Good Seedlets #30

Watch to nurture…….

•  Carmen Avilés Modern Flamenco: Her style blends the ancestral weight of pure flamenco with hip-hop and contemporary dance, turning ordinary sidewalks and stairwells into performance spaces. It's the same throughline as the Usha Jey piece from a past good seedlet: tradition and reinvention refusing to cancel each other out, just staying in the fight together. Raw, fast, and genuinely hard to look away from.

• Mon Laferte Tiny Desk Concert: This set is genre-crossing, a little confrontational, and totally gorgeous. She opens with a cutting jazz number aimed at the corporate grind, surrounded by musicians in suits numbly nodding along, and it somehow ends up feeling like the most vulnerable thing in the room.

  
  

Follow to grow………….

• Recovering, Holly Whitaker:  She wrote Quit Like a Woman and built her name on sobriety writing, but these days her newsletter has widened into something bigger — untangling herself from what she calls "external capital," the constant pull to perform, package, and prove yourself online. If you want writing that's willing to sit in the uncomfortable and not rush to resolve it, this is it.

• Here For Now, Alex Elle: NYT bestselling author and breathwork coach whose newsletter grew out of a promise she made to herself in the thick of grief back in 2020: to practice gratitude on purpose, even when it wasn't easy. What started as a personal ritual is now journal prompts, reflections, and gentle reminders that joy isn't something that just happens to you; it's something you choose. A good one for slower mornings.

• The Practice of Living, Brook Woolf:  Weekly essays on healing, somatics, and what it actually means to live fully in your body and in community as daily practice. Recent pieces have wandered into where women's creativity goes after art school and how to gently mend a frayed nervous system. 

Read to root…….

• Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth: Meet Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick:  eighty-one, gloriously grumpy, permanently armed with a cutting remark and a cup of tea. She's spent sixty years minding her business on a quiet street, but when a neighbor turns up dead, the whispers start, and it turns out Elsie has a past she's worked very hard to bury. Hepworth toggles between Elsie's present and the childhood that earned her the "Mad Mabel" name, and somehow makes an eighty-one-year-old former convicted murderer one of the most tender, funny, heartbreaking characters I've read all year. It's a mystery, but really it's a story about being underestimated your whole life and finally getting to tell it your way. I read this in almost one sitting.

• The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vols. 1–8 by Beth Brower: I don't even know how to describe this series except to say it swallowed me whole. It's 1883 London, and Emma M. Lion has returned to the eccentric little neighborhood of St. Crispian's with plans for a quiet, studious life — plans immediately wrecked by her ridiculous cousin, her terrifying aunt, and a cast of neighborhood oddballs who somehow become your dearest friends within a volume or two. It's written as Emma's own journal entries, so it's funny in this dry, self-aware, slightly unhinged way;  think Jane Austen's wit crossed with the "watching Gilmore Girls with your best friend" feeling. Each volume is short, which makes the whole series dangerously easy to binge from start to finish, and I did exactly that. Start with Vol. 1 and just keep going. Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee. 

• Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet: Karlsson opens with a couple who ate dinner together every Thursday for over a decade before realizing, on a trip to Greece, that they'd been in love the whole time — then turns to his own version of that story, a childhood friend he wrote off as "just funny" for fifteen years before discovering, almost by accident, how deeply attuned the guy actually was. He leans on Aristotle's three kinds of friendship — pleasure, utility, and virtue — to make the case that we usually judge people too fast and on the wrong axis, and that the people we dismiss as boring might just be people we've never seen in the right context. 

• State Change by Ken Liu: A short, strange little sci-fi story.  Rina is born with her soul as a physical object, in her case an ice cube, and her entire adult life gets organized around not letting it melt: no travel far from a fridge, no risks, no heat. It's about what it costs to protect the fragile part of yourself so carefully that you stop living, and what happens when you finally decide the risk is worth it. Only about 5,000 words, so it's a fifteen-minute read, but it'll sit with you a lot longer than that. 

Listen to expand……

• Good Grief by Sara Bareilles: Her first album in seven years — fourteen songs written after losing two close friends within a few years, working through a rough stretch with fertility, and finding herself, in her words, afraid grief would simply dissolve her. It never turns into a slog even though the subject matter is heavy; Bareilles treats mourning like something worth paying attention to instead of something to just survive through. 

• Seed Capital: Do Not Squander Your Gifts: Becca Piastrelli uses this episode to unpack her own inherited money story and what she calls being a "seed investor"; someone tending resources, relationships, and land with an eye toward what gets left behind rather than what gets extracted now. She talks candidly about shame around money, the pull back toward the hyperlocal, and what she's naming her "cosmic assignment." It’s an interesting conversation about our shared responsibilities. 

Support if you can….

•  Return to Freedom: Sister organization to Skydog, also doing wild-horse sanctuary and anti-roundup advocacy work. Right now they have a matching-gift campaign running through Sept. 30 in honor of their oldest resident's 31st birthday, so donations go twice as far this month!