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Hey, it's producer Micah Kielbon.

This spring, the Slowdown team and I asked you to help us select for the podcast to send in poems that have helped you slow yourself down.

In just a few days we received nearly 300 entries.

We then chose just five submissions to share this week. Here's today's

community curator to share what's special about their submission. My name is

Candice House. I live in North Carolina. I am a marketer by day and a writer by night,

morning or whenever I'm not procrastinating. Early 2021, I was in the pandemic and I was like well I'm just going to like get on the internet and read some random poems and try to cheer myself up and somehow I stumbled across this poem and I felt like it really spoke to where I was in my life at that time

and everything's kind of like falling apart but you have these little things like

thinking about what that means. I think my biggest hope is that someone who hears this poem fills a sense of hope and is inspired to really grasp a hold of those little joys that are in our life.

And I think it's especially important now,

just because personally and as a society,

there's so much that we're carrying and so much that we're working through.

Something else I like about the poem is how

communal it feels. Whenever I read it, I also feel like I'm in that moment with

someone else and so I really like the the feeling of the unity that I

think this poem kind of inspires.

I major Jackson. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. It's funny how some people treat grocery stores like sports teams. My wife denies this, but when we first

dated she sized up the bakery section of my local store and said you call that a bagel as if I missed a soccer goal. That

was it the competition was on. I kept tally of every carton of furred raspberries and pesticide-laden non-organic

vegetable at her store. She made fun of cramped owls and expired cheeses still in refrigerators at my store.

...