The Other Side of a Hard Time

A sampling on long recoveries from my recent anniversary party

At my other Substack publication, Quiet Reading with Tara Penry, I hosted a virtual gathering recently in honor of a year of continuous newsletter writing. So many people participated that it’s easy for a reader to miss some essays they might enjoy. For this month’s PeaceLinks recommendations, therefore, I want to highlight a few folks from the anniversary gathering who have a common theme: living through hard times and making peace in the present.

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:

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Priscilla Stuckey

writes

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

. 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.”

47. Trusting the Waters of Life

Jackie Daly

writes

Creative Seasoning

, 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.”

Finding grace by dancing with grief

Serena Camacho

of

WordDance

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:

“Change One Person and You Change the World”

Exhausted from a high-powered career that sapped her strength,

Kim Van Bruggen

of

Life (un)Learned

discovered a childhood trauma in therapy. Her process of recovering professionally meant also facing her personal past:

I Lost My Identity. What I Found was Unexpected.

After writing about a parent with dementia,

Victoria

of

Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration

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”:

'Music Memory is more powerful than words.'

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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!

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels