As I announced last month, this post is the last issue of PeaceLinks. More and more, my other newsletter, , has become a place of cooperative writing adventures and absorbing experiments. I have also returned to work at last on a book project — something I set aside in 2020 when COVID changed everything about home and work. These ventures need time and attention.

To close this year of PeaceLinks, I’ll leave you with something of a selected shorts album, though there’s plenty more from both Substack writers and Other parts of the Internet in the archive.

Cooperative Writing

For the last month, the cooperative project at the forefront for me has been the memorial of Substack writers for Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, who died in May. The post contains annotated links aplenty to help new and familiar readers of Munro appreciate her more:

Quiet Reading with Tara Penry

The Alice Munro Substack Virtual Memorial

June 17, 2024 For the last few weeks, I’ve been honoring the long career of Canadian short story writer Alice Munro (1931-2024), who died in Ontario last month. Today’s post closes this series on Munro with a compilation of tributes from fellow Substack writers…

Read more

2 years ago · 46 likes · 32 comments · Tara Penry

*

Activism

In the year since I came across ’s and ’s , I’ve admired the commitment of both to research and writing with a sharp focus on universal human needs: clean water, justice and humane institutions, and community. Here is my original post about their newsletters from last June:

*

Ways of Seeing

It’s hard to believe it was also almost a year ago that I started enjoying the humor and humanity of at and at . Elizabeth’s reflection on community and common ground last Fourth of July seemed a clear PeaceLink to me, and Sal captivated me with her introduction to “ways of seeing.”

*

Body Work

Other Substack writers that I found while alert for the themes of PeaceLinks were of and of . Last July, I encountered one of Andrea’s powerful cancer monologues about the same time I watched Kimberly’s 6 1/2 minute video about her research for a documentary film exploring “the messy, uncomfortable journey of being alive” in a body beyond one’s control. I linked both amazing videos here:

*

History’s Answer to Political Stalemate

When Substack erupted last winter over Nazism and other forms of hate speech on the platform, my contribution to the conversation was this investigation of Ben Franklin’s commitment to both free speech and civil discourse. No, “free speech” did not mean “absence of moral behavior” to the signers of the Constitution:

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Recovery

In February, I celebrated my one-year anniversary at Quiet Reading with a Five-Word Reading Party. A theme that emerged from many posts was recovery from various spiritual shocks and lifequakes. I gathered several of those posts together as PeaceLinks:

*

There are many more excellent authors and posts featured in the PeaceLinks archive, organized by common themes. The PeaceLinks home page and archive will remain accessible, though I have no plans for additional posts at present.

If you are not a Quiet Reading subscriber, I invite you to jump to that home page and take a free subscription to the publication where I will continue to post on Mondays.

Coming up there in the next month: Two short summer interludes between bookish posts, one more collaborative writing announcement for late summer, and another famous author who made it through disappointment and dark times.

Quiet Reading Home Page

Thank you for subscribing and supporting PeaceLinks!

🙏 ✌🏼

Tara

PeaceLinks turns one year old this month, and change is in the air.

I launched PeaceLinks in May 2023 to keep track of inspiring posts I found on themes of peace, cooperation, and common ground. What started as a virtual file cabinet became a gathering place for mutual affirmation and appreciation. It became a place for finding kindred souls.

Despite these pleasures, my energies are moving in different directions.

I’d like to consolidate my reading community into one place rather than divide in two.

Along with me, some of the people featured early here have their own flourishing communities. I’d like to make time to meet them more often on their own ground

I’d like to make room this summer to work on a book — a goal I set aside in 2020 when COVID arrived.

For these reasons and more, I plan just one more monthly issue of PeaceLinks in June. The subject will be the celebrated Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, who passed away on Monday of this week.

The Munro Memorial

As I announced Wednesday in Notes, I’m organizing a Substack writers’ memorial to Munro. If Munro’s work means something to you, I hope you’ll consider contributing any post in her honor on June 13 (one month after her death) and tagging me to be included in the collated memorial page. Guidelines and Q&A are here:

Quiet Reading with Tara Penry

Join a June 13 Virtual Memorial for Alice Munro

In honor of the life and literary legacy of Alice Munro, all Substack writers are invited to contribute a post to a virtual memorial on June 13, one month from the Nobel Laureate’s death. To participate Schedule a post on a Munro-related theme to publish on June 13, 2024, in any time zone…

Read more

2 years ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Tara Penry

For the June issue of PeaceLinks, I plan to cross-post the memorial page. After that, I hope you’ll decide to stick around at my primary Stack, Quiet Reading, for original posts that tap the wisdom of authors, books, and literary history to boost our confidence amid this human struggle. You can view the most recent and most popular posts on the home page. Dip into the comments on any posts to get a sense of whether the “vibe” over there is for you. I think anyone with an interest in PeaceLinks will appreciate Quiet Reading, too.

For the foreseeable future, PeaceLinks will remain an open, free, accessible archive for anyone who’d like to browse the thematic posts. I do not at present plan to add new posts after June. If you have a paid subscription to PeaceLinks after June, you will receive a complimentary subscription to Quiet Reading at the same level.

But change is not somber. There’s plenty of peace-work continuing on Substack. Here’s a sample, in our usual PeaceLinks format:

1. A Library of Small Stacks

of has launched a SmallStack library, a service long needed on Substack. The goal is to create a library of publications with fewer than 1,000 subscribers and to publish featured articles, especially by those with under 500 subscribers. If that describes you, check out the simple form linked at the top of Robin’s home page:

SmallStack

A collection of the finest newsletters with fewer than 1,000 subscribers, with special love given to the under 500 subscriber stacks out there.

By Robin Taylor (he/him)

2. Serenity in Chaos

A couple of weeks ago, writer, editor, and intrepid traveler shared a medical diagnosis with her readers and posted a cluster of poems expressing her gratitude for “serenity amid chaos” and other wonders viewed through the prism of pain. Her post is wise, tender, and wryly titled. Is it a toast to pain? Or an allusion to Cary Elwes’ line in The Princess Bride when his character Westley needs to buy time in a duel? Maybe she’ll tell. (“To the death!” cries Prince Humperdinck. “No. To the pain,” responds Westley from the bed where he is gambling that he can distract Humperdinck with threatening banter until the muscles in his legs work.) Like Westley, Holly displays the courage to face whatever must be faced:

Holly Starley's Rolling Desk

To the Pain

If you’ve been reading the Rolling Desk or following my Notes, you might have seen vague hints that I’m facing a new, unexpected health challenge. To share or not to share? Among the many fascinating pieces of watching the creature who is me deal with pain and change is seeing shifts in long-held, unquestioned tendencies. A fierce need to keep private especially anything that is “bad” or “difficult” seems to be dissolving. Instead of wanting to hide or be cryptic, I want to tell you that, after months of pain that’s slowed me to a crawl, I’ve been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. AS is in the rheumatic arthritic family, so autoimmune, and affects the large joints—hips and shoulders and neck. And there are relatively new treatments to slow or maybe even stop its progression, which I’m now looking into…

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3 years ago · 57 likes · 71 comments · Holly Starley

3. Touching the Earth

A pair of posts that spoke to each other recently were a walking prayer by of and a reconciliation with the earth by of . It was Emily who drew my attention to the connection between the two posts in her comment on Antonia’s April essay, read aloud before sunrise with a background of birdsong.

A critic of privatization and champion of the commons, Antonia halted at a No Trespassing sign, though her “feet ached to wander into that field, wiggle toes into the soil that could draw so many bluebirds.” Emily expressed inward rather than outward hesitation at getting close to nature. The earth, she realized, is “suffering so much. I’m afraid to grow closer to it because then I would have to be with all of that suffering; I would have to feel it.” After such an insightful revelation, she receives a suggestion that might help.

On the Commons

To walk a prayer to the world

Audio version: Imagine yourself in a cabin, curled up on a beaten couch in the corner of the small room shared by a couple of bunk beds, a table, a counter and stove, and you. It’s night out, and an almost-full Moon was rising in the south when you went out earlier, a boreal owl barely audible from the woods…

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3 years ago · 81 likes · 58 comments · Antonia Malchik

4. Connected to Strangers

Just in time for today’s post, I discovered and the encouragements issuing from her orange desk. In the post below, I second her recommendation (let’s upgrade that to insistence - just don’t miss it) to watch the video at the top of her post. Expect nothing. Just watch.

Elsewhere in the post, Patti offers an inclusive and affirming alternative to the common greeting, “What do you do?” And she helps us honor other people’s stories.

I am grateful for this year of PeaceLinks that has trained my eye on posts with a spirit like this one:

From My Orange Desk

Curiosity is a kind of love

First, please watch this video. (I tried to embed it here to no avail). Trust me, you’ll want to watch it first. (4:38…

Read more

2 years ago · 18 likes · 9 comments · Patti Digh

With so many encouraging impressions lingering from this month’s featured posts, I thank the regulars for this year of community and newcomers for your curiosity. I look forward to seeing you at Quiet Reading when we are no longer gathering regularly here at PeaceLinks.

Keep the peace, friends.

Tara

Jump to Quiet Reading

See Tara's Profile

If you didn’t know that Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day, there’s no reason you and I can’t celebrate it today or any day. Initiated in 2002 in New York City, the day is now observed throughout the U.S. and Canada. Here’s my short rendering of how it works:

1. Choose a poem you like.

2. Choose a day you like, since April 18, chosen by the Academy of American Poets, has passed us by.

3. Post copies of your poem wherever you like.

4. Print your poem and carry it around with you. Read it to anyone who will listen.

   Hint: Shorter poems have an undoubted edge in the department of listener satisfaction. ;-)

You undoubtedly have your own favorite poets, but here’s one you may not know so well.

Making Peace with Mortality and Time — Robinson Jeffers

The phrase in the title of this post comes from a short poem by 20th-century California poet Robinson Jeffers, known for his environmental poems and for building Tor House and Hawk Tower at Carmel Point, California.

“To the Stone-cutters” (1924), introduces a signature Jeffers theme: humans and our creations live only a short time compared to the long history of the planet and the universe. In this single-stanza verse, even though we know we are mortal, we take peace in artworks that at least live longer than we do. You can read the whole poem here. I’ll quote a few lines and add commentary.

The poem begins,

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion ...

Artists challenge time and oblivion by making things to outlast themselves, “[t]he poet as well” as stone-cutters and others who build and create. They are all “foredefeated” because eventually “rock splits”; rain and weather wear down stone carvings. Oblivion always wins. Mortality is the background condition of all human action.

What I love most are the last two lines — when the speaker makes peace with this condition:

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
    thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

Art may not live forever, but it lives long enough to give us peace for the short time that our human pains need comfort.

For more of Jeffers, here are some classic lines from “The Beauty of Things” (1951):

man, you might say, is nature 
       dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant -- to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the 
       natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

Two of my favorite Jeffers poems are “The Bed by the Window” (1932) and “The House Dog’s Grave” (1941). Both continue Jeffers’s theme of making peace with time, death, and mortality. In the first of these, I find Jeffers uncommonly humorous when he describes the guest bed in his home and its secret intention to be the peaceful place where he hopes to take his last breath. The second is also unusual, a poem of consolation spoken from the perspective of the beloved family dog who has died. I recommend you check out the links to both of these short poems.

For many people, “The House Dog’s Grave” is the only Jeffers poem they need. (Thinking of you and other caregivers, of .)

(Thinking of you with both of these poems. Don’t miss “The Bed by the Window.”)

If you’re a Jeffers fan or curious about this writer, you might want to keep up with the Robinson Jeffers Association, which has a Substack newsletter:

RJA News & Notes

A newsletter and discussion site for members of the Robinson Jeffers Association

By Robinson Jeffers Association

Beyond Jeffers

Want to think and write more poetically? Poet and teacher is kicking off a couple of classes soon at , the first one on thinking poetically (by reading some poets), and the second on writing poetry. Check out her offerings:

Poetry & Made Things

Poetry Pivot from Writing to Teaching

Read on about a new endeavor and your invitation to come along. But first, be sure to fill out the Survey at the end! Something New and Different Dear Readers & New Subscribers—Welcome! I have a brains…

Read more

3 years ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Jody L. Collins

If Jeffers is not quite to your taste but you do like poetry, check out ’s and ’s for plenty of additional poems to put in your pocket and read today to the person wearing earbuds at the bus stop. Both offer poems for free subscribers and premium posts, courses, or reading groups for paid subscribers.

Poetry Today

deepening your practice of poetry, mindset, and wonder

By Maya C. Popa

The Sharpener

Thinking through poetry

By Sean Singer

I was in a poetic frame of mind over at my primary Stack last week, too. Readers had fun choosing a favorite among the four short stanzas:

Quiet Reading with Tara Penry

Easy April

If you are new to Quiet Reading, welcome, and thank you for dropping by! You may have heard good things about the unique profiles of authors and books you’ll find here. This week, we are due for something lighter. Inspired by the forsythia, redbud, crabapple, and fruit flowers so much in evidence in my city, I send you a fair, weightless flurry…

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3 years ago · 60 likes · 62 comments · Tara Penry

Let me know what kind of response you get when you start declaiming your poem in public spaces. :-)

Til next month,

Peace.

✌🏼 Tara

PeaceLinks is a monthly roundup of links from Substack or the wider web relating to peace, cooperation, or common ground. Thank you for reading, liking, and sharing!

Quiet Reading is my primary Stack

Your Turn

1. Were you already a Jeffers fan before this post? Which poem is your favorite? (Links welcome)

2. Is Jeffers new to you? What do you think of the suggested poems above?

3. Are you loopy enough to walk around with a poem in your pocket and blurt it out when the mood strikes? If so, which poem? (It doesn’t have to be from Jeffers, of course!)
   

If you’re new here, PeaceLinks is a monthly archive of links to anything online relating to peace, cooperation, or the middle ground. I typically choose a theme and more often than not focus on Substack newsletters, though occasionally I go foraging in other areas of the internet.

This month’s theme emerged as I read some authors new to me. Posts they had chosen to share had this theme of making peace in common. Here are a few:

writes . Her post “Trusting the Waters of Life” centers on a line of encouragement once given to her by a friend. At a low point, she acknowledged, “This twist in the river too belonged to the great current, and if I could manage to trust even this current I didn’t understand, it might lead toward lands I’d barely dreamed of.”

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

47. Trusting the Waters of Life

Transcript Many years ago I had to leave my dream house in a city I loved and a neighborhood where everyone knew my name. I cried every day with a sadness that was scraping my heart raw. One day in the middle of my tears a friend hugged me gently, and in a very quiet voice he asked, “But you’re still being carried by the river, aren’t you…

Listen now

3 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Priscilla Stuckey

writes , about creativity and grief. In “Finding Grace by Dancing with Grief,” she writes about rediscovering dance after the loss of her husband — but not right away. Of her new lifelines, she noted, “If someone had handed me this list during the early stages of grief, I’d have torn it up in front of them. Loss tore my life down to the foundations. I needed time to sit in the rubble, mourning.”

Creative Seasoning

Finding grace by dancing with grief

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to receive new posts by email and support my work…

Read more

3 years ago · 26 likes · 22 comments · Jackie Daly

of also returned to dancing — and also writing — in recovery. Her story includes not one but two bouts with cancer (“No Regrets”). In “‘Change One Person and You Change the World,’ ” she explains how she decided to write about personal topics and vulnerabilities:

WordDance

“Change One Person and You Change the World”

There’s a question that keeps rearing its ugly little head, and I can’t quite get it out of mine: What will people get out of reading my work? This might be my perpetual self-doubt talking, which I’ve been carrying around since sometime in my teens. That lingering question quickly leads to: …

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · Serena Camacho

Exhausted from a high-powered career that sapped her strength, of discovered a childhood trauma in therapy. Her process of recovering professionally meant also facing her personal past:

Life (un)Learned

I Lost My Identity. What I Found was Unexpected.

This story touches on suicidal ideation and sexual abuse and may be triggering. Part I: It’s January 2023, perfect time to turn the page on the past and begin anew. I think to myself—New year. New chapter. New page. I had a dream in December 2022, well, more like the recurring work nightmares that had been plaguing me for the past year and a half…

Read more

3 years ago · 56 likes · 63 comments · Kim Van Bruggen

After writing about a parent with dementia, of put out a request for people’s uplifting music memories. “Dementia patients may forget words,” she explained, “but they don't forget how something [like music] made them feel. Caregivers need uplifting stories; EVERYONE needs to be lifted up by meaningful moments.” She posted the responses to her call at “Music Memory Is More Powerful than Words”:

Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration

'Music Memory is more powerful than words.'

Dementia patients may forget words but I’ve seen and felt how a piece of music can reconnect us. No words are needed. When I published ‘Dementia, the Unforgettable Impact on Caregivers’ I knew I wanted to find a way to share how Dad and I communicated beyond his health issues and despite the dementia disconnections…

Read more

3 years ago · 10 likes · 23 comments · Victoria

Here at PeaceLinks, we generally keep it simple with a monthly collection of links about peace, cooperation, or the middle ground and minimal interference from me. To read my writing, you can hop over to Quiet Reading with Tara Penry.

I hope you enjoy the reading. See you back here on the third Friday of April!

If you’re like me, you may feel connected to all the suffering behind each of those names, and far from it at the same time.

What’s a person to do?

PeaceLinks is a monthly archive of online writing about peace, cooperation, and the middle ground. With so much out of whack, I can think of nothing better to do than to get grounded by taking a walk. Here are some companionable posts to help you decide if that’s the right thing for you, too.

.

of may be laid up with a muscle injury at the moment, but his archive provides plenty of inspiration for walking in all environments. Maybe because it reminds me of the miles and miles of walking I used to do when I lived in New York City in the 1990s, I’m partial to his post called “Why I Walk,” on discovering micro-communities that one misses by car and even bicycle:

Chris Arnade Walks the World

Why I Walk

Why walk? (Part two, How to Walk 12 miles a day, will focus on answering a lot of questions on logistics I have gotten.) On my first day in Brooklyn (1993) I took the subway from Brooklyn Heights to its terminus at the tip of Coney Island, then walked the ten miles back…

Read more

5 years ago · 144 likes · 22 comments · Chris Arnade

.

I love going walking with in her newsletter, across the thousands of miles between our homes. Her camera knows just what I like to see in the roll of hills and the cameo appearances of wildlife. Her short poem about snowdrops fits the somber mood of these times while doing justice to beauty. Give yourself the treat of the poem and the photograph at the end of it:

Mother of Hope

Snowdrops

I’m struggling to write at the moment. It’s been a strange week, for various reasons. I’m going to take a bit of a break from things on here. Regroup, as they say. For now though, have a poem I wrote, about Snowdrops. Snowdrops The snowdrops dangled silver tears…

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3 years ago · 46 likes · 18 comments · Julie Dee

.

I found of refreshing on the subject of fabled Pacific Northwest hikes and other outdoor adventures. From her archive, the photo-essay “wherever you go, there you are” sported beautiful photos of my home region while making the case for beauty in Maddy’s midwestern home. No place is perfect, and no one appreciates home like a traveler:

Hello Stranger

wherever you go there you are

In my head the Pacific Northwest is this sparkling and magical green place. From Minnesota, I imagined crashing teal waves and snow capped peaks that turn dusty purple in the evening and blaze pink in the morning sun. I imagined thick carpets of moss and blue rivers and that I would sit by the base of waterfalls and journal, mist clinging to my hair and…

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3 years ago · 20 likes · 15 comments · Maddy Marquardt

.

of takes an urban planner’s view of what it takes to design a city for pedestrian activity. The impetus for his latest post was a question about whether electric cars would be more “green” (and offer more independence) than public transit:

The Possible City

Moving Through: How to Replace Public Transit with Cars, Part 1

Somebody asked recently, why not just have everyone drive electric cars, and make wider roads. They proposed that, for the sake of our freedom and the environment, we should “just get rid of public transit,” suggesting electric cars would be more “green,” and that we would no longer have to wait for buses or walk anywhere anymore…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · Patrick M. Lydon

.

Checking in on a PeaceLinks alumnus this month, leads foraging walks in Israel during times of peace, but this week’s post “Trudging” announced that he is temporarily slowing down with the birth of child #3. Congratulations, Shmuel and family!

The Healthy Jew

Trudging

Last Monday afternoon, this little prince joined our family. But apparently he forgot that in this world of mortals we live by breathing, because he promptly popped a hole in his lung. Thankfully, after a few days in the ICU he figured things out, and the wonderful doctors and nurses of Tel Hashomer Hospital sent him on his way…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 12 comments · Shmuel Chaim Naiman

That’s all for this edition. I’m going to wrap it up while the February sun is shining. Any guesses what I’m going to do next?

In all the unrest, sending you peace.

What I usually do here at PeaceLinks is start a little blaze fed by a theme and then invite you to come closer and warm your hands. The talk always touches somehow on peace, cooperation, or the middle ground, with every month a unique approach to it.

If you enjoyed the research-based post last month, you can find more of that at my other newsletter, . For example, subscribers at Quiet Reading enjoyed digging in to the mystery of who wrote the famous Christmas poem that begins, “Twas the night before Christmas.” There’s a new series starting about writers from the past, and the first is a Ben Franklin contemporary.

Here at PeaceLinks, I typically keep my own contribution short, and then I turn the spotlight on some other authors whose writings keep the fireside warm and convivial.

This month, I’m thinking about the various meanings of the phrase snow load, and the writers who keep it light and beautiful. They know something about the art of digging down for moving water and inner peace.

In my part of the U.S. Intermountain West, we have had enough snow this month to strain the juniper trees. They lean like dominoes and bend like hooded devotees of a silent faith. I used to knock the snow off the branches, but last year, they outgrew my reach. They’ll have to manage their own snow load now.

Snow load. Now there’s a phrase!

The Oxford English Dictionary has nothing to say about it.

Construction and insurance companies know it well. “Snow load is the downward force on a building’s roof exerted by accumulated snow and ice,” explains one of them. This kind of pressure also poses a risk to airplane wings and spindly foliage.

You might apply it to the spirit of a person who carries too much of anything. This month, PeaceLinks has been on the lookout for posts that lighten the winter load.

’s “Winter Bird Frenzy” at is a brief visual treat for bird-watchers. I’m sorry the link doesn’t include one of his photographs. Check it out. You’ll see what I mean:

Listening to the Land

Winter Bird Frenzy

With a blizzard raging outside, it seemed like a good day to 1) feed our bird friends; and 2) photograph birds (through the window, of course!) Thus, what follows is a sampling of photos from the past few snowy days…

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3 years ago · 13 likes · 6 comments · Larry Stone

Speaking of photographs, in Substack Notes, I’ve been enjoying the images of of , who accompanies her photography with reflections in her newsletter:

Thanks to another post in Notes from , I read this week on writing a “Not-to-do List,” and it was as though someone had knocked a block of ice from my branches:

The Babbling Brook

What are you NOT doing today?

People are feeling stretched too far and spread too thin in this day and age, at least according to a lot of the Substack essays I read at the turn of the year. I live in the same capitalist cyber-dystopian hustle culture as everyone else, so naturally, I share this predicament…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · 5 comments · Kate Brook

writes “a weekly dispatch about something beautiful.” Last month, his “Winter Light” started with a soothing Monet painting and ended with this sense of expansive space:

In my corner of the world, writing “Scenes of Quiet Reading” at my other newsletter has been giving me little bursts of winter levity.

For those of us gestating changes this winter — maybe change in the direction of simplifying or asking, “What’s the lighter way to do this?” — two of my favorite inspirations are , who just finished a series and a workshop on change at , and , new to Substack and slaying it with this Title of the Week:

🌻 A Year of Mental Health

"I wish I'd made that change later.” -said no one

New here? Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have a new post on mental health and purposeful productivity. If you like it, please pass it on to others! 💚 Over the years, I’ve written a lot about change. I’ve even described my audience as “pro-change,” when asked to explain who reads my blog and comes to my events…

Read more

3 years ago · 93 likes · 81 comments · Chris Guillebeau

Any more would not be small or light. I sign off wishing you a warm mid-winter with those you love, and countless small beauties to knock the weight off your branches.

Until next month, Peace.

Share

Two letters appeared Thursday in the Notes feed and inboxes of many Substack readers. One of them, signed “Substackers Against Nazis,” asked Substack leadership what it planned to do about Nazis and white supremacists on the platform. The other, by , urged no change in content policies (“Substack Shouldn’t Decide What We Read”). “Let the writers and readers moderate, not the social media platforms,” she advised. Between them, the letters attracted hundreds of Substack authors as co-signers, responding to an Atlantic Monthly article by called “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”1

If Benjamin Franklin were here, he would find something to approve in both letters, and Substack leaders would be wise to avoid reading the letters as opposites representing political “sides.” Franklin would wonder, however, how any printer, publisher, or platform developer could write Content Guidelines without the moral concepts he called virtue and vice.

As a young printer in the British-ruled American colonies, Franklin did not believe in content moderation any more than the Substack founders, but he did consider it his responsibility to limit the spread of “Vice” and say no to “large Bodies” of “resent[ful]” men whose words posed a danger to individuals or civil society. If you have heard of Ben Franklin — his almanac, statesmanship, scientific investigations, or wit — then you know that his refusal to allow his press to become a tool of resentful men did not result in any lasting harm to his reputation, to his business, or to free speech.

WWBFD (What Would Benjamin Franklin Do)?

Despite being a famously hands-off American media entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin had a content policy at least one degree more interventionist than Substack’s.

In 1731, when threatened with a boycott for something he had printed for hire, Franklin answered with nine points in defense of printers’ freedom.2 Unlike shoemakers and carpenters, he said, a printer was bound to offend people in the regular course of his work. To stay in business, he would inevitably provide a platform for opinions he did not support.

As Franklin put it, professional printers were “scarce able to do anything in their way of getting a Living which shall not probably give Offense to some, and perhaps to many.” He justified his content neutrality with optimism that history has perhaps proven unwarranted, adding,

[W]hen Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter. Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.

Wrestling with similar questions of content moderation to those faced by Substack and any media business, Franklin in his printing office developed nine “hands-off,” “business-first” principles, based on the supposition that Truth and Error, abstract principles, had a foreordained outcome. If Truth is going to win anyhow, why should a printer turn any paying customer away?

Despite this evident optimism, Franklin had one more principle that qualified all the rest. It followed from his lifelong study of private virtue, which he was not willing to sacrifice in the name of business. “Notwithstanding” a man’s ability to choose any work he is paid for, Franklin wrote,

yet Printers do continually discourage the Printing of great Numbers of bad things, and stifle them in the Birth. I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance Vice or promote Immorality; tho’ by complying in such Cases with the corrupt Taste of the Majority, I might have got much Money.

Such choices mostly take place out of the public eye, Franklin points out, which means that the printer gets no credit for virtue in his business accounts. According to Hands-Off Franklin’s Principle #10, the printer / media owner’s virtuous choice to “discourage . . . bad things” has a higher claim than his neutrality or his revenue.

One Degree of Difference

Substack’s Content Guidelines (last updated August 7, 2023) sound very much in the spirit of Franklin’s first nine principles, with even a modest version of Principle #10. “In General,” the owners profess,

We want Substack to be a safe place for discussion and expression. At the same time, we believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities. In all cases, Substack does not allow credible threats of physical harm.

The guidelines also offer language discouraging “hate” and the circulation of “private information,” a tactic that hate groups have used on other platforms to cause harm.

But there is a fine and noteworthy distinction between the Substack standard — “does not allow credible threats of physical harm” and the 1731 standard of Benjamin Franklin. The Philadelphian refused “constantly” to print anything that “might” so much as “countenance” or approve of vice.

Twice in his Principle #10, Franklin used the word “might” to set that higher standard:

I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance Vice or promote Immorality. (emphasis added)

And in the next sentence:

I have also always refus’d to print such things as might do real Injury to any Person. (emphasis added)

Franklin did not wait for “credible threats of physical harm.” The quaint-sounding eighteenth-century word “vice” allowed him to reject anything he considered immoral, not just “real Injury to any Person” or other itemized wrongs. He cultivated a moral sensibility and relied on it to refuse any customer the amplification of his printing platform.

Of course, the Future Founding Father did not infringe on the free speech of people he rejected as customers. He simply turned down their money and said no to circulating words he thought should be left unprinted. He set moral boundaries for his business, and the free speakers took their words elsewhere, neither infringed nor amplified by the print technology of the day.

Safety First

Matching Franklin’s ethical standard would in no way detract from Substack’s policy of encouraging “robust discourse.”

In fact, the current Substack guideline opposes “safety” to “controversy” in a manner Franklin would surely reject. To return to this important point, Substack policy states,

We want Substack to be a safe place for discussion and expression. At the same time, we believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities.

Here, friends, is the problem distilled to a single phrase: It sounds good at first, but there is no such thing in a civil society as a “reasonable balance” between safety and “robust discourse.” Those two things are not opposites, and they do not belong on two sides of a balancing scale.

As any teacher or therapist will tell you, and probably you know it yourself when you whack your head (not too hard) with the palm of your hand, a “safe place for discussion” is a precondition for “robust discourse” about “controversial issues.”

Full stop.

Franklin’s Principle #10 established safety for discourse as a precondition of his business. He was willing to earn “the Resentment of large Bodies of Men, for refusing” their jobs “absolutely.” After that, he considered himself free to practice content neutrality on lesser matters of public disagreement.

Dear Substack: You have created a wonderful thing. Don’t let anyone tell you that “safety” can be compromised so that someone’s “free” expression can have the scope it wants. None of us are free when any of us are unsafe.

Did I say full stop?

Beyond Franklin

So far, I have only considered Substack’s guidelines in light of the standard set by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. At that time, he risked a boycott because he printed an advertisement for a ship that did not want clergymen as passengers. From public anger on this issue, Franklin decided it was time to declare his nine principles of content neutrality and one qualifying principle of ethical intervention.

The challenges we face today are far more grave than the exclusion of clergymen from a ship.

expressed gratitude for the wisdom of Substack letting readers and writers curate and moderate their own communities. She is right: Substack is superior to other platforms for letting us shut out authors we consider opprobrious. If someone wants to insult clergymen and women and we find that rude, we can boot those hooligans from our invitation-only Substack garden.

But that is not enough.

We know something Benjamin Franklin did not. We know from twentieth-century history that it’s possible for the beneficiaries of a democracy to give up/lose their privileges to the mind-numbing slogans of fascism. And we know how hard it is to dislodge fascism once it gains the upper hand.

This means it is in the practical (not ideal, aspirational, rhetorical) interest of every media platform that depends on free speech and open discourse to actively promote democratic freedoms and actively discourage fascism or other threats to the Constitution and the due process of law. What Franklin called “Vice” and “Immorality” we have to translate into the words and actions of our own day. We learned in the last century that threats to democracy and the rule of law are threats to the safety of persons and the free exchange of ideas.

A platform that recognizes its debt to open discourse and democracy will do everything to protect the fragile environment that allows controversy to be safely aired. It will not “countenance” fascism, nor “promote” anything that “might do injury” to a person or to the democratic republic that preserves both our safety and our freedom to speak.

Dear Substack: Will you stifle in the birth any writing that would use your platform to harm democracy or promote fascism?

A Timely Idea

It may be hard for us to believe that the same author who wrote Franklin’s nine hands-off principles also wrote, “I have heretofore fallen under the Resentment of large Bodies of Men, for refusing absolutely to print any of their Party or Personal Reflections. In this Manner I have made my self many Enemies, and the constant Fatigue of denying is almost insupportable.” (From “Apology for Printers,” 1731, Principle #10)

Franklin knew that in order to have a flourishing business in a time of “controversial issues” (there is never any other time), the printer / platformer had to be the gatekeeper of what should never find an audience, at a cost measured, in the short term, in more than coins. In the long term, the influence of Franklin’s integrity and intellect towers over the voices he refused to amplify.

Dear Substack: I know this magnifies the job of developing a platform. Will you discern where in the team you can lodge this responsibility, and treat it with utmost sincerity and care? Your technical and creative contributions have attracted a crowd. Now it’s time to ask what your ethical contribution to this era will be.

I close with two questions for Substack leadership and anyone who’d like to comment:

1. Do you think it appropriate for content guidelines today to meet the moral standard of Benjamin Franklin in 1731?

2. Do you think it appropriate for content guidelines today to surpass the moral standard of Benjamin Franklin in 1731, in light of our greater knowledge of what makes free speech and democracy vulnerable?

For more on this subject:

Writer Everlasting

Hateful Speech vs Hate Speech

I’m hoping this will be the last piece I have to write on the subject of the Substack ‘Nazi problem’. I wish I could say, ‘problem solved’. If you’ve been following along, you know we’re nowhere close. The letter titled “Substackers Against Nazis” that, at last count, more than 200 of us have signed and published, got a ton of noti…

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3 years ago · 27 likes · 21 comments · Ramona Grigg

Here is today’s update from the journalist who organized the Substackers Against Nazis letter, which has grown its list of supporters since Thursday:

PeaceLinks is usually a digest of posts I admire and want to remember. I do most of my own writing at Quiet Reading with Tara Penry, linked here:

Quiet Reading with Tara Penry

If you don’t have children or teach them, you may not see the notices that teens and tweens today are suffering from extraordinary rates of depression, anxiety, and even suicide. Smartphones and social media are the chief culprits, researchers say, but other factors are also in the mix. Today’s post offers hope and one practical suggestion for parents and teachers trying to engage kids at school and bend the curve back down on the mental health charts.

For those who do not have youngsters in their care, the links here are designed to give hope by checking in with people who make a difference.

Let’s start with the actionable suggestion.

The newsletter has posted a flurry of well-researched articles on the youth mental health crisis. Among them, ’s recent “Good News for Anxious Kids (And Parents)” offers a practical strategy for families with anxious kids, from the author of the book Free-Range Kids. The post contains a link to the “Let’s Grow” project, assigning kids one task a week to do at home with parents’ permission but without parents’ help.

The article also helps Gen X parents understand why we may be unwittingly contributing to our kids’ anxiety. Remember the milk cartons? Shudder.

After Babel

Good News For Anxious Kids (And Parents)

[Note from Jon Haidt] When my family moved to New York City in 2011, we got to know Lenore Skenazy, who had by then earned herself the nickname of “America’s Worst Mom” for reasons she’ll explain below. She had recently written a book titled Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children…

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3 years ago · 206 likes · 31 comments · Lenore Skenazy

With today’s high rates of youth anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts, it’s hard for kids to stay engaged in school.

I crossed virtual paths with 5th grade teacher just before finalizing this month’s newsletter, and I’m glad to know of his work for this issue. His vision for “Awakening the moonshot potential of every student” is just the sort of extravagant but necessary vision that kids need in their teachers.

I use the word extravagant with a particular sense. It’s one of my favorite words, a meld of Latin vagari (to wander) + extra (outside, beyond). Extravagant teachers go beyond large-scale standardized curricula to craft personal lessons that keep their kids awake and engaged. They believe in moonshots. Here’s Adrian explaining why he thinks expensive school reform efforts miss the mark, and what he tries to do instead:

Adrian’s Newsletter

Public education is an adaptive challenge

We have been trying to reform education for a very long time. I believe that one of the main reasons we still have an industrial model of education is because stakeholders use technical solutions to “fix” education instead of dismantling it and redesigning anew. Education is an incredibly complex and adaptive system. There are intersections of race, gen…

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3 years ago · Adrian Neibauer

FYI: Adrian is about to start a free reading group for anyone who’d like to discuss Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. The emphasis of chats may be on teaching strategies, but who am I to say? Subscribe to to learn more.

Speaking of education that wanders off campus and out of bounds, if you’ve been following PeaceLinks the last few months, you may remember that a group of my university students will soon be visiting an elementary school in our area to read aloud with schoolchildren and give them hand-selected new books to take home. After an October fundraising campaign, our team chose the books below for every first, second, and third grade student on our list. You may consider this a recommendation if you have children to shop for:

These are the books we will read aloud in small groups when we meet the kids in two weeks. In addition, from donated books on our shelves, we added two more books for every child, chosen with care to ensure every book is worthy of a child’s love.

Today’s PeaceLinks post comes a day later than usual, following yesterday’s book bag packing extravaganza. We have an amazing team of motivated, caring book-lovers! And now our bags are packed for our elementary school visit after our Thanksgiving holiday.

In keeping with this month’s theme of supporting kids (by supporting parents!!), and just launched a new Substack this week called . With one-year-olds to feed, they offer recipes and tips for navigating the ocean of nutritional advice for parents. Their first post includes a simple recipe for broccoli pesto that I am salivating to try! Welcome to Substack, Fanny and Greta!

The Green Spoon

Cooking simple + delicious food for young kids and their exhausted parents.

We’ll close by checking in on a PeaceLink alumna.

PeaceLink Alumni Corner

was one of the first Substackers featured on PeaceLinks when this project began last spring. (Here’s that post.) Her newsletter always brings me a sense of peace and refreshment. Here’s a link to her October post about a late-summer trip to California to meet a friend. My question is whether any of her five original haikus over her photographs stand out as favorites for you? Feel free to mention it in the comments.

Smaller & Deeper

When Poetry Becomes Practice

A few weeks ago, one of my closest friends and I met in Monterey, California, for a few days. We savored the ocean breeze, made a list of all the birds we saw, drove the famed 17-mile-drive (twice!!), found beaches with Sea Otters, sat in Adirondack chairs with our feet in a freezing river in Big Sur, explored Missions and Catholic Cathedrals and, of co…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Amy Hoppock

Thank you for reading and sharing.

I wish you a peaceful month. 🙏

See you back here on the 3rd Friday in December!

Táh-ra

Welcome to PeaceLinks, a digest of web links about peace, cooperation, and common ground, currently on a monthly publishing schedule. Two awful wars claim our attention this month while for those of us fortunate to live outside the war zones, the quotidian demands of family, home, garden, and community rise as usual to our attention. I am grateful and appreciative of each one of the following posts in helping me to understand my relation to the violence in our world.

I recommend following the posts in order, whether you skim some links or open all of them. The sequence proceeds from the discomfort of this time to what we can be doing now.

of considered yesterday how a North American without ties to Israel or Palestine might respond to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, and the aftermath. A passage that stood out to me from Kim’s research was this statement by Gershon Baskin, a longtime Israeli peace advocate, about the impossibility of negotiation with Hamas:

“After what they did on Saturday [October 7th], there’s no doubt in my mind that the end result of this war has to be the non-existence of Hamas as a governing body in Gaza and as a military threat to Israel.”

Peace talks require two (or more) cooperating sides. Kim looks for a humanitarian response to the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis that is not oversimplified:

Life (un)Learned

When Choosing a Side is Dangerous

A Difference of Opinion is an op/ed style newsletter featured monthly on hot topics from the news of the day and what’s happening around the world. With an invitation at the end to add your two cents…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 19 comments · Kim Van Bruggen

, a professor in the U.S. who writes , asks a similar question to : “What can I even say or write in this part of the world about what people in other regions are actually living through?” She connects the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as two examples of state-sponsored terrorism. Her post includes a 15-minute uplifting audio story by Victor Levenstein, a Ukraine-born centenarian and former political prisoner of the Stalinist Soviet Union, whose story was published by The Moth Radio Hour. Levenstein was 99 when he made the recording embedded in Malathi’s post. One hears in his storytelling the complicated emotions of remembered trauma and full humanity, with room for humor and determination.

As usual of answers readers’ yearning for both truth and hope. Her embedded video, “Blood Relations” is worth a complete watch (8 minutes):

Life is a Sacred Text

a peacemaking lens

This is Life is a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.🌱 Heya. First of all, resharing the last post…

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3 years ago · 115 likes · 24 comments · Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

When PeaceLinks switched from a weekly to a monthly frequency, I added a spotlight feature on a PeaceLinks alum. This month, of offers three strategies for coping with the present war. Anyone can adopt #2 (Live well, Take good care); some will also find #1 (Cry for help) appropriate to their situation. Shmuel’s third strategy, telling of Israel the land, kicks off a new series. “We are opening a second front,” he writes.

If only for a few moments each week, I invite you to exchange the images of pain and fear with pictures of purpose and hope.

