Lament for Syria: A Young Poet Looks Back
"I wrote about all my memories: how I woke up in the morning to my grandmother drinking coffee next to the jasmine tree listening to the music of the Lebanese singer Fairuz. I wrote about how my siblings and I walked to school with our neighbors and how we saw a boy smoking and then hiding the cigarette from his older brother.
I didn't want Syria to be known just for its war. I wanted to co... posted on Jun 24 2021, 3,545 reads

The Frightfully Wondrous Experience of Being Here
Ra Avis didn't call herself a writer till she was accused of the crime that would eventually result in 437 days of incarceration. In the four years between the accusation and the handcuffs, after a friendly push from her husband--a writer himself--she started a blog and named it Rarasaur (frightfully wondrous things happen here). It became a space for writing about love and grace and grief, and wo... posted on Jun 23 2021, 4,360 reads

Donella Meadows: Dancing with Systems
"We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we do'nt even know what to optimize. We cant keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship ... posted on Jun 22 2021, 4,915 reads

Listening to the Language of the Birds
"When bird language entered my life, I felt that a new sense had been grafted into me. Bird voices opened a fresh dimension of sensory experience. This expansion drew me into stories of my home in unexpected ways, revealing ecological rhythms and connections, stimulating my curiosity, and suffusing me with a sense of belonging. The practice of listening to other species is the original 'augmented ... posted on Jun 21 2021, 4,966 reads

The Nightingale's Song
"Living in England with a very strange secularity within our folk repertoire has allowed me to explore what a sacred spiritual form of practice might be with these birds and how they might enable a re-enchantment. I feel like nature is my spiritual leader in this respect and the nightingale is my imam at the top of that tower calling the prayer out." In this interview, which weaves conversation, s... posted on Jun 20 2021, 2,999 reads

The Wanting Memories Project
We have all lost someone we love and wondered how our lives could go on without them--without their touch, their encouragement and their wisdom. In this song, composer Ysaye Barnwell gives voice to our deepest longings to remember our departed loved ones and to find the strength to carry their deepest lessons into our lives now. "Songs have intention in themselves but when we sing together, we def... posted on Jun 19 2021, 2,873 reads

What Critically Ill Kids Can Teach Us
"In 2013, Shay Beider accompanied an anxious little boy into the office of Dr. Fayez Ghishan, the Physician in Chief and a pediatric gastroenterologist at Diamond Childrens Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. The boy was soon to undergo an endoscopy, an invasive scope to examine the digestive tract. Such procedures could be traumatic for children because they required an IV placement; nurses often had to... posted on Jun 18 2021, 4,519 reads

The Third Harmony
In this short film made by the Metta Center for Nonviolence, veteran activists make clear the need for nonviolence on a worldwide scale at this critical stage in human evolution--not just to solve problems in an isolated crisis but as a way of life that can change the world for all of us. According to Dr. Bernard LaFayette, founder of the Center for Nonviolence & Peace studies, the challenge for e... posted on Jun 17 2021, 2,209 reads

Melanie DeMore: Sending You Light
Singer-songwriter Melanie DeMore has a captivating voice-- a voice that blends her original music with African American folk music, spirituals, and ballads. Through her music and catalytic presence DeMore has uplifted and unified diverse audiences. She has been called in to sing at the bedside of newborns as well as the dying. She has taught and performed in schools, prisons, coffee houses and con... posted on Jun 16 2021, 10,296 reads

On Barry Lopez: Now That It's Come to This
"Once, before I knew him well, I asked Barry Lopez the earliest thing he could remember. Without missing a beat, the most widely traveled and sophisticated spiritual seeker in North American letters in a century--a writer of mystical sensitivity and grace, who'd been up to his armpits in snow, tracking wolves in Alaska, and who charted the migration of snow geese across Canada, who listened to Ind... posted on Jun 15 2021, 3,744 reads