""Mom, I'm feeling nervous, my 12-year-old daughter shared one night as I tucked her into bed. "Are you just having nervous feelings or are you thinking about something?" I asked. "Ukraine," she replied. I asked if she wanted to talk about it. She didn't."I just want you to tell me a story--a happy story--to help me fall asleep." In that moment, I found myself going through the eternal parenting struggle--the struggle of wanting to do or say the right thing and not knowing exactly what that was." In this thoughtful piece Shauna Tominey offers five pointers on how to talk with kids about the difficult realities of our current world.

When Anna-Zoe Herr's father passed four years ago, she grappled with almost unbearable pain and grief and was finding it difficult to find hope. One night, she had a dream in which her father appeared, sitting opposite her. "I came back because you have a question for me," he said. Zoe was taken aback and then said quickly, "Yes, I do. How do I overcome your death?" "You don't overcome my death," her father replied. "You just love." Taking this injunction to heart, Zoe's path deepened towards love, towards hope and imagination even amidst despair. You can read more about Zoe's journey and her creative endeavors here.

"Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life." In this engaging post Maria Popova shines a light on the garden-related musings of artists and writers down the ages.