On the Road with Thomas Merton
"In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Mertons path, retracing the monks journey across the landscape. Amid stunning backdrops of ocean, redwood, and canyon, the film features the faces and voices of people Merton encountered. The essay offers a more intimate med... posted on Aug 07 2021, 9,323 reads

I Created the Repair Cafe
Throwing our broken appliances and other items away seems to be the only thing to do if they have become unusable, but Martine Postman in Amsterdam wasn't satisfied with this symptom of wasteful over-consumption. She was determined to find a way to do more then watch dumpsters overflowing and created the concept of Repair Cafes. Once a month her coffee shop provides space for repair experts to wor... posted on Aug 06 2021, 2,232 reads

What Do Gardens Mean?
"This much is clear: people calling themselves artists and who are called artists by others -- are making gardens and calling it art, or are making art in which the making of gardens is part of what they are calling art. And for a very long time, people who may not call themselves anything, have been making gardens that other people call art. Further, it would be greatly surprising if all this we... posted on Aug 05 2021, 2,291 reads

Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don't Control
'"Let death be what takes us," Dr. BJ Miller has written, "not a lack of imagination." As a palliative care physician, he brings a design sensibility to the matter of living until we die. And he's largely redesigned his sense of own physical presence after an accident at college left him without both of his legs and part of one arm. He offers a transformative reframing on our imperfect bodies, the... posted on Aug 04 2021, 0 reads

Live a Life Worth Living
"On 19 March 2018, almost five years after being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, thirty-eight-year-old Julie Yip-Williams died, leaving behind a husband and two daughters. Her early years had been anything but easy. Born blind in Vietnam, at two months of age she was almost euthanised on the orders of a grandmother who deemed her to be defective; years later, as an older child, she sailed to... posted on Aug 03 2021, 10,561 reads

How to Recapture Your Imagination
"If you had the spyglass, you could see anything in the world. If you had the spyglass, there was nothing from which you couldn't glean information. It had mesmeric power over the people. It had been created by a king who gave it to his daughter, to be used for the strangest of courtships. If you wished to marry her, you had to achieve only one thing. You had to disappear. You had to become a magi... posted on Aug 02 2021, 3,447 reads

Moon Tree
"In 1971, more than four hundred tree seeds were collected and ensconced in an aluminum canister. They were chosen from across the United States: the resinous sweet gum and mud-loving southern loblolly; the northwestern Douglas fir, green and mossy; the sycamore leafing over mid-western flood plains; and the coastal redwood, stretching along the sandy loam of the Pacific. For all the preparations ... posted on Aug 01 2021, 3,769 reads

Clarksville Elementary School: We Are the World
All 500 students from Clarksville Elementary School in Indiana worked with their music teacher over the course of the pandemic school year to create this heartwarming music video to showcase their talents and to bring smiles to the world. The exuberance and enthusiasm of these young singers remind us that they are the world, they are the future, and we can all make a better day when we stand toget... posted on Jul 31 2021, 3,749 reads

Becoming an Ancestor
"Did you know that we're all on our way to becoming someone's ancestor? It's true. We're all future dead people, and 100 years from now, someone like me will come looking for you. I
know this for a fact because that's usually have at least one in each generation, much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We're a bit obsessive about what we do.You say you have no interest in family history or gene... posted on Jul 30 2021, 4,771 reads

For Love of Wild Horses
Wildife biologist, Craig Downer's, childhood experience with his trusted horse, Poco, and their many adventures in the wild lands of Nevada, led to a lifetime of passionate advocacy for the protection of wild horses and burros in the Western United States. His is often a lonely struggle between raising consciousness about the long term ecological benefits these animals bring and the forces more co... posted on Jul 29 2021, 1,790 reads