Here is the post announcing these three strategies (featuring the view from his home looking west toward darkened Gaza):

The Healthy Jew

Three Things Everyone Can Do to Help

I live in Israel. I don’t know why all thi…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Shmuel Chaim Naiman

Before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Shmuel had led a foraging walk in late September, as described in this earlier post:

The Healthy Jew

Festival of Foraging

Lots of Healthy Jews are busy these days scouring stores for a stunning set of four plants: lulav (palm branch), esrog (citron), hadasim (myrtle branches), and aravos (willow branches). It’s a great time to pause and notice what we’re doing: searching four random, mostly inedible plants…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Shmuel Chaim Naiman

Keep an eye on for more posts about the land of Israel and the history of Jewish people on the land.

was previously featured on PeaceLinks here, for his post about teaching children to eat healthfully.

It feels right to me, especially in light of Shmuel’s second piece of actionable advice to “Live Well” (not to let terrorism spread fear), to close this post with notes on what is commanding the attention and spreading peace outside the world’s war zones right now.

of has just revised a Substack that was formerly about creativity and the garden; now it is for midlife women facing change. After telling a story about a mythical figure who collects bones and forms them back into animal shapes, Tina writes,

We can spend a lifetime gathering the bones of who we think we should be, and fitting into a skin that isn’t ours. Gathering our bones is definitely for you if deep down you know that it is time to explore, rather than define, who you can be and who you desire to be. If you are ready to forage for and gather your own bones, slip into a skin that feels more ‘you’ and have some creative fun doing it, then do join me.

I can’t help but feel right now that the figurative practice of gathering, reassembling, and reanimating bones speaks not only to midlife women but to any of us shaken by the times. Nonetheless, Tina urges us to focus inward, to the inner territory each of us knows best. Here is Tina’s post just yesterday announcing her plans:

Also inspiring from my recent Substack reading is ’s journal of running her B&B in France, called . Her posts of the last month usher out the last paying guests of the year, return the house to the family for the off-season, and witness the beauties of the land she tends. We live in a large world, where each of us is responsible for only a narrow, local life, even as we intuit our connection to the suffering and hope beyond our personal gardens. If war touches all of us right now, so does Rebecca’s relief at serving her last breakfast of the season and turning her attention to herself, her family, and her garden. The good news belongs to all of us as much as the bad, ritual and stewardship as much as terror and war:

Between

A change of pace

Sunday 1st October Setting the tables for the last breakfast of the season is bittersweet. While I shan’t miss the early mornings, I will miss the ritual of it. Every morning, seven days a week for the last 22 weeks, I have been up, dressed and working in the kitchen by 7.30am to make breakfast for our guests…

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3 years ago · 98 likes · 31 comments · Rebecca Jones

I am grateful to know that Rebecca’s family business exists right now in this troubled world.

*

And finally:

I mentioned two months ago that my university students would be buying books to give to children in need this fall, and our fundraiser closed yesterday (click to view the students’ heartfelt 30-second project video). That included contributions I passed through from PeaceLinks and Enchanted in America paid subscribers. Thank you!

I promised to post readers here on our progress. We exceeded our original goal of $2,000 and came close enough to our higher “stretch goal” that we are now ordering books for 6 classes of children, ages 5 to 10. Later today, our class will reach out to our partner school for this term to arrange class visits in November. These are joyful occasions when the university students read aloud to small groups of school children and leave with gifts of new books.

I feel strongly the pull of my local responsibilities, the unabated demands of love here. I hope you also have ways to take comfort in actions that spread love and peace and make the world better, starting with your home place as the center of the world, and radiating outward from there. I know that other PeaceLinks alumni are doing exactly this, as we will see in future alumni check-ins.

May our efforts be felt where they are needed most.

Peace to all.

Tara

At the end of the post, we’ll check in on an author featured previously in PeaceLinks and also on the children’s literacy project that paid subscribers are currently supporting.

of provided the theme this month when she reported on a stained glass window at Winchester Cathedral in England. The window was destroyed centuries ago in a war and put back together as an abstract arrangement of colored fragments. Not only does the window testify to “the potential beauty of fragmentation,” it also records a story of cooperation. Chloe adds, “I love to think of the many hands that gathered this glass, that kept it safe, and that painstakingly pieced it back together.” Not every post about peace and cooperation is also about beauty (or is it? Hmm). This one is:

Death & Birds

The cathedral

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3 years ago · 85 likes · 72 comments · Chloe Hope

Readers of my other Substack, , may have noticed that I already mentioned over there ’s inaugural post about a community garden that exceeded the vision of its creators in West Yorkshire. But it’s worth mentioning twice the cooperative outpouring that occurred in Todmorden, profiled well by Safar. After transforming the visual, nutritional, and cultural life of one town, the community garden seemed to be jumping to other locales:

The Fiertzeside

Welcome to the Fiertzeside

Picture yourself under the sun-dappled shade of an old oak as it whispers in the breeze. There is a celebratory feel to this, our first of gatherings. You are invited to sample the offering of food and drink. Glasses clink. A fire smoulders and you savour a smoky black-bean burger in a freshly baked sourdough bun, perfectly paired with homegrown salads…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 18 comments · Safar Fiertze

For , journalist visited the Iowa State Fair in August, trying to understand the great rift between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. right now. While he felt politically and culturally out of place, “the idea of going to war (what else do we mean by “national divorce”?) with any of the people I spoke to—many of whom, Trump voters or not, did not fall neatly into any ideological camp—felt so very wrong.”

I found the quick response of the young woman at the 4:00-minute mark in the video most surprising. She’s not interested in any of the big-ticket issues. She just thinks she can’t trust anyone who doesn’t work as hard as she does. At least, that’s what I heard:

The Free Press

VIDEO: Pork Chops! Politics! The Free Press Goes to the Iowa State Fair.

Watch now (5 mins) | I do not have terribly agrarian instincts. My primary interest as a kid was musical theater; I think the closest I have come to cultivating anything was when I was briefly the owner of a Chia Pet. But this past weekend, I spent my time surrounded by a radically different type of human: people who, it would seem, have bent the land—or at least some anima…

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3 years ago · 312 likes · 463 comments · Ben Kawaller

of Inner Peace started a list of moments that made his heart sing. Somehow these items on the list reminded me of those shards of glass at Winchester Cathedral. Can you guess the length of his list?

Inner Peace

A Few Things I Remember

Hi friends, Does anybody know why they remember one moment over another? There seems to be no formula or precise science with our brains, full of complexities and mysteries and all the stuff that makes us human. What I know is that we tend to remember moments when someone or something made our heart sing. Those moments — …

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Matthew Gutierrez

And just in case shorter days, darker nights, and periods of anxiety are getting folks down, therapist at offers this affirmation:

You are not in trouble.

They are not secretly mad at you.

You are inherently good.

You are safe.

Peace of Mind by Meg Josephson

You're Not in Trouble

Peace of Mind is a reader-supported newsletter. If you’d like to receive weekly letters with journaling prompts + monthly guided meditations, I invite you to become a paid subscriber. Thank you so much for being here, exactly as you are…

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3 years ago · 21 likes · 3 comments · Meg Josephson

And so ends the regular PeaceLinks buffet — a cluster of posts that speak to each other, at least in my head — about some aspect of peace, cooperation, or middle ground. The rest is new to the monthly format.

PeaceLink Alumni Corner

After a full summer of weekly posts, PeaceLinks has built up an archive of inspiring authors spreading peace and cooperation. Now that we’re posting monthly, I’ll give a little space to checking back on a formerly featured author, or perhaps a PeaceLinks subscriber (or both) here near the end of the post.

I enjoyed discovering ’s this summer because I am originally from the Puget Sound area of Washington State — John’s adopted home — and his title struck me as especially clever and loaded with possibilities from whimsy to serious community engagement — all of which one finds in John’s posts. Lately he and his wife have been traveling in Finland, and John’s eye for everything related to water is eminently satisfying. The island dwellers go island-hopping half a globe from home, with rain and beaches as though they’d never left. Climate change and clean water are never far from mind. But some moments are decidedly new, as you’ll see.

John has become a great ambassador for PeaceLinks (for which, many thanks!) and was the swiftest subscriber to sign up for the optional paid level of subscription — an act of sheer generosity since all posts here are free.

Check out this recent post for some beautiful photos and John’s keen eye for all things watery in Finland:

Mostly Water

Finland by water

Drinking water, fog, and lakes In the last couple of posts, I talked about Vierumäki, Lahti, and the Ironman, covering drinking water, fog, and lakes. But there’s more! Here's an update from Helsinki and the Turku archipelago. Helsinki and Suomenlinna - plumbing and rain…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 12 comments · John Lovie

Update from Books in Every Home, the Fall Charity

If you saw last month’s post on children’s literacy, you know that paid subscriptions are a new option at PeaceLinks, and you know that I timed the activation of a paid option to provide an extra source of support for a project at my university called Books in Every Home.

In this project, university students buy books for early elementary-aged children and deliver them to families with a high level of economic need. This year’s class has sorted and catalogued our current books on hand, reserved space on our quad during Homecoming Weekend for publicity, and started work on the fundraising site that will go live around the end of this month. They are an energetic, creative group, full of initiative!

If you decide to sign up for a paid subscription at any level this month, a portion of your subscription will be sent on to Books in Every Home.

ALSO, if you pay for a subscription to PeaceLinks and would like full, paid access to my other newsletter, Enchanted in America, email me at peacelinks@substack.com to request 2-for-1. (It doesn’t happen automatically, so the email is an important step.)

Thank you for reading and sharing. It is a privilege to carry on this project and be moved regularly by so many fine writers with their eye on better things. 🙏 See you back here on the 3rd Friday in October!

/TAH-ra/

Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, where I share links relating to peace, cooperation, and uplifting work happening somewhere right now.

For back-to-school week, I’m shaking up the schedule and the formula on both of my Substacks, this one and Enchanted in America. For the main feature here, I’m going to introduce you to a special program of my own that supports childhood literacy, and then we’ll get to some related links to other people’s literacy programs further down the post.

Be sure to stick around for big announcements at the end, including a new schedule (lower frequency), a paid subscription option (but no paywalls here), and the 2-for-1 special with Enchanted in America, where there will be special content for paid subscribers.

Before all that, or even photographs, let me tell you a story.

Books in Every Home

In May of 2017, I learned about an impressive nonprofit in my area offering a full suite of services to help families out of homelessness — but something was missing: books!

Of course, shelter, jobs, and education are crucial for adults, but I pictured what the five-, eight-, and twelve-year-olds would be doing while their parents were working new jobs or going back to school. What are the chances, I asked, that the homes of recently homeless families contain high-quality children’s books — the kind of books that kids want to take down and reread for the sheer pleasure of it?

New books. Picture books. Poetry books. Humor books. The kind of books that compete with rent money. The ones too heavy to carry in a backpack from shelter to shelter. The ones that give a person dignity. On your shelf. In your home.

For some of us, childhood books were an ornamented doorway to our literacy education, school motivation, and even our ability to see positive futures for ourselves.

All that summer of 2017 I pushed these thoughts down. I told myself it was not my problem. I had enough on my plate.

Then came August and my university president’s back-to-school address. He spoke in his usual stirring and presidential way about faculty making experiences for students to build their resumés and connect them meaningfully with the community. Who told him?? Oh blast! It was like that moment in the Old Testament when a voice in the night calls Samuel a third time, and there’s no more ignoring it.

And so, in Fall 2017 a small program was born at my university called Books in Every Home. My students learned how to raise money, research new and award-winning children’s literature, arrange visits to Title I schools (where a majority of families qualify for economic support programs), hold the attention of six-year-olds, and give away books. Since then, the class has met more or less every fall and sometimes in spring, and every group of students has found some way to put its own stamp on the project.

Based on student preferences, we have partnered with many agencies in town: the local food bank, a literacy program serving refugee families, the homeless services office that inspired the project in the first place, and more. University students earn elective credit and build their resumés with project management, professional writing, teamwork, leadership, and more. And children whose parents can’t afford them receive hand-picked, shiny new, award-winning picture books with the most delightful literary characters and madcap stories of the year.

Photos: These children were just read to by a university student and then learned that the three books in their bags were theirs to take home and keep. We adjusted our methods but did not stop for COVID in 2020. Books in Every Home project, Fall 2021.

Links to Other Literacy Programs

We’re not the only literacy program around. Some of my favorite people anywhere, I’ve discovered, work in early childhood literacy access. Continuing today’s theme of book-love and children’s literacy, here are three more agencies working to support children’s literacy in the U.S. Click any photo to visit that organization’s home page.

The Children’s Literacy Initiative

The Children’s Literacy Initiative, with offices in Philadelphia, Chicago, Florida, and New Jersey, provides books to classrooms and professional development to teachers to improve literacy instruction, especially for Black and Latinx students.

First Nations Development Institute

The First Nations Development Institute, based in Colorado, provides grants for many aspects of Native economic and cultural well-being, including language preservation and child literacy. FNDI provides this 2018 selected reading list for kids.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

Founded in 1995 in East Tennessee, the country-western singer’s literacy program sends one free book each month to registered children through age five.

And now . . . Big Announcements!

1. SCHEDULE: September through May, the frequency of PeaceLinks will change to monthly to make room for Books in Every Home and other work of the academic year, as well as new things at Enchanted in America. Starting September 15th, watch for PeaceLinks every 3rd Friday of the month.

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2. PAID OPTION: Today I am turning on a paid subscription option for both PeaceLinks and Enchanted in America. Why now? Because a portion of every subscription initiated in August or September — monthly or yearly — will be used to purchase books for the program I just described above, Books in Every Home.

   .

   That’s right. I’m inviting you to make a paid subscription at the same time that I’m going to post with less frequency. I’ll post news of the literacy project at the end of monthly posts or in special updates, so you’ll know exactly where subscription dollars go.

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as we search monthly for links promoting peace, cooperation, and good juju.

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Happy Friday, and welcome to another edition of PeaceLinks, where I gather up themed links about peace, cooperation, and the middle ground. Before I went traveling last week, I had squirreled away a few Notes and posts with a critter theme. When I got home yesterday and sat down with my file of possible links for this week, I realized that hidden in the animal posts was a pattern of pairs: canine and feline, human/non-human, domestic/wild, broken/whole, wanted/unwanted.

In this handful of pictures and words about pairs, the first authors caught my attention with a single compelling picture and scene - though clicking through to their Substacks opened up more.

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If this canine-feline silhouette from of — a new Substack launch — isn’t a picture of peace, I don’t know what is:

(Welcome to Substack, Ben!)

I noticed two Substackers recently commenting about the beautiful and awkward interface of life with critters.

of replaced her lawn in Glasgow and attracted butterflies, one with a torn wing:

(Also from Lindsay, read about mothers folding everyone into their care.)

of caught on video another injured critter — a gecko missing a tail, hanging out in her home in Italy. Inspired by Albert Schweitzer’s respect for animal life, she is trying to shoo a houseful of lizards out of doors without hurting any feelings. Start with her philosophical June post about the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Follow her for more updates on the evolving gecko story.

Finding Home

Groundhogs in the Garden

Animals are cute, fun, even magnificent – just so long as they are where we want them. As soon as they invade our space, we consider them pests. I heard a woman say this on NPR back in January but I didn’t catch her name and forgot which program. Still, I keep thinking about this. Why do we admire animals from a distance but consider them a problem when …

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3 years ago · 14 likes · 12 comments · Jan Peppler, PhD

Inspired by Jan and Lindsay, I felt sure that of would have something to say on the subject of cohabitation with critters, maybe even pollinators. The author of a hand-illustrated newsletter on sustainable urban futures did not disappoint. (Note: There is a newer Substack with the same name. You can’t miss Patrick’s hand illustrations.) Here’s a charming post from way back in 2021 about a home with indoor/outdoor insects:

The Possible City

SHORT #1: The Pollinator's Breakfast

He was directing the traffic of pollinators on the morning that we first met. They fly in, one by one each morning, through the garden, into the doors of the sunroom. He greets each of them, not with a fly swatter, but with a calm nod and smile. “There are five different species this morning. Not a bad group on the verge of winter. But this one, the littl…

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5 years ago · 2 comments · Patrick M. Lydon

I couldn’t help but think that yesterday’s issue of by Andrew Smith was also relevant here. Andrew has been thinking about creative collaborations with Artificial Intelligence, and his latest post called “Collaborations” provides a gateway to his method of making peace with AI, as well as a list of his Substack collaborations with other writers on creativity and technology. The interface with bugs and animals isn’t the only perplexing one.

Goatfury Writes

Collaborations

The double-edged nature of rapid technological progress is now at the center of the world’s stage. The pace of change in today’s world—in particular, late 2022 and on into 2023—inspired me to start writing every day this year. I’ve since published 120 pieces, all of them trying to make sense of this change in various ways…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 9 comments · Andrew Smith

Humans may have been living a lot longer with animal companions, but isn’t AI a bit like a hatch of geckos in the house, a little bit wanted, and also unwanted?

Oh sure, it’s a crazy idea. Like Gene Kelly dancing with a mop. (See 1:47-2:50.)

Jump to my other Substack

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I. “Peace Train”

By Cat Stevens/ Yusuf

When I heard Cat Stevens/Yusuf on a friend’s turntable at a party several years ago, I hadn’t thought about the man in decades. The tunes and choruses came right back, though — “Wide World,” “Morning Has Broken,” “Peace Train,” and the rest.

Soon after, I got my own copy of the classic album Teaser and the Firecat and a greatest hits compilation. On long trips in the car, I turn up “Peace Train” and sing along. I check the kids’ bored expressions and wonder how many times I heard these songs before they got into my mitochondria, and how many times I might get away with playing them before we reach our destination.

Thanks to the preparation of this post, I learned that Cat/Yusuf just released a new album in June after fifty years of songwriting. It’s called “King of a Land.” If you’re a Cat Stevens fan and remember the unique animated cover art on the album Teaser and the Firecat, look for a Teaser cameo at 3:53:

And is anyone surprised that Cat/Jusuf has a foundation called Peace Train? Now that’s a PeaceLink!

II. “Watermark”

By Enya

There is a point in the drive when I like to pop Enya’s Watermark CD into the stereo. It comes soon after we put urban highway exits behind us, as the landscape opens up in all directions — arid hills to the north, a long plain and a small cluster of distant mountains to the south. I like to play the album while we cross the Snake River from Idaho into Oregon and as we climb through the winding route of the old Oregon Trail, up and up to Baker City and the high valleys of eastern Oregon. It is much drier here than in Ireland, but the hills and gulches rise away from my vehicle in quiet only disturbed by the paired grey ribbons of the interstate road.

III. “Thank You for the Music”

By Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, performed by ABBA

No question, the most important CD in my travel kit is Abba GOLD, a Greatest Hits album. It powers me through the late afternoon slump, about 2/3 of the way into a full day of driving. Songs like “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo” keep the wheels rolling, but don’t you think “Thank You for the Music” makes a better PeaceLink?

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Your turn. If you’re not driving a car yourself, pop down to the comments and let me know:

1. Do you have a story about any of these songs or artists?

2. What are some of your favorite driving tunes? Does it matter how far you are going?

3. What format, platform, or tech do you rely on when driving or getting around by another conveyance? Is anyone else still playing CD’s in a 3-disc changer? “You were educated in the twentieth century!” cries my exasperated firstborn, as though that explains everything.

4. Is there a song from your youth that you really wish your kids or someone else’s kids could hear the way you heard it? And when you eye them sideways, they don’t appear to care a piffle? (Piffle: Is that a twentieth-century word? Nineteenth? Eighteenth?)

🌲 The monthly digest of enchanting reads on Substack will go out to subscribers of my other publication tomorrow. Head over there to subscribe before “The Enchanted Forest” for August hits inboxes. Thank you if you already read both publications! 🙏

Jump to Enchanted in America

As you may have heard by now, the Irish singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor died Wednesday. No cause of death had been announced as of this writing.

It feels right to me to let ’s loving memorial post stand alone in this week’s PeaceLinks. This tribute is personal and informative. Usually, on Fridays I post two or more links on a theme related to peace, cooperation, or the middle ground. Today, it is enough to honor the restless, searching, and honest life of Sinéad.

If you’ve read Cathleen’s post already, open it again, head to the bottom, and spend a few minutes viewing some of her carefully chosen links, honoring one of the great voices of our generation.

