Whether you’re new here or returning to the page, consider this an open door. Our 30-Day New Year’s Journaling Project isn’t a set of one-line prompts to rush through and forget—it’s a slow, spacious invitation to live the questions, inspired by the poet Rilke’s call to stay with uncertainty long enough that, one day, we begin living our way into the answers.

Each prompt opens into something larger: a piece of writing to linger with, music to write alongside, art to stir your imagination. Think of it less as an assignment and more as a creative care package—one you can unbox daily.

These prompts are designed to be evergreen—meant to be revisited, remixed, combined, and made your own. Some people write to them solo; others gather friends or family and turn them into a journaling club, or even conversation starters around the dinner table.

The invitation is simple: respond to what appears. Stay curious. Let the unfolding lead.

To access the full 30-Day Journaling Project—and join us in this ongoing practice—you’re warmly invited to become a paid subscriber ($6/month or $60/year).

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Dive in—

Day 1: Live the Questions

Day 2: Life Tells a Story

Day 3: Here Come the Warm Jets

Day 4: Breathing Out

Day 5: Thank You, Even Though…

Day 6: Start Here. Eyes Closed.

Day 7: Nonnegotiable

Day 8: Hospital Bracelets and Writing a Life

Day 9: Today’s Assignment: Do Nothing

Day 10: What the Hand Knows

Day 11: Cursed Days

Day 12: Early. Late. Emotionally Complicated.

Day 13: To Feel, Not To Do

Day 14: The First Sentence

Day 15: Marginalia

Day 16: Set a Timer. Tell the Truth.

Day 17: Let the Image Speak

Day 18: Blanky-Dank & Beginnings (A Love Story)

Day 19: Corporeal Correspondence

Day 20: The Art of Subtraction

Day 21: When the Mind Goes Quiet

Day 22: A Map Made of Feeling

Day 23: To Live Well

Day 24: Cut & Paste

Day 25: When the Mind Goes Missing

Day 26: The Shape of Memory

Day 27: Small Wins, Big Cringe

Day 28: The (Small) Hill I’ll Die On

Day 29: Words to Live By

Day 30: The What Now Manifesto

A place to gather—

For connection, commiseration, and a little accountability, join us in the Isolation Journals Chat.

For further inspiration—

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What do we pack when we don’t know what’s coming?

Four years ago this week, I was preparing for a long hospital stay. As I approached my second bone marrow transplant, I did what I always do when the future feels uncertain: I gathered, I arranged, I tried to ready myself for what I could not yet see.

Experience had been a teacher. I didn’t bring tomes like War and Peace this time. (I still haven’t read it.) I left the yoga mat and resistance bands at home. Instead, I prepared for comfort and inspiration—cozy sweatpants, port-friendly hoodies, soft beanies, sheepskin slippers. I brought a stack of journals, my lifeline during the first transplant; a couple of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “How To” books; and an art book of Frida Kahlo’s work. At the last minute, almost as an afterthought, I added a small watercolor set and a few paintbrushes a friend had given me. I slotted it all into a gray felt diaper caddy. So tidy. So controlled.

The irony was that I barely wrote and didn’t read at all. My vision soon doubled from the cocktail of medications, making reading or writing nearly impossible. Texting, too. I told a friend it felt like my phone was autocorrecting—just to the wrong language. Luckily, I had brought those paints. When words failed, color did not. Painting became a kind of visual journal—a way of recording what I was living through when language slipped its grip: the hallucinations, the night terrors, the strange elasticity of time. What I couldn’t name, I could still place on the page.

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, both literally and figuratively. I’ve been on the road more than I’ve been home—for The Book of Alchemy and other work events, joining Jon on tour, family trips, and a return to Tunisia for the first time in years. With each trip, I perform the same calculation: if I can fit all the right things into my suitcase—the coordinated outfits, the comfortable shoes, the heating pad, enough nausea meds to sedate a small elephant—then the day might hold.

This is the myth of preparedness—that by assembling the right provisions and safeguards, we might protect ourselves from the discomfort, uncertainty, and pain of being human.

I’m writing this after a disorienting two weeks. The first was all medical: a bone marrow biopsy, five days of chemo, then a donor lymphocyte infusion—an accumulation that leaves me flattened.

The following week, Jon and I traveled to Zurich for the World Economic Forum, not as political power players or industry insiders, but to talk about art—about writing and music as a way of surviving what otherwise feels unbearable.

A friend was on the same flight. He knew I’d finished chemo the day before. “How are you doing?” he asked. Then: “I can’t believe you’re here.”

I wouldn’t normally make such a plan—and I told him so. “This wasn’t Plan A or Plan B,” I said. “This was more like Plan F.” The week after chemo is a wash, between the nausea and the brain fog and the fatigue. But shingles in December pushed my treatment schedule into January, which pushed it straight up against this trip. There was no elegant solution. Only imperfect sequencing.

It was also a few days after my conversation with my friend, the writer and Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, about what to do when the shit hits the fan. The conversation was impromptu; our expectations were low. She told me that since being diagnosed with breast cancer, her brain no longer worked the way it used to, and that she cried easily. I told her I had brain fog, too, and had spent the week on the verge of tears.

We agreed: if we needed to go slowly, we would. If we lost our train of thought, we’d change topics. If we needed to stop after twenty minutes, we’d stop. If we cried, we’d cry.

That is how we proceeded. And in that slowness and vulnerability, something opened. We spoke of illness, and how it alters the shape of our days and our thinking. Of loss, and what it teaches us about love—its power to divide or draw us closer. Of forgiveness and grace, practiced like muscles, strengthened by use. And of joy, chosen even in despair: a flash of phosphorescence in dark ocean water.

But what stayed with me most were those initial caveats. The way they opened the door to gentleness. A refusal to bow to the cultural pressure to be endlessly functional, articulate, productive. An insistence that slowness, fogginess, and mess are not moral failures.

I needed that reminder later during my time at the World Economic Forum, especially on the final night. Jon was meant to speak at an event, and I was scheduled for a roundtable discussion. But a cascade of mishaps followed—traffic, snow, standing in a snowbank on the side of the road as a motorcade sped past.

I thought of this community, and of Monday’s prompt, which asked you to write a letter from the body to the mind. Over and over, you wrote some version of the same message: Hey, I’m here, remember me? I carry you. Sometimes you forget we are one and the same. I had been saving that prompt. (Or avoiding it—there’s so much to unpack.) But in that moment, I knew my body was telling me very clearly to stop, and I had to listen.

And so I turned to Jon and said, “I’m done.”

He nodded, as if this were both reasonable and overdue. There was no way we were making it on time anyway. Back at the hotel, I told him, “I can’t pack. I can’t think. I can’t move.”

“Lie down,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

He packed my suitcase. He located my phone charger, which I had lost. He brought me pizza to eat in bed—proof that he understands both triage and romance. Another moment from my conversation with Nadia echoed back to me: care often arrives not as a grand gesture, but as logistics. Love can look like handling the details when someone else can’t.

One of the things I admire most about Nadia is that she never rushes toward resolution. She doesn’t offer fixes or prescriptions. She offers accompaniment. In a culture obsessed with self-help and panaceas, this feels quietly radical: to sit with what hurts, to be gentle with a mind or body undergoing a profound recalibration.

So today, I want to share Nadia’s essay from The Book of Alchemy. It’s called “I Packed for Shit That Day.” It doesn’t tell you how to grieve well or heal quickly. It simply stays with you when the map disappears.

After the essay, you’ll find today’s prompt—an invitation to practice gentleness. To reflect on a time you extended yourself grace, or a time someone else helped you pack, literally or figuratively. Or a moment when gentleness felt out of reach, and what you might do differently next time.

May Nadia’s words keep you company when shit hits the fan.

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Prompt 368. I Packed for Shit That Day by Nadia Bolz-Weber

When I answered my phone on a Friday morning in August 2021, and my sister said, “Someone killed Henry”—her son—my mind rejected the words. I knew what they meant individually; I knew what “someone” meant and what “killed” meant and what “Henry” meant. But together, they were indecipherable.

So I said, “No.”

Reader, I’m not sure how many times in a row I said no, but it was many, many times. No is the only response my mind had to the words “someone” and “killed” and “Henry” all in a row. So my mind grabbed the biggest NO it could find, placed it between her hands, and tried to keep those three impossible words out.

It didn’t work.

A couple days later, I was packing to fly to where Henry had been living—my husband and I were going to clean out Henry’s apartment for my sister—and I realized that I no longer knew what to put in a suitcase. I am a seasoned traveler, and up until that moment, my mind had been really good at this task. She knew how many shirts to include, what size travel toothpaste is allowed, and where my toiletry case is. But this time, she failed. I failed. I packed for shit that day.

I guess one way to think of it is that I’d lost my mind. But another way is this: my mind had to take to the skies, it had to go circle the globe, and then dig itself a hole in which to rest in order to ever come back to me.

So, sweet reader, how do you grieve without losing your mind?

You can’t.

The poor thing is undergoing a prolonged software update. Because it had understood the world one way—as one in which nephews aren’t shot to death—and that world doesn’t exist anymore.

It had a way of understanding a world in which your best friend doesn’t suddenly betray you, or a world in which other people have cancer but not you, or a world in which your husband still loves you, and that world doesn’t exist anymore.

So if your mind doesn’t remember to pack underwear, or how to keep showing up for work, or the name of the person who cuts your hair, try and just be gentle with it. It will come back, but it and you will be changed.

No one escapes this, my friend—which sucks. But it’s also a comfort, because you’re not alone in the madness. And we who have also lost our minds with grief will overpack for you. Just in case.

This is your prompt:

Write about being gentle with yourself in grief. Maybe about a time you extended yourself grace. Maybe about a time someone else showed up and helped you pack (literally or figuratively). Maybe about a time you weren’t gentle, but how you plan to be next time.

Optional musical pairings:

Caroline Shaw with Sansara, “I Will Hold You”

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion, “Sing On”

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Today’s Contributor—

is an ordained Lutheran pastor and the author of three New York Times bestselling memoirs: Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, and Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. She writes and speaks about personal failings, recovery, grace, and faith and always prefers to sit in the corner with the other weirdos. You can keep up with her recent writing in The Corners.

When Shit Hits the Fan

Earlier this week, I shared the video of my full conversation with Nadia—where we talked about why despair won’t save us, the necessity of renouncing empty promises, and the holiness of something as ordinary as a Pyrex dish. Paid subscribers can watch the full conversation.

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We talk a lot in our house about how to begin—projects, sentences, songs, days.

At the outset of a new creative project, I often feel frozen—not only by the prospect of finishing, but by the first sentence or brushstroke. Why is the blank page so terrifying? Why does it feel like sticking your finger into a goldfish pond—poof, all the ideas scatter?

The question, then, is how we move around that fear. Do we wait for the perfect first line to arrive, like something divinely bestowed? Do we muscle our way into motion?

My husband Jon has been a real teacher for me in this regard.

I’ve never met someone who draws inspiration from so many places. I call him a YouTube historian: he’ll get obsessed with a subject or a person or a historical moment and then seek out every related clip in existence. (I do not exaggerate when I say every clip. Several times a week I wake up to hundreds of tabs open on my browser—evidence of his latest late-night deep dive.)

Sometimes what captivates him is what’s being said. Just as often, it’s how it’s being said—the rhythm of a sentence, a particular sound, a facial expression that communicates more than words ever could. He’ll rewind again and again, letting whatever intrigues him seep in.

Jon also reads widely and travels everywhere with at least two books. Earlier this week, he came with me to the hospital for an early-morning biopsy and chemo appointment and, naturally, brought two along. One was The Radical King, a collection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s essays edited by Cornel West. The other was The Great Pianists by the New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg. (This would not have been my early-morning hospital waiting-room reading material of choice.)

Out of curiosity, I read the dust jacket of The Great Pianists and was struck by the author’s description of Mozart’s legato, which he said “flowed like oil.”

Legato that flowed like oil. I kept thinking about that phrase all day—so tactile, so strange. It wasn’t Mozart or his mastery of legato that stayed with me, but the sensory charge of the language itself: a rush of texture and imagery. It made me hungry to write—not because I had a particular idea in mind, but because it had refilled the well.

