1 The most brilliant bookshops in the world
Hastings' Little Red Bookshop doesn't make this article but there are still many amazing places featured like the one pictured in China.
2 Aubade on a ghost hunt - Traci Brimhall
We prefer to do it with the lights on,
the Victrola scratching How long can it last?
against the tremble of curtains. Patient,
we learn the walls, their glossary of knocks,
translating harlequin and dust. What we
know lives here—lonely bone star blossom
of the spider plant, lost bee on the sill,
the recorder’s static alive and puckering.
I tell you our future is the guttering candle
in the basement birdcage. Prove it, you say,
and I set both its shadows swaying. Our history—
the attic window, how the unseen surprises
the photograph. You ask what is there
to be afraid of. I ask the past to make itself
known to me. We only have to make it through
the night, so we close the dolls’ eyes. Danger
midwifes the heart’s spring. We are cabbage roses
grooming the parlor air with unsexed pistils.
I have this kiss and its sleepless itinerary.
Your lip, pink logic and cushion. The door
tests its lock, and I let you ruin each light
orb and whisper with physics. If we’re sure
something is here, then we have to find out
what it wants. A voice on the recorder, sweet
as gravecake—don’t go. We can admit it wasn’t
proof we came for, it was the question.
Plus, they've made a Spotify playlist for you to check out. Very kind.
4 How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again
5 Valarie Kaur on listening
“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear.
When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses.
Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person’s view of the world is to feel the world with them"
I'll be on the lookout for her book - See No Stranger
