leo the wonderdog did that day.

Your prompt: Relive or invent an animal encounter. It could be with a pet or a wild animal on land or sea. Have you ever come so close to a whale that it took your breath away? Or had a bear come to your campsite? Or watched a red bird at your feeder and wondered what it meant? Dive into the memory deeply and create a scene that includes your thoughts on what you worried might happen with the animal, and what ultimately did. 

Day 27

Visions of summer.  Our prompt comes from Stephanie LaFlora. @stephanielaflora (don’t miss her wit and true style; she is one of my favorite people to follow)

I met Stephanie on my first day working at gloo.us creating tools for champions (educators, leaders, therapists…) to help others grow. In a room full of engineers, she was a radiant storm of strategic creativity. I couldn’t wait to become her friend. I am also a big fan of SwimXL, her inclusive brand of swimwear that is made “by a working mom saying yes to post-partum body change.”

I like to think who we were in middle school is who we really are. The person who existed before popularity contests or dating or real academic pressure. I find it helpful to remember that version of me when I’m stressed or tense. It helps me to shake off “shoulds” and feel free to do what I want. 

Your prompt: Try to remember summer time in middle school. Bring to mind the way you passed the time, the food you ate, cartoons you watched, people you spent the most time with daily. Now, recount a perfect summer day and write, in as much detail as you can, how the day would go. 

*Bonus*: What part of that version of you is still preserved? What has gone unchanged?

Day 29

Write about what makes you mad. I used to believe that good girls don’t express rage. It’s no wonder that I have no idea what to do with the anger that consumes me sometimes. I will not stay quiet. I want to speak up for what matters to me. But if I don’t express the anger I feel in a healthy way, I will rage against the people closest to me. Writing down what makes me mad is healthy and helps! For example, this is from a journal entry of mine:

Sometimes there is a rage inside me that is not mine, but ours. Rage for what my future and my children’s future holds. Rage for those who live in fear because of their age, gender, class, or the color of their skin. Rage for the poverty that too many are born into. Rage for the feeling of helplessness. Rage that I am not angrier, not doing more.

When I write about anger, sadness often comes up. Many say that sorrow is underneath all of our anger. Yet it’s good for us to feel the “bad” emotions. It helps us to find courage and clarity for our compassion and activism. It’s also been proven to help us live longer. 

Your prompt: Write about what makes you mad. Give yourself permission to be angry. Start wherever you are, and focus on personal issues first. If you’re frustrated with someone in your family, your own inability to be productive, or your unreliable internet connection, write it down. Then keep going, expand to larger issues of social or environmental justice that make you mad. Let it rip. To end your entry, visualize taking your foot off the gas pedal of anger. Slow down. Come back to NOW. Write down at least one thing that is going well at this moment.