On Being Proactive About Your Mental Health — We will do anything to make the physical spaces we live in beautiful. We will clean out the closets, get rid of clutter, and wash our windows. We will swap out the old with the new and refreshing. We will do all of this and not even give it another…

I recently was engaged in my favorite topic of conversation: books. My friend told me that when her children were young, she would get up at 5:00 each morning to read. I found that to be so charming. I pictured the scene: a hot mug of coffee, a cozy sweatshirt…

Six simple things you can do to help your loved ones when they need it — Let’s get really diplomatic about something quick: Life is weird. Some days are marvelous. Some days feel impossible, and those days can easily blur into weeks, sometimes months. When that happens, we need our community to be there for us to hold our hand and bring us back to the…

On Parenting and Prioritizing Yourself — The glitter reflected the light like a setting sun shining through a thousand icicles. Rising over the letters beautifully scripted with school glue, the different colors bled together and formed the most magnificent piece of art, right on my kitchen counter. It was stunning, truly. It was also lunchtime. I…

From Jhumpa Lahiri to Donna Tartt, these are the passages that stuck with me this year — Last December, after enduring the year everybody loves to hate, I dug up the 20 most beautiful lines I had read. It was a process of mining for beauty in a time that needed it, and it proved to be highly beneficial to me. Looking for the most beautiful passages…

Sometimes the relationships that are supposed to be foundational just aren’t. — I don’t have an immense amount of friends. I’m not the kind of person who acquires a friend during each new phase of my life, collecting them along the way like souvenirs from places I’ve visited. Nor would I ever have a birthday party with fifty of my closest friends…

The beautiful, tragic feeling of missing a moment before it is gone — It is the golden hour. The sun is low in the sky and casts oblong shadows that dance as the wind rustles the fiery leaves still clutching to the trees. You are on a front porch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the sun make its dramatic descent. You revel in…

Louise Erdrich, Suleika Jaouad, and more — If the act of reading a book could be represented by a season, that season would be fall. Everything about fall invites the opportunity to warm up with a book, a cozy blanket, and a nice cup of coffee or glass of wine, depending on the time of day. Like…

Ideas for your summer TBR stack — Do you ever wish you could read a book again for the first time? When you read the last line, you move on to the acknowledgments, the paragraph about the author, and even turn to the back of the book to reread the synopsis, trying to find any new information…