For 2 months I couldn’t find an honest way to reach out to Sara Bareilles. Every version turned into a pitch. Then she gave out a phone number and asked people to share their story, and the problem solved itself. So I called and shared mine.

Sara Bareilles realized she was carrying grief for her country and wrote a song about it. Stephen Colbert says anger is armor against what we actually feel. Put those together and the thing everyone calls anger starts to look like something else.

A chain of small decisions none of us were thinking twice about put a concert poster in the hands of a woman whose husband died in January.

A Pearl Jam concert and a Sara Bareilles concert could not look more different. I’ve been to both and found they were doing the identical thing. That sent me down a road about how small a definition of grief most of us are working with.

Tremayne and I are turning our friendship into a children's book. He's incarcerated in Virginia, so making it together means everything is much harder. Here's why we wouldn't do it any other way.

I've been telling people I'm planning to self-publish my children's books. But the more I say that word, the more it feels like a lie.

A foggy morning, a wedding ring, and a question I couldn't put down. What are the small things we carry, and what do they pull us back to?

We toured FDR's summer cottage, where he got polio at 39. Standing in those rooms, I couldn't stop asking whether our hardest moments take from us or make us.

I always thought suffering was something other people did. Then a friend who spent his life in ministry asked a question that reframed forty years of my own.

I watched Road House recently, and one line has stuck with me for weeks. Nobody ever wins a fight. It got me thinking about every argument I've ever won.

On August 14, FROM WITHIN closed at Curtis Memorial Library. A boy of about 7 looked at paintings made inside a Virginia prison and said he couldn’t believe prisoners made them. We learn pretty early how we are supposed to think about certain people.

I sat down with Rob Reider around a fire in the woods. He founded Sad Dads Club after he and his wife lost their daughter, Lila. What he taught me about grief has stayed with me since.

A crowd packed into Curtis Memorial Library to watch someone cut a ribbon. For a lobby. Not a new wing. Not a new building. A lobby. That's when it hit me how much of my life has happens inside that place. So, I wrote it a love letter.

My friend Jonathan lost his hearing the same season he lost his wife. He chose not to be bitter, because bitterness would mean living a life that wasn’t his.

On a drive north in Maine, I stopped at a gas station that told me to pump first and pay after. That small act of trust got me thinking about how we do business, rent homes, and pay people.

A Haitian saying from Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money sent me into a Durham, NC coffee shop with a question. What happens when you ask three strangers to share a snack and a conversation with you? The first Sharing Cake story.

I sat down with Carlos Walker in front of a fireplace in Bethesda, Maryland. Carlos spent 13 years in prison. He’s sold over 14,000 books hand to hand. And he said something I keep coming back to: “People always see the butterfly. But you have to hear the caterpillar story.”

We visited Grandpa Bill at his assisted living community in Dallas. He’s 101 years old, a former Braniff pilot, and still full of adventure. What happened with AI and a stranger’s note brought the whole visit full circle.

A blue lobster, a sea turtle, and a dinner in Costa Rica. What started as a moment of gratitude became a reflection on what it actually means to feel like you've won the lottery in life.

I bought a cacao fruit at a market in Costa Rica. When I opened it up, it was overripe. My first instinct was to take it back. That was fear talking. Then love stepped in and changed my perspective.