What stayed with me, too, was the fact that I never would have encountered that sentence on my own. The subject of the book has nothing to do with what I’m working on. It was a reminder that the path to inspiration can’t be summoned on command—that sometimes the way into the work is not to approach it directly, but to arrive at it obliquely.

This is something Jon seems to understand instinctively. He follows his curiosity without demanding to know where it’s headed. That openness—the willingness to roam and linger—creates unexpected doorways into the creative process.

The image that comes to mind is a child in the woods with a butterfly net. You don’t always catch what you’re aiming for. Sometimes you catch nothing at all. But in the wandering, you stumble across something else—and occasionally, that’s exactly what you needed.

This is the spirit behind today’s prompt—Day 18 of 30 for those taking part in our New Year’s Journaling Project. Inspired by the inimitable Gertrude Stein, it invites us to practice that kind of wandering.

Consider it a permission slip to play, to wriggle free from logic, to make some beautiful nonsense. To tap into your blanky-dank, as Jon would put it.

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I loved every second of this impromptu conversation with Jon. We sat on the stoop—dogs milling about—and talked about first lines and the tyranny of the blank page. Music was played. Wisdom was dropped. Laughter, love, and blanky-dankery (more on that in the video) were very much in attendance.

If you’d like to watch the full conversation, you can join us by upgrading to a paid subscription anytime.

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Prompt 367. Tender Buttons & Trickster Nonsense

I’ve been thinking about the value of nonsense—an invitation to play, to loosen, to see what might surface when we stop trying so hard to make meaning. That curiosity led me back to the poet Gertrude Stein, who in the early twentieth century made an experiment of language itself.

The painters around Stein in post–World War I Paris were breaking all the rules, abandoning strict representation in favor of more abstract, figurative, or otherwise evocative forms: expressionism, surrealism, cubism. They were trying to capture something different—maybe even truer—about what it felt like to be human in the modern world.

Stein wondered if the same kind of rupture could happen in language. What if words didn’t point so neatly to ideas? What if they were experienced instead sonically, rhythmically, viscerally—in relation to one another, and nothing else?

There’s something deeply liberating in the idea that our writing doesn’t have to make sense—that we can play with words the way we once played with crayons or paint, following impulse rather than meaning.

For inspiration, here’s a short selection from Tender Buttons, Stein’s collection of experimental prose poems inspired by everyday objects, food, and activities. (I recommend reading them the way poetry wants to be read: aloud.) Below the excerpt, you’ll find a prompt inviting you to try your own hand at experimenting with “nonsense”—language unmoored from logic, but alive with rhythm, feeling, and play.

From Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

Mildred’s Umbrella

A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.

A Red Stamp

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

A Red Hat

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

A Dog

A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more signs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

This is your prompt:

Write nonsense. Play with words as if they’re paint on a canvas, repeating them, rhyming them, seeing what happens when you place an energetic verb next to a particularly strange noun. See if nonsense can make another type of sense—at least to you.

Optional musical pairings:

Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue”

Jon Batiste, “Freedom”

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About Gertrude Stein—

Gertrude Stein was a poet, playwright, novelist, and art collector. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in California, she moved to Paris in 1903, where she held a Saturday evening salon frequented by Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. She was the author of Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a quasi-memoir told from the point of view of her longtime partner. Stein died in France in 1946.

Why I Do This Work—

One of my greatest joys is hearing from this community. Reading your comments reminds me, again and again, why I keep showing up to do this work.

I wanted to share a few notes that made me stop, reread, and think, okay—this is it. This is why.

The 30-Day Journaling Project has been the tether to keep me grounded during one of the more challenging periods of my life. —Kathy

Before embarking on this project, my experience with journaling involved making to-do lists and summarizing accomplishments of the day. Since January 1, journaling has become much more interesting and fun. —Carol

With the current grind of work and parenting and the world as it is these days, I really haven’t been able to take time to just be creative and unlock things in my brain—connections from my past, goals for my future, etc. I’ve really enjoyed this journaling inspiration as away to start the year in a more intentional way. —Maggie

In just two weeks I am writing, dancing, coloring, singing, drawing, painting—I am my 5-year-old self again. —Julie

If you’ve been curious about our New Year’s Journaling Project, you can jump in today or start from the beginning. We’d love to have you.

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