He ran up a cliff with blood in his backpack

In partnership with

Free email without sacrificing your privacy

Gmail is free, but you pay with your data. Proton Mail is different.

We don’t scan your messages. We don’t sell your behavior. We don’t follow you across the internet.

Proton Mail gives you full-featured, private email without surveillance or creepy profiling. It’s email that respects your time, your attention, and your boundaries.

Email doesn’t have to cost your privacy.

Ditch the Gmail data grab

Good morning, friends.

This one is stacked. You will meet an EMT who ran up a mountain with blood in his backpack, a rescued gorilla who just became a mother in the wild, and a hotel staff in Sicily who made a stuffed bear feel like a movie star. Grab your coffee. Let's go.

🌱 TODAY'S MINDSET

The thirty seconds before you decide who you are today

There is a small window every morning, right after you become aware but before you pick up your phone, where you get to choose the tone of your day. Most people miss it. They wake, they reach, and by the time they are upright the day has already been handed to them by whatever the internet decided to serve first.

Here is the useful part. That window does not require meditation, or a routine, or anything that sounds like homework. It only requires that you notice you are awake, and answer one honest question before anything else gets to talk to you. The question that seems to do the most work is this: what do I want more of today?

Not what you have to do. Not what you owe anyone. What do you want more of. More patience. More laughter. More quiet. More of that feeling you had last Tuesday when the light was slanting through the kitchen and nobody needed anything from you. Whatever the answer is, you have just told your nervous system where to point.

This is not magic. It is aim. The day is going to happen either way, and there will be plenty of things asking for your attention. But the ones you called for first tend to be the ones you notice. You will catch a warmer exchange with the person at the register. You will hear the joke you would have walked past. You will spot the ten minutes you did not know were free.

Try it tomorrow, before you reach for anything. One question. Thirty seconds. Then get up.

⭐ TODAY'S BRIGHT LEAD

He ran 1,000 vertical feet up a North Carolina cliff in 31 minutes, carrying blood in a backpack

Will Soper of Burke Rescue Inc. Photo courtesy of Will Soper via Outside.

Jacob Gregory, an experienced climber and a father, fell twenty feet down a rock face on Shortoff Mountain in western North Carolina last week. He was in critical condition with internal bleeding, and the trail up to him was steep, hot, and long.

Will Soper is an EMT and technical rescuer with Burke Rescue Inc. He drove in from a training course two hours away and started up the trail. He was already halfway up when the radio crackled: the patient needed blood, right now. Soper turned around, ran back down to his vehicle, packed blood bags, a cooler, and every accessory needed to transfuse a person on a cliff face into a backpack, and started climbing again.

He covered 1.5 miles and roughly 1,000 feet of elevation gain in about 31 minutes. Gregory got his transfusion. He was stabilized, rappelled down, and flown to Atrium Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, where he is recovering.

More than twenty agencies converged on that mountain to get Jacob home. Twenty. His family, writing on the GoFundMe raising funds for his recovery, said it plainly: "You saved a life and brought a husband, father, brother, son, friend, and loved one to safety."

Read the full story at Good News Network

🌍 MORE GOOD TODAY

A rescued gorilla just gave birth in the wild in the Congo

Her name is Lulingu. She is an eastern lowland gorilla, one of the rarest great apes on Earth, and she spent years at the GRACE sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo before being released back into the forest at the end of 2024. On May 21, deep inside Virunga National Park, she had a healthy baby. Rangers only confirmed it recently. It is the first birth in the wild from a rewilded eastern lowland gorilla, and every conservationist in the region is quietly, ecstatically celebrating. Rewild has the story.

Democratic Republic of the Congo. Conservation.

An indie comic artist sold out overnight because one reviewer stopped at his table

Dare, an American illustrator of Nigerian heritage, has been making a Yoruba-inspired indie comic called Ori: Holder of the Heads. A TikTok reviewer who specializes in the tables everyone else walks past stopped, bought two copies, and posted a short video. It got a million likes. Twenty-five thousand new followers arrived at Dare's page. Every copy of Ori sold out, so did the presale, and Dare had to ask his brother Joshua to drive the remaining stock from Pennsylvania to New York, where those sold out too. He is at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda this weekend. Full story.

United States. Cultural underdog.

A little girl lost her stuffed bear at a Sicilian hotel. The staff sent Rosie home with a novel.

Julia's mother emailed the Four Seasons at San Domenico Palace in Taormina after realizing that Rosie the bear had been swept up with the sheets. The staff not only found Rosie, they gave her a full vacation: photos by the pool, at the bar, at breakfast, exploring the grounds. Then they mailed her back with a handwritten letter in Rosie's voice. "When we got separated at the beautiful San Domenico Palace, I was a little worried at first, but the kind people at the hotel took very good care of me while I waited for you." The postscript: "my favorite place in the whole world is right beside you." Julia's older sister posted the reunion on TikTok. Millions of people watched. See the letter.

Italy. Everyday kindness.

🔬 SCIENCE OF JOY

Meet the Founders. Florida's lab-bred coral is going home to the reef.

For decades, Florida scientists have been trying to help the state's coral reefs survive warmer water. Nurseries. Transplants. All of it helping, none of it enough. So the strategy shifted: instead of moving corals around, breed new ones that can take the heat.

Since 2020, the Florida Aquarium and researchers at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School have been running controlled spawning programs, matching parent corals from different reefs to give the offspring a wider genetic deck to play with. The first batch of these lab-bred colonies is finally being placed on the reef. They call them the Founders. As of this month, elkhorn Founders are back in the ocean off south Florida, and biologists are watching to see how they hold up through the warm season.

This is what patience looks like in science. Five years of breeding to earn a chance at the next hundred years of reef. WLRN has the full report.

💛 BRIGHT FIND

This slot is open

This is where we share a product, a book, a small brand, or a nonprofit that fits the spirit of this newsletter. We are picky about it because you are the reason the newsletter exists and we do not want to waste your inbox.

If you make something you would want a reader here to know about, hit reply. We read every note.

✨ ONE MORE SMILE

Rhys Wynne-Jones was homeless in Cornwall, England, for ten years. Two winters ago, on a very cold night, he took shelter in St. Mary's Church in Penzance, which stays open around the clock for people who need somewhere to be. There was a piano. He sat down and played. Somebody was recording.

Thirty months later, Rhys has his own apartment, a keyboard he practices on daily, and just over $54,000 raised for homeless charities from a series of concerts he has played since the video went viral.

He told a reporter this week: "I don't see myself as a professional pianist or a celebrity. I only need enough money to cover my expenses. I just love to play the piano to raise money for good causes."The story.

That's the day.

Ask yourself the question. Notice what shows up.

See you tomorrow,

Great News Day