Cathleen Falsani: This Numinous World

My Favourite Things (MFT): July 27 | Sinéad

These weekly My Favourite Things (MFT) posts are available as a premium for paid subscribers only, but this one is free to all for what I hope are obvious reasons. It wasn’t what I’d had planned for today or this week or any day, but Sinéad has gone and here we are…

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3 years ago · 17 likes · 7 comments · Cathleen Falsani

R. I. P., Sinéad, and son Shane, who predeceased her. 🙏

No subscription button today. When you’ve finished here, just file quietly out. ❤️

Back next week.

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Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, a digest of web finds relating to peace, cooperation, and plain decency.

This week a daisy chain of Substack links led me to two virtuoso videos about hope and community in adversity. Both are exceptional.

Here is how it all unfolded.

First came a Note from Sarah Fay, who is serializing her memoir . She Restacked a post from , another memoir serializer and the creator of a documentary called Unfixed, about the way people deal with adversity.

Video #1

In a Substack update a week ago, Kimberly shared the documentary video about the way chronic illness turned her attention toward other people whose lives had come “unfixed.” It’s a moving 6 1/2 minutes of “yes to the messy, uncomfortable journey of being alive”:

Unfixed

The birth of Unfixed

Hello friends! Don’t worry, it’s not Sunday. Some of our readers have been requesting helpful resources on “living unfixed.” We all encounter adversity in life. For me, early traumas, perfectionism and a nervous system stuck in “flight and freeze” became fertile ground for chronic illness to take root in my flesh…

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3 years ago · 23 likes · 17 comments · Kimberly Warner - Unfixed

After mashing my empty Kleenex box into the recycle bin and replacing it with a fresh one, I hit the subscribe button on , which is how I learned about virtuoso video #2.

Yesterday’s Unfixed post in my inbox promised, “You are in for a treat,” and shared a link by a poet new to me, Andrea Gibson. A short (1 1/2-minute) poem about joy “undimmed by cancer” piqued my interest enough to send me to Andrea’s archive, where I found more to love.

Video #2

“MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room” hammers out justice for the MAGA era. I know you can’t get a whole country into a single poem — even though Walt Whitman made a pretty good show of it, and Allen Ginsberg tried to follow suit — but if you could do that, this would be the poem of this time, right now:

Things That Don't Suck

MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM

Hi Sweet Community, Today I’m sharing a video of my poem, MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM, which I just today submitted to the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. If you’ve never watched a Tiny Desk concert online, check one out today. They’re absolutely incredible. I’ve seen many of my favorite artists perform their most intimate sets in that space…

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4 years ago · 158 likes · 55 comments · Andrea Gibson

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Update on a continuing story:

Last week’s edition included a story by investigative journalist about James Barber, a man on death row in Alabama who was put to death early this morning, after requests for a stay of execution were denied in Alabama and (late last night) by the U.S. Supreme Court. There were dissents at both levels. For more perspective on this story, see recent posts at and by .

From my other Substack:

Last week saw the conclusion of the friendly competition asking “When were you enchanted by a book, poem, or story?” See the five winning essays here. This morning, I’ll be sending a custom poem, as promised, to one of the prizewinners. Next Monday breaks the recent series of posts from me on children’s books, as we sink our teeth into the dark magic of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Kindred, in which a late-twentieth-century California woman travels back in time to 1815 — and slavery. This is nobody’s idea of a sweet enchantment.

Coming Up:

Next Friday, PeaceLinks will announce a lighter transition-to-fall schedule as we get ready to start school here in mid-August! We’re also getting ready to turn on a paid subscription option in August, with initial revenues supporting a community literacy project. I can’t wait to tell you about that! Subscribe to learn more in a future post.

Until next Friday — Peace,

Tah-ra

Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, my personal archive of favorite web links on the subject of peace, cooperation, and the middle ground. Today’s post features three Substack authors: two write with expertise and clarity on the subject of forgiveness and releasing oneself of emotional burdens; the third is an investigative journalist with a story of forgiveness from Alabama’s death row.

PeaceLinks readers are exceptionally savvy and heart-aware people, so these posts will affirm some things this crowd already knows. Even so, I’m certain that you will find something gracious, revelatory, or surprising from each of today’s authors.

Psychologist and theologian of is writing a series on forgiveness in five parts. Dr. Chanequa is the author of multiple books, the most recent one from HarperCollins called Sacred Self-Care: Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves. The link below leads to the outstanding first installment in her forgiveness series, explaining why five myths about forgiveness interfere with the ability of an injured person to heal. I hope you will read her series and find somewhere to share it:

No Trifling Matter

Myths about Forgiveness

In January, I began taking a yearlong class based upon Steven Levine’s book, A Year to Live. One of our recurrent topics is forgiveness. Every time it comes up, people in the class struggle with it. Since I’ve taught a few seminary courses on forgiveness and reconciliation, I thought it’d be a good idea to do a series on i…

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3 years ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Chanequa Walker-Barnes

When I searched Substack to see who else had interesting things to say about forgiveness, I had the pleasure of discovering of . Patty is a hypnotherapist, reiki master/teacher, and author of Forever Five: Adventures of the Ladybug Hunter, a memoir of what comes after the unfathomable loss of a child. Earlier this year, she posted from her research on the Native Hawaiian practice of forgiveness, or making-right with loved ones and oneself. If you like language-play, you’ll appreciate this fresh angle on a familiar subject:

My Weird and Wonderful Life

Ho'oponono and the Art of Forgiveness

What is Ho’oponopono? “Ho’oponopono” is defined in the Hawaiian Dictionary as “mental cleansing: Family conferences within which relationships were set right through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance, and mutual restitution and forgiveness.” Literally, ho’o is a particle used to make an actualizing verb from the following noun, as would “to” be…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Patricia Meier

More recently, wrote about aging as a process of shedding judgment. This post fits beautifully with last week’s PeaceLinks theme.

My Weird and Wonderful Life

The Burden of Judgement

My Weird and Wonderful Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There are many books in the fields of both psychology and spirituality that talk about the phases in our lives; both viewpoints agree that from birth to approximately 28 years of age are the highly experien…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · Patricia Meier

It sometimes happens with PeaceLinks that I’ve drafted an entire Friday post by Monday or Tuesday, only to come across something new to me and on-point on Thursday. This is one of those weeks.

Yesterday, the indefatigable PeaceLinks alumna posted a Substack Note that would otherwise have eluded me. She Restacked a post from her fellow investigative journalist in Alabama . The central figure of this short essay is a man who is currently scheduled to be executed for murder in Alabama. The story is not about legal clemency; it’s about forgiveness. We don’t learn the details of how he reconciled with people he harmed, but we hear that he and others took the leap.

Tread by Lee Hedgepeth

In the shadow of his planned execution, James Barber says he sees hope

His hope doesn’t lie with the State of Alabama. Instead, James Barber, scheduled to be executed on the evening of July 20, said he puts his faith in a much higher power. On Wednesday, about a dozen people gathered to pray for Barber, who goes by J…

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3 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Lee Hedgepeth

I hope you enjoy today’s authors and share whatever moves you in their work by clicking into their posts and hitting the Share button there.

Peace, friends.

Jump to sister-pub Enchanted in America

Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, a collection of online writings compiled for their interest in peace, cooperation, and the middle ground.

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#1

In anticipation of July 4th, at offered up this reflection on the craving of Americans for connection and moderation, contrary to headlines that focus on extremists:

I think we’re more similar than not. And, even in our differences, I know we still crave connection. We love finding common ground. We care for our communities.

Our perceptions of one another are skewed by external forces, creating tendencies for us to dismiss, distrust, and dispute without much provocation. But, under the right circumstances, with the right messenger, I believe we can change our minds. Notice that the focus is on us, not them.

This isn’t about winning over our political adversaries. It’s about building opportunities to better understand each other by taking stock of our own biases. It’s about moving away from despair and stepping toward reassurance. It’s about being determined to offer grace before judgement. [italics added]

Read the whole post here:

Chicken Scratch

Look out!

Earlier this year, I started putting together thoughts about the rising polarization of our country and world. I’d been shoving the idea down for months, but I could still hear it making noises under the surface of my daily life. So, I finally let it come up for air. I knew it was a formidable topic; I wasn’t sure I had the chops. But, I hoped I might f…

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3 years ago · 20 likes · 16 comments · Elizabeth Beggins

Elizabeth ends her post with some resources to help her readers take action from the middle. This June 2 PeaceLink describes another organization with the same goal.

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#2

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I enjoy unexpected connections between writers and websites that seem to have little in common.

Artist and senior Zen student ’s most recent post in offers a process for observing and appreciating any work of art. The emphasis is on slow observation and sensation, ending with a personal and changeable connection between the viewer and the artwork. To begin, “First, I try not to judge the work, not to worry if it is good or bad or great” (bold emphasis in original).

I cannot help but wonder what would happen if someone applied Sal’s method of approaching art in the context of approaching an old friend or neighbor, as in Elizabeth’s Chicken Scratch essay. What if we approached each other slowly, giving time, suspending judgment, not worrying if the other person is good or bad or great or has opinion x or y. Would this be possible? What might happen?

Read Sal’s whole post here:

The Uses of Art

Ways of Seeing #1

Dear Friends, I’m trying out something new this week. Here is the first installment of “Ways of Seeing,” a series of inspirations and practical exercises for deepening attention and engaging with art. I’ll be interspersing these exercises between my longer posts. Let me know what you think…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · Sal Randolph

There is more in Sal’s archive that relates to the PeaceLinks theme — an essay on a gender-changing Buddhist figure, for example, or the question of whether the appreciation of artwork can be understood to create communities — but these two posts speak poetically alongside each other about what happens when criticism and judgment are pushed well below connection and relationship.

The principal seems the same for art as for interpersonal interaction. Both essays imply that we have the option to judge, criticize, and raise hot questions; and then both of these essays come firmly down with a choice of something else.

#3

And speaking of art — #3 today might not have struck me as a PeaceLink without the other two. We’ve been hopping on river rocks from Elizabeth’s clear theme of neighborly common ground, to Sal’s method of seeing art (which strikes me as a peaceful, hot-air-reducing method of seeing anything and anyone), to a poem about an artist’s change of vision. All three of these have to do with trusting what the body and its intuition knows, without judgment or criticism. (ok, yes - Elizabeth did some research to confirm her hunch.) The speaker of this poem sounds a bit vexed with his doctor, but behind that there is acceptance-turned-ecstasy with what someone else might call a disability.

