For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing: A Meditative Poem
The origin story of "For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing" lies in a dream that writer Phyllis Cole-Dai had last year. This remarkable poem was published in the early days of the pandemic that has now claimed over 2 million lives worldwide. Cole-Dai's words have comforted many people through the grief and loss of these challenging times. What follows here is the poem's backstory in her own w... posted on Jan 28 2021, 13,240 reads

The Blue Hour: A Celebration of Nature's Rarest Color
"Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanitys most beautiful reflections on our planets primary hue, is the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world, a world of many blues a pioneering 19th-century nomenclature of colors listed eleven kinds of blue, in hues as varied as the color of the flax... posted on Jan 27 2021, 8,389 reads

Don Berwick: Health Care as a Loving Relationship
For the past 30 years, Donald Berwick has been one of the nation's leading authorities and innovators of quality and improvement in the U.S. healthcare system. A pediatrician by training, a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health, and a top health care administrator during the Obama Administration, Berwick challenges administrators, policy makers, and doctors to go... posted on Jan 26 2021, 5,249 reads

Social Distance: A Community-Style Poem
In the early weeks of the pandemic last year, "NPR asked listeners to respond to art with a poem -- a style of poetry called ekphrastic. For inspiration, Kwame Alexander, NPR's poet in residence, selected two paintings: Kadir Nelson's Heatwave and Salvador Dali's Young Woman At A Window. Both show women inside looking longingly out into the world. The paintings struck a chord with those experienci... posted on Jan 25 2021, 5,208 reads

Fatherland
"When I was growing up, my father worked for a United Nations agency. His job meant that I was raised a nomad, moving to a different country every few years: Tanzania, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda, and England. Annually, my father was granted what the UN calls 'home leave.' When we stepped off the plane in Ghana's capital, Accra, my father would sometimes turn to me, spread his arms wide, and say, "Akw... posted on Jan 24 2021, 3,473 reads

Lisa Dolby Chadwick: Letting in the Light
Chadwick talks about her struggle to keep her San Francisco gallery afloat in the pandemic. Emailing her list, she began pairing poems with paintings from her artists. "With that first one, I paired Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "So Much Happiness" with a great John DiPaolo painting. I was doing it five days a week. Responses came back from all over the world, really personal ones from people I don't k... posted on Jan 23 2021, 3,109 reads

Kiss the Ground: The Soil Story
"Science meets inspiration in this tale of nature's best hidden innovation: soil. 'The Soil Story,'made by Kiss the Ground, is a five-minute film that shares the importance of healthy soil for a healthy planet. Learn how we can "sequester" (store) carbon from our atmosphere, where it is harmful, and pull it back into the earth, where it belongs, through regenerative agriculture, composting, and ot... posted on Jan 22 2021, 5,776 reads

Amanda Gorman: The Miracle of Morning
Amanda Gorman has achieved many firsts, including being the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate in the United States at age 19. On January 20, 2021, the 22-year-old Gorman read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. What follows here is a video of her reciting "The Miracle of Morning," a poem written several years ago "when hurricanes, hate crimes, and deportations were some of the many ... posted on Jan 21 2021, 8,923 reads

A Reset for Unprecedented Times
"We are currently living amid a planetary climate emergency, a global pandemic, uprisings against state violence upon Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, and a failing economic system the world over. Pandemic lockdowns have forced major lifestyle changes: shifting consumption habits, realizing how deeply connected we are to each other and the environment, and focusing more on the non-material as... posted on Jan 20 2021, 4,705 reads

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance
"As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?"... posted on Jan 19 2021, 11,173 reads