The poem appeared in a Note posted earlier this morning by globetrotter , who writes . I don’t know how he reads, writes, takes photographs, and catches flights at the same time, but he does it, and thank goodness. Thank you, M. E., for sharing this radiant poem by Lisel Mueller, from Monet Refuses the Operation (1996). Amen.

Click to read the full poem:

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Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, my archive of web links about peace, cooperation, and plain decency.

Showing up with love in this world can be bruising and exhausting. Even though I’ve used the word “uplift” to describe some of what I look for in a Peace Link, I don’t mean to be saccharine about it. Efforts at justice, common sense, and cooperation fail and frustrate many times before strangers recognize their common purpose and throw each other lifelines.

Today’s links come from two Substackers who shine light on a particular space of brokenness - a specific region and specific problem - and then approach it with research, tenacity, and love.

It is hard to wait for injustice to change. Lives are lost while systems lag. of and of don’t let that overwhelm them. They are showing up for the dignity and preservation of life, no matter how long it takes. And by writing about it, they transform the struggle into something beautiful that you and I can share. From sharing, if we feel moved to it, some of us will find ways to add support.

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Beth Shelburne was a successful TV news anchor when her life changed five years ago. She reassigned herself to the beat of covering the Alabama prison system as an investigative reporter. The post about what prompted this change makes a good introduction to her work. From there, just keep reading to meet the men, women, and children whose lives have redirected her purpose. The less I say, the better. Her story has a liberty-bell ring of truth to it:

Moth to flame

How prison reporting changed my heart

Most people familiar with my work know that I focus on injustice in Alabama, but since I have many new subscribers (Hi y’all!) and because I just passed a major milestone in my health (5 years of survival after a heart attack), I wanted to share some of the ways that…

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4 years ago · 41 likes · 21 comments · Beth Shelburne

John Lovie draws attention to another area where people are not at peace. As an environmental writer from the northwestern U.S. (an island in my home region of the Puget Sound), he works with his neighbors to mitigate the consequences of careless development and rising seas.

Instead of ranting against another political tribe, he encourages us not to be divided and conquered by a small number of people whose narrow interests defy common sense. “In highly individualistic societies,” he writes,

including most Western countries, but especially the United States, politicians, corporations, and others have weaponized our lizard brains against us. They have done this by taking advantage of our fixation on personal freedom and property rights to portray solutions to societal problems as threats to liberty so that our lizard brain reacts. This is how we surrender wetland protections to personal property rights; sacrifice schoolchildren to gun rights; “other” people and take away their rights, forgetting that those are our rights too. [italics added]

Whatever our politics, could we learn to notice when someone — anyone — portrays a solution to a societal problem as a threat to liberty, and recognize this as the manipulative formula that it is? John Lovie is trying to expand the space of our common ground on environmental subjects, as if our lives might depend on it:

Mostly Water

Denial and the lizard brain

Most of the work I'm doing, and most of what I post about here, is at the interface of environmental and public health issues and society and culture. Although the science is clear on climate change, sea level rise, and contamination in water, we have a hard time making progress on implementing solutions. Why is it that seemingly reasonable solutions ru…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · John Lovie

Beth and John remind me to self-check:

What can I do today to spread love in the world? What energies can I redirect from work that makes me smaller? What need in my community do I have the power to show up for?

P.S.

Have you been enchanted by a story about someone getting free of the prison system? Or about water? Have you been enchanted by a book? Consider telling your story in a few hundred words and posting it to the friendly contest going on until July 13 at my other Substack, Enchanted in America, here.

Enchanted in America

Enchanted by the Book Contest

HEAR YE, HEAR YE! In honor of my one-year anniversary of creative play on Substack, be it pronounced throughout Florin and all adjoining kingdoms: A Contest, to crown the best most eloquent…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Tara Penry

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Welcome to PeaceLinks, a gathering place for links relating to peace, cooperation, the middle ground, and simple decency. I save these links for my own pleasure and inspiration and am pleased if others enjoy them, too. Today brings 3 links from inside Substack. (Note: I usually post on Fridays, but the post comes a little early this week.)

On Monday of this week in the U.S., we observed the federal holiday called Juneteenth, recognizing the date in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, declaring the liberation of enslaved people in Texas two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the end of the Civil War.

Naturally, I looked for Substack posts about the holiday on Monday, or about peace and freedom generally, and I’m sure they’re out there, but what fell to my eye unasked was a trio of posts about loving thy neighbor. It’s not exactly the Juneteenth message, but it’s a PeaceLinks message, and I couldn’t resist the way these three Monday readings underscored and echoed each other. When things fall together unasked, well, whaddya do?

Enjoy . . .

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usually breaks down legal issues in the headlines with outstanding clarity and depth in his newsletter, . On Monday, acknowledging the Juneteenth holiday and Pride month, he took a break from his usual beat to share some pictures and reflections from a family wedding. His “Message of Hope, Sprung From Love” is a quick read, a short post about his niece’s international, inter-everything wedding. It gave me a lift, as I hope it does for you.

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I have always been partial to an informed, scholarly, Thanksgiving feast of a sermon, so it was a pleasure to come across ’s newsletter, , some time ago. Rabbi Danya has been working her way through the Torah, providing contemporary, inclusive interpretations along the way, and this week she made it to the central verse in the central book. She speaks emphatically about the line at the center of the Torah from which radiates “the rest of spirituality, the rest of service to the divine, the rest of our work down here as people, the rest of everything.” She offers several examples about how to live it. Any guesses what it is? (Hint: There’s a version of it in the Ten Commandments also, and Jews and Christians both hold it in the highest esteem.)

Life is a Sacred Text

the point of it all

This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re generally working our way through Leviticus these days. More about the project…

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3 years ago · 50 likes · 24 comments · Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

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I’ve saved for last a short poem, read aloud by author on his The poem is called “Eating Heart,” and I had to think twice about it before I realized how well it fit with these other two posts. (I love when a poem makes me think twice.) Pay attention to the unexpected guests in the poem, and how they are treated compared to the expected ones. The same? Or different? I’m grateful for the audio recordings that convey the author’s smile in them. I think you’ll agree this poem brings perfect closure to today’s post.

Wolf Tracks Substack

Eating Heart

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3 years ago · 1 comment · James Don BlueWolf

Thank you, , , and for the inspiration of your writing and your big hearts!

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Welcome to PeaceLinks, an archive of online readings about peace, cooperation, the middle ground, and the spread of decency.

Today’s Peacelinks sure look like an incoherent pairing from a daft editor.

Except for the fact that both featured authors are fathers of two young children (and it’s Father’s Day weekend in the U.S.), Dwell by Andrew Boryga and “The Healthy Jew” by have no more in common than two strangers assigned to share a cabin at summer camp. According to his “About” page, Andrew aims to “put out little reflective essays on the writing practice that are authentic, engaging, and, hopefully, helpful to others.” Shmuel writes about wellness rooted in spirituality and philosophy. He is especially guided by the wisdom of the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who “taught that a person enters humankind by using his mind to guide his body’s actions to a single immediate purpose: physical and emotional well-being” (“About,” “The Healthy Jew”).

Authentic writing practices and a philosophy of wellness: What are the chances of these Father’s Day cabinmates hitting it off?

See what you think.

⚾️ ⚾️ ⚾️ ⚾️ ⚾️

Andrew’s latest post, “Baseball: My Useful Distraction,” demonstrates why it’s important for writers to have hobbies, avocations, or absorptions, rooting us in the world and keeping us in contact with people who are not writers. As a PeaceLink, this post also radiates with dignity and well-being when Andrew speaks of his teammates. The players may not have much in common off the field, but baseball gives them a common language and a common love.

Dwell by Andrew Boryga

Baseball: My Useful Distraction

Thanks for reading Dwell. Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. All posts are free and there is no charge to subscribe. On Sunday, I was crowned a champion. A champion of my adult softball league, that is. After a 5-5 record in the regular season, my team went 4-0 in the playoffs to win the whole shebang. It was a fitting cap to a great bounce back season for me…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · Andrew Boryga

🥕 🥕 🥕 🥕 🥕

“The Healthy Jew” was a new discovery for me in the last couple of weeks, but I’ve enjoyed several posts from the archive, and, as a parent, I especially wanted to repost Shmuel Chaim Naiman’s May 30 reflection, “What about the Kids?” After advising his readers about healthy eating practices, he decides to flex a little on the kids’ diet. His explanation offers wisdom to any parent.

Instead of worrying that relaxed food standards are a problem, Shmuel asks what’s more important at a given time, Eating Well or Relating Well. There is Peace in the gentle movement of the mind from a healthy plate to a healthy relationship.

P.S. Who can resist the categories of real foods, almost-real foods, and food-like substances?

The Healthy Jew

What About the Kids?

“Come on, get real,” you might be thinking. It’s a nice try, but the kids won’t go for plain potato chips and pretzels. No matter how much The Healthy Jew harps on the qualitative differences between pure food-like substances and almost-real foods, they will still demand ice cream, Fanta, candy corn, and a thousand other variations of sugar with unprono…

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3 years ago · 5 likes · Shmuel Chaim Naiman

Finally, in honor of Father’s Day Sunday, here is a “dad”-post from Andrew, too:

Dwell by Andrew Boryga

Becoming A Dad Made Me A Better Writer

Before my son was born, writing ruled my world. I thought of myself, first and foremost, as a writer. I spent my days thinking about my writing, the writing of others I was jealous of, my plan to achieve “success” and publish a book to critical acclaim in my 20s, and why that plan was bombing…

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4 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Andrew Boryga

What do you think? Do any of these posts put you in a more peaceful frame of mind? Does the reading experience remind you of the dignity in yourself or others? Does it remind you of your loves?

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See you next Friday! :-)

P.S. Wait - stop the presses! Big news from Andrew Boryga this very day. Congratulations! Excuse me while I put in my order from his favorite indie bookstore in Miami …

Dwell by Andrew Boryga

You Can Pre-Order My Novel Now!

Since starting this space five months ago, I’ve often mentioned this novel of mine. It felt weird at times, because aside from a Publisher’s Marketplace announcement last year, I didn’t have anything concrete to point you towards to prove it is a real thing…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · 6 comments · Andrew Boryga